22 Jan

Release Party in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Posted by noughmad in KDE, Real Life. Tagged: , , , .

After a one-year break, the KDE release party tradition in Slovenia is back. As usual, it will take place in Kiberpipa on Tuesday, January 31. Apart from a display of KDE’s latest features, we will also discuss ways of contributing to KDE, especially by programming and translations.

There will be not one but three presentations:

  • Jure Repinc will show what’s new in the KDE Software Compilation, with a focus on Plasma and Plasma Active
  • Andrej Vernekar, the Slovenian translation coordinator and Linux user group president, will have a presentation about translating KDE.
  • Miha Čančula (myself) will talk about programming for KDE, my experience with the mentorship programs, and how KDE makes a programmer’s life easier.

More info is available on the community wiki or in the Slovene version.

22 Jan

Zabava ob izidu KDE 4.8

Posted by noughmad in Computers, Programming, Real Life. Tagged: , , , .

Po enoletnem premoru se tradicionalno druženje ob izidu proste programske opreme skupnosti KDE spet vrača. Ob izidu različice 4.8 si bomo najprej ogledali, kaj se je v zadnjih dveh letih dogajalo v drugi največji odprtokodni skupnosti in predstavili nekaj največjih novosti namizja Plasma in ostalih programov. Sem spada tudi posebno novo okolje Plasma Active, ki bo letos na voljo na tabličnih računalnikih. Predstavili bomo tudi nekaj izmed načinov, kako se lahko svojimi prispevki in izkušnjami pridružite skupnosti KDE. Osredotočili se bomo predvsem na prevajanje in programiranje.
Po predstavitvah sledi druženje s pijačo in kakim prigrizkom. Po načelu »kdor prvi pride, prvi melje« bomo razdelili tudi nekaj daril.

Predavatelji:

  • Jure Repinc je študent računalništva, ki v svojem času poskuša čimveč prispevati k raznim odprto-kodnim projektom, v največji meri pri KDE.
  • Andrej Vernekar je zaposlen kot vodja pisanja tehnične dokumentacije, v prostem času pa prevaja KDE-jevo programsko opremo in je koordinator slovenjenja KDE ter predsednik društva LUGOS.
  • Miha Čančula sem študent fizike, ki pri projektu KDE razvijam šahovski program Knights in Cantor, ki je vmesnik za matematične programe

Lokacija:

Kiberpipa (zemljevid)

Povezave:

http://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/4.8#Ljubljana

English version

17 Jan

Knights 2.4.1 Released

Posted by noughmad in Programming, KDE. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Today Knights has reached the stage where some exciting new features are completed and usable. The new release includes saving and loading PGN files, setting the difficulty, and supporting the UCI engine communication protocol. I also added a move history widget, which can display the moves so far in three different notations.

Playing against Stockfish, a strong chess engine using UCI

A handful of new themes appeared on kde-look which can be downloaded from the Knights configuration dialog.

St. George theme by Dave Kaye, with visible history and clock widgets.

Move history can be save quickly from the history widget, or from the dialog which appears after a game is over.

Knights can be downloaded from their usual site at kde-apps:

Related articles

14 Jan

Ice Cream Sandwich on my Galaxy Ace

Posted by noughmad in Computers, Real Life. Tagged: , , , , , .

Today, I installed the first beta of CyanogenMod 9 (based on ICS) on my phone, beating the official distribution channels for an unknown but long and possibly infinite amount of time.

Why

The coolness factor, of course. I’m quite sure I’m the first of all my friends to have ICS. Also, it looks very slick. It is also heavily hyped, so I had to try it out.

CM9 welcome screen, still fresh and empty

The user interface is about as responsive as with 2.3, which is not perfect, but good enough. It’s actually quite fast, but the animations are not smooth, damaging the polished feel of the UX.

There is also the fact that the app development API has got many additions since Android 3.0, so it’s easier and more portable to write apps for ICS than for 2.3 that was installed by default.

CM9 app drawer.

How

There is a thread on the XDA-developers forum with news and releases. I downloaded the zip and installed it from ClockWorkMod recovery. A complete data wipe is needed, so make sure that your Google account is fully integrated and synced before trying the installation, or backup everything.

As the first post warns, if you don’t know how to install it, you probably shouldn’t. So I won’t post complete instructions here, but feel free to ask in the comments.

What now

The camera still doesn’t work. If this is something important to you, don’t use CM9 on your phone. For me, it’s an inconvenience, but the development possibilities are more important for me.

What you may or may not notice on the previous picture is that the icons are quite small on SGA’s 3.5-inch screen. The same is true for text in menus, fortunately there is an option to enlarge it in Settings > Accessibility.

ICS accessibility config, with the Large Text option checked

In general, it shows in a couple of places that my phone is somewhat too small and the screen resolution too low. Icons are too small, while text in some applications is too large. Other than that, web browsing and email is usable, and I don’t really need anything else from a phone. It also makes calls and messages, I tested it myself.

2 Jan

Free (harvested) energy

Posted by noughmad in School. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

As a Physics student, I have to prepare a seminar for my classmates regarding some topic broadly connected with Physics. I chose Energy harvesting, as suggested by a professor, without knowing much about the field or the commercial offerings. However, aften collecting many sources and writing the article, I have come to have a much better opinion of our future than before. Namely, I discovered things like this: Continue reading

1 Jan

New year’s eve in Ljubljana

Posted by noughmad in Real Life. Tagged: , , .

image

The fog may be annoying, but the lights are shiny

image

Somethings for us science geeks as well

image

A small girl in front of a big tree

26 Dec

AppMenu is here

Posted by noughmad in Computers, KDE. Tagged: , , , , , .

Qt 4.8 was released last week. The announcement lists Lighthouse integration (aka. QPA) and some optimizations, but nobody mentioned my most-wanted feature yet: Aurelien Gateau’s patch that enables exporting the application menus. On a laptop, especially one of those wide-screen ones like mine, vertical space is very important, so removing one toolbar while keeping all of its actions easily accessible is a killer feature. Ubuntu users had this for some time, but now it has made it way to other distributions as well.

Currently, there are two things you can do with the menu once you rip it out of the application: put it in a plasma panel, or embed it the window decoration. Arch users can get both of them from the AUR. Because I still like the menu to be visually connected to the application, I am now using the second option, with the Oxygen-appmenu window decorations.

Application menus embedded in the window decoration

Currently, this only works for Qt applications. The equivalent patch to Gtk is still included only in Ubuntu and would require recompiling Gtk, something I am not fond of doing. In any case, I have found that at least on the laptop the only non-Qt app I use is Firefox, which includes a similar button as its menu. It doesn’t look as well, but it does the job and keep things consistent. An extension for LibreOffice is avaliable in the AUR as well, but the only text processor I need is Kile.

17 Nov

Gaming again

Posted by noughmad in Computers. Tagged: , , , , , .

My summer job is now done, and I have just adjusted to the school rhythm. My girlfriend is studying physics and pharmacy in parallel, so I’m often alone at home with not much to do. I spend some of this time programming Knights or nTasks, but I find it hard to program when I’m tired, and I need breaks even when I’m not. So I started playing computer games again.

My current addiction is Sins of a Solar Empire. It’s a space-based real time strategy, with its characteristic property being its slowness. The game is very detailed with epic battles, so even with the slow pace it keeps you busy, but it’s quite possible to wage two or more battles at one.

The game is rather old, and it wasn’t one of the big-budget productions, so it’s relatively cheap, but both the graphics and the gameplay are really well done.

10 Nov

Model analysis report in hexameter

Posted by noughmad in Real Life, School.

Unfortunately, only in slovene.

7 Nov

CyanogenMod

Posted by noughmad in Computers, Real Life. Tagged: , , .

What’s the point of an open-source mobile OS if you can’t change it?

So, yesterday I finally managed to install CyanogenMod. It’s not yet officially released for my Galaxy Ace, but there is a good unofficial build on the xda-developers forum. The process is really easy, but due to it being unofficial the instructions are somewhat hard to find, and that’s why it took me a long time.

As an operating system, it’s not much different than original Android. However, the appearance is heavily modified, with theming support for colors and icons, a better App list, and some really cool wallpapers. A small but important improvement is the lack of pre-installed apps that come with the phone. Additionally, CM add a plethora of configuration options, so you can really make your phone look unique.

Taking screenshots is easier, too

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