Fading Memories

Inge Wallin is visiting us with his kids for New Year's Eve. And while we also make trips like taking a ride on a real steam train, we manage to do some hacking on the side. In fact, Inge declares he's being really productive right now:

First, the sketch I made for this year's seasonal greetings. It's actually our house and our church: the church is downstairs, we live upstairs. I tried to keep to the style of the Dutch painter Anton Pieck. Our part of town looks, especially if there is a little snow, just like his calendar illustrations anyway.

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For the past few years, since I started hacking on Krita in 2003, I have spent nearly all my spare time on Krita and KOffice. In the beginning, I did remember to spare a little time for actually drawing and painting, but quite soon I stopped doing event that. And whenever I picked up my pen, pencil or brush I noticed that what little skill I may have had had detoriated quite a lot.

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Everyone who knows me even slightly, knows that I am not a mathematical genius. I'm very glad that people like Casper Boemann, Cyrille Berger and Emanuele Tamponi or Michael Thaler handle that part of Krita. But it becomes a problem when your eldest daughter has a problem with her maths homework, and you cannot help her.

I've tried reading up on mathematics, and Mathematics for Computer Graphics is exactly the right level for me. But ever since Simon Stevin invented a purely Dutch vocabulary for mathematics in 17th century, it's been very hard to read about maths in English and then explain in Dutch. Especially since the text book Naomi's school uses refuses to talk mathematics, instead offering unexplained shortcuts and "steps to follow".

Enter KAlgebra

With this application we can explore the formulas in her book and discover how they work through experimentation. And for any given solution, we can then work backwards and discover the right steps ourselves. It's a very nice, polished application. Sure, there are things that could be improved: a floating palette with things like unicode power symbols would be easy, a mode that adds brackets to show the order of evaluation of a formula or a way to generate the steps necessary to solve an formula would make it even more educational. And the crosshairs could have a snap-to-grid mode.

Of course, there's also KMplot. That has the palette with symbols, It turned out to be just a tiny little bit more difficult to get started, The big problem here being that I couldn't choose the plot I needed among the various kinds of plots provided: cartesian, parametric, polar, implicit, explicit. Handling the graph is not as easy as with kalgebra, either.

For application developers, the biggest problem in the past two years has been that we could not develop against released KDE packages. We had to keep up with the joneses: keep checked out qt-copy, kdelibs, kdesupport, kdepimlibs and kdebase, keep them compiled, just to be able to get to a point where we could work on KOffice.

It's unavoidable, of course, and not a big problem for me personally. This dual core X61 61 bits OpenSUSE tablet can compile kdelibs before breakfast (if I start the compile before going to bed). By the way -- with the current kernel, OpenSUSE is incredibly stable. Suspend and resume is as reliable as with my old Pismo Powerbook under OS X -- and faster.

But it makes it really hard to attract new developers, people who'd like to report a bug and are prepared to compile koffice svn just to check whether it's already been fixed. Those are the people who tend to stay around and even help out with development after a while. Asking them to also compile all of kde is often just a bridge too far.

But yesterday night I managed to clean out my installation of all previous attempts, install the OpenSUSE KDE4 rc2 packages and succesfully compile KOffice against them. Yay! We're getting really close to the end of the road, and I'll try to keep developing against released packages only from now on.

It also marks my switch to KDE4 as my default environment. Things work quite well. Oxygen is drop-dead gorgeous, especially after making the window color #CFCFCF. I love all the subtle details. I wish I could have the scrollbars always in the gorgeous green color, instead of only when I hover over them. KWin's effects work great on OpenSUSE. Kickoff has completely won me over: I've added a couple of favourites, and that made all the difference. Dolphin rocks -- I hadn't expected that, I must admit.

Sure, there are irritants: the fish kio slave doesn't seem to work. I get a login prompt, but no directory listing. The panel is a little high, especially on my 1024x768 screen. I cannot get the pager to show up to the right of the K-menu button. Migrating my feed list from akregator3 to akregator4 baffles me. KWrite doesn't word-wrap, but glyph-wrap. There are still lots of glitches and bugs -- but life is very much worth living, and I salivate at the thought of what goodness will be built on top of these foundations.