Kasperian Moving Parts

KPilot 4.2 Progress (woot!)

Monday January 19, 2009

I spent a crapload of time this weekend, going through all the old and crufty KPilot bugs we’ve done a really horrible job of keeping up-to-date on, and triaged the bejeebers out of the list. I think we had ~ 150+ a few months ago. I went through the last 100 of them individually today, and was able to close out 93 of them, woot! A lot of them were problems that had been fixed in KDE 3.5.x, or had been directly addressed more recently in our KDE 4.2 work, or had been indirectly fixed via our KDE 4.2 work. A lot of them were also the low-hanging fruit you’d expect with “it don’t work so good” and not much Read more…

KDE, KPilot

KPilot 4.2 progress

Tuesday January 13, 2009

I discovered a nasty little data corruption bug in KPilot last night and have put some fixes in for it just this morning. The good news is that we didn’t lose any data. We just gave you a lot more data. =:) So, if you’re helping to test KPilot for our KDE 4.2 release looming Any Day Now (TM), please update from svn (branches/KDE/4.2/kdepim/kpilot) and test again. There is still one little nasty behavior that I see that I need to find a fix for tonight, though. With our new core conduit design for KDE 4.2, KPilot keeps its Handheld -> PC mappings in its own XML file–one per conduit. This is a Really Good Thing (also TM). However, it Read more…

Google, KDE, KPilot, Video Games, Work Stuff

Random Musings About a Good Week

Saturday January 10, 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged (I blame Twitter), and I had an interesting week, this last, so I figured I’d blog about it. Probably should be a bunch of individual posts, but blef and here goes…. Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet with my team at work and while this may not seem like a big deal, it was to me. Being that I’m currently working remotely, it’s very easy to feel isolated and alone and disconnected most of the time. Until I figure out how to build a virtual presence robot (like Twiki, maybe, except instead of Dr. Theopolis hanging around his neck, it would be Read more…

KDE, Linux

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia == AWESOME!!

Monday December 22, 2008

Stark contrast to my last post, I know, but I felt it was only fair to blog about the wonders of OpenSUSE 11.1, even/especially with my little nVidia chip. First off, I still think there’s something wonky going on with X and/or nVidia’s driver in taking so long to start that kdm ends up giving up and committing hari kari, but my little workaround in extending ServerAttempts and ServerTimeout in kdmrc seems to be at least good enough to keep me from committing hari kari myself. And quite honestly, that’s about as much time as I want to spend on debugging it. =:/ But I updated to the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages again today and am absolutely loving OpenSUSE 11.1. Read more…

KDE, Linux

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia?

So, first off, OpenSUSE 11.1 has to be the sweetest, best put together distro, like ever. Really amazing, quality stuff. The new installer has some excellent improvements, and package management has never felt zippier (zyppier??) However, there are a few problems that I’ve hit that I’m still trying to figure out after 2 days of fun and frolic. First off, I have a laptop (meaning I cant change the video card) with an nVidia chipset (meaning I’d like to change the video card). So while OpenSUSE 11.1 works really nicely with the open source “nv” video driver, it can’t do any compositing, 3d, OpenGL, etc., etc. (meaning no wobbley windows or cube goodness or translucency or… you get the idea…). Read more…

Linux

bbkeys 0.9.1 released (5 years later…)

Sunday December 21, 2008

I installed OpenSUSE 11.1 yesterday and there’s some… challenges… that have kept me busy for the last 2 days. But I’ll cover those in a different post… Most relevant to the title is this: OpenSUSE 11.1 doesn’t come with blackbox or bbkeys, so I set about compiling them myself and hit some problems. Blackbox, of course, compiled and installed just fine from source. Bbkeys (which depends on Blackbox and its libbt.pc) did not fare so well. For starters, there are some includes missing that newer versions of gcc fail on. Luckily, Art Haas and Egon Braun both sent me in a patch (that I regretably have been sitting on for… a long time…) that addresses this. So I submitted it Read more…

Video Games

Street Fighter IV and Keystone II Look Awesome!

Saturday December 20, 2008

I happened to see this amazing shoryuken.com post that has an awesome video about Keystone II and the next *drool* version *salivate* of the most awesome fighting game ever *slobber*: Street Fighter IV. I was also excited to see my fellow VMwarian, Tom Cannon, in the video. DANG I wish I was back in Cali to at least watch these guys playing!!

Life in General

Cleaning Up (and Remembering) The Old

Saturday November 29, 2008

I hate leaving things on my mental To-Do list, no matter how trivial or stupid they are. But I’ve had it on my mental to do list for like 4 years now to move all of the images I had in /bimages/ and /images/ on my web server to flickr and update the content in my wordpress database appropriately. So this morning, I took a couple of hours and did just this. Only had like 75 posts to edit, so it wasn’t all that bad. But along the way, it was pretty cool getting to see some of the really old pictures I still had in there and have some nice memories come back, such as: Dang I was excited Read more…

KDE

Korganizer, Exchange, OWASync, Google Calendar, KPilot

Friday November 21, 2008

I use KOrganizer to view and manage my personal calendar. My employer uses Microsoft Exchange *spit* for its calendaring solution, so I also have a calendar on the Exchange server that holds all of my work meetings and reminders. I would really like to keep everything on my Google Calendar too, so I can share it with my family. And I sync everything with my Palm so I can carry my schedule with me and get alarms when a meeting is coming up. As an aside, I’d really like to use my Nokia N810 for this instead of my Palm, but alas this is just not there yet, mCalendar notwithstanding. So my current “solution” involves using OWASync to pull down Read more…

Desktop, KDE, KPilot, Open Source

KDE 4.2 is flat out going to rock

Tuesday November 11, 2008

That’s my prediction. Of course, the truth of the matter is that KDE 4.2 (trunk) flat out rocks today. Seriously. I have never been more excited about the Linux desktop than I am right now. And this, 2+ months out from our actual KDE 4.2 release. I’ve been running OpenSUSE 11 for a couple of months now, and thanks to the awesome nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk packages, I’m thoroughly enjoying pretty-darned-bleeding-edge 4.2/trunk packages, but with half the carbs, and I am loving what I’m seeing! Recent KMail improvements are awesome. Plasma is getting more and more bullet-proof and gorgeous by the week. Kwin just keeps getting more and more stable and purty. Kdevelop4 and Kate are getting some SERIOUSLY cool enhancements Read more…