The time to paint easter eggs has not come yet. It will though, in about half an hour. Also I don't really know why I'll do it. Maybe to reflect on my art skills once more and be happy that other people user their ability to create great artwork for KDE and Parley.
Instead I yesterday started something that had been rotating in the back of my head for about a year now. Since I started working on KVocTrain/Parley one problem has been how to deal with synonyms (to a lesser degree antonyms and false friends, which will be done with in the same instant).

Plasmoids have been creeping into different parts of KDE... The E-Team lately spotted two of them. So maybe check out KDE-Edu to get a real hot calculator made by apol. The gui is in need of some love, but it's already very powerful since it uses KAlgebra behind the scenes (yay, scientific calculations on your desktop).

The other one I quickly hacked together, using artwork that leeo did for the icon originally.
Being reminded by aseigo to seperate engine and applet, I had a glimpse at how engines are created, decided it's easy enough, so the engine is there too now. It can easily be extended to give tons of data, so I'm open to crazy ideas, if you want it to spit out more data, just tell me. Font config works, but some layouting might do good. And feel free to come up with an improved design and especially layout. As I have little time lately and rather want to get Parley in trunk into a working state again, I won't update the plasmoid much. Junior jobbing anyone? Great place to start, I already have a couple of ideas... drop by in #kde-edu on freenode.

Seems like the official launch of KDE4 generates quite some momentum all around. I got two surprise presents today
Michael Hofer started a Java app to practice Parley vocabulary files "on the road" - using mobile phones that is. Open xml formats are a good thing.
See the project homepage at sourceforge: MobVoc.
Lee sent me an update of Parley icons and I'm very very happy this time! The toolbar looks much clearer now (the icons are a bit simpler to make them easier to recognize in small sizes).

Torsten, the evil marble-mind tries to take over the world, but that's old news (pun where?).
He talked me into getting hot new stuff support into Marble. That was real easy... except of course that marble has all this custom stuff to be a pure qt app. Well it works now. You can get a very nice map of crustal ages of the earth there now. Don't ask me what it actually shows, I guess the legend has to be adjusted a bit

After hacking away on KNS2 for a while, I just could not see it any more, so I continued my experiments on Parley, and tried putting the Marble widget in there.
The vocabulary file has been created by a nice guy, including pictures and just makes me smile when I look at it. There are about 1600 words in four languages in there and about 125 pictures. Yay!
And don't be scared by the interface clutter - all docks can be hidden and the first time start will be with only the lesson dock visible probably.

This rocks. Now if we add in Johannes new practice gui... I'm already looking forward to 4.1
Maybe someone can tell me what I have to do to get the HTTP header when doing a KIO::FileCopyJob. With KIO::get, I get the header as metaData(). For FileCopy the meta data is just empty. Is that intentionally? Or is it reasonably easy to use get and something to download the file?
Also big files seem to work badly on the server we now have managed by Josef - kstuff.org. While small files work, a 3.6 mb marble map chokes from there, while it works when downloading from edu.kde.org.
Argh.

After much back and forth, Parley has an icon!

And not only one, Lee also gave in to my wish to create maybe one or two other icons for the menus and such... so now I have 13 new icons, some even in svn already and some more on the way (note: the screenshots are not the final versions... some of the icons have already been updated yet again)
It's great to see how many people care about this little edu app which really is not that important... but it made four people (that I have contact with) get KDE4 from svn
Getting regular user feed back is the best that can happen I guess. Which reminds me: Thanks to you all for making this possible! Keep up the great work!

Thanks Lee Olson!

Yesterday I wandered around in my library a little and stumbled upon a book about XSLT. I never intended to get into that stuff because I hate doing html and this looked far too similiar to that. But I picked up the book, read some of it yesterday for half an hour and today I took two hours to see, if our kvtml format was usable with it, since it's just xml.
I also picked up a book about css which I never looked at before.

The idea is to make printing from Parley (and on the way KHangMan, Kanagram and KWordQuiz) just a little less painful.
The current implementation is horrible to use and so far I have not spent a minute looking at it. Maybe I can avoid it this way
So the idea is to profit of the xml we have and shift the problem. If we generate nice HTML, printing that will be easy and hopefully everyone is happy with that too.
There's still a lot to do, but for now the basic is there. This is the time where people with some better HTML/CSS knowledge have to get involved, as I am incapable of coming up with a nice layout.

I'll abuse websvn.kde.org to shown an example. That's really easy for any of our vocabulary documents, further improvements are on their way.
Sadly this does not work with konqueror since it needs client side XSL, but with firefox it works.
a kvtml file transformed to html (needs a xsl capable browser)

On IRC we had a nice visitor "Derbeth" from the Polish wiktionary, which was a good thing, because he was working to create some vocabulary files - even including images and sounds - which are already collected at the Polish wiktionary site. Yay! One bad thing with wiktionary (it's a great source of words, pronunciation files and such) is that it seems to be heavily localized, so that the English page has less strict templates and will be much hard to parse while the German and Polish ones are much easier. So much for automatically generating vocabulary files from there... ideas are welcome of course, I'd love to start some cooperation with wiktionary.

And I'm quite happy that Parley starts receiving a bunch of feature requests and little improvement suggestions, but no crash or other big problem has been reported in quite a while

Well, Halloween is over and I really don't care for it much, since here it seems the kids don't get around to saying something. Opening the door and looking at them either makes them run or babble something. And the German version of "Trick or treat" sounds rather bad to my ears. So I decided to just spend a nice evening relaxing. But then I was invited over to some friends and figured it was just the occasion for some "Zombies!!!" - one of the worst board games I own. It always boils down to pure luck and a (rather boring) die throwing... having the most 5 and 6 will let you survive longest