blog.daniel-laidig.de

So, I’ve spent the last few days in Switzerland (also known as "Cheeseland") on the KDE Multimedia and Edu Sprint. A lot has happened and I’m still feeling tired.

For Parley there are quite some changes for the upcoming release of KDE SC 4.5. Basically, the pratice part has been completely rewritten with lots of improvements. Hopefully, you’ll hear more about that soon. At the meeting we tried to finish the last missing bits and get it in a good shape for the release. There is still some work to do but we are getting there. Harald and Frederik also started the Fluffy project which started with a Parley theme and later turned into a complete fluffy pink distribution.

Fluffy Parley

For Frederik and me it was also interesting to finally meet Sabine and Bèrto from Vox Humanitatis. Hopefully we can get a collaboration going that will really help both Parley and Vox Humanitatis. Getting to know each other in person and discussing a lot is an important step in getting this successful.

In general, the sprint has been just great. I have to thank Mario again for organizing this — he really put a lot of effort into this and everything went smoothly. The location was perfect: we were in the middle of nowhere but we had everything we needed (power, internet and Free Beer that is) and the nature around us was just beautiful.

The view from my room in the morning

Lots of other stuff happened at the meeting, from presentations about different applications, quite some discussions to a very nice trip to the Klein Matterhorn, a proposal and a "real-life KStars" session from tackat. I miss being around KDE people already but at least Akademy is not that far away.

Update: The title of this post was supposed to be ‘kDebug() << “Hello Planet KDE.”;’, but apparently that’s to geeky for Wordpress.

While enjoying the last few days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, which has been really awesome so far, I thought that it would be a good idea to finally start blogging. So here I am. My name is Daniel Laidig (dani_l on IRC) and I’m working on Parley (the vocabulary app) and KCharSelect (the widget and application displaying stuff about characters and unicode).

I’m not gonna blog that much about GCDS. Lots of other people are doing that (my attempt to keep up with Planet KDE while I’m here has failed, by the way), so you’re already informed. However, I should note that I’m pretty happy with the hotel I’m in. It’s quite cheap and currently a noisy construction site, but it’s also the hotel where all the cool people are meeting up at the infamous penthouse suite every evening.

I haven’t really been productive in terms of coding, but that’s not really what I’m here for anyway. However, I got other people to fix bugs that really annoyed me. Thanks to Sebastian Sauer and Thomas McGuire for that.

You should also keep an eye on something about the Bug Squad song appearing on the planet in hopefully a few days. I can guarantee that it will be interesting and fun. If nothing’s happening soon, you should probably blame Alex (blauzahl) for refusing to sing.

If you continued reading until that point, that’s good. If you are interested in learning languages, that’s even better, because now I would like to collect some feedback about Parley, the vocabulary trainer.

At the moment, we are not really happy with the practice part of Parley. It’s looking quite boring and is also quite hard to maintain. That is why we had a summer of code last year to rewrite that whole part, but unfortunately at the end it wasn’t complete and stable enough to be released. After that, nothing much has happened.

That’s why Frederik and me will probably sit together for some time and discuss how practicing vocabulary should be done properly. Then I’ll see whether the existing code can be refactored or if it’s better to start from scratch (again).

Now is the point where you get in. What exactly do you want when practicing vocabulary? Which training modes should we support and how should they behave? Please tell me your good ideas, so that we can keep them in mind right from the beginning.

I’m looking forward to your comments.