OSSPACK

Thanks to Expedia you can now get 3 Trillion Dollars off your future trip to Mars.

Obviously 3 Trillion Dollars isn’t as much as it was a few years ago, since the US Government is spending that on candy and poorly ran companies..

Thank you Expedia for bailing out the common folk:

http://www.expedia.com/daily/mars/flights-to-mars/?mcicid=Mars_home_us

Microsoft and TomTom have settled their patent lawsuit in a way that leaves Microsoft's FAT patents active as a threat to other companies. Since I last wrote on this topic, TomTom brought a counter-suit against Microsoft, attempting to get the software giant to license four mapping patents that TomTom claims MS infringed. Tomtom apparently had previously been attempting to convince Microsoft to license. So, it's hard for me to find sympathy for either player in these lawsuits, but there's lots of sympathy to hand out to the software industry, justice, and Linux – all losers in this deal. Justice lost because there's been no trial to overturn the FAT filesystem patents. As venture capitalist Larry Augustin wrote: "Those of us who have PhDs in computer disciplines and have studied operating systems and file systems, don't see anything particularly innovative in FAT or its extension to support longer file names, FAT32."

Recent work in the Ubiquity internationalization realm has focused on the upcoming Ubiquity parser which will bring some great new features to Ubiquity, including support for overlord verbs and semi-automatic localization of commands via semantic roles. It’s possible, though, that these new features will break backwards compatibility of the current command specification and noun types. Creative destruction for the win.

As we look to move forward with incorporating the next generation parser into Ubiquity proper, it thus becomes important to take a look at the current command ecosystem to see how possibly disruptive this move will be. To this end last night I wrote a quick perl script to scrape the commands cached on the herd and get some quantitative answers to my questions.

(1577 different verbs were analyzed. None of these computations below are weighted by feed popularity.)

Q: Are there a lot of commands which use more than one argument?

A: The vast majority (>85%) of commands take one or no arguments, requiring no modifiers. Only those remaining 15% will require a switch to refer to different arguments by semantic role.

Q: Do many commands introduce custom noun types?

A: 147 different noun types (lumping anonymous inline objects as one type) were detected. The vast majority of all takes (direct object) arguments were of type noun_arb_text, although many modifiers arguments used custom noun types. The other standard (built-in) noun types are well represented as well, with noun_type_language coming in at second place. Here’s a chart with all the noun types which had more than one use.

Q: Are commands with modifiers using natural-language delimiters?

A: Most of the modifiers detected were English prepositions such as “from”, “to”, “as”, “with”, but other words were also seen such as “title”, “type”, “username”, and “message” and even a handful of commands with symbols such as “@”, “>”, or “#”.

Related Posts

1. Writing commands with semantic roles
2. Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation Demo
3. Ubiquity in Firefox: Focus on Japanese
4. Ubiquity i18n: questions to ask
5. Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

wjt has just blogged about the new off the record support in Empathy 2.27, including a privacy mode for video chat.

Awesome.

Yet another multicore rant. This one is triggered by the recent Multicore Expo.

Tech Source From Bohol: "Infonetics Research released a study that projects that the smartphone market will continue to grow despite an eight percent drop in mobile-phone sales this year."

So after I implemented tooltip support in QuickLaunch I started to look around for some more Plasma related things to hack on. That's when I happened upon this, which is how I stumbled upon this

I thought to myself, "That would be really neat!" So a few days ago I made a simple wallpaper plugin that would paint a specified picture to the containment background. Once that was working I raided the weather plasmoid of its configuration code and choice parts of its backend and ported it to work in a Plasma Wallpaper plugin. The result? A Plasma Wallpaper plugin that changes the wallpaper depending on the weather at a set location is. To retrieve the weather it uses the weather dataengine introduced in KDE 4.2, as seen in the Weather plasmoid and the LCD Weather Station plasmoid. Dataengines for the win!

Code is available from trunk/playground/base/plasma/wallpapers/weather. It should build with KDE 4.2 and KDE 4.3. Here's a small build tutorial:

- svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/plasma/wallpapers/weather
- cd weather
- mkdir build
- cd build
- cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
- make
- sudo make install
- kbuildsycoca4

You should now be able to change the wallpaper type in Plasma's Appearance settings from "Image" to "Weather".

Here are screenshots (click for bigger ones), stay tuned for limitations and bugs:

Limitations and Bugs

This plugin is quite new, and as such there are several limitations. Here are the ones I know of:
- It displays tiled versions of 1280x1024 wallpaper. If your screen isn't the exact size of the wallpaper, the wallpaper will loop.
- The "Wallpaper is loading" wallpaper is cut off in mid-sentence. Dunno how that happened, but I plan to redo that image eventually so it's sorta just a placeholder for now.
- It doesn't have images for all possible weathers.
- At the moment it won't work with the NOAA ion since the plugin currently relies on the icon name returned by the weather dataengine, and the NOAA ion doesn't return icon names
- Setting the config the first time works, but if you change the config a second time the change won't take place until you restart Plasma. (Though the preview in the Appearance dialog changes properly, it's sorta weird)

So, I hope you enjoy it. Once it gets a bit less buggy I'll probably post this on kde-look and maybe make some K/Ubuntu packages for my PPA.

Oh, in semi-related news I've also picked up maintenance of the QuickAccess plasmoid and have done a quick bugfix release that ports the applet to KDE 4.2 and fixes a crash: http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=101968
Best wishes to the original author.

I’m almost as sick of this Conficker stuff as I am going to be sick of April Fools Day stuff when I wake up tomorrow (not to mention I think this is a big promotional stunt for a movie called ‘Conficker’ coming out soon. You watch!), but I have to laugh when I see all these mainstream news organizations falling all over themselves to tell people how to get rid of this malware. In reality, all you have to tell your friends and family is to use one product that will protect them from Conficker and future viruses:

No joke. Happy April Fools Day, I guess.

The following article presents a status report on the development of five of the most active notation software projects for Linux. Most of them are works in progress, but all are well along on their development track and in varying states of usability.