blogbo!

I seem to be unable to commit to blogging for some reason, I don’t know why it’s just not a natural thing for me. I recently re-read this post from Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror and StackOverflow fame) I’m not sure if I meet all those credentials, my writing certainly leaves something to be desired. I think I’ve got a few interesting things to say though! If only to satisfy my own desire to say them.

I’ve been following openSUSE for a while now, and last week was the major release of 11.1 which brought with it quite a few updates including the much anticipated KDE4.1 release. I found KDE4.0 to be a mixed bag, but with this new release I’m really enjoying the direction the KDE team are taking the project. It’s worth noting that I’ve prefered KDE over GNOME. Not only is it a damn nice looking desktop but I actually enjoying using it.

pwetty

I’ve also been trying to use Amarok 2 but it still needs some work before I’m happy with it replacing Amarok 1.4. For example it doesn’t handle compilation albums very well, look at what it does to my One Life Left CD!

how festive!

I hope they make better use of the chunk of space in the middle because the best thing about Amarok has been it’s use of space, if you look at 1.4 everything there is useful and well laid out.

There has been some interesting chat on the Kamaelia mailing list about Google Summer of Code and it’s effectiveness at getting contributers into the community. I don’t want to dwell on this point but reiterate a twitter update of mine:

SoC replaces a summer *job* and that’s its biggest flaw, it needs to mirror volunteer work / hobbies not jobs.

Personally I think reddit’s Feed a Need project has a very cool idea, perhaps something like that could be done for Summer of Code, and Google just offer T-Shirts to the participants, we all know people only do it for the T-Shirt anyway

Current projects:

• Looking at getting my Summer of Code project merged
• Django tutorial voting app
• Django “webcomic” app - really interested in getting this going if anyones interested.
• Playing with some things in Haskell from this amazing tutorial