Surviving BIC monday, etc.

Well, BIC monday was tricky, but we survived it thanks to lots of cooperation in #kde4-devel, good work everyone. Work was hectic as most mondays when the boss just got back from a business trip are, but somehow I was also able to get mbrola going on my machine (Yes, I'm one of those weird people that hooks konversation and kopete up to kttsd so I can hear messages on my headphones.)

I was also thinking yesterday, that maybe some of you might skip over my posts because of lack of picture, so I included a picture of kpicross scaled with white-on-grey kde4 color scheme made possible by the new colors kcm (sorry, that was a blatant boast, but probably not a good one, as white on grey is horrid).

Colors, Picross, and Comminuty

Hey, it's been a while since I've posted. (insert standard excuse here) Some good things have happened since last time though. I somehow got involved with the colors kcm helping mwoelke with that a bit. It moved into trunk this week, and is somewhat functional, you can set your colors and apply/ok work, but saving/loading color schemes is not in place yet, and the effects page does nothing yet. Also an issue has been discovered in kwin when using the colors kcm or the composite kcm with composite turned on, it hangs on apply in both unless rivo or Seli got that fixed already.

In other news, in my daily reading on planet.kde.org I read that kdenonbeta stuff is to be moved soon, so I checked out what was in there, and found KPicross, a picross game Zack made on a plane trip years ago. I just got back into picross with Picross DS and would like to see kpicross come back to life. So I asked Zack about it, and moved it into playground. I spent some time on it today, and got it ported to Qt 4 and KDE 4 and got it scaling and using KColorScheme colors for drawing. It's still got a lot of work to make it beautiful like the rest of kdegames, but I just keep imagining sharing picross puzzles with other kde-ers through KHotNewStuff and it keeps me motivated.

Back in kde-edu stuff, Frederik has somehow kept his pace up with fixes to Parley. Some Chinese contributors have donated some chinese vocabulary files that I think I'll be utilizing soon to review chinese characters with as my understanding in #kde-cn is not what it should be.

Anyway, enough rambling, my goals for this weekend are to have colors kcm functional to the point that the only thing missing is saving/loading of scheme files.

Watching Frederik go

This week I haven't done much, but it seems like lots has happened. Probably because the checkins in keduvocdocument were many and a lot changed. Thanks to Frederik for taking on the ugly conjugation class, and for making an identifiers class, as well as fixing kvoctrain issues that the changes in the library caused (Sorry about that fregl.)

Not sure if anyone cares, but in the kde diplomacy game on phpdiplomacy.net we are down to the final 4 players, and it seems sides have been taken. Groundferret (Germany) and I (France) have made war with SaroEngels (Turkey) and his brother haldir (Austria).

On the kde4 testing front (informally only for now) CPgmrSw2 (sorry, I butchered your nick) noticed about a month ago that shortcut keys were not working in kde 4 for some reason. We looked into it a bit at the time, but couldn't find any solution (or what the problem was for that matter.) This last week Seli got back from vacation, and when we mentioned it to him Mattias Kretz said his were working fine. Then we found his was working ok when launched from kde3, so we tried various combinations of kde3 and kde4 sessions with kde4's kwin window manager. Mikmak of yzis fame found the problem had to do with KGlobalAccel's going away when kded encountered problems. I found a way to get it working on my system by pointing kde4.dekstop at a small shell script that sets up my environment with kde4 paths, and then executing kde4's startkde. (I can finally Ctrl-F8 to get the desktop grid-effect, and alt-tab with composite, yay!) Mikmak also had success by removing old plugins from his KDE4/libs folder.

Can't think of anything else for this week, but I'll probably think of something this weekend (and hopefully get some hacking done also to report about.)

P.S. thanks to all those that responded to either my last post or annma's e-mail and helped translate/update khangman/kanagram data files. It's great to be part of a community so willing to help each other out.