annma's blog

This new little guy tells you on the KDE-Edu website that you can find a tutorial related to the program page. Thanks to Arindam Ghosh, you can find a tutorial on how to add words in Kanagram, in KHangMan and how to add a map in KGeography.
This will trigger more contributions and when KNewStuff upload feature is available (in 4.2 only probably) we'll have everything needed to share data. Those tutorials are fun to read and easy to follow, thanks Arindam! Anyone is free to improve them as the .odf sources are also available!

Thanks to Alexis [Darktears] we gathered again for our monthly workshop. Cyrille Berger from Krita fame joined and we were 4 steady people and others coming to say Hi like ervin, some without machines so they just chatted a bit and some to see what we do. We even had a user using this other Linux desktop but finding KDE 4 cool and also finding the idea of these hacking sessions cool and wanting to join next month and moving to KDE 4. Cyrille hacked on Krita, he also gave some info about KOffice, Alexis fixed the task manager (yeah, no more "black holes!) and filled me about the Plasma meeting and I made a few Plasma API review commits. I also worked on KAppTemplate which is nearly ready to move to kdereview (I have to finish the doc). I have to thanks "asraniel" who sent me a patch, his first KDE contribution and as I knew he wants to work on other parts of KDE I suggested he ask for a svn account which he got quickly. He fixed a few bugs in KAppTemplate and that allowed me to keep going and improve the GUI a bit. Welcome asraniel and thanks for your excellent work already!
A very productive Saturday!

The Edu meeting we had in December 2007 was surely not productive in terms of commits numbers (refering to Paul's blog which I found quite puzzling), we did not had an outstanding number of commits. But it glued the team in a way that no IRC or email exchanges could have achieved. We have 8 GSoC projects accepted, one is Step author wife (who is already hacking on Step) and she'll start an Incredible Machine like game for Step, mentored by Carsten. I believe this was made possible by our meeting and I'd like to thank all mentors for their dedication. Welcome to all students!
I am certainly not very productive, having been on a 1 week dream holiday alone with my husband (thanks to Debs who looked after Clarisse and Léah!). I am currently rebuilding trunk on a USB disk due to space problems and bad partitions management.
I am quite behind for all applications I am maintaining and I am not sure to reach the deadline in 2 weeks for the new KAppTemplate. It needs some GUI tweaking, it's a QWizard, the first page presents the app, the second page lists the available templates (KDE4, PyQT4, PyKDE4, Ruby korundum). Then the rest is not finished, the 3rd page asks for some details like author and email and where to install, it needs a 4th page with some feedback on how the template installs... It's a really easy project with little code and if you feel you want to contribute to KDE this could be a great way to get started. The code is in /playground/devtools/kapptemplate, you need to
svn co -N .../playground/devtools/
cd devtools
svn up cmake
svn up kapptemplate
and run cmake in devtools build level then cd kapptemplate and build it. Thanks in advance!

So what I have been up to these past days? I started a GUI interface for KAppTemplate. KAppTemplate was (still is) a bash script (in kdesdk) which generates some templates projects for people who want to start a KDE app but do not want the full KDevelop. Somehow I ended up in porting KAppTemplate to KDE 4 (being bash, it was not too difficult, I hear you mumbling! true, but the templates themselves needed the port). One of my contributions in KDevelop 3 was to maintain some templates and I added some (as I began from scratch, I guess I am grateful for those tools and I want to help newcomers in KDE as much as I can).
KAppTemplate interface will be based on QWizard and the idea will be to share the templates with KDevelop (probably having a KHNS repository for them). So it's like a total rewrite in fact. KDevelop at the moment has only a Qt4 template and KAppTemplate has 2 KDE 4 templates.
I digged into model/view and also wrote 2 unit tests, thanks to David Faure and Kévin Ottens for the inspirational talk they gave at last Akademy. I took me time to assimilate the concept of tests but when I found myself writing several small test cases to check some chunks of my code, I remembered about tests :) Pretty neat! The whole code is in /playground/devtools/
KAppTemplate as it'll maybe look like:


Clarisse was 2 last Sunday but as we were away we could not celebrate properly and it'll be done next Sunday. She starts talking and is very funny, inventing syllables and concatenating words like "Joachim" (our son aged 17, her idol) and "Clarisse" give "Yo'isse" (she cannot say J or R). While as she is always around it's often difficult for me to concentrate when coding, on the other hand I'm lucky to share every step she takes. During the second week holiday I went to the "Cité de l'espace" with Léah and also to the circus. Léah will be 10 in May and is interested by everything, constantly asking questions and always smiling... To a soccer match with Joachim (our team at the moment is meant to go to the 2nd League...)

These past days I got contributions to KDE-Edu applications and that remainded me how Educational applications are different from other applications in the sense that they need data.
Pavol Pitoňák sent 5 KTouch keyboard layouts. KTouch changed the way keyboard layouts are done in KDE 4 and thus all layouts need to be redone (there's a keyboard layout editor integrated in KTouch but still you need to update keys and it can be quite tedious). Thanks a lot Pavol for these contributions!
Amine Say sent me the KLettres alphabet sounds in Arabic. Recording sounds is a difficult task as you need clear pronounced sounds. These sounds are integrated in the Arabic l10n module so all Arabic KDE users get them and they are also available via KNewStuff in KLettres.
I tested the sounds and got Arabic l10n module to further test in RTL mode. The kids theme did not accommodate the letter too well so I pushed the bear to the right a bit in the SVG background theme.

Very impressive work, thanks Amine. KLettres has now 19 languages sounds. While being quite a simple program, it's nevertheless efficient and liked by users.
I detected a couple of bugs in KLettres in the process and refactored a bit the language detection code. The program needs to scan for globally installed sounds and locally installed ones (via KNewStuff) and then to update the Languages menu with corresponding languages names in the correct user language. A crash occurred when somehow the current chosen language was removed by the user. In programming, there must always be a fallback of some sort, an index cannot be equal to -1 for example...

I was away for 1 week without internet on a family vacation in the Pyrénées. We went skiing, Léah who is nearly 10 especially misses the snow since we got back to France from Québec so she was very happy. She is very good in cross-country skiing and is full of energy! There was not much snow as the weather is too mild and ski resorts have to use snow cannons to generate snow.
Here is Little Clarisse (nearly 2 years old) and myself! Being born in Canada and being Canadian, Clarisse only got snow-aware during this week which is a bit of a paradox.

Meanwhile George added a Flickr provider to the PoDT engine (Picture of the Day) so I need to fix the Frame itself to integrate this engine. Thanks George for this addition! I have various attempts of code on my laptops, none seem satisfactory enough from the GUI point of view.
I started to play with QGraphicsWidget and I also started a GUI for KApptemplate in the form of a QWizard (KAppTemplate is currently a bash script that generates various KDE 4 projects that you can use to start programming).

I had this idea to add Wikipedia Picture of the Day to the Frame applet and as there are many Pictures of the Day around, I started an engine to fetch them, based on the Comic engine code (which is great btw, thanks Tobias!) So far I did 3 providers: APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day), EPOD (Earth Science Picture of the Day), no, IPOD is not the 3rd one actually, it's OSEI which displays NOAA weather satellite images. The Wikipedia one is probably the most difficult to code, the ones above are quite easy, the only trick it to extract the pic name (varies each day) using QRegExp and some math calculations from the http source of the main page. I'll check tomorrow if the various providers still display the new pic...
At the moment, I did not include this in the Frame code (except locally for testing). I don't want to overload the Config Dialog GUI which will be redesigned by Jeremy (jpwhiting) to match the Desktop background setting dialog as both have quite the same functionalities. The only addition Frame has is to configure the Frame border. I also plan to have a right click setting which will allow to put the current Frame picture as a wallpaper.
Plasma is still very much a WIP (Work In Progress) but as you can see from the Planet posts, we're moving forward!
The pic shows today's APOD which is the first Explorer, launched 50 years ago!