BasKet is dead. Long live BasKet(?)

Note: This post is a work in progress. Comments appreciated

In KDE 3 there was an application called BasKet, a general purpose notes and wiki application. It was incredibly awesome, and in general just kicked but. It was by far one of my favorite KDE 3 applications.

Unfortunately, this application never made the official switch to KDE 4, and only a few beta or alpha quality builds based on the Qt4 toolkit were made available. Over the last few days though, spurred by seeing various patches and videos flaoting around, I’ve been thinking about how easy it would be, with the frameworks written by various KDE teams, to reimplement BasKet as a really incredible note-taking application.

In essence, I think that most of BasKet’s functionality is already present in libplasma and nepomuk… so why not use it? Let’s take a look at the feature list that is on the front page of the basket website.

• Take Notes: Well, these would be the Notes applets we have at the moment.
• Paste any data into the application: Each data type could be associated with a type of applet. Of course, adding support for new applet would be simple because of the huge list of plasma’s supported applet languages.
• Organize pages hierarchically: Currently it is not possible to save and load plasma activities, but there is a patch on reviewboard that will solve that. This makes it a simple matter of creating a treeview to house the containments
• Organize data on a page in columns or in free form: This would be a standard Desktop Activity versus a Newspaper activity.
• Tag your notes: Nepomuk, anyone?
• Quick filtering and searching of notes: Nepomuk (and possibly Strigi) anyone?
• System Tray and background support: Sure, we could even use KNotificationItem.
• Autosave of data: Easy-peasy, I suppose.
• Password protection, and optionally public/private key encryption: Simple as well, I’d say
• Embeddable into kontact: This may be a little more interesting, depending on how well a plasma containment plays with Kontact.
• Quickly share your notes, either as a native BasKet file or an html webpage: Sure. We could even integrate KNewStuff3, if it seemed to make sense.
• Import your data from other applications: Just a matter of parsing

The room to expand is also really, really, open, I’d say. Imagine you create a small todo list as in the above screen shot. When you create this todo list, imagine that it was automatically added to KOrganizer via an Akonadi resource that parsed the new BasKet’s data files. There are so many different KDE 4 technologies that could fit into such a project as this, it seems like a really exciting way to get involved in far too many parts of KDE to stay sane

And it would also make a really awesome GSoC project. Personal views on Google and Summer of Code aside, this would be an extremely good Summer of Code project to work on, whether as my Rrix Summer of Code, or by sponsored by the Big G-Dog. I’m considering adding it to the list of possible 2010 GSoC projects, but I’m unsure of the scope of such a, possibly, large application. Where do we start? What is the end-of-summer goal? Who has their hands in enough places to be able to mentor a project like this?

What do you think? Lend me your support before I repost this syndicated to Planet KDE, my MANY MANY blag subscribers!

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Rant about prom, I guess

"They’ve got a gun in my face and a knife in my back; don’t wind me up too tight"

Yesterday I decided that I won’t be going to prom this year. What’s the point? "Oh the high school experience, it’ll be so much fun"

No. It won’t.

There are very few people who I would be comfortable with and enjoy taking to prom. Unfortunately, the people that I have any interest in taking to prom are either already going with someone else or are simply not going for various other reasons. I’m not taking someone that I’m ‘friends’ with[1] simply to go, no. I want to actually enjoy myself, and dance with someone I care about.

As far as I can tell, most girls look at prom as a fashion show, who can get the most attention, who can bitch at the other girls for having a dress to similar to their own. No, I won’t be a part of this. Call me a stick in the mud, I don’t care, it’s just not something I’m interested in taking part in. High school girls are childish creatures (the vast majority, anyways) and I want absolutely nothing to do with them any more.

[1] I’m sick of the word ‘friend’ getting completely bastardized to ‘people you know.’ I blame farcebook, and MySpace, they’re who are at fault for the destruction of real friendships. I’m still of the belief that friends are people you can actually count on and enjoy hanging out with, or share some special bond with. Not people simply know from school or whatever. Nicole, Leah, Giacomo, AJ and the short list of folks I am friends with online are the only people I really consider friends, farcebook be damned.

I guess I’m just in a bad mood today

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This week in words #2 (01252010-02022010)

QCheckBox sleep uneventful security plasma netbooks toques screencast budget college toronto money d

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KDE SC 4.4RC2 Fedora KDE preview

Hey all,

Interested in trying out KDE SC 4.4 but don’t want to do a full installation, risking system instability? Before my presentation at Wednesday’s Phoenix Linux User Group meeting, it occured to me that I should bring a live image for folks to play with. Unfortunately, I spun x86_64 live images, which are great for x86_64 folks, but pretty lametastic for everyone else. So, our awesome KDE SIG and kde-redhat maintainer Rex Dieter, fixed that, and, after fixing my kickstart a few times of course (:D) we have unofficial i686 KDE 4.4 previews. They lack the Fedora branding for legal reasons, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the same system as you’d get by installing Fedora 12 and then configuring KDE-redhat repos.

So, have at it. Rex has three servers seeding, and I’ll seed when I can The image is 700Mb total (sorry) so it doesn’t fit on a CD, but is just about the perfect size for a 1gb live usb. We’ll probably try to par down the image to fit a CD at some point, but for now this ‘just works’

Any bugs that you may come across can be given to us either in #fedora-kde on IRC, or the fedora-kde mailing list.

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This week in words #1 (01182010-01252010)

beach birds mojito tired eagles lies goodbye code geolocation plasma shower sleep lfnw scale inheritance unknown change future past party happy cough amazing beautiful elegent facebook api 500 crash tiling

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The Great Desktop Switchoff 2010

Up for a challenge of epic proportions?

Mel Chua and I will be embarking on an epic quest, a quest for knowledge, of power and of learning.

Mel and I will be switching desktops between February 15-22 — she will be running KDE for that week, and I will run GNOME. Not only will this be an interesting chance to expose myself to new software, and expose Mel to new software, it will also give me a chance to see ways to improve KDE and its applications and help break the stigma that I have against the GNOME desktop

I encourage other users to join us, it is always a good way to learn about new things and possibly break the, seemingly, high wall of "I hate $DE, it sux"

So, I encourage anyone to join us in this experiment It’s only a week, and it would probably be a good learning experience for everyone, as well as a good team building experience, in that you know you can go to the people who switched desktops with you for help

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Things I learned at Camp KDE 2010

Things I learned at Camp KDE 2010:

• Having a weird red eye that doesn’t hurt or mess with your vision is awkward, and makes for awkward photos.
• Chani has an epic sticker collection (though she may have lost it not sure)
• Trying to run through the rain is a stupid idea. Especially in a short sleeve shirt and no umbrella.
• Real rain is pretty intense. Phoenix never gets rain like this weekend’s.
• It is possible to live on three hours of sleep and little coffee when you are pumped up to be somewhere.
• Troy hates the f—ing eagles, and is a geologist.
• All Germans and Dutch folks are bloody.
• Americans drive pickups, carry shotguns, and chase birds. All of them.
• Multigrain pancakes cooked in vegetable oil on a gas stove that won’t keep a sane temperature is suboptimal but still earns happy breakfast eaters.
• karaoke is epic win when done correctly.
• There’s no better way to spend your 18th birthday than karaoke with friends, or watching The Big Lebowski, or hanging out on a deck by the ocean.
• People seem so familiar. Even after only knowing them for days, they are like friends you have known for years. It’s as though you have known them from before, you recognize the face, but can’t tie a past name to it. It’s a strange feeling, but I was able to do that for most campers, at least the ones at the hostel. Even those I didn’t know well on IRC beforehand.
• It’s really hard to say good bye.

I have met so many amazing people this weekend, and knowing that I may not see (m)any of them until next year’s camp is a really depressing thought. I simply cannot wait until the next time we meet up for a weekend like this. It may be in the Great White North, but that’s okay, I guess.

I guess this will be my last post about Camp KDE until next year’s, so I just want to thank everyone who helped me have a really amazing 18th birthday, a really amazing learning experience, and a chance to meet so many awesome people.

I came to this conference to learn about KDE development, and get energized to do something. I missed the Qt training that will be tomorrow, unfortunately, so that first part will be a longer term project for me But I’m pumped and ready to kick some major butt!

Jeff is a master at doing a good job setting up events, I think. Camp KDE was 99% flawless, besides a few behind-schedule-ness days, which was mostly because we started late (because we all need coffee ) and there were so many awesome questions during the presentations at the event. Regardless of that one issue, the event was epic win, and Jeff should get a large gold star taped to his Amarok tee shirt for all of this.

Everyone who stayed in the hostel was simply awesome, including some of the people who didn’t go to camp, and were just there. That random guy who sang Bobby McGee is a Karaoke god, for example. I think he was literally sweating after singing that song.

And then there are the folks who I spent the last four days with, hacking, eating, and having fun with. I can’t say enough about all of you, and at the same time, I can hardly say anything at all because I am speechless. Jos, Frank, Troy, Blauzahl, Aaron, Ade, Marco, Helio, Jeff, Chani, and everyone I am too tired to remember; you all ROCK!! Seriously. It almost makes me wish KDE wasn’t such an amazing global community, that we could all get together and do things like this more often. Alas, we are an awesome global community though, and that’s what makes us as amazing as we are

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Camp KDE day 3

Today was a very interesting day at Camp KDE. After rolling out of bed about ten minutes too late to ride with "the group," I caught a ride with Jeff, who is also a LOST fan (epic win is epic) and headed in for the final day of official talk-iness.

After listening to some really cool talks, including a really great one put on by Will Stephenson regarding OpenSuSE’s build service, I tried to head home. Unfortunately it was raining cats, dogs, and pigs. So I hitched a ride home. yay for parents in town!!

Back at the hostel, we rounded up Chani, Frank and Jos and headed out to find something to eat, and listened to them recount the stories of hostel floods, lost power and general chaos that we had missed that day. And OH TEH NOES no internet!! Aaron met us on the way, and we wandered around for about an hour before settling at Liberty pizza and enjoying some nice pizza, which Aaron insisted on paying for. He is a lovely person as a result. After that we went to Ralphs for food and drinks, and materials for Raegean(sorry, I couldn’t see the spelling in the dark) aka Troy, and I to cook pancakes and bacon for the campers tomorrow. See there is a major benefit to staying at the hostel!!

Anyways, yes, after that we watched The Big Lebowski, again, and in general hung out. And celebrated my birthday And hit on Troy. And hit on Frank. Maybe Ian too. I think I tried hitting on Chani too, mostly because she felt left out.

And now my battery is almost dead and I cannot find an outlet, so I bid you, planet and facebook and other planet a farewell and good night from Camp KDE 2010.

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Camp KDE Day 2

Today I celebrated my 18th birthday with a day full of awesome talks, and some fun times with my fellow campers. After a late start in the day, we headed down to UCSD minus one Troy, and got ready for Frank’s keynote, which was pretty awesome. I think I’ll be joining in on his BoF tomorrow, I think, if I’m sane and conscious.

Right now, I’m sitting around, watching everyone drink. Again.

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Camp KDE Day 1 (seriously, it is this time!)

So, the real day one was today (stupid me labelled yesterday’s post as day 1… wtf?) and I surprisingly made it up at 8 am, with plenty of time to get ready for the Camp. No stop off at Kona Cafe, but that’ll be a goal by the end of the weekend.

So after drinking coffee, which I added way too much sugar to, we got into a bunch of cars and went on down the UCSD, where, after opening remarks from Jeff, we jumped into some awesome talks by Phillip Bourne, Helio and Will, Celeste, Alaxandra and Till, Justin, Jos and Artur. It was really an exciting day.

Now most of us are sitting around the table at Banana Bungalow, trading stories, ogling at Chani’s EPIC sticker collection, and battling with wireless. Tomorrow should provide some more technical talks. from Frank, Chani and others. Woot!

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