Randa 2012: First Half of Awesomeness

Time passes fast when you are enjoying the great company and the great location that the Randa 2012 meeting provides.

It's been a busy time for me in the Education part of the meeting.

I've worked on the following items:

kdeedu

Kalzium

- Fix uninitialized memory use
- Fix memory leak
- Make molecule downloading more user friendly
- Let kalzium open molecules both from command line and from clicking in the file manager
- Look and feel improvements to the calculator

Rocs

- Fix uninitialized memory use

Step

- Fix uninitialized memory use

Website

- Make it a bit more localization friendly (now we should not show images with text besides the KDE Edu logo)

kdegames

Thanks to Ben we now have kdegames on jenkins, which made me fix some bugs there :)

Killbots

- Make tests work without the game being installed

kmahjongg

- Fix compilation when libkmahjongg is not installed in default folders

kshisen

- Fix compilation when libkmahjongg is not installed in default folders

kdelibs

- Fix a bug with menubars when editing toolbars

l10n-kde4

- Regular tasks of moving files around

And of course this is just the things that resulted in commits, between the various random things I've helped people around with their questions that fall inside my area of expertise, for example helped Frederik Gladhorn integrate the KDE translation system on the Qt AT SPI project so we can provide an even more polished accessibility solution to our users and also "chaired" the KDE Edu discussions whose results you can find in the Notes links at http://community.kde.org/KDEEdu/Sprint2012

And finally to get some relax I've also contributed to the soluttion of the puzzle containing last year's group photo


And also got photographed for next years puzzle ;-)


Thanks all that donated to the pledgie and made Randa 2012 happen!

And now back to Awesomeness!

Why small KDE projects are useful for the big KDE picture?

On Wednesday, Burkhard Lück began sending mails to the kdegames mailing list about the shortcomings we had regarding translations not being loaded, not being possible, etc.

One of the most reported issues was that translations of theme names were not used even though they had been translated. That shocked us as we use the typical KDE way of using .desktop files, so we investigated a bit, and came up with with a very small test case that showed that the kdelibs class for accessing .desktop files was not working correctly.

In less than two hours we had the bug fixed. So that's why small KDE projects like kdegames are useful for KDE, they are as good testers as anyone else.

KTuberling themers wanted

If you can draw and always wanted to help KDE but did not know how, this is your opportunity!

As you may know KTuberling got a nice SVG engine a month ago. The problem is that i am not able to draw, and even if the KDE world has some nice artists, they are overloaded with work, so more people on board never hurt.

Contributing themes for KTuberling is VERY easy. All you have to do is draw a nice SVG image.
As example, here are the two themes that we have currently
potato-game.svg and default_theme.svg, the themes.HOWTO file and the two .theme files for the SVG files potato-game.theme and default_theme.theme

If you have any code question do not hesitate to contact me at <aacid _AT_ kde _DOT_ org>
For graphical guidance contact kde games graphics dude at <johann _DOT_ ollivierlapeyre _AT_ gmail _DOT_ com>

KDE fame is waiting for you!

TaxiPilot looking for developers

Thomas Friedrichsmeier, TaxiPilot's author is looking for development helpers to port his small but nice game to KDE 4. So if you are looking for a nice introduction to KDE 4 development do not hesitate to contact him!

Kiriki moved to kdereview

On last kdegames irc meeting, it was decided that Kiriki, the Yahtzee! clone for KDE 4 i've began writing on Málaga's aKademy, was worth enough to be on KDEgames 4.0 release. Today i moved it to the kdereview module for the mandatory two weeks review period. If nothing goes wrong it'll hit kdegames around April 18th or so. Do not hesitate to try it and comment, just don't mention networking :D It's planned but i'll wait for KDE 4.1, try to hook it up on GGZ and convince gtali developers (if any) to do the same :-)

On other news, yesterday i went to RENFE station to pick up the tickets i had bought via internet and they have NO special queue for that kind of people, so i still had to wait the 120! turns of people that was before me to pick the tickets, wonder what advantage gives me buying the ticket over internet if i still have to do the same queue that if i bought the ticket on the station.