cooking; belaying; delaying

tonight t., the p. man and i went up to a friends' place (hi bob & maura! hope i spelled your names right. eek. =) for dinner tonight. i cooked a baked vegan stuffed manicotti dish and had some plating fun with the salads (placed the salad in a ring of orange bell pepper with a tomato flower on the side). nothing "five star chef", but a lot of fun and everyone enjoyed it. some were impressed that it wasn't meat in the filling. =)

of course tech came up in conversation since 80% of the adults there work in the industry. one of the non-techie people at the dinner asked about ms paint for mac. they showed some of the pictures they'd done with ms paint and said they loved it but didn't really like the higher end stuff (they mentioned photoshop and paintshop pro in specific). i whipped out the laptop and showed them kolourpaint and they were quite happy after playing with it for a while. then they explored the rest of kde and decided they were going to try it out on a computer of their own. they live with a techie so it should go well =)

yesterday t. and i took our belaying test at the rock wall at a local fitness centre. we'd taken the initial course about 5 months back and finally got around to taking the test so we can belay on our own. so now we can yard people up and down walls with ropes. neat.

as most of those reading this probably have heard, there was a developer release of the kde4 platform today. this is a pretty important milestone for the project as it marks a rather arduous period of effort for us. it has not been an easy climb to this point as we deal with a number of issues that come from having as much code as we do, taking on a large number of core changes to code that has been relatively stable since kde2 times and increasing time pressures on us from the outside world. i personally feel we need to more responsibly deal with by sometimes telling the sources of those pressures to back off. but that's another topic =)

the release itself is for developers to start porting applications with, to start stressing the newer APIs and seeing what kde4 development will start to look like. there's still a lot more to come though, even in the libs, with changes coming to kwizard, kconfig, khtml (the rather exciting unity stuff) and certainly more. but a lot of the big rocking the boat stuff is there, from here we can build Cool Visible Stuff (CVS?)

which brings me to the topic of plasma and specifically: where is it? it's been caught between a kdelibs that wasn't quite ready for serious app devel, a qt4 that lacked certain key features and me simply not having enough time to breath. sadly, my only tasks are not coding related in kde. they also involve being on the board of the e.V. (which takes an unexpected amount of time and energy at times), dealing with organizations partnering with KDE and playing "public face" when needed. this has all conspired to delay plasma's emergence. this isn't unusual or particularly concerning for me.

right now deadlines are looming (which i tend to work rather well under). and i've been finding my coding mojo really hammering at me to write more. i have a month until aKademy, more or less, and i have committed to showing some demo stuff there in a presentation. four months after that plasma needs to be in a shippable place. which is ample time (though not lots) seeing as a lot of it will be building on the very nice work already done elsewhere in qt4 and kde4 and the design of things has been worked out in my little noggin for quite some time.

so as to keep me honest and all the plasma hungerers out there happy, my blog will be working thusly for the next several months: each wednesday and friday i'll be posting a plasma-only blog entry detailing the progress in svn over the last few days. you can ride along as we put the building blocks in order.

and yes, i'll be doing a kde://radio recording soon again. and about plasma this time.