Bobulate

Q: How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Seven. One to change the lightbulb and six to stand around and go "yeah, I can do that."

That’s one of my favorite guitarist jokes — I play badly enough that I know most of the time I can’t do that, but hey. While the crux of the joke is that those saying they can, aren’t really up-to-snuff, I’ve been going "yeah, we can do that" a lot this week. Where "we" is various KDE applications or technologies. Perhaps they need a little more promo?

First there was this Ars Technica article on Terminator, to which the first comment was "yeah, Konsole can do that" (for years already, at that). And of course emacs, screen, and plenty of others. Makes me think of the way I use Konsole tabs, though. I tend to have one tab per thing-I’m-doing open, all in different directories; for programming projects I tend to have a source-editing and a compilation tab open. Editing means vi, unless I know I’m going to be at it all day, then there’s a Konsole tab from which I run Kate.

Oddly, I never use the window splitting feature; instead I rely on quick tab switching with alt-arrows and the activity indicators in the tabs themselves. I wonder if that’s something to add to the Konsole Userbase page, describing different ways of using Konsole efficiently? A collection of best practices, if you will, or suggested possible workflows with Konsole. That’s a useful addition to the handbook, I think.

Later — might have been via Glyn Moody’s endless twitter stream — I ran into Matt Zimmerman’s "Embracing the Web". Another "wait, what? we do that." To some extent, KDE’s project Silk aims to do just that. First-class web-apps on the desktop? Midgard does that, too with its deployment framework thingy (Henri may correct my pronounciation here). OwnCloud might fill the management gap, and GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff) brings things from the web to the desktop. The other direction, I’m not so sure of.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what Matt is after, though. A bigger ecosystem of interoperable web applications (not just services) on a Free Software model (which implies license choices so that cooperation is fostered)? Sure, sign me up — mind that a combination of Quanta Plus (once ported to KDE4) and Silk is probably an awesome development platform and the pervasive support for HTML markup and Javascript in Plasma makes development of web-like applications locally a piece of cake.

The NLUUG fall conference on Het Open Web (English, the Open Web, and I’ll guess that a little over half of the conference will be in English) is now complete. We have the programme sorted out. Topics (or tracks, if you will) include multimedia and the social web (or desktop). KDE people will find some of the speakers vaguely familiar .. I was not on the programme committee, you can’t blame me for it.

Registration has opened. As in previous years, students pay only EUR 26, NLUUG members who are not longer students EUR 135. A bargain conference with great content, and I invite you all to attend.

I was reading some article on the Register just now and one of the doubleclick ads was for OpenOffice. “Gosh, Free Software really has gone mainstream”, I thought, although the domain name of the target was a little odd; I clicked on it anyway (wear rubbers!) and ended up on www dot openoffice dash dash plus dot info slash nl slash and .. whoa. That’s a fascinating way of getting people to download a very big, presumably very poisonous, .exe file. It’s a good thing that the site is a mish-mash of Dutch and Spanish, as that might tip off some potential victims that this is not entirely kosher.