Here’s the desktop background for December.  I know it’s Western-centric - perhaps next year will be more neutral.  To use as your background just left-click on the appropriate image for your monitor size.  Then right-click on the image and your browser will probably have an option called “set as desktop background”.  If it doesn’t, you can save it to your computer and manually set it.

for square monitors:

[caption id=“attachment_3923” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Dec 2010 Background for Square Monitors -1024x768”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3993” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Amarok”] [/caption]

So, as I mentioned before, I wanted to try and make sure to get mostly unheard music on my random playlist so I could go through all my music.  So I put in a bias to make sure that there was an 80% that the next song picked was unplayed.  I started getting even more played music showing up than before!  I was baffled!  Then I realized it was my piss-poor understanding of statistics at fault.  Telling it that there should be an 80% of the music selected having never been played is equivalent to saying there should be a 20% change that the music selected should have been played before.  What the heck is going on?  So, if you look at my collection - when I moved to KDE 4, it lost the previous stats.  So all of my music was unplayed.  Let’s say I have 10,000 songs.  So when I tell it to randomly play music (with no bias), there’s, at first a 0/10,000 chance of a played song coming up.  After that, there’s a 1/10,000 chance of a previously played song showing up.  After a day, there’s a 26/10,000 chance of a played song coming up.  So because of randomness I could end up with previously played songs.  Stats only tell us what will happen in the long run.  In 10 flips of a coin you could get 10 heads.  But in infinite flips you should get half of them heads and half tails.  26/10,000 = 0.26% chance of a previously played song coming up.  So, when I set the bias so that theres a 20% of the songs that come up will have been played, I’m greatly increasing my changes of hearing a song again vs just leaving it on random!  At least for now.  Once I’d listened to most of my collection, it should flip.  There will be so many previously played songs that those will be random enough to satisfy me.  Right now not enough of them have been played relative to my collection’s size so the same ones keep coming up.

Back when I first started using Linux I was using a very underpowered computer that I got donated as part of my research at school.  So OpenOffice.org was a real pain in the butt to use.  It took forever to load!  KOffice, on the other hand, loaded up quickly.  At that time, with KOffice 1, they had the presentation program, the spreadsheet, and the word processing program.

At the time there were two neat things about KWord that I really liked and they both stemmed from something I was doing at the time.  I was the head of the Phi Sigma Pi (scholastic frat) alumni team.  We had a newsletter to get out.  Turned out that KWord, as it worked at the time, allowed for very easy desktop publishing.  I don’t think it was intended to replace Scribus, but when compared to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, it was MUCH easier to set the layout.  That made it really easy to create.  With MS Word (at least 2000 and 2003) it was SUCH a PITA to try and get images where you wanted to be and to have text properly wrap around it.  We had all kinds of issues in this class I took my sophomore year in which we had a tutorial class session on how to do this and it was still horrible to work with.  KWord also had the ability to output to PDF which was great as I was trying to help the frat save money by seeing if we could get the alumni to accept emails instead of letters.  They ended up rebuffing that offer, but at least it was something I was able to do.  (I hadn’t discovered cutePDF and other ways to create free PDFs on Windows)

Sure, it’s a tired and cliche phrase, but hurray for the wisdom of the crowd.  I’ve received comments on identi.ca, twitter, and in the comments here with answers to nearly all my problems with KDE.  Let’s see if I can get them all to work.  First off, I was told that my problem with Konversation not getting my password in time to keep me from being signed into the fedora-unregistered could be solved by setting the password as a server password.  Alright!  That worked!  woohoo!  Before I’d had it set to just run the /msg identify command.

Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me.  I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about.  Evolution is the Linux equivalent to Microsoft Office Outlook.  I switched to it a few years ago so that I could have tasks, email, and calenders in one spot.  In theory, it’s perfect - it syncs with Hotmail, Gmail, and Google Calendar.  I have all my todo items in there out to April of next year.  It supports GPG signing and encryption via integration with Gnome’s Seahorse keyring.  In practice, it has started taking forever to start a new email or enter a new task.  I click the button and then have to wait for a long time until the dialog pops up; if it pops up.  A lot of the time doing this causes the program to crash.  I’ve filed a bug via the auto-bug-filing program in Fedora.  There’s also a bug that doesn’t bother me as much where it keeps asking me to supply the password for my Hotmail account and not accepting it until the next time I restart the program.  So I decided that I’d wait and see if things improved with Gnome 2.32, included in Fedora 14.

So I’ve used KDE for about a work week.  During that time I’ve pretty much gone to using the KDE versions of all my programs except Konqueror.  I’m not sure if the Fedora 14 version of Konqueror is the one with Webkit, but last time I used Konqueror with KHTML it was mucking up a bunch of web pages including my blog.  So I stuck with Google Chrome, which is what i use on Gnome, LXDE (Lubuntu on my laptop), and on my Windows 7 install.  (Also, I stuck with gPodder for podcasts because that’s working perfectly)  So how did it go?  First of all, I love the stock screenshot tool in KDE, KSnapshot.  I love that lets me choose full screen, region, window under cursor, and section of Window.  With Gnome I hit print screen and then I have to edit the png in the GIMP.  So it gives me less work for my Linux-related blogging.

Desktop search is one of those techs that keeps coming back and never really sticking.  At least that’s how it seems to me.  Look at how giddy I was about Beagle back in 2006.  And I tried it and it was, generally, pretty awesome.  It really worked well.  It was like the speed of locate without having to wait until the database was updated at midnight.  And it could see into IMs, MP3 metadata, emails and office documents.  Now?  According the the official website it’s no longer under active development.  Perhaps that’s because they met all their goals.  And that’s fine, but pretty much everyone switched over to tracker around 2008.  I’m not quite sure why - perhaps all the anti-Mono hatred that went on.  Fedora doesn’t even ship with Tomboy or F-Spot anymore.  They’re there in the repos, but they aren’t the defaults.

It can be seen on their site here if you think you want to setup something similar.

[caption id=“attachment_3901” align=“aligncenter” width=“290” caption=“Amarok 2.5.2”] [/caption]

There was a time when I thought Amarok was the best music player on Linux.  I even used to run it in Gnome as you can see from this 2005 screenshot.  In that first link you can read me gushing over Amarok 1.4.  I loved all the integrated technologies, especially the metadata juggling Amarok did.  The first few Amarok 2.x releases with the KDE 4 libraries were complete crap.  They were ugly and were missing nearly all of Amarok’s features.  (Mirroring the complaints people were having about KDE 4 at the time)  When I took a look at Amarok and KDE 4.4 in October I said I would take another look at Amarok.

I love to write so when I started the 2010 NanoWrimo competition 9 days late I thought it would be no big deal to get caught up.  I really under-estimated the effort behind writing over two thousand words a day.  I think I probably could have made it if I had an idea ahead of time, but I ran out of steam somewhere around 15 thousand words.  I’m nearly at 18 thousand and nearly everything I’ve written has been complete and utter crap.  Being very trope savvy has made it hard for me to just make stuff up as I go along because I’ve been trying to avoid plot and logic holes.