wamf

Back in the day ... waaaay back in the day, I had a friend who had once sung in a punk band in New York City (hello, CBGBs! :) and at one point got accidentally (long story) committed to a mental institution. She had a pretty crazy life in general. Anyways, she used to ask, between drags of her thin brown cigarettes, "Wamf?" (Pronounced "wawmpf", or something like that.) What she was asking was, "What are my feelings?" Well, she wasn't actually asking what her feelings were, but what yours were. She was odd like that.

There are still days when I sit back and think ... "Wamf?"

I got back home from Switzerland Sunday night, and got right back to work on Monday morning. I was in the Confoederatio Helvetica for ten days .. and I really wouldn't even know where to begin about the trip. French people singing songs in their mother tongue, backed by an upright base and a nylon strung guitar on a rooftop terrace in Zurich at night? Or how they launched fire-toting paper hot air balloons from the deck so we could watch them float over the city (!) and up into the clouds? Or the dragons on the water spouts in Gottlieben? Or revisting Kreuzlingen? Or tramping on foot into Germany to do some shopping? Or cycling through the old town in Biel/Bienne? Or eating Spargel themed dishes on St. Petersinsel? Or watching fencing?

(Edit: I nearly forgot to mention the guy I saw using a laptop with KDE 4 on it in an airline lounge in Heathrow. Turned out he was an astronomer doing research at a University in England. Neat...)

I wasn't online much during the work week in between the two weekends I was there, but I got some work done. More importantly I had the chance to breathe. Wamf? Calmness .. happiness .. contentment.

I'm back now and my body has finally caught up with being eight timezones to the left again. Not bad given that I got in at 23:00 and was at work by 09:00 the next day. Maybe they could make timezone hopping an Olympic sport. It's probably the only realistic chance I'd have in participating in the games. Assuming, of course, I somehow lost my ethical issues with them. That's another story though. Wamf? A little exhausted.

I've been mostly working on bug fixing these last few days, though I've also been working on moving forward some netbooky type project stuff forward. It's a bunch of somethings I've been working on since last November and which has had more than its fair share of ups and downs. It seems on the up now, though, and I hope to be able to blog about the whole thing sooner rather than later. Wamf? Excited, but with great caution in the winds.

While I work on bugfixes and attend conference calls, I'm jealously eyeing up the GSoC students working on fun new features and Marco and Artur starting in on the new netbook interface. I'm happy that we've got so many really important "last mile" type projects going right now. It leaves us in a momentary "nothing new to show" trough, though, as all these projects are in their first trimester (to use a pregnancy analogy, for no particular reason). It's good timing, though, with 4.3 just a couple months out, as they should be maturing very nicely in time to drop into trunk when 4.4 dev opens up and in a good place to work on at Akademy. Wamf? Pure excitement, a little envy, no caution needed. :)

I also have convinced a fellow here in Calgary to start a little project so that we can demo a really neat aspect of Plasma for people. It's sort of a parlor trick, to be honest, but the kind of parlor trick that could take off in a big way with the right opportunities. The project is building a proof of concept device using an Arduino processor with a Bluetooth board attached. When you approach with a Plasma device (well, pending Rob's GSoC project on Remote Plasmoids) we'll see that there's something available via Bluetooth. Plasma will poke the device such that it spits out a Javascript Plasmoid that will then appear ready for action. Walk away and the Bluetooth connection goes away and so does the widget. The first prototype app will probably emulate a printer: how much paper and toner is there; print a test page; etc.

The idea is to allow Plasma enabled devices to access things inside of otherwise "dumb" machines and give the user a rich interface to it with no configuration (just some approval and security clearances). Image this on a factory floor, or in a restaurant, or inside a vending machine. At first, I'd expect the applications to be pretty vertical as we don't have millions of Plasma devices wandering around in people's pockets and backbacks ... yet. ;)

Perhaps it'll just be a cool demo that goes nowhere, and it's certainly nothing that hasn't been thought of before ... but it's something that really fits with the vision of social and contextual computing: who are you, where are you, what kind of device are you using and who and what is nearby?

Wamf? A mixture of relief (to be nearing fruition of some of the longer term concepts) and tinglyness.

Oh, an I picked up a German language starter kit thing from PONS. Four CDs and a couple of books. We'll see how that goes. The wamf on that one is a sense of adventure (oooh, new things! :) and nervousness (I've never learned another language before and I have an odd sort of performance anxiety..).

Well, that was a lot of stuff about not much .. but it's what I felt like sharing right now. Hopefully I'll some stuff more in the "cool" zone to show in the coming weeks and we'll definitely be showcasing some of the nice stuff coming in 4.3 as it draws closer too ... but for today, I'm good .. hope you are, too.

Love 'n hugs ...