In this post I will write about some of the things that have happened in the period since I last posted till now, both KDE-related and general nonsense.

Bachelor’s degree

Before summer I finished my Bachelor’s degree in Meteorology. My thesis was about the impact of soot, regionally, on surface temperature in India and Sweden. Although the last days before the deadline were trying, I enjoyed working on it a lot and it make me confident to continue down the academic route. If anyone is interested in reading it, just send me an email.

The SCAM GUI written in Qt3

To model the atmosphere I used the one-column model NCAR SCAM. I knew from before that it had a GUI, but it was unexpected and fun to find out that it used Qt. Not so fun to have to dive into the code to fix a couple of bugs, but it could have been worse – at least my attempts to learn C++ and Qt paid off, even if it was in a way I never imagined. The rest of the model was written in FORTRAN, something I wouldn’t be surprised to see again soon.

Akademy

Next stop was located in Finland, Tampere – Akademy 2010. Yeah I’m a little late writing about it; let’s just say that I’m still recovering from the shock.

It already began on the bus from Helsinki to Tampere. When I had found a nice seat and looked out of the window, I saw someone who resembled Aaron Seigo. Pure coincidence, I thought to myself, there’s no way I’ll run into Akademy attendees this soon. Then this guy who looked like Aaron bought a bus ticket, and damn, his voice was also almost identical. Yes, that’s the voice I’ve heard in a lot of screencasts and other media before. Next he started to talk to some of the other passengers and said something along the lines of “so a bunch of you are on this bus”, and the situation became clear – I was already being surrounded by KDE people.

Surely you can imagine how long this text is gong to be if I were to describe everything in detail (hell, we haven’t even arrived at Tampere yet), so I’ll try to summarize the experience of my first KDE event. In short – it was amazing.

I hadn’t met anyone there before, but everyone was very open and friendly. It was nice to see the faces behind the nicks and talk to people I had exchanged messages with online. Unfortunately there weren’t many from the KDE Forums team that could attend – other than Anne Wilson and me, Luca Beltrame made a quick visit on Tuesday. On a more positive note, some people without direct KDE connections who cooperate with us on the forums and UserBase made it to Tampere to take part of Akademy, which was very cool.

Finally I would like to thank the organizers for doing an awesome job and the KDE e.V. for making it possible for me to attend.

Mountain bike competition

At the end of the summer I went to Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, to participate in a mountain bike competition. It was my first bike competition ever.

The competition was held over two days, with 42 km cycling each day (in total 84 km). It’s a bit much for a newbie like me, but I liked how the competition focused on the experience rather than who the fastest rider was. During those two days the participants got a taste of the best Gotland had to offer. The route passed through muddy trails, rocky paths, a nightclub and past customers in a supermarket, cheerleaders and glassblowers, among other strange and less strange things.

I ended up fourth to last, but needless to say it was very fun. (It’s amazing how the brain tends to forget the last painful kilometers and only focus on the good parts.) Besides, if we were to multiply the times by our number of wheels, my placing would be bumped up towards the top even compared to the elite class riders.

I usually don’t like to post pictures of myself online, but I guess I can make an exception this time, just for your sake. (You still won’t see my face though. Hah.)

Me (left) and my friend

By the way, do we have other uni riders who reads Planet KDE (I know about one more), or maybe even MUni riders?

What’s next?

So what plans do I have for the nearest future? In KDE land I’ll continue to help out in the KDE Forums as usual, and I’ll also try to contribute to UserBase in various ways. I think the wiki has a lot of potential, it just needs to reach a critical mass of contributors.

From now on I’m going to spend more time on my studies and look into different fields of meteorology to find out what I’m really interested in. As a consequence, I expect to have less free time to spend on KDE, but don’t worry, I won’t disappear completely.

My plan is to continue to write here, mainly about the KDE Forums as well as UserBase. If all goes well I’ll also share some KDE tips, more about this later. Finally, if I get in the mood for coding, I might continue my The Road to KDE Devland series. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

week 1

day 1

set 1 – 10
set 2 – 12
set 3 – 10
set 4 – 8
set 5 – max (at least 10)

day 2

set 1 – 14
set 2 – 20
set 3 – 16
set 4 – 14
set 5 – max (at least 20)

day 3

set 1 – 34
set 2 – 40
set 3 – 32
set 4 – 28
set 5 – max (at least 99)

Couldn’t quite manage to do them all? Don’t worry – a lot of people struggle with this week. Just keep on repeating it until you feel confident to move on, and you’ll surely be closer to reach the goal!

Joke aside,

the one hundred push ups program deserves some credit. Who would’ve thought that someone like me could do 100 push ups? Sure I paused a few times to take a deep breath, and during the last push ups some corridor mates probably wondered what the hell I was doing. But I did it.

I’m far from a training maniac – I would rather describe myself as the thin type with most of the muscle mass located below the waist – but I got interested in the one hundred thingy since it sounded like a fun challenge. And I do like challenges.

As expected, it took way longer than six weeks. More like one year and a half. But that’s mostly my own fault – I stopped many times because I was busy with other stuff, and then forgot to continue with the program. After some time I would start from week 1 again.

This time I followed though until I reached the final test after week 6, without having to repeat any weeks; guess the previous training wasn’t a complete waste. And well, you know the rest of the story.

Next challenge: two hundred sit-ups!

I admit this isn’t the best strip, but it shows what I love about xkcd: that’s me! I usually try to avoid just answering “I’m fine thanks”, because that’s just plain boring. And most of the times isn’t really a honest answer at all.

Other than that, there are so many comics there which I can identify myself with. Almost all of them. (OK, maybe not all; can’t recall being strapped like that).

Guess I’m a geek after all.

On a side note, I’ve started to use LaTeX. Ooh, it’s so nice in so many ways. Instant love. Sorry OO.o and other WYSIWYG word processors, I think you’ve annoyed me for the last time (certainly not as there still are people who insist on using .doc).

Since I’ve unconsciously avoided emacs and prefer KDE applications, it felt natural to begin with Kile. A few years ago I would be surprised that such a great application is completely free, and still not understand that it means more than ‘gratis’.

Plasma has also gotten pretty hot lately with WoC and everything, but it still has too many rough edges to enter my love list. The little beauty below, however, has been among the top since I saw it for the first time.

On a side note, I’m quite comfortable on my new keyboard now. Typing about 30 wpm, ~57 % of my original qwerty speed. After a month. Not too bad. And my hands feel good doing it, no more awkward twists.

I said I was going to remap some keys, here’s the result; I’m pleased to introduce chvorak 0.9:

Click to enlarge

Note that I’ve omitted the backspace, enter and space key in the middle. You can’t see the function keys either (for example the numpad).

I’m really happy with the layout so far. The only thing I don’t really like is the placement of the apostrophe. It’s quite dangerous being between Esc and Tab, but in my opinion much better than the Svorak placement.

Until recently, that is. I read a review of ergonomic keyboards, and Typematrix EZ-Reach 2030 was one of the products reviewed. I had seen that keyboard before, and even if it didn’t score very good in the test (they didn’t like the grid layout. Huh?) the geek in me just screamed: I want it!

I recalled that a friend of mine used a Typematrix, so I asked him about it on IRC. As it’s quite expensive here in Sweden, I wanted to know where he had ordered it.

Short story even shorter, here I sit with my EZ-Reach and try to type Svorak. ‘You can have mine’ the friend told me, “I don’t use it anyway.” Just like that.
The C key didn’t work, and some keys were “sticky”, so I decided to clean it inside out. It took some time to assemble it again, much thanks to the Space key.

Seriously, this thing is awesome.

Now I’m going to remap some keys. For your information, this was all written in Svorak. Damn slowly…

Like most blogs out there, this one was doomed to die before it was even born. It’s suffering from “penuria of vicis”, or rather, I am.

Not much has happened since last time. The first version of KDE4 and KDE 4.0.1 as well have been released. I like the slogan “be free”. Speaking of freedom, I’ve listened to a lecture by Richard Stallman when he was in Stockholm. Awesomeness. He’s weird.

The first patch I’ve written made its way to SVN. Isn’t it nice?

And finally, I’ve decided – no Lobster for me this summer. Unfortunately. But that’s how things turned out. At least I think my wallet and legs are grateful. And probably the rest of my body. Oh well.

It’s not very large, but the package didn’t fit in the postbox

Wrapped pretty tightly in plastic

*drumwhirl*

“You should’ve invested in a better camera” you may think, but don’t you agree that low-quality photos taken with the mobile phone are pretty charming? No? Me neither.

Anyway, what exactly is it? Well, if you can’t tell by looking at the pictures, I see little point in teilling you. *Hint* Maybe they’ll appear on this blog again, in another context.

By the way, let me notice you that K/Ubuntu 7.10, know as Gutsy Gibbon, is going to be released tomorrow. Hooray!

I’m looking forward to tomorrow – hopefully I’ll receive my secret package. You wonder what it’ll contain? Maybe I’ll post a photo when I get it (with my crappy mobile camera). Yeah!

Tomorrow I’m going to try idling again. I made some attempts  to idle today; at one time I even felt that nice feeling, “hey I can do this!, but then I fell to the ground. Well, guess that means that I have to train more.