plasma.progress();

today was spent mostly getting rid of bugs plasma, working on other parts of kde (oh, to be an app developer only =), some bits of community management, aKademy and lugradio presentation and fleshing out the next things i'll be coding in plasma.

there is a growing number of people working on plasma these days, which is great. the more i work on it, the more other people show up and start throwing lines of code on the cart. it's an odd phenomenon but one i won't question. i'm just happy that as my hands move, so do those of others. in short order they will make mine completely insignificant, i am sure.

the weather engine has appeared, the dictionary engine/applet takes more shape, frederikh has started lending his graphics knowledge to phase/animator. i'm completely astounded by the number of people working on dataengines and plasmoids right now; it's a horribly hostile environment of changing APIs and naught but apidox and my samples to go by.

we're also on the front page of linux.com today with story on plasma by nathan sanders.

i did manage to take a walk along the boulevard today. i found a curiously great book ("the. cryptographic. shakespare.) published in 1987 that uses computer based analysis of shakespeare's works to "prove" it wasn't him at all but francis bacon that wrote those wonderful works of english prose and poetry. personally, i don't particularly care who wrote them for they stand on their own and were certainly penned by some gifted englishman.

what makes this particular book so great, however, is: the wonderful english it itself employs; that it is signed by its author (penn leary); that it is copy 158 of the first 2000 printed. reading the first couple dozen pages has proved to be a great joy. i don't care if it is right or wrong, the writing says much about the author, human tendencies and the pursuit of fact.

i also got it cheap (cheaper than amazom.com even), which is always good. =)

"Good intentions, founded upon ancient assertions, have jealously built ivory fortresses against new, and therefore suspect, inquiries. The guards athwart such towers warn us against any change, and fresh dry charges are kept near their cannon." given that the author is writing about literary history, "cannon" is a wonderful play on words. beyond that, there are so many wonderful things one might say about just those two sentences, ranging from prose style to the tactic of warding people towards belief in a conspiracy by attacking those that guard the accepted story with undeservedly dark descriptions of their commitment to doing so.

it is the form of the work of others, rather than the accuracy of their content, that tends to inspire me the most. as such, i can empathize with the agnostic priest.