release event prep

i won't be making many commits this week. it's crunch time for the release event in mountainview now. presentations to be slicked up, videos to be downloaded and prepped, final bits of travel plans to be figured out.

but i'm rather happy with the plasma devel of the last couple weeks. it's been pretty much solid bug fixing and feature polishing. which is exactly what one would hope for right after a big release. after the release event, task #1 will be the panel toolbox so we can all get at panel configuration options. between now and then i'll still be on the mailing list and dealing with the bug triage; good news on that front is that we're seeing few reports of new bugs now, so it seems we've tapped out most of the major flaws in the existing features.

i picked up a new laptop last night that i'm hoping to do the presentation and demos on; it's slightly better than the one i've been using for the last couple of years, to say the least. the sales people at the best buy i went to happened to be big kde/linux fans; i was wearing a kde t-shirt and they spotted me from across the computer section and homed in on p. and i =) they hooked me up with a good deal and we talked about kde development. they were young guys just getting into software; one of them starts his comp sci degree this year. i left with a laptop, and they both have my email address and some info about getting involved with kde development. didn't really expect to do any community building / new developer recruiting while i was out, but then you can never predict these things =)

i've got OpenSuse 10.3 on the new machine and i have to say that i'm more than pleased with it. i was afraid i'd miss apt-get ... but zypper rocks. the only annoyance i had in the whole ordeal was the built in ricoh webcam: to get that working i had to build the r5u870 driver from source and manually copy the firmware (ugh!) into /lib/firmware. not a big deal, but will be nice when that stuff gets into the drivers:webcam repo.

update: in the comments section, Carlos pointing me to this rpm search that shows that someone has packaged up this webcam driver! i had (silly me ;) gone looking in the main software and then the webcam repos; the rpm search through community contributions is yet another really great thing that has happened during my hiatus from suseland; really nice to see and something i'm sure to use again in the future... thanks for the tip, Carlos!

everything else seems amazingly slick, and i'm pretty happy with the improvements in yast that have happened since i've been gone. i stopped using suse after several years of loving it due to the sad releases that were 10.0 and 10.1. but after seeing 10.3 i was impressed enough to try it out again; i'm a little tired of the *buntu world these days and unhappy with some of their decisions. didn't help that on my last upgrade of my laptop, it rendered my system unusable due to a screw up in their evms packaging; this was doubly "humorous" as the system wasn't using evms at all. it was just installed and that was enough. this isn't the first time such a catastrophic update has come down those apt-get pipes, so it's just in time for me that OpenSuse starts to look like its back on the rails again. there were even kde4 packages available as an option in the installer =)

on an unrelated topic, on the way into school this morning p. offered me a proof that the first person who lived is no longer alive somewhere on the planet: he noted that people die, and that all people before the people who just died have also died, so the people before that also died, and so on .. so the first person must also have died. i couldn't help but grin ear to ear as he used what is essentially induction as proof of his theory, and that he actually was thinking about things like "where is the first person who lived right now?" .. kids are amazing.