progressions

last night p. had his kindergarten graduation event (i'm not going to get all "overwrought parent" and call it a ceremony). they sang a few songs and got diploma scrolls. afterwards everyone had cake and visited. the school he has been attending isn't just a kindergarten, they also do preschool. so some kids have been there for a few years (p. had been there for 2) and it's hard for the teachers to see them leave as they go on to grade one.

a new cat joined the household this week as well, which p. has christened 'george'. he's a little black guy who was found fending for himself by an older woman. she is fighting a bad cancer, however, so had to give him up and that eventually led him to my place. so once again i have two cats. persia and george have gotten past the "who the hell are you and why are you in my house?" stage and are forming a good friendship.

after doing my first qtdbus coding this week, i have to say that the api is really quite nice. while the org.kde.appname and /module/something/more paths are a bit longish (a dbus thing), the actual qt code that one produces is quite succinct. more so than dcop was, even. huzzah. right now dbus causes some crashes in kde4 so it's not particularly usable at the moment, but that's being worked on so we can move on to the next set of breakages ;)

thiago and i are co-authoring a tutorial on using dbus in kde and qt apps that will be released next week. this will probably replace the current kde and dbus wiki page and be more thorough (and maybe even fun =).

i was also sent a nice url for a story about a new 12,000 seat kde deployment in germany. congrats to basysKom (which is eva's company) and to the regional tax office of lower saxony.

some interesting points to be gleaned: 300 desktops a day are being transitioned, so it doesn't seem that there's a big problem with deployment once it gets going; it was 2 years in the planning before deployment started; they were a solaris shop previously, so once again the unix-to-linux story repeats; kde's user and group policy framework (kiosk) was pretty key.

speaking of kiosk ... one of the kde4 TODOs is to rename that thing so it's more obvious what it does. kiosk is the results of years of effort to instrument both the kde libraries to provide an insane level of global and local control (from managing allowed url usage to automagic reflection of kiosk policies in application config dialogs, and a thousand other things in between) as well as individual applications to ensure things like "don't let people move this and that button on the panel, but let them customize the rest" are possible. it was a huge investment for the project, but it's something that nearly all kde deployments of any size end up using (and relying on) heavily. it deserves a better name. it will get one. boop boop be boop, boo!