Archive for the 'kde' Category

The Realm of the Flying Pigs

So M got a flying pig for his birthday. Imagine that!
Awesomeness - aren’t you jealous? I surely am. It’s even pink!
There are days (or does it only happen at night, when you can’t sleep?) where flying pigs seem to be the secret rulers of KDE.
Flying Pig

M told me that he used to have a moving earth as desktop wallpaper.
At night when I should have been sleeping the pig came flying by to remind me of the marble spinning in space.
The pig kept talking to me. It reminded me that I had read about patterns as desktop background and the Mandelbrot fractal.
And there was a plasma applet based on marble already. All ingredients there right?
So yesterday I sat down and started writing a moving earth desktop wallpaper.
It’s currently in playground/base/plasma/wallpapers and just an early proof of concept.

Since the planet doesn’t show the video, here is a link: Marble wallpaper video

The great thing about this is that it took only approximately three hours to get it to work for the first time.
To me that shows how easy to use our APIs have become and how much power KDE 4 offers.
There are stil lots of things to improve in the wallpaper globe.
Some are very simple like adding a sun and stars (maybe optionally) by simply switching them on as Marble plugins.
Another great idea would be to enable mouse interaction with the background.
It’s all there, probably just a few lines of code missing to get the first truly interactive background in KDE.
And how about a different perspective - some more tilt to get a more 3d impression when flying over the country.
Thank you pink flying pig.

Nurenberg work and fun

When your boss tells you that you have to take over some work from a collegue, work that involves travelling several hours in each direction, work on a project you haven’t been involved before and only get a minimum briefing, your most common reaction will likely be “this sucks!”.

Lets not be kidding, work itself and the circumstances still sucked, but being a KDE developer has certain advantages, e.g. knowing people all over the world, especially in KDE stronghold like Nurenberg.

So on Tuesday evening I went for dinner with The SUSE People(tm), Flavio, Stephan, Cornelius, Dirk and Will, to a really nice place called “Herr Lenz” with an interesting style of cuisine and very good beer Smiling
Thanks a lot guys!

P.S.: unless I am really lucky I am going to have to cunduct the actual site acceptance test procedure next week as well, so you might get a call from my again.