This week has been pretty cool =)

My partner and some hackers from the OSS project he's involved with have been gearing up for the ICFP contest (http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/). I'm very interested in seeing what will be happening in the next few days as they work on the first stage of the competition entry.

I've been very surprised and pleased with all the positive feedback I'm getting at the moment about my first installment of a monthly features guide tracking KDE development:

http://dot.kde.org/1119602849/

I'm hoping this can help get more people interested in trying out unstable KDE builds to test and submit bug reports for better QA. I really have to say thanks to aseigo, mattr and Riddell for tons of useful information and being there to bounce ideas off. Especially thanks to physos for helping me so much with css! The KDE community never ceases to amaze me with the wide pool of knowledge about all kinds of subjects that's available to those who ask.

If anyone has any ideas of cool new features they'd like to see included in next month's edition, or suggestions about content I'd love to hear from you if you were to drop me an email or message me on IRC.

My next project I'm planning to undertake (after a bit of work on the plasma website) will be to start a localised KDE website for New Zealand. Being the only dot in my country on the http://worldwide.kde.org/ map isn't terribly much fun when I hear about all the interesting conferences and meetings that are happening in Europe and the USA. Hopefully I can drum up some KDE enthusiasts in New Zealand to keep me company =)

Last night I took a break from the computer to go walking around the waterfront with Bruce and Mara. I think we girls tried his patience sorely, as we stopped ever 5 paces to take yet another photograph of the lights across the harbour. I can only assume it's our incredible cuteness that makes him put up with both of us at once

For all you tweakers,
I've just finished writing an article on hidden kicker configuration options that I've posted on the Wiki for the moment

http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Kicker+Hacks

I notice that kind fairies have nicely formatted my article while I slept. Thanks for tweaking the layout luci, I guess you can tell that I've never used a wiki before.

It's going to become an appendix in the kicker handbook as soon as I figure out how you markup docbook that contains other arbitrary xml markup within it as examples, without the parser thinking you want your examples to be docbook. Hrm.

I've been drafted to write the documentation and help administer the website for plasma and I'm really quite interested in where the discussion is going. There seem to be some very talented new faces hacking with aseigo at the moment and lots of new ideas. I'm looking forward to getting my desktop computer back so I can start tracking KDE 4 development, to write about features as they come in.

I'm currently helping a little with cleaning up the translation of some kalzium strings and installed kdeedu to take a look at the app. It's been quite a challenge for me since I'm no chemist and don't know what some of the words mean in English but it looks a very interesting app. I had no idea kdeedu was packed with such great programs.

I've since been spending far too much time playing khangman and fiddling around with other great kdeedu programs. I've downloaded some language packs for khangman and have been attempting to play the animals level in German with my Bildwörterbuch as a guide, with varying degrees of sucess.

I hear the recursion support I nagged cies for has made it into Kturtle in trunk, yay! Kturtle is an implementation of the logo programming language with a rather cute green turtle and a nice interface. Using a turtle can be great to teach people some very important programming and mathematical basics in a fun way. For anyone who has fond memories of using logo and a turtle way back when, here is a screenshot of kturtle drawing a plane filling curve (in colour! This is much cooler than other turtles, who don't do colour

Now I just have to bug the maintainer for a way to push and pop a turtles location off a stack, so that one can draw things like delicate fractal trees using recursion.

If you haven't yet, do check out kdeedu. Whether you have children or are a child at heart you'll have lots of fun rediscovering things you forgot you knew, and perhaps even learn something you didn't know before.

Lately I've been looking at various Linux photo management apps in preparation for writing a comparison. After some struggling I managed to get digiKam working under Slackware. The hotplug scripts are a very nice touch. When I plug my camera in, hotplug launches a usbcam script that sets the permissions on the device for the current user and launches digiKam, which immediately connects to the camera and shows you a window of thumbnails you can import from your camera.

I set it up for a friend of mine on her Fedora laptop and she seems pretty impressed with it too. Tip: remember to put your camera in ptp mode, else hald will continously mount it when you plug it in until you want to tear your hair out

This program is absolutely lovely. I could rhapsodise all day about how well put together and feature rich digiKam is. For anyone who hasn't tried it yet or has perhaps been put off by attempting to resolve the dependancies by hand - it's worth the effort!

Some photographs from my walk around the harbour yesterday:

(click for full size)
Panoramic view of the harbour

Bruce pointed out a baby hedgehog in the path in front of us. He was running away on spindly little legs that seemed absurdly skinny to support such a rotund ball of quills. We caught up with him and he posed prettily for some photographs then allowed me to stroke him. New Zealand wildlife is amazing. I can't imagine attempting to touch an Australian wild animal without losing my hand

Thanks to those who told me how to get images to show up on the planet

This evening I went along to a Mac developers meeting. We were invited to sit in a circle and introduce ourselves one by one.

"Hi, I'm Jessica and I'm a Linux geek and open source hacker. I don't use macs."

It was primarily a presentation about Web Objects. It was interesting, although it mostly made me think 'I must get around to reading up on Ruby on Rails'. One quote from the presentation was 'If you're writing code, you're doing something wrong'. I tried really hard not to smirk. I've always found it amusing the style of marketing Apple seem to focus on: 'If you're too stupid to use a PC, this is the OS for you'. In the buzz of mingled conversation afterwards I heard KDE mentioned a few times.

On mentioning KDE I saw reactions I'd observed in the past. Some people there had impressions of KDE from early versions, mostly of interface inconsistency between KDE and non KDE applications like Netscape. Even though these versions are quite a few years old these negative imprints are retained - and even worse, expressed as opinions to others who may not have tried Linux or KDE at all. I'd like to think of some effective ways to promote what KDE's strengths are today to Unix user/developer groups.

An interesting night.

Today was my second glider flight. I try not to mention the first one. The discovery that I was lactose intolerant at 3000ft after drinking an inhabitual hot chocolate on my way to the airfield was fairly traumatic for both myself and the pilot.

Today went much more smoothly. We were up for 15 minutes and just floated gently back and forth along a nearby ridgeline. I took a few photographs toward the end and a short video clip of the landing (Including authentic violent camera jerking as the wheel hits the runway =). I'm hoping I can get used to this enough to photograph scenery from way up high without getting queasy looking through the viewfinder.

I'm starting to think I might be interested in learning to fly one of these things.

It's a small, small world.

While staying in Wellington I thought I'd take the opportunity check out the local LUG. It seems to be a collection of some pretty nice people of varying geekiness, most of whom I'm interested in getting to know better. A nice man who has the same model laptop as I do. We exchanged some pointers on how we'd gotten various things working. A younger guy, burning with New Gentoo Convert Zeal. Seems very bright and funny in a goofy way. There was one other girl there - yay!

Job interviews really, really suck.

The traditional upbringing of an Australian fundamentalist christian renders you almost incapable of 'selling yourself' effectively in an interview. As a child, you learn that to state your own talents is 'bragging' or 'being up yourself'. It makes it very difficult as an adult to then learn how to market yourself to an employer. They ask you 'So, why should we give you this job?' and you look at them blankly. 'Uh.... um, cause I wouldn't suck at it too much?'

I'm currently doing some research focused on marketing and promotion for a KDE related project, and I'd really love it if people reading this could help me out. I'm looking for the opinions of primarily windows and apple users who have switched to using KDE on UNIX-like platforms. There are two main points I'd like to collect data about:

I've been fortunate enough to get my hands on a replacement laptop thanks to someone who has now secured my life-long adoration. My venerable dell latitude csx that has served me for much of the last year has been acting up lately eating up batteries and having the charger malfunction. Not very good and rather frustrating.

I'm making plans to possibly move to Sydney sometime within the next few months. For those of you in the US, New Zealand is not a part of Australia, and I even need a passport to go there. It's not a huge move since the countries are so similar and I am actually Australian to start with, but moving country at the best of times is a Big Pain.