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CH3CH2OH

Sunday, 19 June 2005  |  Canllaith

Last night I took a break from the computer to go walking around the waterfront with Bruce and Mara. I think we girls tried his patience sorely, as we stopped ever 5 paces to take yet another photograph of the lights across the harbour. I can only assume it's our incredible cuteness that makes him put up with both of us at once ;)

For all you tweakers, I've just finished writing an article on hidden kicker configuration options that I've posted on the Wiki for the moment

http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Kicker+Hacks

I notice that kind fairies have nicely formatted my article while I slept. Thanks for tweaking the layout luci, I guess you can tell that I've never used a wiki before.

It's going to become an appendix in the kicker handbook as soon as I figure out how you markup docbook that contains other arbitrary xml markup within it as examples, without the parser thinking you want your examples to be docbook. Hrm.

I've been drafted to write the documentation and help administer the website for plasma and I'm really quite interested in where the discussion is going. There seem to be some very talented new faces hacking with aseigo at the moment and lots of new ideas. I'm looking forward to getting my desktop computer back so I can start tracking KDE 4 development, to write about features as they come in.

I'm currently helping a little with cleaning up the translation of some kalzium strings and installed kdeedu to take a look at the app. It's been quite a challenge for me since I'm no chemist and don't know what some of the words mean in English but it looks a very interesting app. I had no idea kdeedu was packed with such great programs.

I've since been spending far too much time playing khangman and fiddling around with other great kdeedu programs. I've downloaded some language packs for khangman and have been attempting to play the animals level in German with my Bildwörterbuch as a guide, with varying degrees of sucess.

I hear the recursion support I nagged cies for has made it into Kturtle in trunk, yay! Kturtle is an implementation of the logo programming language with a rather cute green turtle and a nice interface. Using a turtle can be great to teach people some very important programming and mathematical basics in a fun way. For anyone who has fond memories of using logo and a turtle way back when, here is a screenshot of kturtle drawing a plane filling curve (in colour! This is much cooler than other turtles, who don't do colour ;)

Now I just have to bug the maintainer for a way to push and pop a turtles location off a stack, so that one can draw things like delicate fractal trees using recursion.

If you haven't yet, do check out kdeedu. Whether you have children or are a child at heart you'll have lots of fun rediscovering things you forgot you knew, and perhaps even learn something you didn't know before.