Technology, Open Source and Shiny Things

I love KDE and am ok with OS X so I was very excited about the KDE team releasing KDE 4 on Windows and Mac. It is a technology preview so it is not ready for production.

It installs. You need about 5 packages to get up and running. I also installed Amarok 2. The first thing I noticed is that the footprint of these packages was massive. I have downloaded all of KDE for Linux before and these seem to be about 500MB. The OS X installer seems to be twice this size

After all this I tried running some applications. They pretty much all “run” but whether you can do anything with them depends. Ultimately I am excited and can’t wait until new stuff comes out.

Greasemonkey is a firefox extension that when it first I dismissed it as a power user tool. Greasemonkey allows you to change the functionality of the browser with custom Javascript. While I consider myself a power user, I am pretty lazy when it comes to writing scripts for myself(more of a waste of time). I was wrong about it completely. The power of greasemonkey is that it can be included In other extensions. One of my favourite extensions based on Greasemonkey is Stylish which allows you to load custom CSS on popular websites that members of the community have created. This allows me to have a darker Google experience. The only thing that is annoying is that there are a lot of terrible themes.

I have struggled for a long time with blogging. Having said that, I am doing well so far. I have been using the Worpress iPhone app which I’d very simple but good.

The other thing that has helped is WordPress 2.7. The biggest thing I had trouble with was staying up to date. I would find myself in an endless circle of not updating and so not posting. It now auto updates. This also extends to plugins. Themes do not yet update automatically but I think this is coming. The new admin backend is a lot more logical. There are things in WordPress that I couldn’t figure out with the old backend. It just makes more sense.

The first time that I used Linux was mid 2006. I had heard about Linux from a couple of people but never really done much investigating myself. One day I was listening to the Maccast, one of the few podcasts out at the time, and the host had some news about the bootcamp beta. Someone had triple booted a mac with OS X, Windows and this thing called Ubuntu.

Well this got my attention I started googlingaround for this ubuntu thing and was really interested. Once I installed it I fell in love. I started learning everything that I could about Linux. Tried different distros and window managers. I tried KDE 3 but it seemed too much like windows and I could spend days configuring the thing. So I stuck with Gnome for two years.

Almost a year ago KDE 4 came out and it was a bit rough, with good reason, anyone who used it would notice the massive changes and give it some time. Well I have been using the 4.2 beta for a few months now and just upgraded to the final release. It is now my desktop of choice and moreover I see so much potential for it going forward. Truly I am a Konvert.

I have been starting to use jQuery for a school project. I have done some javascript a few times. Form validation and stuff like that. I liked the syntax and loose typing but it is such a massive language and programming for the web is always a moving target.

Well jQuery does a good job of abstracting all the browser stuff away and once you get everything figured out it is pretty awesome. It is not really Ajax(although it has some Ajax handling) it is more of a merger of javascript and CSS. They also have an awesome plugin community.

The biggest problem I found was that the code is so minimalistic that it is sometimes hard to figure out what is doing what.

So I just bought my first Mac. My thinking was to eliminate Windows(I need iTunes for iPhone). I also wanted to have a small media centre system. I also wanted to learn about developing applications for iPhone. I am surprised at how powerful it is. Even so I am probably going to throw in a new hard drive and add more memory.

The thing that drives me crazy about it are the lack of keyboard shortcuts. In Windows or Linux I can use the system without a mouse with a Mac I can’t… Yet. The other thing that is annoying is when switching programs it only has the application and not all the windows of that program.

I was wondering if you can do 4 GB of RAM with the new Mac Mini. I have read conflicting reports online about that. The Core 2 Duo is 64-Bit but is Leopard on the Mac Mini? I’m thinking that the people who can’t get more than 3 gigs and change are on the mac mini with just a core duo.