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- kpresenter templates, foss/lc and other thingsAugust 12
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I was chatting a few days ago with Thorsten from the KOffice and KPresenter team about the KPresenter template contest. We've received a couple of entries, but we'd really like to see a lot more of them. I know there are a lot of brilliant artists out there in F/OSS-land, and this is an opportunity to get involved, get a bit of recognition and help out those who aren't as artistically gifted as you are to make stunning presentations with KOffice. The contest closes on the 15th of next month, so get your art engines revved up! :)
Speaking of revving, I'm working on what will hopefully be final drafts of my two presentations for FOSS LC's Summer Camp. One is about managing open source software projects, using the KDE meta-project as the poster child. I'll be covering things such as governance, leadership and infrastructure. I only have half an hour to do it in, so I'm sticking to the most important issues.
I'll also be giving an hour long presentation on where KDE and the Free Software desktop are going. It's one of the main presentations at the end of the day so the audience should be healthy. Always easier to draw a larger crowd when there are no other presentations to compete with? ;) I'll be covering what we're doing internally with The Pillars, what we're doing in - making writing documentation ... enjoyable?August 9
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Among other things, I'm a software developer. From what I understand that is supposed to make me genetically incapable of writing usage documentation without experiencing great pains in my head and various extremities .. or something along those lines. I wouldn't know, really, because I've generally run screaming from the task. I've just taken the word of my peers as to the horrors that would, in theory, await. Until this past week ...
I've been poking my head into Userbase and picking at the Plasma documentation there along with a handful of other people who have been writing content there. The revelation for me is how enjoyable it is to do this on a wiki. I spent some time thinking about why it's enjoyable, while I find the old "write it in a local file" method less so. Here are my thoughts thus far:
The wiki gives me instant feedback: I can write something and then preview it in its final form instantly. That's nice, but not as nice as seeing other people's content appear as well. Maybe I'm more teamwork driven than others (which is perhaps ironic, given how anti-team work as a student ;) but that really makes a psychological difference for me.
The discussion pages are great as they let us coordinate. Pages can be written before being linked to, allowing a nice editorial process. New pages that don't exist can be linked to from existing pages as well, giving a nice way to find something that needs doing.
The writing style is als - Javascript DataEngines Get ServicesAugust 6
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DataEngines written in JavaScript can now offer Services. Sounds life changing, right? Ok, maybe not, but really, I swear it is! ;)
DataEngines publish data in a read-only pattern that allows the data to be accessed and shared by multiple consumers (or what we usually refer to as "visualizations"). The "read-only" part is a bit of an annoyance if the data being presented represents a live artifact. For instance, if a DataEngine was reporting on the network link, it might be nice to set the status of that network interface. Of if the DataEngine was publishing information about windows on screen, it might be nice to be able to say, "Hey, minimize that one." Or if the DataEngine shows information from an online service, it might be really useful to say, "By the way, here are my log in credentials for that service."
Plasma has the concept of a "Service", which does pretty much what it sounds like: it provides an interactive service that you can make calls to. What those calls do, exactly, is completely up to the Service. Service is designed around asynchronous jobs, but it can be used synchronously, something that is again up to the Service. Services, unlike DataEngines, are not shared but are used by the consumer that requests it. If 10 visualizations are using the same DataEngine, there is one copy of the data. If those 10 visualizations all request a specific Service, there are 10 services created, one for each. Such is the nature of asynchronous write o - quick wiki experiment updateAugust 6
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This is a quick follow-up on my post from yesterday about adding content to Userbase and Techbase.
The good news is that two people (besides myself) have started adding content to the Plasma Panels page. There's a discussion thread with three people (including me) adding to it. This is great!
I added some links in the introduction section to text that refers to specific widgts, such as the system tray and tasks widget. If you're looking for something even more focused than "Panels in Plasma" to add to, log in to Userbase and click on one (or more :) of those links and start adding content.
I've also added the {{improve|reason why}} template from Techbase, and used it on the Panels page. This in turn gives us the auto-generated Needs Improvement page thanks to the use of categories. Looks like a nice start to getting lists together. I need to discuss with Anne about adding a Category to the {{under_construction}} template so we can start building lists of new pages that are needed as well.
The Techbase task is still open and untouched, but that's understandable as it is a bit more technical and complex so the possible authorship audience is likewise smal - copyright assignments of the third kindAugust 6
- Richard Hillesley wrote an articled title "om/tracker/7615673-9101433041943371670?l=aseigo.blogspot.com" alt="" />