The next iteration of the Plasma FAQ - call for help

A few may know that I more or less maintain the Plasma FAQ page on KDE’s UserBase. Given the rapid advance of Plasma between KDE versions, each time a new version is out a new FAQ needs to be made, as the content rapidly becomes obsolete. For 4.3, unfortunately, I’m not sure I’ll be able to put a new version up in time for the 4.3 release. The reason is mostly practical: it takes a bit of work to collect and add information, and currently my free time is limited due to a rather heavy workload and some other commitments.

June 27, 2009

A brand new look for KDE Community forums

Today, a major upgrade of the KDE Community Forums took place. The change brings quite a number of changes to the forums themselves, and it’s a further step towards providing a better experience for KDE users (and developers too!).

June 19, 2009

Tears to Tiara - Blu-Ray volume 1

Today, after some customs delay and courier problems, I finally received the first volume of Tears to Tiara. Having got a PS3, I chose the Blu-Ray version (priced 8,192 yen, quite steep if you hear me): as I preordered it soon enough, I got the first presse edition, which, according to CDJapan, was comprised of a “deluxe outer case”, a “stick poster” and a booklet, in addition to the Blu-ray itself.

June 13, 2009

DataMatrix 0.8 is finally out

At last, after months of inactivity, I pushed out a new release of [DataMatrix]({{ site.url }}/projects/datamatrix). Although the version bump is small (0.8) there are a lot of changes since last releases. The most notable include: Ability to apply functions to elements of the matrix Ability to filter rows by column contents Ability to transpose rows with columns An option to load text files produced by R (which are, by design, broken) Removed the getter for columns, using dictionary-like syntax directly A lot of bug fixes The download links on [the project page]({{ site.

May 30, 2009

KDE Brainstorm Monthly Digest - issue 2

Hello, and welcome to the second issue of the KDE Brainstorm Digest! This issue comes in slightly late, due to some real time commitments, but I couldn’t leave you without it, could I?

May 1, 2009

New, refactored System Settings

A rather big change has gone into KDE’s SVN recently: Ben Cooksley (bcooksley) and Mathias Soeken (msoeken) have committed a complete rework of System Settings.

Compared to the previous implementation, System Settings now has two operational modes, one being the current icon-based view since KDE 4 (and also seen in Kubuntu prior to KDE 4), and a second view, named “Classic”, which reimplements the old KControl look and feel. The latter change is probably very welcome to anyone who found System Settings less useful than the old KControl. The current view used can be changed in the configuration options. In addition, upon hovering an icon or module that show if there are any sub-modules associated.

April 28, 2009

Amarok 2.1 beta in openSUSE

Currently, the openSUSE Build Service contains Amarok 2.1 beta packages only for the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE repository (i.e. current trunk, soon-to-be 4.3). However, a quick search identified a repository that contains a RPM of current 2.0.90 compiled for the KDE:KDE4:Factory Desktop (which will change to 4.3 with Beta 1) andanother one for the KDE:42 repository. So you can add them using YaST or zypper and download the relevant package. I had to force a repository using zypper, otherwise zypper would complain and try to install amarok 1.

April 25, 2009

KDE Brainstorm Monthly Digest - issue 1

Hello, and welcome to the first “issue” of the KDE Brainstorm monthly digest. First of all, a few words of introduction. There are quite a number of ideas being posted on the KDE Brainstorm, and it would be nice to know how the initiative is faring, and important highlights, like what ideas are more popular, which are more controversial, etc. That is why the idea of a monthly digest was born (in a similar fashion as the fabolous Commit Digest).

April 4, 2009

First KDE Brainstorm idea implemented!

Via Harald Hvaal’s blog I learnt that the first non-forum suggestion has been implemented! I think this shows without doubt that initiatives like the KDE Brainstorm are undoubtedly useful to the community at large, both users and developers. Keep on rocking!

March 31, 2009

Gene search applet: suggestions and code review needed

In the past months I’ve always wanted to write a small Plasma applet to aid me in some boring tasks as a bioinformatician. One example (for the non-scientific crowd out there) is when I find a specific gene out of my analysis work which I want to take a look at. I am often lazy, so instead of firing up the browser to look at the online resources, I wanted to write something which could access said resources programmatically.