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Aaron Seigo (aseigo): apathy and how engagement fixes itYesterday

I live in a wonderful country, Canada. We have democracy and wide open spaces. We have amazing wildlife and vibrant artists. We have large cities and quaint little towns, too. We have our poor and homeless, but even they do better than many in other countries. We have socialized health care and lots of jobs even in this climate. Perhaps it is too good, though, as too many of my fellow Canadians are apathetic.

We've had a recent storm-in-a-teacup in our Parliament this week (I won't bore you with the details) and all it really showed was how few Canadians understand our political system. Now, I didn't go to high school in Canada which is when you learn about this stuff and even I understood how our rather antiquated first-past-the-post parliamentary system worked. So many Canadians believe, however, that our system is more like the USA and that we actually elect our Prime Minister directly.

For many, however, this week was a bit of a wake up call, and when I've talked to some of my friends here in town about it, they became mentally engaged and suddenly started asking questions and formulating observations. Huh.

It reminded me about how the other week I and all my neighbors started getting automated parking tickets due to a snafu with the computerized GPS-and-a-database ticketing system we have here in Calgary. Essentially our block of parking "fell off" their map and so despite our parking permits started receiving tickets .. every day.

Aaron Seigo (aseigo): KDE Videocast Episode 4, December 6!Yesterday

Episode 4 of my KDE videocast will be broadcast live at 17:00 UTC on Saturday, December 6th over at ... well ... still working on that little detail. ;) It won't be at UStream, and I have two options on the table, one of which is FOSS! If the FOSS option doesn't come through this week, it hopefully will by next week. I'll post details on my blog here when I know exactly where it will be.

This week's show will look like this:

• Hello, viewers!
• Week in review: Camp KDE 2009 approaches, KDE 4.2 beta 1 reviews and a development stats update.
• The Headline: Plasma in 4.3 .. The "What now?" release: with 4.2 shining with lots of newness, what am I thinking for 4.3 and Plasma?
• Feature of the Week: KDE Games fly-by: we'll look at a number of the games in 4.2 and how they are shaping up to be better than ever, including one or two that won't be in 4.2!
• Town Hall: Bring your questions to #aseigo on irc.freenode.net, or leave one in the comment section below if you can't show up! I'll have my sack of answers at the ready at showtime.
• Developer Corner: Using Phonon to add rich media support easily to your application. We didn't get to this last week, so it's a do-over for this one!

A FOSS friendly codec version with all the media and text files used in the show will be offered via bittorrent after the show so you can download it for offline viewi

Holger Freyther (zecke): Making your own dumplingsYesterday

If I would be in Taipei I could ask Tick, Jeremy, Erin, Olv, Julian, John to have lunch with me and eat dumplings at one of the restaurants pretty close to the office and lie that it is my first time eating with chop sticks and that my skills are not bad for the first time.... But I'm currently not in Taipei, I have no place to get dumplings. So today was the day to make vegetarian dumplings myself. The process is really simple, you don't even need a fancy bamboo steamer, just don't put too much sugar into it... working with tofu and vegetables is also fun. See you soon in Taipei...

The result:


The filling: Carrots, Pepper, Tofu, Ginger, some Chilli, Garlic, a bit of onions..

Thiago Macieira (thiago): How KDE 4 is blocking Qt 4.5Yesterday

But in a good way

I remember back in 2006, when I was a brand, new engineer at then-Trolltech AS, I was the only one who still built KDE 3 from sources. Everyone was using distribution-prepared packages: mostly Kubuntu and SuSE, but also source distros like Gentoo, as well as FreeBSD (ports tree). And I remember this fact for one simple reason: being able to run many Qt applications (KDE) with the Qt you’re developing makes you find your issues a lot sooner. In other words, the chances for ugly issues slipping through releases was much less.

But 2006 means we were working on Qt 4.2 already, while KDE hadn’t released 4.0 yet. We had only Qt Designer, Assistant, Linguist, and one other internal application to test with.

Now, the situation is different. Many of the engineers are running KDE 4. Not only that, a few brave souls are actually running — if not compiling — KDE 4 with the current Qt 4.5 from our Git repository. That’s why I say KDE 4 is blocking the release of Qt 4.5. I won’t say it is the only reason, but it’s a very important one.

Three weeks ago, I did a full build of KDE 4 from trunk (to-be-4.2) with the standard Qt 4.4 sources. Then I launched it with Qt 4.5. For one thing, I haven’t detected a single issue related to symbols, so there don’t seem to be any binary- or source-compatibility issues.

Frederik Gladhorn: The Realm of the Flying PigsYesterday

So M got a flying pig for his birthday. Imagine that! Awesomeness - aren't you jealous? I surely am. It's even pink! There are days (or does it only happen at night, when you can't sleep?) where flying pigs seem to be the secret rulers of KDE.

M told me that he used to have a moving earth as desktop wallpaper. At night when I should have been sleeping the pig came flying by to remind me of the marble spinning in space. The pig kept talking to me. It reminded me that I had read about patterns as desktop background and the Mandelbrot fractal. And there was a plasma applet based on marble already. All ingredients there right? So yesterday I sat down and started writing a moving earth desktop wallpaper. It's currently in playground/base/plasma/wallpapers and just an early proof of concept.

Since the planet doesn't show the video, here is a link: Marble wallpaper video

The great thing about this is that it took only approximately three hours to get it to work for the first time. To me that shows how easy to use our APIs have become and how much power KDE 4 offers. There are stil lots of things to improve in the wallpaper globe. Some are very simple like adding a sun and stars (maybe optionally) by simply switching them on as Marble plugins. Another great idea would be to enable mouse interaction with the background. It's all there,