Posted by George Wright
Sun, 22 Aug 2004 00:05:00 GMT
icecream, in kdenonbeta, is a wonderful tool. Written by Stephan Kulow, Cornelius Schumacher, Frerich Raabe among others, it aims to act as a complete replacement for distcc/Teambuilder etc. Documentation is rather slim at the moment, but the features are there and it works pretty well.
Probably the best feature of icecream is that it doesn’t require you to have the same version of gcc on every machine - you run a command (create-env) and it creates a tarball of your gcc (seems to be approx 8MB) and then sends it across to any nodes on the compile farm that are going to compile your code, or if you don’t do this it’ll do it for you. There is also support for cross compiling within the farm so I’ve been using the dual and quad Xeons we have here to compile KDE on my machine. As a rather crude benchmark, Qt compiled in under 25 minutes!
It is rather unstable (it’s still very much in alpha stage) and the scheduler likes to keep hanging and falling apart, but I’m sure it will mature and I think I’ll have a lot of use for this at home using the two Athlon XPs to assist in compiling on the PowerBook.
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Posted by George Wright
Sat, 21 Aug 2004 09:26:00 GMT
Well, I arrived here in Ludwigsburg last night at about 22:15 local time; trip was (relatively) pleasant and the conference venue is quite nice. It’s just a shame the weather is being rather intermittent and there have been some showers.
So far I’ve been to the keynote by Eirik Chambe-Eng which was interesting - seems I have to get used to pronouncing “Qt” as “Cute”! I’ve also been to Scott Wheeler’s talk on the way forward from heirarchical organisation and now I’m in the gallery clogging up Chris Howell’s ethernet port. ;)
It’s great being able to (finally) put faces to IRC nicks as the only KDE’ers I’ve met are the GB people from the Linux User & Dev expo in April.
Other points of interest include the KDE store (where I have now acquired a stuffed Konqi!!!!) and the computer rooms where there is wired ethernet access. I have yet to taste the food here but apparently IBM has sponsored our meals which is quite cool.
Photos will (probably) be posted later.
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Posted by George Wright
Wed, 11 Aug 2004 13:00:00 GMT
Well, I decided that I needed a new laptop case as my current Targus one has nearly been destroyed through 3 years of usage and I didn’t particularly want to lug my laptop around aKademy in a case that’s half destroyed. So, on Sunday I ordered a MacCase BriefCase from http://www.jambags.com. They shipped it out Monday and it arrived today in London (Wednesday), which I think is pretty good service.
The bag itself is small, but has a LOT of padding. The PowerBook fits snugly inside and doesn’t move around at all, and there’s a small media flap that goes on top of it. Unfortunately, the pockets in the flap don’t seem to be big enough to hold full size CDs which is a shame.
Well, enough advertising from me for one day. :)
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Posted by George Wright
Sat, 07 Aug 2004 15:16:00 GMT
Well, it seems over the last few months my Linksys wireless access point + 4 port switch (BEFW11S4 version 2) has decided to die. Every so often it’ll stop responding and nothing can get through, then it’ll suddenly start working again. Anyway, I now finally have the new networking gear I ordered from eBuyer (those guys are incredibly cheap!). Only problem is that my Titanium PowerBook’s Airport card bluntly refuses to associate with the new access point whilst in Linux (claims the MAC of the AP is 44:44:44:44:44:44).
Anyway, enough of that. It seems Linux World Conf & Expo has now finished and Charles Samuels has uploaded photos to his ktown webspace. The dot now seems to be back up again and Charles seems to have posted a story regarding the expo.
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Posted by George Wright
Wed, 04 Aug 2004 19:17:00 GMT
Well, it’s Linux World Conference & Expo over in San Francisco at the moment. I have no idea who’s representing KDE except that Charles Samuels aka njaard seems to be there. It’s nice to know that he’s not forgotten me as I got this little surprise from him and another guy called Richard Cohen. If you can’t read the writing it says “We hate you GEORGE!”. At least it doesn’t say “We love you GEORGE!” or I’d really have a cause for worry…
It seems KDE enters total freeze today. I have no idea what sort of state KLatin is in but I haven’t received any bug reports and it works fine over here, so I’m not too fussed.
At last I have my air tickets for Stuttgart and I’ve paid off KDE e.V. for my hostel booking so I’ll be seeing all you KDE-ers at aKademy!
I’ve also finally got around to sending an email to my work experience tutor requesting permission to attend LWCE in London in early October, so if any of you GB KDE-ers aren’t going to be at aKademy I’ll most likely see you there.
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Posted by George Wright
Sun, 18 Jul 2004 17:39:00 GMT
Well, between Monday and Thursday I was at the national cadets rifle shooting competition for the coveted Ashburton Shield. First three days went well (for the Iveagh and Wellington prizes) and I shot quite well at 300 and 500 yards (combined score of 66.5 out of 70.14). However, come the day of the Ashburton (Thursday) and I, along with the rest of my team, messed up. We’ll be lucky to come in the top 10 based on that performance (there were probably about 50 teams there, including Australia…). The fact that the rifle kept smacking me in the eye on Thursday didn’t help either, and I only just seem to have recovered.
Before that, I was working on sorting out the crap that makes up KLatin. The source was a complete mess, and probably still is to an extent. At least it all works though… Just.
And finally - on Thursday my new ADSL got activated. Up from 512/256 all the time with a dynamic IP to 512/256 between 8am and 6pm, and 2048/256 all other times and all weekend, with a static IP - and all for about 2 GBP more than the old connection cost!
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Posted by George Wright
Fri, 02 Jul 2004 18:44:00 GMT
At last I have finished my “work experience” and I can start working on KLatin once again. I’ll probably start on Sunday as I’m out in London for a good deal of tomorrow. Must get it working for the freeze in just over a week’s time!
It also seems I’ll be going to UKUUG’s “Linux 2004” (http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2004/) conference thingy up in Leeds between August 5th - 8th; any UK people coming along? Seems there is only 1 presentation regarding KDE - “Developing a Plug-In structure for your KDE application” by Jesper K. Pedersen. However, the programme looks pretty fun.
As for this month, I’m going back to school next Sunday for four days, then I have the rest of the month off. ;) Isn’t life fun?
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Posted by George Wright
Sun, 27 Jun 2004 19:10:00 GMT
Well, I’ve fixed the PHP behind the RSS generator for this blog. For some reason the newlines weren’t being replaced with br tags; thanks lypie for helping me with that!
Still no work done on anything KDE related - been busy and ill since I got back home from school, and then work experience all of next week. :( At least afterwards I should have a good 2 months of free time, and I should be attending aKademy, so I have plenty of time to get things done!
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Posted by George Wright
Sat, 26 Jun 2004 20:11:00 GMT
Well, finally finished my exams and so I have about 2 months of spare time that’s going to be dedicated to KDE development. GCSEs went OK, and I’m predicting myself about 7-8 A*s and the rest As. I should get my results whilst I’m at aKademy.
I have to fix KLatin (it’s a bit of a mess at the moment, and I need to fix i18n somewhat). I also need to make some headway on Kurrent, and perhaps start this pinball game I’ve been going on about for years.
For now, I’m feeling shattered after a month of exams and next week I have work experience at a place in London…
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Posted by George Wright
Thu, 10 Jun 2004 15:18:00 GMT
I managed to totally mess up my English Exam… Hopefully I can still save that appalling performance with the next paper though; perhaps I can save it to an A or even an A*.
Things have been getting far too hot here at school - I had to get a big fan brought in just to keep my room cool (perhaps it’s my desktop being on permanently that’s caused my room to heat up like an oven?). In any case, I’ve stopped melting now.
I have managed to do absolutely nothing KDE related for the past few weeks, and I’m not sure I can do anything much for the coming weeks either. These GCSE exams are REALLY annoying!
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