Revelations

Like many other geeky people I've spent the last week in Scotland. The insane abundance of overgrown egos caused wrinkles at the very fabric of weather conditions in Glasgow and it rained the whole week. It happened to be my second birthday in a row that I've spent on a KDE hackfest. If things continue like this Aaron will have to adopt me, because I refuse to marry him and we're spending way too many "family holidays" together to be "just friends".
I've been always highly supportive of the "Earth is the center of the universe" theory. I considered this to be a side-effect of the fact that I'm the very center of the creation. By association this small piece of rock has got to be in the smack-middle of the universe.
That is until I find a way of developing a dust-powered interstellar spacecraft (dust being the only material possession that I have at my disposal in numbers even remotely close enough to those necessary for intergalactic travel) and I leave this place in pursuit of happiness/aliens. Unlike all other people I don't really want to meet aliens or exchange knowledge/ideas with them, I just want to punch a foreign life form in whatever is their equivalent of a face. Stay with me here, because there's an elaborate reason for that: I'm spending a lot of my time talking to people and for the purposes of a story "I've seen aliens, met them and we chatted a bit about the meaning of life, technology, universe and then I got anal probed" makes a boring story. One that is so prevalent in Alabama. Now if I've met someone who has seen an alien, met an alien and punched it in the face - that person has got my full attention. A way better story.
But for now I'm stuck here, so I used this week to look over some of the graphics code that was written for KDE4. It looks pretty good. Clearly a lot of it has been influenced by heavy drugs and some people have got to be shooting it straight down their aortas for them to have that severe effects. I'm trying to figure out whether to write a FAQ or some scripts to clean some of the mess up. I've also done a little fun hacking. I added sample 3D plasmoids looking like this:


They work very nicely and taking that code allows you to write 3D plasmoids. The examples animate (pretty nicely I might add, but everything I do is at least "pretty nice" so that's a redundant statement). The code is in KDE SVN playground/base/plasma/applets/samplegl* module.

Since for some cards we still don't have terribly good 3D drivers I created a sample plasmoid that shows how to rotate it and have something shown on the back. The code is in the playground/base/plasma/applets/rotator. A movie with the rotating widget is here. And statically it looks like this:



With much love
Yours Truly: militant interstellar dominator (by day), graphics voodoo practitioner (by night)