KDE Brainstorm: after the launch

Now that the KDE Brainstorm has been launched, it’s time to take a look at the results so far. Currently, the forum hosts 160 threads, approximately one for each idea, and 441 posts. Not bad for the first two days of operation. At the same time, the staff has been working hard to make sure only appropriate ideas (not bug reports, not duplicates…) are on the forum. People have also begun voting, although slowly: it’s understandable, given the fact that there are so many threads in so little time.

March 20, 2009

KDE Brainstorm is live!

It’s finally there: KDE Brainstorm has been launched today! Like this, it will be possible to propose features and have them voted by the community, and then submit the most voted requests to the developers. Every feature request is screened prior to posting, so duplicates, spam and flames are unlikely to occur. There is no guarantee that the voted upon features will be implemented, but as opposed to individual postings, this approach reduces the noise a lot, and allows a better communication between the “two worlds” (users and developers).

March 18, 2009

I love poison

No, it’s not_ _a teen-like “I hate my life, I’m going to die tomorrow” post. I’m actually referring to the comments of a person nicknamed “I Love” that are popping up in almost all blogs that are linked to PlanetKDE which deal with Plasma or KDE4 adoption. The name “I Love” contrasts with an attitude that is unconstructive and rather trollish. This wouldn’t be such a big problem, if not for the fact that posts from said individual have had a rather negative effect: for example Aaron was forced to turn comment moderation on on his blog, Jos’ entry on the new Plasma in the upcoming KDE 4.

March 17, 2009

Tears to Tiara in animation - faithful?

![Tears to Tiara cast]({{ site.url }}/images/2009/03/ttt.png)

So I’ve heard that _Tears to Tiara _is coming in animated form. Being in the middle of playing its PS3 incarnation, Tears to Tiara - Kaikan no Daichi, I decided to take a look at some images that have been recently published on news.dengeki.com. It was already known that the anime would be an adaptation of the PS3 game, which is a good thing (I didn’t like the original character design). Animation is done by _Oriental Light and _Magic (OLM), and the same staff who adapted another Aquaplus game, Utawarerumono (or should I say Underwater Ray Romano ? snicker).

March 17, 2009

Bilbo Blogger

Mtux, of choqok fame, along with another person, has written Bilbo Blogger, a blogging utility for Blogger or any blog that supports Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, and MovableType APIs (EDIT: also GData). It is based on the KDE4 libraries and it includes a WYSIWYG editor, an HTML editor, and a Post Preview function that can even fetch your blog’s CSS to render the entry and see how it looks. It’s not released yet, but for the daring, you can actually try and compile it.

February 27, 2009

Moving on

Some say that all good things must come to an end. I’m not entirely sure that this is a universal truth, but I can say that at some point in life there are decisions that need to be taken. In this case I made my own: today was the last day inDr.Cristina Battaglia’s laboratory, a place where I spent my three-year Ph.D. course and one year as a post-doc research fellow.

February 22, 2009

Science and KDE: kile

During the course of my research work, I may obtain results that are worthy of publication in scientific journals. Since my master’s thesis I’ve been using LaTeX as my writing platform, mainly because I can concentrate on content rather than presentation (I find it useful also for writing non-scientific stuff as well). Also, I can handle bibliography (essential for a scientific publication) very well without using expensive proprietary applications (such as Endnote).

In my early days I used kLyX first, then LyX, but I found the platform to be too limited for my tastes, and also LaTeX errors were difficult to diagnose. I needed a proper editor, and that’s when I heard of kile, a KDE front-end for LaTeX. Kile is currently at version 2.0.2 and is a KDE 3 application. However, in KDE SVN work is ongoing to produce a KDE4 version (2.1) and that’s what I’ll look at in this entry.

February 7, 2009

Science and KDE: rkward

I try to use FOSS extensively for my scientific work. In fact, when possible, I use only FOSS tools. Among these there is the R programming language. It’s a Free implementation of the S-plus language, and it’s mainly aimed at statistics and mathematics. As the people who read my scientific posts know, I don’t like R much. But sometimes it’s the only alternative.

Well, what does R have to do with KDE? With this post I’d like to start a series (hopefully) of articles that deals with KDE programs used for scientific purposes. In this particular entry, I’ll focus on rkward, a GUI front-end for R.

January 31, 2009

Fishing for ideas

I have been thinking of doing another Kourse at the KDE Forums, similar to the one that has produced three nice screencasts. My idea would be to show very brief and focused screencasts, a sort of “how do I…”. I have a few ideas, but I’d like to ask the KDE community at large. I’m mostly interested in showing single features (short videos), preferably of the “eye-opener” kind. If you have any suggestions, leave a comment.

January 27, 2009

"The Answer"

Yes, I know I’m a bit late to the party (unfortunately today was one of the busiest days ever where I work), but I thought I’d join the other members of the KDE community, because KDE 4.2 has been released today. Take a look at the visual guide, or see if your distribution has already packages for you. For your enquiries, the KDE Forums are at your disposal.