since someone complained about my being utterly offtopic for planetkde (and sadly he’s right) I figured I’d make an attempt at getting at least somewhere close to being on-topic. I have actually begun coding again (yay!!!), which is nice. despite the start-of-school madness, I’ve found time, and have regained that obsessive desire to code which mysteriously vanished for a semester. I think it helps that our jindu class is only doing one chapter a week, instead of one a day (that was insane and I hardly remember anything I learnt and I’m so glad it’s over).

first, let’s get the RL stuff out of the way: school is school, but we’ve been split into different classes, which means new friends and also having an amount of time when my bf is in class and I’m not. I was expecting electives to take a chunk of my free time, but when we got to see the sheet today, the class I really wanted to take conflicted with my schedule. I’m really pissed off about that right now; you’d think china would have lots of martial arts courses, but no, there’s just. this. one. and I can’t frigging take the class. and last semester they said we couldn’t take any electives because we arrived too late in the semester. and the semester before, in canada, I dropped my martial arts class because I needed more time to study. grrrrr. I’ve only had one semester where I successfully got into a course, and it was such fun…

aanyways. at least that leaves me with more coding time, I guess. I did get kde4 compiled again a week or two ago, and played with it a bit, but I wasn’t really sure what I might want to work on, or what I might be able to do. I quickly got distracted by an old project I keep reviving and attempting to rewrite… I got a fair bit further in that than other attempts, because this time I was using pyqt4, but it never really gets far because I just can’t decide where it’s going. :) it’s dropping into the background again already.

yesterday I spent a lot of time playing around with django, because a friend has asked me to do some for-profit coding. it’s a really small project, so I’m only expecting it to take a couple of weeks… I just have to figure out what tools I want to use to do it. :) django seems fun, but might be overkill… I dunno. pylons looks interesting too.

something I was discussing last night was the state of plasma. I was really surprised that it doesn’t yet have panels I can toss things onto, and the taskbar and systray seem such a mess… I was a bit less surprised by this when I found out qt4.3’s qgraphicsview can’t have qwidgets on the canvas. doh. that would make things a bit harder, wouldn’t it? :) shame we can’t just make 4.4 be out already :P I guess that’ll just have to wait… there are several things I’m really looking forward to in 4.1, now.

in the meantime, maybe once I’m done this paid code I’ll dive into plasma and see if I can lend a hand there. I’m also interested in making kde’s proxy stuff suck less (since I have such a crazy mess of proxies here) but I’ve been told that has to wait until 4.1.

so I finally made some progress on my ideas for chinese-practice programs.
I’ve got a little quiz app that’ll help me study (if I actually use it instead of just working on it), a script to make creating lesson files faster, and a simple thing to make looking up words in cedict easier - now I just have to paste the text and hit enter, instead of grepping the cedict file myself. :)

they’re all really quick, simple things, but I guess I’ll show a couple screenshots of the quiz app anyways. at this point it’s still got the lesson filename hardcoded in, even!
I’m hoping that someday I can make it a proper little kde app.

well, the update did indeed go smoothly. most of the issues I found after rebooting were weird graphical changes, like the widget style being changed and my clock mysteriously disappearing. nothing that couldn’t be fixed in a few minutes. the biggest thing was that privoxy started failing at dns a lot, but I eventually realised that it was due to a new setting in the config file, so that was easy to fix too. :)

unfortunately I haven’t seen many improvements yet, either. gmail and wordpress still mess with konqueror - supposedly the gmail fix is in 3.5.7 and I’ve got 3.5.6 :P
I probably have a newer version of kdevelop that I should go check out, though. :) and… networkmanager seems to no longer be baffled by my static ip. that’s certainly an improvement :)

[edit: ick, found a bad thing: konq 3.5.6 gets along even worse with wordpress. it's often impossible to delete text when creating a post - how the heck did they manage that one!?]

now I’m reading about lvm, and hoping to set it up tomorrow. my partitions are a mess, so I need to do this before I can make space to try out any other distros.

I guess I should get back to kde4 stuff, too.

then there’s various coding projects, and studying, and projects that are meant to help with studying… but I’ll probably end up procrastinating instead :) I *still* haven’t bought anything that’s actually effective at killing or repelling mosquitoes.

wednesday kinda disappeared in a blur of programming. pete and jon decided they’re going to write a program to record their go games with a webcam - tuesday night I wandered into their discussion. I decided it’d be a good excuse to try out pyqt, so I spent wednesday morning getting pyqt4 installed and working. it was pretty easy, once I got past the huge changes between qt3 and 4 (99% of examples online are for pyqt3 or older) and figured out how to write in python. I tossed together a quick gui, then decided to do it with designer instead of manually.
well, first I wanted to try out kdevelop, but it turns out the version in edgy is from right before they started qt4 support :P so I installed qt4-designer and started learning to use that. I’ve played with designer a little before, trying to fix a kopete bug, but I really don’t know much about it :) I got caught by the silly mistake of dragging a layout onto my widget instead of using the toolbar layout buttons.
I also got caught by the fact that edgy’s uic module (the tool for converting .ui files into python code) lags behind, and is actualy for qt 4.1, which apparently lacks QGraphicsView.

still, by the end of the day I had all my buttons, I was drawing dots on an image, and it mostly did what I wanted :) pretty good for just one day.
I think I might like to use pyqt4 again if I ever get around to implementing my chinese-practice-games ideas.

after discovering all these limitations caused by edgy, I decided it was about time I did a dist-upgrade. the strange lack of upgrade issues listed online unnerves me, but pete got the same idea yesterday and actually *did* the upgrade, and his comp hasn’t exploded or anything ;) yesterday I only got as far as setting up my backup scripts and burning a cd. now I’m debating whether or not to do a full backup of the whole partition before the dist-upgrade…
I really miss gentoo, though. I’m not sure if kubuntu’s still the right distro for me… trying out others takes time, though. and I doubt I can have the flexibility of gentoo without the maintenance effort, in any distro.

ok, time to bring my mind back to some sort of reality. it’s 8pm on monday. there’s nothing I really *need* to do, although I should look at the email mum sent me. I should boot up my laptop, too, and see how far I got installing stuff on that. I should also clean up the kitchen :( and I guess eating would be a good idea…

soc project needs to be thought about - I need to test icq+gaim - if that works (because of their retarded aim-protocol usage) then I might as well do the same thing and figure out the icq stuff after soc. if it doesn’t work then I have to decide whether to leave out icq support and wrap up, or try to reverse-engineer it this week (I’m doubting that’d be feasible, my brain’s likely to burn out).

as for other stuff, I wanna do things but I think I should wait until soc’s dealt with, since there’s less than 2 weeks left. I can still rant, though… there’s a new rant on my laptop I need to post, and it left me with some unfinished thoughts about surfaces and chems that I really should try to sort out.

then there’s the evil school stuff - tuesday I should look over stuff, nag people and ask any questions I have.

for now, I should just clean the kitchen and get a decent meal. by then I’ll probably be ready for sleep anyways.