I am signed up for a lightning talk this Wednesday at the COSI meeting. Additionally, I would like to give a lightning talk on emerge desktop possibly the following week. I may come up with additional lightning talks or presentations after this week.
I started the semester hoping to work on the kde-windows project. I spent a few days getting my build system operational. This took much longer than expected, as the trunk had a number of build errors. This was a good opportunity for me to get involved with the kde-windows developers on IRC freenode.net. In addition to helping me with my build issues, they worked with me to create at least 3 patches by giving me fixes to test for them. After I had my build system installed and kde4 running on windows Vista. I decided I would try to work on the plasma desktop integration first. To do this I downloaded and installed 2 alternative windows shell replacements. These are called emerge desktop and LiteStep. I would like to show emerge desktop as a lightning talk.
I started out finding fixes to the kde shutdown routine, as there were no equivalent shutdown routines for windows. Using MSDN, I was able to find code necessary to elevate privelidges and call the appropriate windows shutdown function. In order to correctly implement this, I was told to make sure plasma shuts down correctly and saves all data. One way to do this is to implement the shutdown code within plasma's own shutdown routine. I better solution should be able to catch the shutdown signal sent to plasma and save all work within the allowed time limit. As my semester grew busy I was unable to finish this task, and plan on resuming during the winter. In the meantime I turned my attention towards implementing an open source web server, explained in parts below.
In order to get running my webserver after attending Zach Shepard's Drupal Presentations, I decided to create my server in a Virtual Machine. To be completely practical, running the server in IIS on Windows would have worked just as well and be more practical, but playing with VirtualBox was an additional learning experience. I ran into a pitfall and some things were not made quite as clear as I needed. I will create a howto document before the end of the year on docs to document my learning.
Using VirtualBox, I installed Ubuntu Server, with the LAMP server option. I ran into trouble viewing my apache server, which I will document in my howto. With apache installed, I attempted to install both drupal and ampache, running into problems this time with proper permissions and mysql. Getting plenty of help from COSI members I was in the end successful, and look forward to passing this knowledge on in my howto.
In the time in which my server is running on my desktop, my web page will be: Drupal and AmpacheTime permitting, 2 more skills I wish to learn this semester are python and emacs. While I'm currently writing this page in Emacs, I am unable to use many of the features that make it more powerful than a simple editor such as nano. (I don't even know how to cut and paste yet) I plan on installing OpenSolaris in VirtualBox this semester and recording my thoughts. Also, I may try to understand what scheme is, and how to read/write it.