Pankages!

KDE 4 roadmap

I found this interesting post on Planet KDE. It seems KDE will do minor monthly releases and every 6 months they will do a new major release. KDE 4.1 is scheduled for July, KDE 4.2 for January 2009 and so on. Now, I don't know if that's official or not, but if it is, I think Mark Shuttleworth will be pleased since that's more or less exactly what he has requested :) I personally hope it's official as I like these time based releases, I think they have worked well for various other projects.

Arstechnica reviews KDE 4.0

KDE 4.0 was recently released and Arstechnica has done what I consider a pretty thorough and fair review of this major new release.

Beer: Nøgne Ø Imperial Stout

This might be the first be I've tasted from this Norwegian micro brewery and I'm already hating myself for not having bought several more bottles of this beer. This is one of the best imperial stouts I've tasted and I can't remember where I bought it - I'll have to take a tour round to the places where I usually buy my beers to find some more.

Beer: Cantillon Kriek

I've never tasted a Lambic beer before so I was looking forward to it. Sadly, I can't say I like it - far from it. I don't think this really have much to do with beer actually, it's more like champagne or something like that. It's not because it is sweet and fruity that I don't like it and I don't think I'm able to explain what exactly it is that I don't like but I'm certain I'll not be buying this again.

Beer: Ølfabrikken Winter Stout

A nice stout from Ølfabrikken, wouldn't mind drinking that again.

Beer: Struise Mikkeller (Elliot Brew)

Quote: "RateBeer Special Release: Behold the second of RateBeer.com’s Worldwide Masters Series!". A pretty nice beer that I wouldn't mind buying again, though I could imagine it is going to be hard to find again.

Humor: Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD

Someone made this awesome clip about the latest happenings in the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Is Apple TV simple?

Apple is famous for making things that look beautiful and are simple to use. However, what happens when Hollywood gets involved? Not even Apple can make their requirements simple. Thanks to Engadget for making that list of what you can and can't do. Be sure to check all the limitations before you rush out to buy it...

KDE 4.0 - first impressions

KDE 4.0 has finally been released to the world and I had to take a look so I installed the packages on my laptop that runs Kubuntu 7.10. I followed this guide to install it and it installed without any problems. I logged out, choose KDE4 session and logged in again and got a KDE4 session. What follows is a bunch of my first impressions.

It's shiny. I like that!

Default fonts are less than optimal. They are thick/bold. This should be resonably easy to correct though and I have already made some changes, but the defaults aren't very good. Particularly if you use Firefox, Thunderbird (and probably other non KDE apps) looks bad.

The taskbar have no settings to configure, it clearly is something that's quickly put together. My laptop have a widescreen and I've actually moved it to the left side. That doesn't seem possible currently.

I loaded some of the widgets, a battery monitor would be nice on a laptop and it loaded fine, but I could drag and drop it to the taskbar. I thought that was supposed to work, but apparently not.

The desktop effects are pretty nice. Like the taskbar few, if any settings are available. They worked fine for a while, but then my they became jerky for some reason and I disabled them. No crashes.

I played around a bit with Dolphin. For some reason it tried to use Thunderbird to open jpg pictures. Simple change, but pretty odd. The preview feature didn't seem to work that well with my pictures either. It made previews of a few of the pictures in a folder, but for most of the pictures it just showed an icon.

I'm not particularly impressed by the start menu. If you search for an application in the integrated search bar, then that search still shows up next time you click on the start menu. The way you navigate through the applications don't seem optimal to me either.

So, in total, not really a raving review is it? Well, much of it I believe can be fixed resonably easy and it has been announced quite a bit that this KDE 4.0 is a bit rough around the edges, but I think their reasons for releasing it are good. KDE 4.1 will likely be a very different animal and have a most of the polish that lacks and I'm really looking forward to what they will have ready at that time. A lot more apps will have been ported to KDE4 by that time as well.

Beer: Baggårdsbryggeriet - Drunken Sailor

Baggårdsbryggeriet is a small danish micro brewery. This particular brew is a whiskey ale and it is a bit smokey /from the whiskey). It doesn't particularly impress me and I'm sad to say that it's not a beer I will be buying again.

KDE 4.0 released!

It's out! Huge congrats and thanks to all people that have been part of creating KDE 4!

I played around with a live cd last night and it certainly is promising. It is important to remember that the goals of this release wasn't to create a desktop that rivals KDE 3.5.x. KDE 4.0 is the foundation. All the big changes are "under the hood". For many people, it will be better to stick with KDE 3.5.x until at least KDE 4.1 is released.

Beer: Greenland Christmas Ale (2007)

Not a bad Christmas Ale, but I probably would buy something else, depending on what's available.

Open standards in Norway

Norway has published a new policy about the use of document standards in the state:

The Norwegian Government has decided that all information on state-operated web sites should be accessible in the open document formats HTML, PDF or ODF. This means an end to the time when public documents are published in closed formats only.

I find this policy very sensible and it would be nice if the Danish government would end up with a similar policy. That would put more pressure on MS to implement proper support for ODF.

Google logo @ Xkcd's Randall Munroe

Chris DiBona has released a nice scanned version of the xkcd styled Google logo. I think Google should use that as their logo :)