People born today age four times slower.

In other completely random news:

• School’s out for a week!
• Konvert2Ogg, the KDE project I’m working on, has a new mission statement and code and GUI design. I am especially satisfied with the way the singleton / object factory (as taught by Alexandrescu) has turned out. With the factory and the base classes in place, adding support for Oggenc took only a few minutes.
  
  Wait for version 0.2 sometime in the next few weeks.

Playing with Qt/KDE

Speed writing means dumping the contents of your brain as fast as you can without stopping to think or check grammar. The small program I wrote today pretends to help you do it by launching a full-screen window to cover all distractions. It also keeps track of time for you and counts how many lines, words, and letters you’ve written. Here’s the source code (rename to .tar.bz2).

It uses the KDE4 libs, and the preposterous colors are the result of my experimenting with Qt style sheets.

PS. Bonus points if you find a way to crash it! (I know there is at least one)

We’re Not Alone In The Universe!

In other words, Konqueror wants to do a Google search for whatever you have currently in your clipboard each time you click with the mouse wheel ;)

Akismet Woes

Akismet is the technology used by WordPress.com in an attempt to filter spam comments in the blogs they host. The idea is simple:

1. The user posts a comment.
2. The comment is submitted to akismet.com
3. Akismet gives a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” and the comment either gets posted or goes to spam.
4. The owner of the blog has the chance to revoke the decision, and Akismet “learns” and improves its accuracy.

Of course, the system is not perfect. There have been multiple “false positives” during the life-time of this blog (i.e. valid comments that got flagged as spam). Most of them were non-English comments, so clicking “Not Spam” must have thought Akismet a lot ;)

But what is more alarming to me is that some of my own comments on my own blog were detected as spam. This is annoying and silly. Why do my comments on my blog even go through the spam filter? Would I post spam on my blog?

Having to check the spam for lost treasures every now and then, today I’ve stumbled upon something that caught my attention. Check it out!

Edit:
And here’s another funny one. You can figure out where the spammer comes from.

Previewing Kubuntu Feisty Fawn

A few days ago I’ve downloaded the Kubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd 5 Alpha CD, whose final version will be released somewhere in April. My impressions so far:

• The theme is a lot nicer than that of Edgy. Finally Kubuntu looks nice enough out of the box and I don’t have to switch to the simplistic but efficient Plastik style. The new icon launching effect did not impress me. Some animations were kind of slow, too.
• I noticed a nice improvement in the sound theme. Particularly, the annoying Konsole bell sound was replaced by a pleasant and less disturbing one. I don’t have to disable those beeps anymore.