moving parts of the kasper clan

Yay! Adriaan was nice enough to include me in the KDE people-of-PIM page! A prouder moment I’ve not had all week. =:)

In other news….

I saw Episode III, and I must say that my predictions were largely accurate, except that reading the screenplay/book was somehow worse than seeing it all movie-fied.

Real Life (TM) is sucking up far too much coding time and as such, I’ve not been able to get a chance to work on getting knotes/kpilot working all beautiful-like. This will require some changes in knotes to deal with categories and another program modifying its ics-file, etc., first before the changes can be made to kpilot, so I think I’ll probably take a look at submitting some patches for knotes along these lines, if I get a chance.

Real Life (TM), as mentioned above, includes various necessities, such as playing Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory until the wee hours of the night on my Xbox. =:/ And what do I have to show for it? Really tired eyes and an overall ranking of 225, grade B fighter. =:/

Mike had his baby!!! Well, actually, Liz had the baby…. Anyway, Mike and Liz had their baby!! Congratulations, Mike!!! =:)

Anybody know how to make a living (support one’s family, etc.) working on the Open Source Desktop (KDE/Qt-development would be preferred, but anything helping to build the Open Source Desktop would be nice)? *sigh*

I am always amazed at the rudeness and insensitivity that is shown by certain members of the Open Source community. This behavior is many times in stark contrast with that of others who do an outstanding job of treating others with kindness and consideration.

I know it’s not fair to generalize or put people into groups, etc., but having watched and been involved in the mailing lists for the evolution project, and the gnome community in general, there are certain inviduals who continually go out of their way to be rude, irritating, and annoying. Here’s a good example which just landed in my lap today….

The evolution GNOME groupware project had made some very nice UI changes between major version 1 and 2. There are some ugly side effects, however, and I filed a wishlist report like a good little user and it has sat for 8 months with little input from the developers. Today, it was rudely closed and marked as invalid by NotZed with the following comments:

Not Zed changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
-----------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |INVALID

------- Additional Comments From Not Zed  2005-05-19 11:50 -------
the ui has changed, you could collapse the items, or you could
scroll once in a while - it wont kill you

That’s nice, eh? Yessirree, I’m feeling good about the time I’ve invested in the evolution community in the past. And it’s not the first time I’ve seen this sort of rude behavior in Open Source communities. And the sad thing is that the only thing this accomplishes is alienates users. It’s not helpful in the least, nor does it invite people to help make your project better, nor even to care to use it. Now, I’m by no means advocating that developers should cater to the every whim from the great, unwashed masses, but to borrow the phrase used on me above, it wouldn’t kill them to think for a second to see if there’s a usability issue that they might not have thought about.

In my case listed here, I think there is. But at the end of the day, I really don’t care anymore. This is just another reason to not care about this software, another reason for me to be thankful for the really great attitudes, atmosphere, and community that I’ve found in the KDE project, and another reason to put all my spare time and energy into helping to improve the KDE project’s solutions (like kontact, kmail, kpilot, korganizer, etc.).

I would gladly pay for this, I really would. The best tool I have to use currently is BloGTK, and while it’s not bad, it doesn’t do WYSIWYG. The user (that would be me) has to click to insert the appropriate tags, etc., and that gets rather boring after… well, it’s boring.

I found PyQLogger and it looks interesting, but as usual, all of the Python-dependencies aren’t to be found for my Fedora Core 3 laptop. Which reminds me, I’m starting to feel the itch to do a clean install on my laptop again, and I’m wondering if Kubuntu is worth trying out. Anyone have experience in the differences between Fedora Core 3 and Kubuntu?

I hate to say this, but I am really disappointed with the Win4Lin Pro product. For those of you who don’t know what this is… it’s software that allows you to run windows programs in Linux. Well, to be fair, it’s more than that. Being that it’s built on top of qemu, it’s actually a full-blown PC emulator which happens to run Windows 2000 and Windows XP, etc.

The reasons I’m disappointed with this new product from Win4Lin are as follows:

• It’s REALLY slow. REEEEEALLY slow. Vmware is about 20 times faster.
• I have been a Win4Lin customer for years, and their old Win9X emulator was REALLY, REALLY fast. Like, twice as fast as Vmware. I was really expecting to see amazing speed with WinXP with Win4Lin 1.1 Pro, and maybe that’s my fault for having expectations to begin with, but I did, and they were not close to being met.
• The price point of this product is over the $100 mark. This is significantly more expensive than Win4Lin was when I was a paying customer. And being that performance is absolutely horrible, I definitely cannot see myself paying $120 for this. And that saddens me, because quite honestly, I can’t see anybody paying $120 for this. And that saddens me because Win4Lin used to be the best windows-on-linux software available. =:/

So, all in all, I’m frustrated for having spent a LARGE amount of time waiting for my laptop to not be 100% CPU-constrained by Win4Lin as it installed WinXP and subsequently ran it, at 486dx4-100 speed. =:/

Very sad. Win4Lin, I wish you the best of luck. I really do. But you’ll have to figure out how to get your VM performance to be better than VMware’s to be successful, I honestly believe, and that’s going to be a really tough job. =:/

I just discovered the Newsboys’ Thrive CD, and I am really loving it.

“Live in Stereo”, “Million Pieces (Kissin’ Your Cares Goodbye)”, “Rescue”, and “Cornelius” are absolutely brilliant, and have kept me rocking, smiling, and singing along on my drive to/from work for the last couple of days. I heartily recommend this CD to everyone, and will have to look into buying some more Newsboys CD’s now.

I think my favorite song lyrically is “Live in Stereo”….

This field guide’s
Got no soul
Digging for the sacred
In a man-made hole

The soil gets harder
The shovel won’t behave
I just dug myself
Into a six foot grave

I need a new dimension
Got to Supersize
A Jacobean ladder
To a parallel prize

The walk’s by faith
The sight lines lie
How’m I gonna tag along
With one tin ear
And one glass eye
Well I…

Chorus:
I can’t get there from here
When every sense is in mono
Walk by faith, you appear
I wanna live in stereo

I can’t get there from here
Without a God-directed go
Walk by faith, you appear
I gotta live in stereo.

I quit, I fold, I’m done
Trying to scale Everest
Sherpa-less
Ain’t fun

The best laid plans
Are in my other pants
The base camp’s buried
In an avalanche

I need a new dimension
Got to Supersize
A Jacobean ladder
To a parallel prize

The walk’s by faith
The lone wolf dies
But how’m I gonna follow you
With blue man ears
And snow blind eyes?
Well I…

… out of which “the best laid plans are in my other pants” is my favorite, I think. =;)

Good CD!! Go get it!!

I am.

I feel like I’m standing still when I should be running. I feel exhausted. I have little time and too much to do in it.

Blargh.

That’s about all I have to say about that.