It seems at the moment everyone is looking out for netbooks, Richard Johnson writes about them on his blog today, and I was interested to read the comments. While I was back in the UK for the Christmas break I spent a day in London shopping, and wondered up and down Tottenham Court Rd looking for a netbook to buy. I ended up with an HP 2133 Mini-Note with SuSE 10 preinstalled on it.

I feel a bit stuck in a time warp, having already written blogs with much the same title and subject as this one, back in April. The difference is that it is now possible to use the Plasma Script Engine api and associated packaging mechanism, as opposed to the earlier bindings, which were based on the C++ plugin api. Of course, being able to write engines in C# as well as Ruby is something new.

Recently I've often been amazed by the ingenuity and the lengths that some people seem to want to go to, in order to be rude about KDE4. One example was a guy on Aaron's blog about the new system tray who claimed that Plasma had 'too many casts' especially dynamic_casts. 'Hey what? Huh?' I thought, as it was a bit off the wall.

One of the nicest applications I've found for the Nokia N810 is a single html page! TiddlyWiki consists of a page called 'empty.html' that you download and copy when you want to create a new Wiki. It works just like a traditional Wiki but is single user, and doesn't need a web server. The code for the Wiki is embedded within the page as JavaScript and CSS.

I just wiped a partition on my laptop that had Mac OS X Tiger on it - I haven't used Mac OS X for a while and the disk space was just being wasted. I've replaced it with KDE from the Kubuntu Hardy disk I got at Akademy, and upgraded it all to 4.1. It was great to just start from scratch and only put in the latest things that I was interested in. One of the shiny new toys was Mono 1.9.1, along with some of the associated sub-projects such as the Visual Basic compiler.

I only discovered today that the n810 doesn't have any swap file turned on by default. It has only 128Mb of memory, which is quite easy to fill up. And when you fill up the memory you don't get a 'consumer friendly dialog' telling you that your machine is full. No instead of anything helpful, the machine will behave slowly, erratically and then ultimately crash. And after is has crashed you will often find that it won't boot anymore and you need to restore your root partition from a backup.

I really enjoyed Akademy this year, and blagging a Nokia N810 right on the day of my birthday was one of the highlights of a great week. I'm very keen to port the QtRuby bindings to the N810 as it should make a nice development environment for quickly developing small free standing apps and Plasma applets. Instead of using Scratchbox, cross compiling on a laptop, and then downloading the binaries, I've been building on the device itself. I'll summarize what I've done so far to get my tablet set up with dual booting OSs and native compilation.

I started my first programming job on August 7th 1978 as a graduate trainee in the 'Advanced Systems Sector' of a company called Dataskil, and today is the 30th anniversary.

I got some Ruby Plasma bindings working a while ago. They wrapped the complete C++ api and allowed you to write a Plasma KDE plugin entirely in Ruby, which just looked like an ordinary C++ plugin to the Plasma runtime. However, that isn't the preferred way to implement non-C++ language support in Plasma.

I've been in Berlin since Thursday, where we're having a meeting and hacking session about language bindings and Kross scripting. I like Berlin - it's a bit like Amsterdam - plenty of hippies on bicyles although without the canals, the Dutch or the narrow buildings.