random ramblings, nothing to see here

Yesterday I had a bit of a fever, probably something I picked up from P. who was ill earlier in the week from something he picked up at school. My laptop had also started to overheat randomly. So after some light hacking in the morning (reworked the time engine to be a lot cleaner internally now that it does sun and moon positioning, by creating a TimeSource class instead of using DataEngine::setData directly; this means the source name is parsed out exactly once and prevents dozens of allocations on every source update (which is twice a second for clocks showing seconds); this also resulted in some internal improvements to Plasma::DataEngine itself so that engines using custom DataContainers don't incur any odd performance penalties; then triaged a few dozen bug reports) I turned the laptop off, took it apart and cleaned out the fan assembly of dust and fluff.

Good news is that today the laptop temperature is back to how it was when I first bought it (love that temperature plasmoid, btw :) and my fever is gone too. Huzzah for that.

P, some friends and I are going to see the Start Trek movie tonight, so I hope its as good as people have been saying.

I'm also taking up a second language, more seriously this time, because I have a renewed need to communicate effectively with people who speak German. I was looking at various "Learn German" offerings at a local book store and the "Instant Immersion" series looks interesting but the entries for it on winehq looked pretty dismal as far as running it in WINE goes. Does anyone out there have a recommendation for a good "Learn German, You Stupid Enlglish Speaking Monoliguist" product?

I'm looking for something that's not audio-only or text-only, as I learn much quicker with multisensory input. Software would be cool, but it has to run on Linux. Otherwise, I'm looking for something with a book and some audio or video CDs/DVDs.

Oh, we also spent some time filling in some of the missing bits on the Plasma "significant changes" changelog for 4.3. That's all stuff that's actually in svn right now for 4.3.0. I'm sure we've missed some things from that list as well, and the "small" things aren't in those changelogs because then it would just be silly long and probably not overly useful due to the ammount of "noise".

This also means we're moving into bug seek-and-destroy mode for 4.3.0. Yesterday I put together a small list of zooming and activity regressions to squash in the coming week and we're making good progress on the resource leak problems as a number of reporters have been exceptional helpful in sending in detailed information about their system and output from various measuring tools when they run Plasma or just specific widgets in various configurations.

Right now, though, it's dinner time.. and then Star Trek time. Yay! :)

p.s. Glad to hear that the KDE GSoC students from North America are having a good time in Boston! From the pictures I've seen, it looks like we have decent gender representation even, and I'm hopeful that we can keep as many of those students involved with KDE in the coming years as possible so we can build our army of North American KDE partiers .. er .. hackers. ;) Seriously though, there's more funding in the pipe for North American hackfests related to Qt/KDE; ping me if you have a good idea for one. :)