Moin

As a biology teacher I am sometimes teaching about how our brain (memory) works. One way to test it is to read out loud the words while my students listen (between 10 and 40 words). When all words have been read they have 2 minutes to write them down.

Depending on the number of words and on the words themselves the results differ a lot. For example, if the words are interconnected ("hammer", "nail") those pairs are remembered quite well.

If you do this with 10 groups you have a problem: There is no way to read the list 10 times in the same way. Two solutions:

(1) Tape you reading and simply play the MP3-file.

(2) Display the words.

As a programmer (2) is much easier and more fun ;-) As I love PythonQt4 I simply wrote an application doing this:



As you can see I added a couple of words lists: One syllable, two syllables, more than two syllables and five lists of similar sounding words (man, ham, spam, damn, ...). You can configure the display time and see all words of a list. I am using a projector to display the words in the classroom.

This application is doing exactly one thing and is doing it well (ok, it won't win a design award...). As far as I know there is no such tool for schools around. So I wonder if there is a place for this kind off application. It is to specialized for kdeedu or Plasma, I think.

By the way: The application has only 129 lines of code including 11 lines of licence, 10 lines for the data, comments and white space. Python + Qt4 rocks :-)

In the last 2 weeks I geocaching. So far I found (cacher-lingo: logged) 10 caches. Yesterday I did my first Nightcache. Those caches can only be found at night, in this case because light reflecting discs are used that cannot be seen at day (or almost: they are white on white background 10 meters away from a road. At night it was pretty easy to see them by using a torch).

Geocaching is fun! :)

From today on 32 laptops in my school have Marble 0.6.1 on Windows XP installed. Runs nicely. Lets see how our geography teachers like it!

Next week I will install it on another 16 machines.

Benoît Jacob asked me to publish this great news for him as his blog disappeared from this planet...:

We just released the beta version of Eigen 2.0. It has matured a lot over recent weeks as quite a number of apps have been ported to it: Avogadro, KOffice (mainly Krita and a little KSpread), KGLLib, SolidKreator, KGLEngine. We plan to release 2.0 later this fall.

There is now a quite decent Tutorial which is a good starting point if you are interested in Eigen.

Besides polishing for the upcoming 2.0 release, we are already making big plans for the future. Version 2.1 will have a complete Sparse module, which will be very useful for Krita and Step. Gael had been doing the ground work for this module, and recently Daniel Gomez joined us and contributed several improvements.

We still are very few developers -- Daniel is basically the 3rd one, with Gael and me, although a few guys have been helping occasionnally in the past. We definitely can use more help (hint, hint). For that reason we try to polish the documentation a lot, and we can mentor any prospective contributor. Here is a TODO with many available jobs, all you need is C++ and some math background.

Moin

This is my situation:

I have data on my Linux machine at home (several thousand files, about 10 gigabyte). I am using that PC several hours a day. The filesystem is Ext3.
Quite regularly I need some of my data at work which is a Windows-only land... I am thinking about buying a 2.5" HDD (USB). For various reasons I have to encrypt my data.

Currently the best solutions seems to be TrueCrypt as it is OpenSource and works on Linux and Windows. I used it on Windows, but never on Linux.

One problem is that I need to be able to read the data on our Windows XP and 2000 machines and that means that I'd need to make the hard disk use FAT which will probably cause problems (I have tons of files with umlauts and I cannot even count the occasions where an umlaut made huge problems when I converted FAT <--> EXT*).

So my question to you, dear Lazyweb, is if a 2.5" USB HDD with TrueCrypt is the best way to go. I'd use rsync to sync between my computer and the USB HDD.
I also thought about an U3 stick but that doesn't work on Linux...

Thanks.

Moin

I just added a feature (local git tree for now) to Kalzium: When you are in the iconic mode (that means where instead of chemical information you see SVG-icons like in the next screenshot) you see information about the icon.



For example to some of us it might not be clear why Lithium is represented by a battery or Sulfur by a match. This information is now in the extended legend-widget:



For one, this is just a demo-text. The information is there but needs to be written in good and easy-to-understand english. Anyone?
Also, I am not sure how to present the information... Perhaps someone with taste and a sense for good GUI design could help me here a bit?

Moin

Somehow Vladimirs blog disappeared from the planet, that is what he asked me to tell you about his work on Plasma. Please read the cool details (with screenshots) here:

http://ksvladimir.blogspot.com/2008/06/converting-any-window-into-plasmoid.html

Hi

I need a really small Qt4 application on Windows XP Professional. That catch is that it has to be self-contained as on the target PCs there is no Qt4 installed. The whole application is 10 lines of code plus one .ui file.

I tried to compile Qt4 statically but gave up after two hours. Vista seems to hate me and I hate Vista, that is for sure.

Anyone? I'd send you the files per email. If you are willing to help me out just send a mail to cniehaus at kde,org.

[Update]: Thanks for all your replies! Patrick Spendrin was the first and already provided me a working .exe file.

Hallo, ich werde am 5. / 6. July 2008 eine OSM-Party in Oldenburg veranstalten. Wer Lust hat, daran teilzunehmen, möge sich hier eintragen und/oder sich bei mir melden.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Oldenburg_mapping_party

10 GPS-Geräte werden von der Geo-Factory bereitgestellt.

__________________________________________

Hello, on the 5 and/or 6 of July 2008 an OSM-Party will be held in Oldenburg, Germany. If you would like to attend please add yourself to the Wikipage and contact me directly.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Oldenburg_mapping_party

10 GPS-devices will be provided by the Geo-Factory.

A couple of years ago I joined Folding At Home. There is a KDE-team for which I folded in 2002. We are getting old, right? :-)

Now that I have a fast computer again I restared using F@H in the background. It is only using one of my two cores, so I can run it all the time.

Well, perhaps you are also interested in helping this biochemical and non-profit project? The teamnumber is 461.

Yesterday I blogged that I decided to use PyQt4 in my class. A few hundred lines of code later I start to like Python. It is quite a nice language so far. The indendation thing still drives me mad from time to time (there seems to be no sane editor for python that autoindents my code... Usually I am using VIM, but it is not correctly indenting my files for some reasons. Need to google a bit more for Python-specific vim scripts/settings, I guess.

But I have one issue I cannot resolve (in a nice way). I am loading data from a CSV file. One data set is just True/False, in the file represented by "1" and "0". The only way to make this work is this code:

liquid = bool(int(row[6]))

Without the casting from string to int the casting to bool is not working. In other words, I cannot directly cast from string to bool. I guess there is a more pythonic way, if you know it please tell me :-)

In the next term I will (for the first time) be teaching a coding class at my school. I had a few must-have criteria for the language and toolkit of choice:

Language

1. Has to be a scripted language as then no compiler is needed. Is easier to understand and less error-prone


2. Has to be free as in beer and freedom


3. Has to run on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Linux


4. Has to have a german reference (for my students)


5. Has to have a good textbook (for me), if possible written in german


6. Has to have a good Editor

1. Perl, Python, Ruby are left


2. Perl, Python, Ruby are still left


3. Perl, Python, Ruby are still left


4. Perl, Python, Ruby are still left


5. Perl, Python, Ruby are still left


6. Perl, Python, Ruby are still left (Notepad++ works great for all three languages)

Ok, so I looked at good toolkits for all three languages. My clear favorite is Ruby, for several reasons. I love the language, I know the language, Richard does a great job maintaining the Qt- and KDE-bindings, the PickAxe is a perfect book to learn Ruby from and so on. But I did not choose Ruby. For a very simple reason. Lets see:

Toolkit

1. Has to be free as in beer and freedom


2. Has to have a good documentation for me (as I need to be a few steps ahead of my students)


3. Has to have a german documentation for my students


4. Has to run on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Linux


5. Has to have a german examples/tutorials which run out of the box (for my students)

1. Qt, GTK and wx variants of Perl, Python and Ruby are left


2. Qt variants of Python and Ruby are left. Sorry for wx and GTK, but there are no good documents I could use. This alone rules you out. Beside this, I'd always prefere Qt as I know that toolkit. But I would have taken wx and GTK to the next level if they had better docs. wxPython has "ok" docs, but compared to what I found for PyQt4 it is still quite thin.


3. PyQt4 and QtRuby4 are still left. Now wxPython and PyGTK would have died anyway.


4. PyQt4 is left. Works like a charm on Windows and Linux. I often used QtRuby on Linux and so far never on Windows. It seems it once existed but is no longer maintained. A shame, really, as Ruby is such a great language.

So it will be PyQt4.

• Python has a great free (beer and freedom, written in german) book which I will probably buy as a dead-tree version (I hate reading a book at the screen).


• There are many, many, many good tutorials, workshops and so on.


• Very good class documentation.


• Even a book for PyQt4 itself (which is a huge plus).

I guess wxPython is on the second place. It also has a good book and compared to the other options a good documentation in general. Well, PyQt4 is nice, I already wrote a few hundred lines of code with it. I hope my students will also like my choice :-)

Today I bought 4 GB MP3-Player. First thing I did was to copy a nice playlist from Amarok to the device (on the product box Trekstor even claims the device to be Linux compatible, nice :-), of course it just worked. After a while I had sound problems when listening to Big Pimpin'/Papercut by Linkin Park/Jay Z.

I thought, ok, let's update the firmware. Of course, the software for that is Windows only (and english-only, btw, nice for those 4 billion of us not speaking english), so I switched the OS. I installed the Software and started it. It requires root-privileges. Huh?

Well, I entered the admin-password and 20 minutes later I gave up. First, Windows recoqnized the device without any problem. From one minute to the other it is an unknown device. I tried hard with all my windows-fu and failed. The is no way to connect to the device it seems...

The funny thing is that Windows Media Player is able to play songs directly from the device... Cool, right?

/me reboots to Linux where things just work (for me, at least)

PS: The sounds issues I had are fixed now, it was a headset problem.

As I just helped Vladimir to understand the basics of Git I though I can as well blog about this and make others understand Git as well. I guess this might be a start for a tutorial on techbase.kde.org? What do you think?

Update: I did just that. Lets improve the tutorial there and make it more KDE centric.

Setting up Git

First, I started a new Git repository and added one file to it.

carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> echo "Test content" > testfile

Now I will check what the status is. I will list one untracked file, that means the file has not yet been added to the repository.

carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# testfile
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

In the next three commands I will add the file, commit the file and then check for the status again.

carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git add testfile
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git commit
Created initial commit 246d7aa: This is the first commit
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 testfile
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Ok, as you can see the file has been commited. Now I will demonstrate what happens when I am changine the contents of the file:

carsten@moinmoin:~/git> echo "new content" > testfile
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
# (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
#
# modified: testfile
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git commit -a
Created commit 14a9802: Second commit
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

You see that Git noticed the changes in the file. "git-commit -a" commits all changes in the repository.

Branches are cheap in Git

git-branch shows you the branches of the repository, the one with the '*' is the active one. So lets create a new branch called "bugfix-branch" and assume we want to fix a branch there. After this fix (in this case the new file) I will merge back all the hard work into the master branch.

carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git-branch
* master
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git branch bugfix-branch
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git checkout bugfix-branch
Switched to branch "bugfix-branch"
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git branch
* bugfix-branch
master
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> echo "a second file" > newfile
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git commit -a
# On branch bugfix-branch
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# newfile
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git add newfile
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git commit -a
Created commit 3264357: This file is here for a demonstration of Gits branch- and merge feature
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 newfile

Ok, the bug is fixed now. Next step: Checkout the master branch and merge the two branches:

carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git checkout master
Switched to branch "master"
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> ls
testfile
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git merge bugfix-branch
Updating 14a9802..3264357
Fast forward
newfile | 1 +
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 newfile
carsten@moinmoin:~/git> ls
newfile testfile

Lets now have a look at the log of the testfile

carsten@moinmoin:~/git> git log
commit 14a9802e249413003d1fa40002baa025aa54c75f
Author: Carsten Niehaus <carsten@moinmoin.site>
Date: Fri Apr 18 18:07:18 2008 +0200

Second commit

commit 246d7aad05139314e7ff62a5becb6c930f72fb8f
Author: Carsten Niehaus <carsten@moinmoin.site>
Date: Fri Apr 18 18:06:33 2008 +0200

This is the first commit

Today, Vladimir moved Step from kdereview to kdeedu. This means that KDE 4.1 will ship it! This week I demonstrated Step to several of my students (7th and 10th grade) and got a little feedback.

This feedback already resulted in several changes including the ability to easily modify the speed of the simulation:



Other recent changes include the tutorial. Vladimirs woman added five tutorial. The following video shows one of them (the second) and also demonstrates how easy it is to "play" with Step: I added a rectangular to the simulation to see what happens when the ball bounces against it...



We hope to get more bugreports and ideas for Step, now that it is inside an official KDE repository. What we currnently would like to get from users is more tutorials and more example. Interested in helping us?

The Step team has a small job to offer, everybody is well suited for this one so don't miss a chance to enter the Free Software World! You do not need to be able to code.

In Step, everything should have a small help-text. We are doing this by creating simple HTML-file like this for example. As you can see, the file is quite simple.

All you would need to do is to choose an item without a helpfile (that is pretty much everything, you can really cherry pick!), write the text and send the file to me, Vladimir or the kdeedu-list.

Interested?

Vladimir and me discussed possible Summer of Code contributions. I just updated our ideas. I added a completly new proposal "Project: Step: different userinterfaces for different target groups".

So if you are interested, please apply!

As the deadline for applications has been extended I thought I should blog about the ideas we came up with for Kalzium:

http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Summer_of_Code/2008/Ideas#Kalzium

In case those are not interesting for you but you'd still like to do something for kdeedu and/or a science-related project, why don't you have a look at Step?

http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Summer_of_Code/2008/Ideas#Step

Sometime people say Git is very hard to use and unusable for mere mortals. Well, in parts that is true. If you ever had a merge conflict and didn't know about 'git-mergetools' it was probably quite confusing. But look what git-mergetool (together with vimdiff, but you can use other diff-viewers if you want) can do for you:



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As you can see you have the local copy, the remote copy and the conflict in one window and can now work on the conflict.

Jarle is such a great artist! Look how nice the new Plasmoid now looks:



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