Of Brainstorm, ideas and seeking help

Many of you know that KDE Brainstorm ideas aren’t posted straight away: they are always pre-screened to avoid repetitions, features that cannot be implemented technically, violations of the Code of Conduct, and so on. This is possible thanks to the work of the Idea Moderators, that patrol Brainstorm and evaluate the new ideas being posted. Recently, a few of them got too busy and thus we’re experiencing a backlog of ideas staying in the Vault (the staging area for evaluation) for longer times than usual.

March 31, 2012

Want to make KDE Brainstorm more useful?

The recent post by Dario on the KDE Workspace Vision raised some concerns on why Brainstorm was not used.One commenter even said _Right now it feels like “Throw an idea over a wall for no-one but end users to discuss until it bitrot’s”. _ _ _ The Brainstorm section is indeed in need of help. To make it more useful, a couple of things are needed: Statistics to evaluate which ideas are best representative: it can’t be just the number of votes per se as there are things like confirmation bias or controversies that may inflate the numbers Integration with Bugzilla: a way to automatically (using XML-RPC) send the ideas flagged as representative to a bug report filed under “wishlist”.

February 12, 2012

Some more Nepomuk, please

Recently we’ve seen several blog posts on Planet KDE related to Nepomuk. Reading those I thought that I could add some (little) semantic features to [Danbooru Client]({{ site.url }}/projects/danbooru-client). Danbooru Client already makes use of Nepomuk: if enabled, tags extracted from Danbooru items are added as Nepomuk tags. But since at least some Danbooru boards are specialized in certain types of images (e.g., wallpapers only, for examples) I found it would be nice to have Nepomuk show me only the images that come from a specific Danbooru board.

December 25, 2011

Unexpected Christmas gifts: THE IDOLM@ASTER

Sometimes Christmas presents are really unexpected, and today I found out I was given one such gift: the limited edition of _THE IDOLM@STER 2, _PS3 version. It was quite a bulky box, showing all the main characters from the game (and from the recently-ended anime) (click to enlarge): ![Side showing Chihaya, Hibiki and Azusa]({{ site.url }}/images/2011/12/idolmaster_1.png) Of course, having such a box means that there’s a lot of stuff inside. In fact, once opened, there are two game BDs (one being the actual game, the second being the first volume of Gravure for you!

December 7, 2011

I'm honestly surprised...

By browsing through sites, I noticed that the Spanish site Akihabara Denno Gumi Universe has posted a translation of an interview the webmaster had with me through email. Here it is (Spanish language). It feels nice to recall some memories of the past once in a while, especially since I couldn’t still believe that dennogumi.org had been such a resource back in the days…

October 2, 2011

Screensavers and the KDE Workspaces - your opinion is needed

Recently in the Plasma mailing list, KDE developers have discussed a new screen-locking implementation that could be added to the upcoming 4.8 release of the KDE Workspaces. The first reason to do so was to solve some security constraints of the existing implementation. As an added bonus, screen locking should be also more aestetically pleasing. There is however a trade-off: such implementation would mean that screensavers that rely on X (also called X screensavers) would not be compatible.

June 29, 2011

PyKDE4: Queries with Nepomuk

In one of my previous blog posts I dealt with [tagging files and resources with Nepomuk]({{ site.url }}/2010/10/pykde4-tag-and-annotate-files-using-nepomuk). But Nepomuk is not only about storing metadata, it is also about retrieving and _interrogating _data. Normally, this would mean querying the metadata database directly, using queries written in SPARQL. But this is not intuitive, can be inefficient (if you do things the wrong way) and error prone (oops, I messed up a parameter!

June 11, 2011

Access multiple Google Calendars from KOrganizer

Recently, a question came up on the KDE Community Forums regarding the use of multiple Google Calendars with KOrganizer. The preferred access up to now has been with googledata Akonadi resource, however that doesn’t support more than one calendar, and (at least from my unscientific observation) seems to be rather unmaintained these days.

Luckily, not all’s lost. Akonadi recently gained the opportunity of accessing CalDAV resources, and Google Calendar also offers a CalDAV interface, hence this is possible.

This post will briefly describe how (thanks go to PIMster krop, which casually mentioned the possibility on IRC and prompted me to investigate).

May 29, 2011

Multiscale bootstrap clustering with Python and R

While reading the statistics for my blog, I noticed that a number of searches looked for hierarchical clustering with Python, which [I covered quite a while ago]({{ site.url }}/2007/11/data-clustering-with-python). Today I’d like to present an updated version which uses more robust techniques.

May 11, 2011

A retrospective view: Galaxy Angel

Recently I had the opportunity of viewing a DVD that I had bought in 2006 but never had the chance of seeing: it was the third season of Galaxy Angel, of which I had already viewed the first two years before. After viewing it, I realized I could have viewed it sooner, as I liked it quite a bit. Not only that, but I brought myself up to speed by getting what was left in the series, that is the second half of the third season (marketed by Bandai Visual as Galaxy Angel AA) and the fourth and final season (known in the English speaking market as Galaxy Angel X).

Well, I found the whole franchise quite good: and after having explored also other bits of it, including the manga and the games related to it, I thought it’d be nice to have a retrospective with my own views. Which is the point of this post.