AnneW's world

I haven’t talked about UserBase for a while, but it’s still actively growing.  We now have 749 pages of content, not counting discussion pages.  I suspect that a lot of the recent growth is down to the efforts of Claus_chr, Qiii2006 and Yurchor, who have all been busily translating and they’ve recently been joined by Alisha and Caig.

The other good news is that we have had more than 1.33 million views of UserBase pages – something to be proud of.  We now have 500 registered users, but nowhere near that number actively contributing.  However, I’ve decided that from time to time I’ll publish the list of top 10 contributors.  So here is the first edition:

Over the last 7 days –
Score      Pages      Changes    Username
49           46            48               Claus chr
34           26            41               Alisha
30           23             37              Qiii2006
25           19             27              Yurchor
14           10            14               Annew
13             1            38               Hans
10             8              9               Caig
09             5              9               Membrive
07             4             6               The madman
01             1             1               ThorstenStaerk
01             1             1                Gdebure

Yes, I know that’s eleven, but it wouldn’t be fair to separate the last two.  An Overall Top Ten contribution list would contain mostly the same names.  You can see from the list above that it wouldn’t take much to get you into the week’s top ten.  Let’s see if the list is noticeably different next time I write.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of applications for which we have little or no information.  Let’s see whether, during October, we can complete the list of entries for the Applications/Internet section.  We need pages for Choqok, Blogilo, KRDC, Krfb, KVpnc, and Kdebluetooth.  If you are not confident with mediawiki markup and want help, you can find me (annew) on IRC most days.

Last month I was asked to jointly moderate the Office & Productivity forum, which of course has led to me spending more time in the forums than I had done previously.  I’ve never been a forum-lover, but I’m impressed with this forum.  It does seem much more pleasant and helpful than forums I’ve visited in the past.  I’ve been giving user support on mailing lists for several years, and for the first time I’m seriously thinking of leaving them.  After a year where I’ve watched general manners and behaviour deteriorate to downright rudeness it has, thankfully, quietened down.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that almost every distro-related list seems to be full of bike-shedding now.  There are few questions where I can help, and I wonder if I can justify the time given, for so little result.

One last thing – this week I have converted the desktops of two non-tech users to KDE 4.2.  They both use Mandriva, so I hope to get them on 4.3 next month, when Mandriva 2010 comes out.  One of the users is still on holiday, so I’ll have to wait for reaction there.  The other user just carried on using the same few apps as always, and apart from a small panic about where to find the shutdown button (his first look at kickoff, and didn’t immediately see that it was tabbed), had no reaction at all.  The other user is a little more demanding, so likely to have more questions.  The next couple of weeks should be interesting.

Image created from .jef file

When I wrote my last blog, “When you have an itch to scratch….” (http://lydgate.org/blogs/?p=17) it was with a forlorn hope.  It seemed to me that my need was not a common one, so it was unlikely that anyone would be interested, particularly since I could give little or no information to help a project get started.  I should have had more faith in the world of FOSS.

Two people initially showed particular interest.  Purple-bobby did some interesting work to start off (http://purple-bobby.co.uk/JEFView/), but has not developed it further.  Maybe he didn’t have time or lost interest, or maybe I was just too slow in responding to him.  The other person was David Boddie, who started a python project that seems to have good potential.

Identifying the part of a .jef file that contains the stitch-out was the quick bit.  Once that was done, scaled display followed, using jef2png.py.  For that to be really useful, it was necessary to identify the colours used.  Between us, we have examined hundreds of patterns, and have identified almost every shade used in patterns. Hopefully the last handful will be found in the next week or so.  You can see the changelog at http://bitbucket.org/dboddie/python-showjef/overview/ .  David uses Mercurial, so it’s easy to keep up with his changes, and by downloading free JEF patterns from the web you can see his progress.  One caveat – we have found a few patterns that don’t use the colour-definitions that seem to be otherwise standard.  Until we find a common denominator it’s hard to do much about that.  The good news is that of my hundreds of stored patterns only three or four have this problem.

After all David’s work, it would be really nice if we could find a collaborator to turn this into a KDE-Other project.  Maybe now purple-bobby knows that we haven’t lost interest he might join us?  Maybe it’s just pricked your interest enough to talk about how this can be done.

We don’t have much in the way of hobby applications.  I’d like to see that addressed.  Wendy van Craen says she’d like to see someone working on a crochet pattern creator.  I know we have knitters among KDE contributors, and while the language of knitting varies enormously between countries, it’s not that hard to represent stitches in a kind of ascii art.  Something that could create and store modules for stitch patterns and combine them would be great.  KrossWordPuzzle 0.7.4 has just been announced, and how about creating some KrossNumberPuzzles?  What about koffice templates for gardeners?  Keeping track of plant collections, or tracking sowing, planting out, harvesting?  I can see possibilities for databases and for spreadsheet templates.  What other hobbies could we benefit?

So – hobbyist KDE section?  I think it is more than possible.