21 Dec 2003 shlomif   » (Master)

YAPC::Israel::2004

The presentations list for the "Yet Another Perl Conference" in Israel, 2004. So, it's final that I'm going to give a lightning talk about the Template Toolkit and a 60-minutes long presentation about LM-Solve.

Now I need to prepare the presentation about the Template Toolkit, but first I'm waiting for the notice about which formats are acceptable for submission ,so I won't work twice. Meanwhile, I'm planning it...

KDE Problem and its Resolution

The "Konqueror" and "Home Directory" buttons of the KDE panel stopped working. I found out the very command line kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing did not work at all, not even from the konsole. (got a "KDEInit could not execute kfmexec" or something like that message). After some investigation, I realized that it worked for different users.

At first I was able to resolve it by creating a $HOME/.kde/share/kfmclientrc file with some settings there. (this is after some investigation of its source code). But then yesterday, it broke again. Renaming .kde to .kde-bak resolved the problem, but made me lose all the settings. So I started renaming directories inside it, and seeing if they change anything. After a long time I found out that renaming applnk-mdk resolved the problem. Then I tried just deleting the konqueror.desktop file there which also made the problem disappear.

All in all, I wasted a lot of good hours on this problem which could have been invested in something more productive. Whatever, now I'll know what do when it happens again.

Gimp Patch

Now I can tell that I updated my Gradient-Fu patch to the latest development version of the GIMP. I received some helpful comments from the core developers on the mailing list and on the GimpNet #gimp IRC channel.

What this patch does is create Procedural Database functions for manipulating gradients, thus allowing them to be manipulated from withing scripts. Here is the Gimp Bugzilla Issue for it, where one can follow its development.

The patch is not complete yet, as there are some gradient manipulation routines that can still only be done in the gradient editor. But I'm getting there. The patch was scheduled for inclusing in Gimp 2.2, because the developers are anxious to get Gimp 2.0 out soon.

What is "Computer Science"

kilmo: I think that defining "Computer Science" solely as "The science that deals with the study, implementation and creation of algorithms" is incorrect and tries to convey some political agenda. By all means, "Computer Science" deals with the entire whole of programming for a computer, not just theoretical algorithms. What you describe is better defined as "Algorithmics".

Let's look some definitions. The Wikipedia entry say: "In its most general sense, computer science (CS) is the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. In practice, computer science includes a variety of topics relating to computers, which range from the abstract analysis of algorithms to more concrete subjects like programming languages, software, and computer hardware. As a scientific discipline, it is a very different activity from computer programming and computer engineering, although the three are often confused. ".

The Free Dictionary says: "computer science - the branch of engineering science that studies (with the aid of computers) computable processes and structures". And you can find more in Google.

So limiting the definition of Computer Science to pure theoretical Algorithmics is probably not a rational thing to do. By all means, it includes many areas that are more practical and applied.

A Productive Day

Yesterday was a productive day. I prepared several questions from the pending Statistics homework, and also worked on the GIMP patch, managing to do a lot of work. Eventually, I was interrupted for a while by the KDE problem, but I was still very productive. Today is a bit slower with all the E-mail reading/web-surfing/arrangement stuff, but I hope to get on the swing soon.

Haifux Site

Haifux has a new site courtesy of ladypine. It is based on her and mine original design of the syscalltrack site. I also contributed some comments in the discussion about it in the mailing list.

An anatomy of Wikis

Recently I had to work with several Wikis, and I can testify that the syntax or implementation of several of them could made using them a bit frustrating at times. For instance, Chiq-Chaq's heavy reliance on JavaScript made it unusable on Konqueror. Also, Kwiki seems to have a relatively poor syntax, and some things are simply not possible in it. It is however, supposed to be very easy to set up.

The Wikipedia seems nice for what I dealt with so far. It has a very powerful syntax and also allows uploading of images and stuff like that.

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