Here is a short update about Marble Plugins. Let's have a look at the weather plugin. At the moment it can display the weather condition as well as the temperature, but as the backend already holds all the other weather information it's easy to present more. Every weather stations also got a priority, which results into the displayed stations being nicely selected.

During the last weeks I introduces Marbles AbstractDataPlugin classes. These make it possible to generate a full featured Marble plugin showing for example photos on the globe with several hundered lines of code.

Marble is one of my favorite applications. I especially like it in combination with OpenStreetmap. Free software and free maps, a brilliant combination. But I also love the historical map or the moon view.

Marble also is great as a demo application. It's easy to grasp and makes an attractive showcase. To make demoing Marble a bit easier I thought it would be nice to have a Marble live CD, and as I happen to have a great application for doing this at hand, I created some Marble live CDs. You can download them from my Marble live CD page.

I'm interested in feedback. So if you have questions, comments or want to help, contact me.

I'd like to say hello to everybody reading this blog. This is my first blog entry. I'm starting my blog because I got accepted to this year's Google Summer of Code to work on Marble.

About Me
I live in Laboe, Germany and I am a student at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. My major subject is computer science and my minor subject Electrical Engineering. At the moment I am in my second semester.

On August 1st, we had a partial solar eclipse in Kuwait, covering about 18% of the solar disk. Part of the event involved showing live view of the eclipse from the Ujari Observatory, which relies on KStars for control. So we got a hand held video cam, an adapter to attach it to a short focal length telescope (which is mounted on the same equatorial fork base of the primary telescope), and a long video cable connecting two 46" LCDs in the ground and first floor levels of the astronomy & space sciences department.

The time to paint easter eggs has not come yet. It will though, in about half an hour. Also I don't really know why I'll do it. Maybe to reflect on my art skills once more and be happy that other people user their ability to create great artwork for KDE and Parley.
Instead I yesterday started something that had been rotating in the back of my head for about a year now. Since I started working on KVocTrain/Parley one problem has been how to deal with synonyms (to a lesser degree antonyms and false friends, which will be done with in the same instant).

Plasmoids have been creeping into different parts of KDE... The E-Team lately spotted two of them. So maybe check out KDE-Edu to get a real hot calculator made by apol. The gui is in need of some love, but it's already very powerful since it uses KAlgebra behind the scenes (yay, scientific calculations on your desktop).
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The other one I quickly hacked together, using artwork that leeo did for the icon originally.
Being reminded by aseigo to seperate engine and applet, I had a glimpse at how engines are created, decided it's easy enough, so the engine is there too now. It can easily be extended to give tons of data, so I'm open to crazy ideas, if you want it to spit out more data, just tell me. Font config works, but some layouting might do good. And feel free to come up with an improved design and especially layout. As I have little time lately and rather want to get Parley in trunk into a working state again, I won't update the plasmoid much. Junior jobbing anyone? Great place to start, I already have a couple of ideas... drop by in #kde-edu on freenode.