While looking for a major I found a potential bug

Yes, I am looking for a college major. Right now I'm pre-pharmacy. I have applied, and now what I am going to study next year hangs in the balance. Since I hate leaving things up to chance (even though it's been proven that regardless of how much I plan, things happen a certain way in-spite of my best efforts). So I am choosing a major besides pre-pharmacy. I said all that to say, if you have any idea of an interesting College majors that also would help me get a job please offer the information.

Yes, I know, a shameless attempt to get non-kde adivce on a kde related blog, but here is what I am "actually" blogging to discuss.

Everyone type the following in your konsole while in an empty directory.

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdeui/tests/krichtexteditor/

Now enter the directory krichtexteditor and type

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../
make

Now run that application

./krichtexteditor

Now use that to open a file with bullets or an ordered list (and this may even work with any rich test at all). In fact I have added below a list you can copy in there. Make sure there are misspelled words in the document.

• adadad
• asd
• adsdfas
• adsfdaf
• adaafa

Now that you have your document with misspelled words and a list of some sort. It's time for the exciting part! Right click to get the context menu and Click Check Spelling.

When the spell check dialog comes up click cancel. If all worked as it did for me, you should now notice that the bulleted list has been removed. YAY! Actually this seems to be an issue in other things I've used with this as well. I haven't checked around into this, but I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating.

UPDATE:
Sadly, I wasn't hallucinating, and so here is the bug report. For those of you who have encountered this issue, you can follow it there. I'm going to try and see later this week if I can do something about this.

UPDATE2:
I forgot to post the bug report link.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188523

Hello KDE

Well, this isn't exactly, my first post, it's my third. The two before this adequately explain what I set out to do when I made the decision to contribute to kde. This is more background, nontechnical information.

Since I started using Linux with Fedora Core 4 & Ubuntu Breezy, I have been looking for a way to contribute. Since then I embarked on a mission to explore numerous distros, to get the feel for not only the software but the communities as well. My goal was to find a place I felt I could really contribute. However I didn't really settle anywhere and all I got out if it is a really bad habit of distro hopping. (Though I mostly stick to Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, and Arch). Then I started looking into KDE 4 (at the time I was a gnome user). I watched the keynote speech on KDE4's frameworks and advancements, and I was hooked, because I truly saw potential in these new software frameworks. It was well integrated, and it was well thought out. On top of all that the DE looked slick and professional. Between Qt and KDE libs I saw endless possibilities. So I switched DE's and began looking for ways to contribute. I outlined some of those in earlier posts but I'll put a quick run through here. (DISCLAIMER: the above wasn't a jab at gnome, I still thinks it's a nice DE and keep track of it, I just prefer kde over gnome).

1. Development: I want to help with actual coding. Though I am new to KDE, Qt, and C++, so I hope those of you out there will help make my a better programmer. To some extent I have already embarked on this mission. Recently I submitted a patch to Stephen Kelly (who has been a great help) that added and auto decimal list feature to Kjots. It was my first code contribution to a FOSS project and I am still very proud of it, and I hope those of you out there will test it in svn.

2. Documentation: I am very big on this. I know it can be tedious even hard to write good documentation, but with all the new frameworks (not to mention improved language support) with kde 4 I think we can do better on the documentation end. I really hope to get started on this end sometime soon. (For those of you who are part of the "inner circle" for developer documentation in kde, please let me know where much of the discussion takes place etc.

3. Any other way I can really (with time considerations of course).

One thing I have to say is that KDE's community is one of the most friendly open minded communities I've seen in FOSS. If you are considering helping out with kde, there are tons of different ways to do so, whether it be code, art work, documentation or anything else you can think of. If you would like to ask any question regarding this, please feel free to ask me I'd be more than happy to help.

I look forward to working with all of you in the future. Here's to happy KDE 4.3 release.

Plasma and what it means for the future:

This originally started as a post about bindings documentation but I decided to instead focus on plasma. You see by making plasma applets such a major part of the kde4 ecosystem the kde developers were in a way providing for a method for programmers of almost any level to get involved. This is further enhance by the bindings to other languages. See, not everyone likes C++ or even knows it well enough to make a decent application with it. But there is a host of people with javascript knowledge. In fact this inclusion of javascript support not only lowers barriers to involvement but it also enables us a lot of web2.0 features/ideas etc. and bring them back from the web to the desktop.

My hope is that plasma development will really come together and get a whole lot of people excited and joining in. We've seen what enabling users to make custom little apps in various Internet sites can do (facebook apps etc. although I'll admit a lot of those applications were annoying and I would like to think that people developing for kde will have a lot more sense in their development models and interfaces).
What I am mostly referring to is the user involvement. Where you can blurr that line between users and developers just a little bit, because if the users are are spending their valuable time working on these applets then they will feel they have more of a stake in the platform and by extension they are more likely to bounce ideas off the main kde developers. This I hope will lead to a platform that is both easier and more intuitive for developers and users. One that is more flexible and more capable of accomplishing the users goals.

I think we have just begun to scratch the surface of plasma. In order to get to the next level I think we need to have more complete documentation for all the various languages like python, C#, java, javascript etc. Right now I see a lot of really good tutorials at techbase.kde.org for C++, but only a few for python ruby, c# etc. There are also some good tutorials scattered around the web on various blogs, mailing lists etc. However for someone starting out it's much nicer if you have a one stop resource for learning how to make really nice plasmoids. I really think we need to get as many of the people that really understand these technologies as we can to write some really good tutorials and explanations of the apis. Especially for the bindings.

The reason I am so insistent on the bindings tutorial is not that I dislike C++. To the contrary it's one of my favorite languages, but the fact that a plasmoid written in C++ has to be re-compiled is a little annoying. I think the scripting languages like python, ruby, javascript are then better suited to this sort of tasks. Granted I think something like systray or the panel and other applets that are going to be packaged with the distro won't have to wrestle with the issue of compilation as much. As for the various weather plasmoids that you find on kde-look they are quite nice, but if I have to compile these then I feel less inclined to bother with adding them. Not to mention I don't think" get hot new stuff" has accommodations for re-compiling plasmoids as they come in. (Disclaimer: it is entirely possible that I missed something and you don't really have to recompile these when moving from distro to distro etc.)

One more thing, more than just tutorials, and apis, we need lots of documented examples. I don't know about most of you but when I am trying to learn a new library or programming language I learn a lot more from examples then from tutorials. Only when I am really comfortable with the basics of library will I start to jump straight to the api.

So here's to hoping that others will take up the call, and that I too will learn enough to be able to write great tutorials and examples.

edit: ya I wrote this when I was completly out of it so my grammer (and in some places logic) are a little screwy...

Hello

I am starting this blog because I intend to use it to relay information about my journey into KDE development/participation. In some ways it will be a case study of what it's like for someone to jump into to work on a project such as KDE. In that context, I will also be using this to show case my work/efforts as well as to discuss various issues reguarding the software industry, particularly in regards to ecosystem that revolves around GNU/Linux.