Mario Fux

So this shall be the start of a tale or a long story about the little dragon Konqi and its adventures in our (or his) world. But first a preamble.

As you probably read in my former blog entry I did a schooling to be able to teach in the primary school and in general I like or better love kids and people who are from time to time childish ;-). And I’d like to improve my english language skills (I’ll do another course in autumn as well). So there is no better possibility to train than writting in this language. In the next time I plan to write on a rather regular basis about the smaller and bigger adventures of the little dragon Konqi. It should be or become a story or tale for kids that means if and when you have, know or own some of these beings tell them this story. or let them read it. Young human beings are still honest and very critical and they will tell you or me if they like it or not..

In the same way as I’m interested in your comments (about the content, about the grammar or orthography (errors ;-)) I’m interested in the opinion of your kids. And there is another thing I’d like to mention before I start to tell you about the life of another little being: What’s a good tale without good and nice pictures and paintings? So if you’re in some way talented or you are one of the few KDE artists (Nuno, Alexandre and all the others 😉 and you’ve some spare time send me an email (fux at the KDE server DOT the mandatory TLD org) and you could be the first who gets the newest report about Konqi’s life. And probably and with some luck the next part of the story has a nice little painting besides.

Oh btw, Krita would be the perfect tool for your fantasy. And there is only one rule for the paintings: Konqi must be green! And now let’s fly to another far away part of the world …

Once upon a time there was a little dragon called Konqi. He was rather small for his kind but more than anything else his heart was good. Konqi grew up in a land far away in the mountains near a nice little village inhabited by human beings. This village was surrounded by a dense coniferous forest and several small rivulets which ceased in magical little ponds. Some of the rivulets had its sources high in the mountains others started just somewhere in between the numberous tall trees. In the steeper areas of the forest there were some caves. Most of them were deep and never entered by a human being, others were just the right place to hide when a sudden summer rain began to fall down to earth.

And in one of these caves, certainly one of the more hidden ones, the little dragon Konqi lived. He was still in his childhood when one day he decided to walk over to the big hill and check what’s there behind this big little rock. After his breakfast, which consisted of berries of the forest, mushrooms and some tasty leaves (Konqi was not one of these dragons who liked to eat up other beings or earthlings), he packed some food for lunch, closed the door of his cave and took the stick which was leant to the rock in front of his cave. It was already at this moment when he first had the feeling that this day would become one of the more thrilling of his long life.

After some minutes of walk through the dense forest he had to cross the first little river. At this place the trees stood not that narrow so that the sun could throw its beams till the ground and there were some white little flowers which enjoyed the warm light of the sun and the soggy neighborhood of the rivulet. Konqi took a break sat down and drank some of the river’s water to refresh himself. He was not really cautious in doing this even though he heard stories about some bewitched waters in the forest. But they must be much deeper in the forest and at places much darker than this beautiful place. And actually it was not the first time he took some of this water.

Finishing his rest he packed up the blanket he had been sitting on and started off into the darker part of the forest. Ten minutes later Konqi then found a place where a lot of different mushrooms were growing. But as he already had enough of them in his bundle he decided to continue his walk over to the big hill. Then after a nice morning walk through denser and clearer parts of the forest he arrived at the hill at around midday. But before he had lunch he wanted to investigate the new side of the hill. ‘New’ because he never before was this far away from his home cave. This was also an area where almost no trees grew.

On the other side of the hill the further area looked exactly the same and so he decided to continue his journey after a short lunch in the hot sun. "Why not take a few more steps away from home?" he was thinking. Just as he was taking his first step of this new part of his trip he perceived a gentle voice almost inaudible. First the voice was just gentle but then suddenly you could recognize fear in it. For the shortest of a moment he continued in lowering his foot to the ground but then suddenly and abruptly its motion was frozen.

And why Konqi’s motion froze so suddenly and who the owner of this gentle and silent voice was you’ll probably find out in the next week at this place. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoye(d) it.

So good morning dear readers. It took a long time for this new and next entry of mine about my kde work days. But I’ve an excuse. I moved – and the new and better internet connection starts to work from the 19th of August. Till then I’m online only when I’m in the office and on some swiss train stations occasionally. It’s now more than two or three weeks since the last entry and I want to start right on about some stuff I did or tried.

Last Friday I started a serie of programming courses at my local LUG (the LUGO – Linux User Group Oberwallis). I’m not yet good in developing with Qt and KDE but I tought that I could give and share my new knowledge with some other LUG mates as I go on. And we already were a group of four people increasing in the next course. There are some spare notes and nine slides of a short presentation. Probably I still write some text of what I told them. But the course shall and will be quite interactive as we are all on different knowledge. So if and when you’re in Switzerland and speak German visit us. The next course is on Friday, the 10th of September 2010. Oh and btw. This Friday, the 13th of August, we have another general meeting at our LUG with some presentations about Linux on different devices (and of course a short presentation by me about KDE mobile) and somehow an integrated release party for KDE SC 4.5.0.

Then I read and tried some of the git stuff in the last weeks. As the projects grow (more than one file) and version control system begins to make sense and which could be better suited than git (no flame war about vcs please – I’ve choosen git because Qt already switched to it and KDE will finally switch to it in the next months). So here is a short summary and listing of some git commands:

• "man git-log" or "git help log" to get information about the git log command
• "git init" in a directory to create and initialize a new git respository
• "git add ." to add the current directory to the cache (index) and
• "git commit" to finally commit it
• "git commit -a" to commit all new changes without explicitely adding them
• "git diff –cached" to see the changes and
• "git log", "git log -p" or "git log –stat –summary" to view the history
• "git branch <newBranch>" creates a new branch and
• "git merge <newBranch>" merges it with the master branch (what a surprise 😉
• "git clone <localOrRemoteUrl> <newName>" clones another repository
• "git pull <otherRepo> master" merges the changes of the otherRepo with your master and
• "git fetch <otherRepo> master" does the same without merging
• "gitk" is a graphical history and diff browser for git

All the stuff I read or learned is from the gittutorial and git documentation (aptitude install git-doc on a Debian system ;-).

As you probably already noticed I’m somehow interested in semantic and natural language stuff. Some months ago I asked some friends of mine to send me five to ten (5-10) sentences in natural (human) language about searches they want to do on their computers. Something like: "show me all the text documents I worked on last week and tagged with ‘project X’". So here is a wish to you or job for you: Send me some such natural language query (english or german, probably some french once, that’s all I speak and understand ;-), preferably from collegues or friends who are not power users but normal computer users. I want to analyse them and try something out.

As this blog entry is already longer than expected I want to add some information about myself. You should now my name and that I like (or love?;-) free software and thus KDE. I’m 31 years old, life in Switzerland (grew up in the south of it and life now somewhere in the middle (who knows where and read the last entry?;-). Eleven years ago I finished my schooling as a primary school teacher but decided to study which I hope to finish in the spring of 2012. My major at the university is education and social education and the minors are computer sciences (with a special interest in AI and semantic web engineering) and computational linguistics.

And to end this entry. There is a new Qt technology coming up about the semantic web and desktop: QtSparql… (but Soprano is worth a look as well to say the least) and soon you’ll find here more information about Konqi the dragon…