run command options and stuff

Today was Tuesday, which meant reading circles at P.'s school. So I went up there 50 minutes earlier than usual to host one of the reading circles. We're reading "Stuart Little" which is not only a great children's novel, but one I loved as a kid myself. We take turns reading and discuss vocabulary and what not. I had them act out some of the passages to help them understand some of the verbs and we dissected nouns they didn't know to their roots.

Picked up a new external hard disk to replace the one that I broke a few months back so I can start doing backups again. Amazing how cheap 750GB of external disk is now. Crazy.

Over the last few days I've managed to watch a couple of rather sad though inspiring movies: Other People's Lives (German) and This Beautiful City (Canadian). Both are tragic tales and I highly recommend them both if you haven't seen them.

On the Plasma front, I added DataEngine support for Wallpaper plugins to make life a wee bit easier for John as he implements the rather cool weather wallpaper. It's a cool idea and nice to see it coming together. So far it's just 370 lines of code, including configuration, which is pretty impressive for something that fetches weather data over the Internet. Viva la DataEngines!

I also have a first run implementation of runner settings. We had this in 4.0 and I think 4.1, but with the new UI it got lost. It shows up as an icon inside the selected match that, when selected, shows the configuration below the item.

What I'm not sure about, however, is what items to actually implement. "Run as a different user" and "run in terminal" are already implemented, but there are a number of other items and I'm wondering which are actually useful. There are "run with a different priority" and "run with realtime scheduling"; these require root privileges (usually, anyways) and maybe I'd use the new PolicyKit framework in svn for them .... but are they really needed? If not, I'd rather not implement them.

If you have used these features in KDE3, please include in the comments your use case (aka "the when, why and how"). They seem a bit ... esoteric ... to me and I'm not sure exactly how user friendly they are or how necessary in a run dialog they are, especially compared to the other two options which make immense amounts of sense.

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decision trees

On Saying "No"

When someone sends in a patch that they feel should be applied, it's always a difficult decision when the patch really shouldn't go in. After all, someone has probably put a good amount of effort into it: they've thought about the problem, come to a conclusion, plunged into the source code, altered it, tested it (well, hopefully :), then sent the diff in to be reviewed and commented on by their peers.

So when a patch just doesn't make the grade .. what do you? I hate saying "No." It's a lot less fun than saying "Yes." because "Yes" makes the person right in front of you happy. Unfortunately, when you are looking after a project (and everyone involved with a project ought to be striving to do that) there is more than just the person in front of you. No matter how loud they are, no matter how much hyperbole they throw at you, no matter how right they think they are .. they are not the only concern.

Casual contributors often lack the deep insight into the code base and design, something those who work on it a lot of time in the project probably have gained over time the hard way. I know that I've submitted patches to projects that have been met with the ominous "No" because I don't have that deep insight into the codebase. I'm a casual visitor to many of the projects I send little patches into, and I try and respect that.

When you are the one who has to say "No", however, there is a way to pay respect to the person's time and effort so it doesn't go wasted: explain the why behind the "No" in clear terms. This not only might help the submitter understand how things work a bit better (passing on your earned knowledge to them), but it will give everyone else in the project a chance to coordinate on a consensus on the matter. When you say "No", the rest of the project deserves an answer why.

Of course, the submitter is likely to respond in turn. If they don't, then you've either laid out a very persuasive line of reasoning or they weren't very sure in their thinking in the first place. Software developers (among others) really, really like being sure about things. As such, you can expect to get a dissenting reply to your "Why I'm saying 'No'" most of the time. Often they'll bring up new questions and thoughts along the way. It may challenge what you think on the matter. It may even change your mind. It also might not.

Trying to work towards consensus, as long as its possible to achieve, should be the goal. Sometimes it's not possible, of course. Such is life, but don't get stuck in a "no decisions made" trap. Take all the input, weigh it, come to a decision as is fitting the context as best you can. (Often "you" means a group of people, not just an individual.)

When there's nothing left to discuss, move on. This requires cooperation from both sides: the person saying "No" needs to both communicate that it's time to move on as well as provide a way to move on, such as setting another destination that can be agreed on and arrived at, and the person who is being told "No" should find a way to respect that. It sucks not getting what you want, but what you want isn't always best.

Trust me, I have a nine year old son and he wants all sorts of stuff that isn't the best for him. We tend to get better at this as adults, but never 100%. Often a lot less than 100% better, in fact. :)

On Realistically Measuring Cost and Benefit

The patch that Dave submitted in this case provides a "fake" translucency for panels that shows the "desktop wallpaper" (a concept that doesn't actually exist in that form in Plasma) not unlike what we had in kicker in KDE3.

Here's how my decision making on the patch went:

• Is the code style compliant and reasonably written? Yes. So far so good. :)


• Is this implementing a feature fully and properly? No; for instance, it doesn't show windows in between the panel and desktop layers.


• Could it be the basis for implementing the feature fully and properly? No, only with compositing can we do this fully or properly. This is a complete dead end approach with a very real limit to the approach that falls below "proper and fully".


• Are there aternate ways to achieve the same thing in a full and proper way? Yes, and we already support this, but it requires compositing support.


• Does the patch incur a positive, negative or neutral cost to the code? Negative: it makes the code harder to maintain by introducing another special case; and we quickly identified at least one situation where this work around probably will require another work around.


• Is this feature critical to functional use? No: there is no functionality that is positively affected by it's existence and, conversely, no functionality is negatively affected by its absence.


• Is this feature important for non-functional attributes, such as aesthetics? Translucency is indeed something that can noticeably impact non-functional attributes, such as aesthetics. However, this approach comes at the cost of some (though thankfully not huge amounts of) performance, and it also runs the risk of coming across as rather amateurish compared to "doing it right" (just as kicker's translucency did). It is possible to make things look very nice without translucency (I know, because right now I'm using a system without compositing :), and there is a way to achieve it properly.

Following this train of thought, it was clear that the feature came quite clearly under the "no hacks for non-critical things" act and was therefore not accepted.

It's interesting that Dave noted how small the patch is, because I know how much code was scattered all over Kicker and its applets to make it work at all there. The difference between doing it in Plasma and doing it in Kicker (both of which I worked on, including the translucency support in both) is that Plasma was designed for flexibility, clarity, cleanliness and maintainability. Accepting patches that work in the opposite direction of that is therefore pretty crazy. We need to use those benefits for things that are critical, differentiating and truly valuable features, not for things that erode those benefits for features that aren't any of those things.

Does it suck that poorly supported or older hardware doesn't support all the bling? Yes, it does. It also sucks that my car isn't an expensive sportscar that can go 200km/hour. I don't insist on trying to make my car look sporty by adding a big fin on the back of it. "Look how sporty it looks now!" would be met with "But it's still slow and crappy ... and now it looks tacky, too."

We have a solution for translucency, and it's called composite. It works on the bulk of systems out there right now and will work on even more systems with each passing year. The number of bugs and improvements that have made their way into various parts of Qt and x.org because of our unflinching insistence to rely on these lower layers in the stack to do the job they are supposed to is pretty impressive and would probably still not have happened if we hadn't. Meanwhile, we have a clean code base that we can work on very efficiently, which is why things can improve and change so quickly compared to Kicker which was quite a bit less complex in concept.

For the systems things like composite don't work on, we work on graceful degradation paths that preserve functionality and as much of the prettiness as is reasonable. KWin took this to a new level with it's auto-detection capabilities, and Plasma's theming adapts to compositing and color depth.

We do have more that we can do here, such as using a color from the theme's color scheme (or the system's color scheme if the theme uses that) as the background color of the PanelView so that even themes with no opaque/widgets/panel-background.svg stand a chance of looking better. That's something that Dave suggested, actually, so good things do come of these exercises. :)

While I don't think there's any benefit to Plasma in discussing this all over again via blog, I hope that there are interesting bits of information about Plasma itself and project guidance in general to be gleaned from all of this. :)

Anyways .. back to krunner hacking for me ... I've implemented the multi-line display as I mentioned yesterday, tidied up a couple of bugs that remained and am now onto working on displaying action buttons so we can have back cool things like "Run as different user"!

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more plasma screencastiness

I recently purchased a small pasta machine. I don't really know what the proper term for it is. I hesitate to call it a "pasta maker" because you still have to the bulk of the work yourself: making the dough, turning the handle, moving the handle between the different rolling and cutting mechanisms, feeding the dough through, etc. It uses no electricity and attaches to the counter or table top with a little vice. This really appeals to my "no school like the old school" side.

It's amazing how a little bit of flour, an egg and a bit of water can, in 5-10 minutes time, produce enough pasta (and then some!) for four people. Add some sauce, toppings and settle in beside a main course or a salad and voila .. great meal. The taste and texture of the pasta is unachievable with dry pasta or even the "fresh" pasta I can get from the grocery stores here. So instead of pulling out some dry pasta from a box (which takes about 10 seconds), I'm spending a whole extra 10 minutes or so to get something that tastes better and which is enjoyable and gets my hands moving. There's something about making food from raw ingredients that's very wholesome feeling. So that's 9:90 well spent. :)

Anyways, enough about the pasta machine. You probably want to see that Plasma screencast I teased you with in the title before spewing about the inconsequential kitchen activities of yours truly. Fair enough. First though, I'd like to kvetch about the weather: it snowed another 10cm or so again today before melting into great puddle of blah everywhere in the afternoon. It's staying light late into the evening and we're still getting snow. Seriously, what the hell?!

Oh, I'll be on the Linux Link Tech show next month. I'm tentatively scheduled to record with the crew on the 8th of April and the show should show up sometime shortly thereafter. I'll keep you posted when the time comes.

Ok, so .. Plasma screencast! I demonstrate a couple of cute little features we've put into 4.3: a nicer moving desktop toolbox that performs little tricks when you click on it, a KRunner that is self-documenting (huzzah for discoverability) and a new KRunner results layout. As you watch it, you may also want to marvel at the speed of it: KRunner is feeling a lot faster in current trunk/. Wilder, David Faure and I have the blisters to prove we earned it. ;)

So without further delay tactics, you can grab the screen cast in ogg vorbis glory by clicking on the screenshot below. Enjoy!

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sun, gas, movies, etc.

Today it decided to be Springlike outside. I'm not holding my breath quite yet though as this Winter has hung on and on and on ... though I'll take beautiful days like today as they come. I filled my car with gas for the bizarrely low price of 54.9 cents a liter due to a 35 cent per liter discount I got from the grocer I patronize. P. and I went to see Monsters Versus Aliens, which was solid DreamWorks stuff and quite enjoyable if not ground breaking.

Spent some time murking about in krunner's list presentation again to it suck yet less, some time pondering how we are doing in terms of interactivity in various places of KDE's code base and also looked at ways of elegantly solving the issue of wallpaper configuration changes not being saved out instantly like every else in Plasma does. I also managed to sneak in an hour of reading in the bath this evening, finishing the book I was currently reading.

So a fairly calm and mundane day with nothing overly spectacular occurring, but it felt good. :)

(.. a couple hours later ..)

I nearly forgot: I came home today to find a big blue bin with wheels on it and instructions on how to do the recycling thing. In one of those "this is great, and I can hardly believe it" moments, I realized that it will soon be April and the first curb-side service recycling program run by the city will be starting up. Huzzah ...

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more on system tray happiness

I mentioned the system tray progress the other day in my blog, but Marco blogged about it extensively today, including a couple of videos and a nice description of why we're doing what we're doing.

This is something long overdue, and I'm very happy to see interest from other projects such as E17 in this as well.

I just wanted to add to Marco's blog entry that we're very open to feedback from potential consumers of the new system, both application developers as well as desktop shell projects.

One fellow left a comment on my blog the other day with some thoughts about how to improve the D-Bus service specification. I looked at the xml, whipped up a small patch (though against the wrong branch *sigh*), and then Marco took it from there and incorporated it into the rest of the codebase.

So check out Marco's blog and if you are someone who works with system tray icons, please give us your feedback.

I'm elated about the whole thing because this is several years in the coming. The first time I shared my concerns about the specification some 4+ years ago, it was met with incredulity and denial. Now we're actually doing something about it, and in a way that can be easily used by anyone who cares to.

I am particularly happy that we haven't had to break backwards compatibility in either direction to make this happen either, making it a perfectly seamless transition for the user who will simply see things get magically better without regressions. As can be seen in Marco's second video, applications using the KDE class dynamically switch between the XEmbed icon or the D-Bus based method as needed (so that KDE apps will continue to run just fine in any environment) and our system tray widget is multi-protocol so supports all possible entry points (meaning apps using the XEmbed approach still work as they always have).

The new possibilities this opens are tremendous though. Marco mentioned multiple views on the same set of icons, but there's also the ability to have completely different kinds of views. The ability to put messaging icons together into a "communications area", to merge application entries with their taskbar representations or to provide more accessible representations such as larger or high contrast icons, text only or even audio system trays ... and with none of the painting and positioning stupidity we've had to deal with over the last year in Plasma.

*slightly giddy*

Oh, and we have an improved device notifier on its way into kdebase soon, too ... :)

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oh yeah, and a couple other things

The problem with not blogging regularly is that I forget about things I want to share with all of you, and then I start upright in the middle of a paragraph in the book I'm reading ("The Billionaire's Vinegar") or whatever I'm doing and feel compelled to wander towards the computer.

What was it this time? Two little non-world-shattering things:

First, it always fascinates me how facile the mind is at the most unexpected times. For instance, while sleeping. When I first got my current cell phone (I went for years without one, actually) I never noticed when it was ringing: my mind just wasn't used to a phone that wasn't on my desk ringing having anything to do with me what-so-ever. Now, however, it wakes me from my sleep.

Yesterday I was sleeping soundly and someone called around 6:45. The phone was in the living room, but my mind nudged me (just barely) awake and I stumbled out to get it. I'll sleep through all sorts of noise and mayhem .. but things my mind decides are important and useful will get me up. My consciousness may be slumbering, but the mind is still simmering.

To those who have my cell number, please don't test this theory out. I do like sleeping a lot more than talking on the phone.

To those who end up sleeping near me, try talking to me while I'm in that state. Chances are I'll babble back at you. The phrase builder in my head apparently doesn't shut off much, though when I'm asleep it generates essentially random, if somehow syntactically sensible, strings of words. It's like I'm channeling every English emblazoned Japanese t-shirt while I snore.

The other odd thing I remembered I wanted to jot down somewhere was that I had a nice little surprise the other day when I started konversation and noticed it was using the Oxygen style .. I hadn't actually noticed that in a recent-ish extragear/network/ update, a working konversation build was to be had. What a nice surprise!

With Digikam's KDE4 version working very nicely (better than the last KDE3 version I had did for me, actually, so kudos to the Digikamers) and K3B shaping up nicely as well, I'm now down to exactly two one KDE3 applications still clinging on to life, both of which sit which sits in my system tray and neither of which will not live much longer into this year (network manager and krandrtray).

It's a kind of emotional moment .. a passing of sorts. It reminds me of when I was finally able to get rid of KDE1's libs because there were no more apps using them on my machine. *tears in a poignant moment* :)

Cue the music, James.

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a few things we've been working on

During my blogging hiatus (blogatus?) there's been the usual frenetic pace of Plasma development.

There are a few new plasmoids in kdereview now, including an input method plasmoid. This will be the first time KDE has shipped with an input method widget; up until now they were always distro provided add ons and that resulted in a lot of duplicated effort and spotty results. KIMPanel (for "KDE Input Method Panel") can be run as a widgets on the desktop, in the panel or as a stand alone application. Major props to Wang Hoi for making this happen.

There's also a cute new system status plasmoid that shows system activity in the form of bubbling goo. Neat. The refactored device notifier is just about ready to go into kdebase as well.

The new system tray protocol stuff is moving along really nicely thanks to Marco's usual heroic efforts, and the Enlightenment 17 people have expressed interest in it as well as they face similar challenges with the current system tray protocol due to also being a modern, canvas-based desktop shell.

Job notifications now show file and directory stats, extenders can be grouped for stacking/collapsing (really handy for things like notifications), notifications show icons properly again, clocks can speak the time, Aike's been backporting multi-screen fixes, Wilder's been backporting krunner fixes, Davide has been puttering about the code base despite getting essentially mugged on a bus last week, Chani's been working on actions and toolboxes ... it's been relatively busy around the Plasma house. :)

Today I committed a few other things, as well.

First is the ability for runners, those plugins for KRunner and other things that want to provide query->result type workflows, to register their syntax. KRunner gained a new button that, when clicked, lists all the known commands and syntax patterns. They are displayed as search returns, and if you select one of them the syntax is placed into the search box. The edit caret is even in the right place, e.g. before the '=' for the calculator. I've only modified the runners in kdebase to register their syntax, but kdeplasma-addons will follow.

KRunner itself now shows results in a vertical list with items taking the width of the window. There's a bunch more work to do there to make it pretty, including adding some nice little animations, and there is now room for action buttons. The action buttons will allow us to show "other" actions besides the primary one, for instance to remove a file from the Recent Documents, to send a file by email or to configure the user to run a command as (ala minicli in KDE3).

Finally, I also committed a change to the Plasma desktop shell such that when the desktop toolbox is clicked, the desktop is cleared of windows using the "show desktop" functionality. When the toolbox is closed, the windows come back. This is rather convenient when doing stuff with the desktop and you don't want to pull the dashboard forward or the dashboard is viewing a different containment.

Besides the usual flow of new patch contributors, there have been lots of really great Google Summer of Code proposals making their way to the plasma-devel@ list as well. So while the "old hands" have been busy plonking away on all sorts of things to make 4.3 a fun, useful and impressive release, it looks like we'll have lots of new blood to help make 4.4 even better than that. :)

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i'm not dead yet :)

Where has the time gone? Yeesh. It's been forever since I blogged. Well, not quite forever, but close enough. :P

Lots and lots has happened in the intervening time. We released a report covering the last two quarters of activity in KDE e.V.. In the introduction, which goes quite long (a full page!) due to the topics covered, I reveal who the next President will be.

(See how I get you to read it? I tease you with something interesting, and then move on. I am a bad, bad man. ;)

I had a house guest, S., at my place for two weeks, which meant my weekends and evenings were well taken up doing things like going to Banff, introducing them to friends and favourite hang outs, going out to catch some entertainment (we attended a Celtic concert on Saint Patty's day), chatting, reading and generally laying about and visiting. You may blame S. for much of my blogligence. :P

P.'s birthday is coming up in a couple weeks time and we managed to get that all arranged, aside from the loot bags the kids attending will get and the traditional cake. The party will be at the science centre here in Calgary, which is one of his favorite places to go and hang out, and he made really cool invite cards from scratch for the kids in his class.

He's really been growing lately, too, both physically and mentally/emotionally. While S. was here he asked if I would mind it if he deleted something from one of the computers and I said I'd live if he delete it. His reply was, "I know that you'll live, but we're talking about feelings here. How would you feel about it?" I tried my best not to fall off my chair.

Otherwise, things have been fairly normal here. Lots of work to keep me busy and winter's still not letting go which is keeping me inside more than I'd like to be. We have over 15 cm of snow over the weekend and are supposed to get some more tomorrow. Lucky us. *sigh* I don't mind winter, but really .. it's nearly April already.

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Plasma and VNC

A number of people use the Plasma desktop and KDE 4 apps over the network using things like VNC. Unfortunately, many of these same people find that Plasma (and styles like Oxygen) often don't look all that hot in their VNC screen.

As with so many "problems" with Plasma, this is not an issue with Plasma (or Oxygen) itself as much as it is with the vnc server. Indeed, the cure is using a decent vncserver such as x11vnc or xf4vnc.

Sadly, krfb doesn't provide such good results. It would be great to see it (and the default vnc servers in Linux desktop distributions in general) get with the program and provide a reasonably modern experience.

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Linux Format: The KDE Issue

Linux Format has dedicated their next issue to KDE: we're right there center stage on the front cover:

As a special bonus, at midnight tonight (GMT) they'll be posting the entire issue online for everyone to download in PDF format for 24 hours only.

Grab it and see what Linux Format is all about. Who knows, perhaps they'll snag some new subscribers with this limited time give away offer. :)

Update: Apparently I'm supposed to send you here for the download. Thanks for the comment, Tecumseh. :)

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smoothenator

The weather outside today is truly bizarre: it can't figure out if it wants to be late winter or early spring and so it's raining sometimes and snowing others (often switching back and forth within a 15 minute period), melting then freezing ... Makes being outside a bit annoying as it's slush and ice and snow and mud puddles and ...

In other words, a perfect day to stay inside and hack on things. ;)

One of the recent, though smaller, changes made to theming in Plasma for 4.3 is the ability to tell all the buttons, checkboxes, comboboxes, etc that Plasma provides in libplasma to use the native style painting instead of Plasmafying them. This is controlled by the theme, as it doesn't make sense with themes like Oxygen or Air due to SVG and color compatibility of the native widgets with the rest of the theme. In the theme's metadata.desktop file the author can put a section that looks like this:


[Settings]
UseNativeWidgetStyle=true


to get native widget styles. This will allow people to make truly boring themes for Plasma so we can all reminisce about the good old days when the QStyle made your panel look dreadful and we liked it that way! ;) More seriously, I'm sure it'll make visual conservatives like Lubos a bit more happy. Now we just need a theme that uses this.

Over in KRunner land, building on wilder's work from last night I added a feature I'd previously vetoed as it would have gotten in the way of getting the thread scheduling sorted out. Runners can now check to see if they are still processing a meaningful query (as in, "the user hasn't continued typing and left us behind") and return early. This tends to save some CPU cycles for people who type fast relative to the available CPU horsepower and makes KRunner go a bit smoother.

It's only 11:00 am, so I've got lots of time for more happyness. Next I'm going to add "Run Command" to the Computer tab in Kickoff so people can get to KRunner with just the mouse and then start on a Plasmoid that uses RunnerManager just like KRunner does so we can put it on our panel or desktop or dashboard or .. well, wherever Plasma goes. :)

Yay for bad weather days. :)

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22:14

It's 22:14, Monday evening.

I spent the last week in semi-hermitage, working on things that didn't require too much communication with others and off of IRC. Today was spent almost entirely in hours-long meetings, and even then I managed to completely miss one phone conference. I find meetings like that very draining. Oh well .. they must be done. :) I've got one more patch to review on review board, but got through the half dozen or so that were waiting in queue this morning.

This evening I spent some time interpreting some of the more unintuitive bits of KRunner internals for Wilder and helping come up with possible solutions for various problems and challenges that code is currently beset with. Wilder's been coming up with patches to knock off various bugs and inefficiencies one by one there, which is really cool. KRunner in 4.3 will be better as a result, and some of the fixes have also been backported for the next 4.2 release.

Work also continues on the other bits of Plasma we broke ground on in Tokamak II and the usual slew of KDE coordination and outreach continues. It's apparently been a bit quiet on the irc channel and what not without me around, so I'll have to fix that this week. ;)

Right now as night enters, I just want to sit here and listen to music and drift off into that wonderful lyrical space that exists between the notes. So that's what I'm up to right now.

Marco's been doing some really cool work on various widgets, including making the Microblogging Widget more sane and allowing all users of Plasma::Dialog Fitt's "Law" compliant by having them not show borders that would otherwise touch the screen edges. Suddenly Kickoff is nicer to use and visually it looks really nice (especially with the new Air theme!); now to fix the flip-view-application explorer to be less a pain in the ass to use and we'll have something Really Good.

Alexis and Artur stepped up this past week to look after plasma-mid, the shell for smaller devices like netbooks and what not. It really needed someone(s) to feel personally responsible for it and get pissed off when it didn't move fast enough or in the right directions. I've got as much as I can be pissed off about at once on my plate already. ;) Delegation can be easy to forget to do, but thankfully there are people like Will S. around to remind me to smarten up.

There are several new Plasmoids in kdereview waiting to get moved over, including a unit converter, a new device notifier that's "more Plasma", a system load viewer modeled after the simple KDE3 one, the keyboard state widget and the weather widget. Lots of stuff cooking in playground, too.

Plasma has so many "heads" now (library, desktop shell, krunner, mid, edu, media, widgets out the wazoo, scripting, services, etc, etc..) that it can be a bit of a challenge keeping on top of it all. It all seems to be moving in a coherent direction, though, which is the important part and while the "old crew" remains we still get new contributors on a regular basis which is very cool. It's really neat to see people I'd first greeted with "welcome to Plasma!" saying the same words to others on the mailing list. :)

Lots of people seem to be lining up for Google Summer of Code projects, too, which is great.

And now for something completely different...

To provide that "random bit of oddness" any good blog entry needs ;) ... I spent some time during the hermitage week thinking about various things, such as the importance of having and making time that is open in one's schedule. Here's something I wrote one evening last week:

"So many of us live lives that are more and more saturated by communicating with people in our inner circles (phones and social networking sites don't help), keeping up with the banal "requirements" of our modern lives and wasting time on media (Et tu, Cable T.V.!). City dwellers in the Western world are usually the worst for this in my experience, though the trend is noticeably spreading. Unfortunately, those cracks in our lives we have been filling in are not just "useless moments we were wasting anyways" but useful moments that are useful because they are empty. It are those empty moments that create community, that allow us to lift each other up in unexpected ways.

They are the moments when we find time to go for that "meaningless walk" during which we come up with that inspired thought, find peace with the world around us or just lighten up a bit because we're in the fresh air without any responsibilities getting in the way of feeling how that feels. If you haven't done so recently, why not go find somewhere nice to walk for at least an hour. Don't take anything with you, not even a music player. Just be. Sometimes the slower you go, the more you achieve.

These are also the moments when we find time for others when they need us. I'm reminded of one event in my life in particular:

When I was a child, a neighbor did something remarkable with one of his empty moments one Saturday just before Spring set in one year. He came over to our house that day and asked if he could take me into town. He explained to my mom that in Spring, every boy should have a bag of marbles. While not quite so true today, when I was a kid it certainly was since Springtime games in the schoolyard tended to revolve around marbles and a boy without marbles was a sad thing. It usually was left to the father to make sure you had a supply of marbles to play with. Without a father, well ... at least I had a neighbor with some time to spare and a lot of care in his heart.

That day he took me to McLeod's, the hardware and toy store in town (I know, an odd combination for a store) and he helped me pick out a small bag of marbles. In that moments I knew I wasn't alone and that I, too, was able to be like "every boy".

Now, I certainly wasn't like every boy: I was different, and it made pretty clear often enough that others were aware of that fact. But as Spring wrapped its warm rejuvenating arms about our little town, those marbles gave me hope that I wasn't hopeless. I could be like every boy in some ways. After all, I had marbles didn't I? And, more importantly, someone around who cared enough to make sure I had marbles.

The neighbor and I made that to get marbles at the start of every Spring from then on until we moved away. It became, for me, a demonstration of hope and love and care.

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that this neighbor was actually a very busy fellow: he had a family of his own, owned and ran two businesses, kept a large vegetable garden and had a boat and a house to look after as well. In addition to his responsibilities, he was something of a recreational scholar and loved reading and researching. However, he made sure he had time that was open here and there to do little things like go marble shopping. Empty moments to fill as needed.

Twenty-five years later I still think back to that whenever Spring starts to show it's face. I am who I am in part because of those sorts of moments; moments that I would later return to and rediscover hope and love and care through.

If we'd like to do something that just happens to help someone else to rise up, or if we'd just like to do something that someone else will remember in twenty-five years and even long after we've passed away ... first we must make sure to have the time to do nothing once in a while so that we will have the time to do something when it's called for.

To be honest, sometimes I forget to do that myself ... but then Spring comes and it tends to remind me that's not good enough. Marbles, after all."

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