Stuart Jarvis

(Planet readers: this is completely unrelated to KDE, so you might want to skip it).

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK. There are many differing opinions over the wisdom and even legality of various military adventures by the UK and its allies over recent years, but I don’t believe that should stop us recognising the sacrifices made by military personnel at the front lines.

If you’re in the UK or are in the fortunate position of having been helped rather than hurt in the past by UK military action then please consider making a donation. Or see if there is a similar organisation in your country supporting your veterans.

Tags: Charity, help needed, offtopic

Following on from a mildly controversial but quite interesting dot story from a user who has found taken a new look at KDE 4 and thrown away some of his prior conceptions from KDE 3, a Fedora contributor has posted an interesting blog entry about trying KDE 4. He’s got some nice observations about plus and minus points coming from a Gnome perspective, some of which are distro-specific.

A couple of choice quotes:

“The [KWin] composition performance feels faster than Gnome + Compiz, and much better integrated”

“It still doesn’t match all my needs but it’s very close to being as usable as Gnome”

Not bad for someone who says he’s always been quite happy with Gnome.

One thing I should say – this isn’t about stealing users from Gnome (is Steven going to switch permanently? I don’t know and I think he should just use whatever is best for him). But it is nice to see KDE 4 attracting interest from people who haven’t previously had any interest in KDE software. Part of this is because KDE 4 is new and shiny and I’m sure I’ll want to check out Gnome 3 when that arrives, but if we’re attracting positive attention from Gnome users then perhaps we’re also better placed to appeal to users of the real competition.

Tags: reviews

I really need to start believing the the power of free communities. I remember hearing about Wikipedia shortly after it started (the English version was at the few thousand articles mark) and thinking that it was a nice idea but would never really take off and compete with traditional encyclopaedias. Yeah, so I was wrong on that one, but at the time I knew nothing of the things (KDE for example) that communities of volunteers can build.

But a few years later, when I first heard about OpenStreetMap, I really shouldn’t have fallen in to the same trap again. But I did, I never thought it would become comprehensive enough to be usable. Now it’s my site of choice when I want a map, not only because the other alternatives either cool, but non-free, belong to the competition or are just plain horrible to use but because in many cases the OSM map data is actually superior (with better marking of local footpaths etc) and – of course – you know you can use it freely.

A really nice illustration of the coolness of OSM, showing edits from 2008, can be found at Vimeo or possibly viewed below if you’re viewing this somewhere that allows embedding. Either will unfortunately require you to have some kind of Flashy stuff installed.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

(This animation was produced by ITO World. It is licensed CC-BY-SA. The music is ‘Open Electro’ by Vincent Girès and is also CC-BY-SA).

Tags: Free Culture, web technology