Animus Wisdom

New year, new theme for my titles…. Any guesses ?

\brief KDE Release Event

I would like to thank everybody involved in the KDE 4 Release Event, It was a pleasure to meet fellow KDE gear heads, talk to media people, get drunk at google, make new friends, get drunk at the hotel, sneak in the backdoor of the oasis pub ( I think it was called oasis ) and sing karaoke till they kicked us out.

\brief Distro Hooping

While at the event I decided to try out Kubuntu since the great Mr. Riddell was so kind as to leave a few install cd’s for anybody who was interested, sadly my POS laptop didn’t like the idea; My Compaq V3010US is one of the worst laptops I have had the pleasure to buy. It has a horrible ACPI implementation, 30 minute battery life, it uses that damn broadcom wireless chipset and a nasty nvidia video chipset that burned out the original LCD display and has already killed a pixel or two in the new display. Sadly Kubuntu lowered the battery life down to 15 minutes and the video drivers didn’t work at all. I have been a hard-core Gentoo user for quite some time and I was a bit worried trying out a binary based distribution but I gave it the old collage try for the duration of my trip yet it didn’t stick, I reinstalled Gentoo as soon as I got home. I love to try distros but I have noticed I keep coming back to good old Gentoo.

\brief Closure

A little under a year ago one of my cars got stolen breaking my stolen car recovery streak; I have recovered every single car that has been stolen from me or one of my family members in a day or even minutes. — I found the damn thing last week in a impound lot!!! The car was stolen on the 14th of Feburary 2007 and was impounded the day after. So it has been waiting for me for almost a year. On the up side my streak has not been broken but on the down side it got stripped by thieves. Que sera sera.

\brief Wrap-up

Well after taking care of most of my backlogged work I can finally get back to some fun and interesting matters! A few photos from ( outside ) the KDE Event and my stripped out car can be found at http://photos.guillermoamaral.com/.

Cheers!

It is time to get ready for my trip to Mountain View for the KDE Release Event, I will be sharing a room with Dave Yates from the Lotta Linux Links site and podcast, so it should be entertaining.

Expect a lot of pictures!

As I picked up my P.O. Box mail yesterday evening I noticed something was different, a large rectangular envelope had found it’s way in to my slot. It was a FedEx Express Envelope, I decided to open it right then and their and as I did a fresh off the ‘Google’ smell came from the inside.
At first I did not believe it, I looked away and started shaking the envelope vigorously until a smaller envelope fell from the inside, carefully picking it up from the soft carpeted ground I noticed it had some sort of new protection technology — “What is this Sorcery ?” my daughter shouted; Two small plastic rectangular pieces covered with glue on one side kept me away from my prize, I put on my emergency latex gloves and proceeded removing the strange objects, after a growling 2 hours of pealing I was Inside the smaller envelope. Their it was… my Official KDE 4 Release Event Invitation from Google Inc.

I wanted to get the new KNotes layout out before the big freeze coming up, I still need to allot time and effort to get the code cleaned up and add much needed improvements.

This following screen shot shows the new layout in all it’s glory.

* What you may not notice is that the Size Grip is no longer set as the Editor’s Corner Widget,
I had some problems getting that to work well on Qt 4.

* KNote now uses actual Qt Layouts to split the components inside each note.

* The note close button is larger and responds to hover and mouse down events differently.

Well after commenting a few posts ago about newsgroup use or the lack there off, I switched all my KDE mailing subscriptions to newsgroups in Gmane :-D, now all my news and mailing lists reside in KNode instead of KMail.

BTW, I will attend the KDE 4 release event at Google, this will be my first KDE event since the European events are quite a long way from my home office in Tijuana, Mexico and the old KWallet is empty during that time of the year. I hope to meet many of you there :-)

P.S. Many people have sent me e-mails asking about my post titles, only two got it right. all titles come from Edgar Allan Poe works, I might have also used a movie title at some point.