snowing on a monday

It's Monday, it's February and in proper Calgarian fashion it's snowing. More importantly, I've actually caught up with things finally. Not only is my email tamed (I have a couple outstanding emails from the weekend, but nothing major), but also with the Plasma patches on Review Board, various IRC meetings and the mailing lists. It feels very good to not have things nagging at me in the back of my head.

I still have some around-the-house stuff to do (though I've caught up with house work too, miraculously!), but I'm ready to rock again. It was disappointing to see this week's KDE Commit Digest and see that Canada was only in the 1% range for commits. Usually it's in the 2-10% range, and I feel personally responsible for that slippage of my region of the world. Who says I take responsibility too personally? ;)

These week I have some great work lined up in the system tray and in PlasMate, two projects that I'm actually excited about. Working on panels some more (there are a few more features I'd like to see there) isn't the most fun thing to do, and keeping my morale up high enough to continue working at a beaver's pace (which is very fast in Canadian terms) I also need enjoyable work to sink my teeth into.

I was really happy to see some of the KWin<->Plasma visual integration work that Lucas has been working on. While at Tokamak II we put together a big list of things we'd like to see happen in KWin (and yes, we're willing to also write patches; a few of us in Plasma have patches scattered about in KWin as it is ..) and shared it with the KWin people. We also realized that we should have had a KWin person or two at Tokamak, which is something we'll remedy at Tokamak III (which is tentatively scheduled for September in a little town in Switzerland) assuming KWin people are available for a few days of fun hacking in the Alps.

When looking at Plasma, the Plasma team tends to talk in "big picture" terms. We don't really care about the technology boundaries between different parts of the code as much as we do about the over all user experience. This is a mode of thought that creates goals that usually take time to reach, but we're doing it with pretty decent success. However, we'd like the whole desktop shell to work well together and look like it's a coherent whole rather than just a collection of shell and window manager and system monitor and run dialog and ... It should appear as seamless as a smart user would expect it to be. That means working with the KWin people (and others) to find common ground and to hide from the user the seams that exist due to how the technologies work.

This has nothing to do with hiding configuration options or making the individual components so tightly coupled that you can't, for instance, run KWin without Plasma or vice versa. That'd just be silly, and while we love Monty Python we don't write our code to be like a Python skit. ;) It does, however, have everything to do with integration as deep as we can get it.

For all you university students out there who look upon our progress and go "holy crap, I wish I was a part of that!", remember that the Google Summer of Code is there as one nice avenue to do just that. You can find our list of ideas for SoC projects on TechBase, but don't let that stunt your imagination.

Oh, and if you notice I've turned on comment moderation on my blog as a precautionary measure against a recent rash of trolls on my blog. I hate the delay it causes, removing some of the immediacy in conversation between people in the comments section, but I just don't have time to delete dozens of contentless, rude comments every day. Hopefully they'll get bored and go away and I can turn off comment moderation soon enough. :)