Monday, March 03, 2008

No black here

Sup, y'all. I realized that Free Software is a lot like the wild west used to be. So, partner, I'll be spreading some "west" and a lot of "wild" over this post.
"What?", you say (oh I'll have a conversation with you whether you want it or not). Well, the connection is obvious once you think about it: during the wild west days people used to ride horses, kill each other for no apparent reason and raise cattle, while in Free Software we write software. I rest my case.

I've spent the last week with Aaron. I absolutely love hanging out with him. It's platonic. Or so I think, with all the heavy drinking that I do, it all gets a little blurry. Also, Peyton (Aaron's son) is a wickedly cool kid.

Anyway, I have a lot of Gallium3D things to do which are a priority, but at nights Aaron and I hacked on Plasma and KDE. I think I speak on behalf of Aaron when I say that we became computer programmers for the women. Which might seem a little confusing to, well all of you (especially if you're a woman) until you realize that it came down to being either a computer programmer or a crackhead. Computer programmer job pays, like, way better and if I had to pick second reason why I do what I do it's money.
We got the Dashboard widgets working. It's been something that I wanted to do for the longest time. Obviously not all of them work because some of them use OS X specific apis (like Core Image magic).
I also added interfaces to use Plasma's DataEngine's from JavaScript in web applets. So you would do something like

var engine = window.plasma.loadDataEngine("time");
var data = engine.query("Local");
document.getElementById('time').innerHTML = "Time is " + data.value("Time");

to use Plasma's time data engine to display the current time. One could use Plasma's Solid data engine to get the list of all the devices attached to the computer and display it in the web applet which would be a little more useful than another a time widget but you ain't enterprise ready unless you have 23 clock applets and we're almost there. There's also a small bug somewhere, that apparently doesn't exist in Qt and is, in fact, a figment of my own imagination due to which the background looks black. On Chuck Norris widget (that like a lot of other dashboard widgets just works. You download it, click on it, run it, show it to all your friends, and remove it once they're gone because it's pretty damn useless) it looks like this:



Do you see black? No, you don't! It's simply that Chuck Norris is a black hole that consumes everything around it, including all the color. Deal with it. Chuck Norris has.