houston, we have liftoff

so i was in houston last week for a handful of days speaking at trolltech's developer roadshow. aside from reminding me in many ways of calgary, it was a nice opportunity to stay in a hotel in a mall (truly odd: a melding of 2 hotel towers, 2 office towers and 3 levels of consumer heaven mall covering several city blocks) and meet with several of trolltech's corporate custooncemers in the area. many were familiar with kde.

aside from having some really nice interaction with people from companies such as texas instrument and lockheed-martin, it was also a time to meet up with some of the qt hackers such as marius and andreas as well as kde people such as george staikos. there's some very cool stuff happening in qt 4.2 such as qgraphicsview which is simply wonderful. think qcanvas on steroids to give us a scenegraph type presentation widget.

i want to do some screencasts and post some screenshots, but i want to clear it by andreas first so i don't steal all his thunder ;) and he and the other graphics hackers @ trolltech certainly have built up a lot of it. some of the demos include a really cool robot demo (he says, looking at ettrich ;), a multiplayer first person shooter type game thing and a demo showing a million skewed and rotated live (as in editable) text areas .... all of it smooth and flicker free, able to switch between opengl and regular painting (and back) by clicking a push button, free zooming and rotation ..... really, really nice stuff.

and speaking of graphics, i picked up zack from the airport last night. we spent the day today getting settled in and prepping for hacking on plasma.

i also had an epiphany about marketing kde4 today that was dislodged by an irc brainstorm we had in #kde-promo today where our marketing working group members showed why they are on that team (hi sebas, wade, martin and others! =) and then a later conversation over vegan chinese food with zack and t. i'll be presenting the ideas to various people in the project quietly over the next week or so if it truly does blossom into something useful (it may not; my previous concept built around "clarity" last year got scooped by microsoft as they started using it for vista =/ ) ... suffice it to say, however, that it will make tom chance rather happy if it does ...

odd side-story: yesterday when grabbing a coffee while hacking on some code, i eavesdropped in on a conversation at the next table (a very "bad" habit i have). it was a young man and woman and she said that a friend of hers had described herself as a "serial monogamist" due to her habit of having many (often simply physical) relationships in a row. she said that it was such a great term to describe exactly how she felt about herself and went on about this great new label. i smiled because that phrase was one i used over 10 years ago to describe my own self at the time (things change...). interesting how we (as a culture) keep rediscovering the same memes over and over ...