KDE 4.2 Plasma Techno-Rant

Hey there,


I promise, my next post will be centered on the Mermaids, but I have been attempting to use KDE 4.2 on my SuSE boxes at home for the last 3 months and have come to a painful conclusion; Plasma and KDE 4.2 are more trouble than they are worth.

To start with, plasma is heavy and slow. When I log in to one of my systems it takes a couple of minutes before plasma can manage to get around to launching the network manager and get my connected to the world. By this time all my networked applications have already fired off and timed out.

So, I thought, save a session without any of these applications running and log into that saved session. Ooops, if there is a way to save a session in KDE 4.2, I can not find it.

Next try. I closed all the networked applications, logged out, and logged back in. It still took over a minute before my network connection managed to crawl out of Plasma.

On to the desktop itself I have tried using Plasma widgets. And tried. And tried. And thought, wow, this is just my desktop! Why am I spending all this time mucking with it?

What goes wrong?

Here are a few of the issues I have had:

• Placement: the widgets do not remain where I place them.


• Settings: using the directory widgets , they frequently revert back to my home directory.


• Session Loss: some times when I log in, all the desktop settings and widgets are just plane gone.

There may be fixes, work-arounds, and alternate use cases that I could use, but why? This is supposed to be a background for my work. The concepts may be aimed at making it a more useful and supportive background, but the implementation makes makes the desktop environment a black hole for time.

I have used KDE on SuSE for the better part of the last decade. I will keep using KDE 4.2 on SuSE, but in a minimalist form. Doing my best to ignore it and pretend it does not exist. Because, so far, all the time spent on it has not added one jot to my productivity.

I am using the 'Factory' repositories and will keep updating the KDE subsystem, but I think some very basic things must be fixed in the plasma environment before I would recommend it to anyone.

If you think I am using the environment incorrectly, or missing the point, please comment.

thanks,

LandShark

Playing with Inkscape

In the past I have dabbled with 'the Gimp' (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) and used it to good effect at work, making UI mock-ups, and altering screen shots to go into documentation. I also like digital photography and have used the Gimp to do artsy things as well as simple management of imagery to go onto the web. But, the Gimp is primarily a 'raster graphics' manipulator and not very good at 'vector graphics'.


Recently I have been playing with the vector graphics application 'Inkscape'. I have had some progress in making new art with the program. In my experience so far I am finding that vector graphics require more artistic judgment to produce. A good friend of mine teaches a colored pencil workshop and I think will enroll to get a better sense of how light and shadow work in drawing.


One of the issues with scalable vector graphics (SVG) files is that they store the image as arithmetic expressions. These equations are resolved over the number of pixels supplied (thus the scalable part) to create the best quality image possible. But, this means there is a computational engine that must execute the image to make it display. In computer terms this is a bit of a 'Pandora's Box', in that naughty instructions can be embedded in the image file that cause the interpreter of the image, called a renderer, to do things other than render the image. This can place files on a persons computer that they did not intend to be there. In extreme cases it could cause a persons computer to be accessed by people they don't know. While there are very smart people working on resolving the security issues with SVG files, they are not yet allowed on such sites as this one. So, here are a couple of examples of my doodlings that have been converted to portable network graphic (PNG) format.














Diana and Whitney came up with the idea for the skull when they found me doing a tutorial making the Sun image. We went to Wikipedia and found a picture of a skull and then started to draw it, switching back and forth from the drawing to the picture. The girls have a better 'eye' for what is wrong with an image than I do. It was a fun collaboration.

LandShark