wow. it’s been a long few days. and suddenly they’re over.

devdays was great. :) I arrived on monday for the education track – nokia needs more qt developers, so it wants schools to use qt more. :) there were several discussions about available resources, upcoming resources and how people have been using qt in schools so far. I was surprised to find one of my former teachers here from BCIT – plus jeff’s teacher from SFU, and someone from UBC too. :)

We weren’t even the only Vancouverites here – later on I was introduced to some others, plus someone from Victoria. :) it’s a small world indeed. and of course there were friendly trolls here. :) it’s always nice to see familiar faces and make new friends.

tuesday and wednesday went by in a bit of a blur. the network wasn’t giving out IPs most of the time, so we weren’t online much. There were presentations, there was yummy food, a quiz thing during tuesday’s dinner where gary and alex both won n900’s… wednesday there were more prizes, and alex won *another* one. :)

In one of the presentations today, the Qt4 Dance song was played… I tried to get people singing (*cough*alexis*cough*), but they’re no fun ;P

I met lots of people here; some are interested in using kde stuff on devices, some are *already* using kde stuff, some are looking for interns and/or hiring… some are just generally cool ;)

oh, and Froglogic and ICS are especially cool; thanks to them (and alex) I’m sleeping in a hotel and not on the street. ;)

Tomorrow morning I head back to the airport; back home I have homework and a midterm and people’s birthdays. seems like another world sometimes… a world where I get a lot more sleep ;)

I’m down in San Francisco this week for Qt Developer Days. It actually hasn’t started yet, though; this weekend blauzahl and des organized an informal kde sprint. Gary joined us too, and Knut was kind enough to let us use the Nokia offices. :)

I arrived saturday… afternoon. eventually. :) the flight was delayed due to fog, and delayed again; I’m lucky I didn’t have a connecting flight. There was one bonus; the flight was circling over the fog just long enough for my movie to finish. ;)

Despite the fog trouble at the airport, SF is quite warm and sunny. :) It’s weird, but nice; Vancouver’s been having normal autumn rain so I haven’t seen much sun for a while.

At the nokia offices, Knut gave us a bit of a lecture on how to organize a sprint, and greeneg talked about where KDE needs to improve for enterprise users. Then we had lunch at 4pm (yes. lunch.) and chatted. We came up with a bit of an agenda for sunday. I don’t remember much after that, just that I was on my computer and very *very* tired. :) I do remember that knut’s n900 is very very shiny.

Eventually, rather late, we pulled ourselves away from the laptops and went out for dinner. Me, blauzahl and des wanted to go out for halloween next… but we hadn’t had much luck finding somewhere to *go*… I got dressed up in my costume (but I’d left my homemade mask at home! waah :( I ended up using a cheap dollar-store mask instead) and we drove around looking for a bar… well, we did find one, but by the time that happened it was so late (probably 1am) and we were so very tired… so we changed our minds and headed home. We took the scenic route back, though, and saw plenty of fun costumes. :)

Sunday we went out to the day of the dead festival (sorry, forgot my camera *again*). After lunch we headed to the nokia office. Me and greeneg worked on techbase’s git documentation. There’s only a little new material so far, but there’s a framework sketched out. Feel free to help us fill it in. :)
After that, blauzahl went through some questions about the new activity stuff (I understand what I mean a lot better after trying to explain it to her) and asked us questions about konqueror use.

Now it’s dinnertime again. We don’t get to use the office on monday, so we’ll probably hang out at the hotel then. :)

So what have I been up to lately? Mostly school.

My stats and AI courses are easy, but still take up time (I’m trying to actually do homework and study instead of just cramming ;)

The robocup project is… Well, it’s a group project. :) It’s not going too badly, though.

I’ve also got martial arts and choir in the evenings (although I think I’m going to drop choir, the schedule’s just a bit too inconvenient). And I found a go club at sfu, which always seems to end in late-night gaming… :) One of the really nice things about school is that every semester there’s a chance of making new friends. Although it is a bit odd to hang out with teenagers – I feel old now ;P

Life is fun and busy… so very busy…

I’ve still been sneaking in a bit of plasma time here and there, though- little fixes for my gsoc project n’stuff. Popup applets can be right-clicked properly. You can add & remove activites without zooming out, too.
Now with those buttons and my activity-list mouse plugin, activities are a lot more convenient:

but that’s a bit ugly. We have better plans being worked on… they are shiny… ;)

Oh, and virtual desktop are more convenient too – you can add a desktop just by right-clicking the pager now. There’ll probably be a remove button soon, but… well.. virtual desktops weren’t really designed for convenience, so it’ll probably have to be a “remove last” button.

Oops, I almost forgot. I can finally commit a bugfix I wrote at tokamak that uses a 4.6 function. whee!

Oh, and i’ll be at dev days in SF. Yay! :) That’ll be fun. And I have midterms directly before and after… Yes, i’m crazy ;)

Well, saturday night was fun. :) We all went out to a chinese restaurant and had lots of yummy food. Then some of us went back to the hotel and played cards for a while. I learnt a new game, but I have no idea how to spell it. :)

Sunday was the last day – checked out of the hotel, did a little hacking, and we had a post-mortem meeting with all the students. I got lost in my laptop after that, plus my mind was not liking the lack of sleep, so I never got around to having lunch… oops. :) There was pizza at the airport, at least. Our group divided up again, into two groups – for the rest of the semester we’ll be working on different features for the robocup client, competing to see which improvements are more helpful, then merging them into trunk (oh god I wish we were using git now instead of svn).

four of us were on the same flight back to vancouver, so we got seats all in a row, which was nice. :) mostly we just wanted sleep, though. god it was nice to get home and sleep in… I didn’t go to any classes today, I need to recover. :)

it’s day two of the ucosp sprint. thursday night I arrived in toronto, tired and coughing… and found karaoke in the hotel bar. grrrr… I *finally* find karaoke, and it’s on a night when I can barely speak. but I met up with some of the other students, and we headed to another bar where the law students were having a party. :) much beer was consumed… and when I wandered back to the hotel with a couple of other students we found the karaoke still going. so we went in there and got to sing the last song. :) I feel sorry for the few people still there listening ;)

friday morning I somehow dragged myself out of bed on time, met the rest of the students, and we headed to the university. there I finally got to meet my team in person. yay! :) we’re doing the robocup 2d simulation… there are a few clients from hte summer that we have the code for, and we had to pick one of them to build on. so we spent time reading stuff and trying to get stuff running, and debated the pros and cons of java vs. python. eventually we decided to extend one of the python clients; it’s got most of the boring details done, but the players are still pretty stupid so there’s lots for us to do. the java project was already so good we weren’t quite sure how we could improve it (and had run out of time to look for things, really).

once we’d settled on a codebase we started poking at that code specifically, trying to get it running on all our computers, coming up with things to improve, fighting with strange network errors… I spent a good chunk of my afternoon replacing the pile of simple bash scripts that started teams with a single more intelligent bash script.

friday evening some student union had organized a party for us at a nearby pub :) free beer FTW. I left early to get caught up on sleep but somehow the interwebs distracted me instead. ;)

saturday morning.. urgh. well, it’s a code sprint, I don’t expect much sleep. the cough and cold are annoying, though. I wandered in late, which turned out to be not so great as my team had started their meeting. oops. :) we came out of that with a list of seven tasks we’re going to do over the semester (and get marked on). I spent most of the rest of the day working with iona on getting the debug output of the clients in a more useful format (one curses thingy per process doesn’t work so well when you start 6+ processes out of a script; we’ve got a PyQt ui started instead).

this afternoon we also had a talk from greg about grad school. I’m not hugely interested, but it was an informative talk. :) most of what I remember is his little speech at the end… undergrad is about learning to learn, grad school is about learning what questions to ask, but what university is really about is teaching us to take over the world. :)

now it’s dinnertime, and I should head out to the group dinner.

wow, the week just flew by. it’s saturday night now, and I’m in zurich, checking email n’stuff. early tomorrow morning I’ll head to the airport.

it’s been a really awesome week. lots of hacking and hiking and very little sleep. it was wonderful to see the plasma family again. I miss you guys already. but I feel like I want a vacation to recover :P

no vacations for me, though. school starts tuesday and I’ve already got reading assigned. I’m in this cool new course where we’re going to be working on projects with students from other universities… here’s the blog for the course. it should be a lot of fun. :) but… the downside is it might be very busy, too, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for KDE this semester. we’ll see. after everything that’s happened at tokamak I really want to make *some* time to keep hacking. :)

so it’s wednesday now, and tokamak continues to be awesome. all of the gsoc students that came here, and all but one of plasma’s gsoc students overall, have merged their code into trunk. we have remote widgets, a new applet browser, and more… then there’s netbook stuff, and web stuff, and we’ve been talking about the future of virtual desktops and the ZUI, and playing with the Mystery Device (whisky + wine -> making plasma look like gnome), and… I’ve already forgotten a lot of things, I’m sure :)

personally, I’ve been working on a bunch of little things: getting folderview to play nice with my mouse plugins, trying to make activity removal work better, chasing obscure bugs that popped up in the middle of that, making little fixes here and there (plasmoidviewer can be run with just a containment now, no applet – I got sick of having a clock in the way of my testing)… yesterday I returned to my javascript plasmoid, and I’ve got half a blog post about that, but right now my mind keeps wandering off to Overview ideas, which we’ll be discussing again tomorrow.

Randa is a really beautiful place, too. even when it rains. :) on monday we went out for a walk and ended up building a dam (exercise! team building! oh my!). Then we watched it get washed away by water released from a *real* dam somewhere upstream. :) the weirdest thing I’ve seen so far, though, is a moth that’s been hanging around the flowers outside, behaving just like a tiny hummingbird. I thought it *was* a hummingbird, but it has antennae. Davide was trying to get photos of it, but I’m not sure whether any turned out well… darn thing never stopped moving. it was fearless, though, buzzing around our heads.

anyways, time for another walk. adventure awaits! and then more hacking when we return…

so, thursday morning I got on a plane again and headed off to switzerland. I met ivan in frankfurt airport, and friday afternoon we arrived at tokamak safe and sound. :) it’s so nice when travel goes so smoothly.

I spent a good portion of the train ride staring out the window… switzerland is quite beautiful. mountains, ravines, waterfalls… the place we’re staying at is in a little valley, tall snow-capped mountains on either side. there’s a little pond behind the house, with frogs, and flowers all over the place. At night, it’s so dark you can see the milky way. :)

we had no trouble finding the house, because there was a giant stuffed konqui sitting outside. :) most of the gang was already there hacking and getting their internet fix.

Saturday morning(ish), tokamak officially began. We had introductions (at least four newbies here!), presentations, and a bit of planning. We’ve got a *lot* of cool stuff going into plasma for 4.4 :)

Saturday evening was our social event… we went out to the nearest town and had lots of fun, then came back and stared at the stars for a while… some of the guys attempted to make bread, too (we’ve been making our own bread here). it doesn’t work so well while drunk. ;)

Now it’s sunday morning. Despite being up very late, I still woke up early this morning, and went for a little walk. The mountains are so high that I couldn’t see the sun until about 9:30, so it was a little chilly. :) but still breathtaking. the scenery here is truly inspiring.

anyways, we’re doing our last few presentations now, and after that we’ll have the rest of the week to hack together. :) :) this is gonna be awesome.

so there was a bit of confusion on monday (some twit told me fedex would arrive that day and take the laptop, when actually it was purolator sometime in the next two days giving me a box and asking me to call back for pickup), but tuesday morning I had a box to put my laptop in and tuesday afternoon it was on its way to toronto. I was told 7-10 business days, but thursday morning the laptop was back. :) they just replaced all the faulty stuff, yay :)

all was not perfect… the dvd drive wouldn’t play movies, and I’m still not sure whether it was testing it in vista (my very first time using it! god it’s annoying) or upgrading libdvdread, but it works again now. the sound issues are reduced but not totally gone – I have to pull my headphones out a bit or the sound gets this weird underwater effect. the good speakers seem to go in further, though, past that weird spot. good enough for me. :)

so, yay! I have a laptop again! :) I’m quite impressed at the speed. maybe it helped that I had a post-it on the keyboard saying “thank you” ;)

now I just have to decide whether to spend nearly $300 on another year of support, or take my chances and put the money towards getting a new laptop when this one eventually dies…

so, I finally got tired of all the little hardware problems with my laptop. I called dell. I jumped through their hoops. I backed everything up. and tomorrow they’re sending a box for me to put my laptop in.
it’ll be back, without the hardware issues (I hope), in 7-10 business days.

this means no laptop for two weeks. :/ sucky, but it was the least painful time of year to do this. and the warranty is only good for another month anyways.

I do have my n810 and my ancient desktop machine, and pete says I can borrow his laptop if I need to – but getting a proper working environment set up always takes time. and effort. and I hate doing it. so I’m going to have to cut one or two plugins from my gsoc project. perhaps I can get them done after gsoc, or perhaps someone else can write them – they’re really not that hard. :)

it’s funny… I love packing and unpacking *things*. moving is fun for me. but moving to a new *computer* is something I hate. I just want my computer to stay the same and stay working, and there’s always a ton of little details that don’t Just Work or are different or something…