I'd like to introduce Akarsh Simha, who was awarded a GSoC this year to work on KStars. His project is entitled "Optimising loading and painting of stars in KStars", and when it is successfully completed, KStars will finally have the ability to display millions of stars, without adversely affecting the programs interactive responsiveness.

Say hello to our new baby daughter, Vivian:

She was born on Feb 25th. Her middle name is QiHui, which is Mandarin for "bright angel". Haiyin and I are very happy, and not a little tired!

Some day, I will have time to work on KStars again...but it probably won't be soon!

I've tried before, the installer always fails for me. But, I'm getting fed up with Gentoo (finally), so I decided to give it another try. Surely this time would be better...

Attending the KDE4 Release Event has been insanely great. It's so good to finally meet people I've only known via email and IRC. We have an incredible community, and now I feel much closer to it than I did before.

Some random bits:

With the release of KDE 4.0, it's time to start maintaining both trunk and branch versions of the code, so that bugfixes can be backported to the branch.

If you use the cs/cb/cmakekde scripts to manage your build environment, it's fairly easy to switch the context of these between branch and trunk.

I posted this to k-c-d a couple days ago, but it generated zero response, so I thought I'd post it to the ol' blog in case any non k-c-d types might be interested.

Qt designer is, shall we say, quite verbose when it comes to encoding rich text. For example, if you put a couple of words in bold in a text field, this is what you get in your UI file: