Paranoid Idealism

I’ve just spent the better part of a day installing various distros on my laptop. I’ll talk about the ones I tried and why I didn’t like them in another post. I wound up sticking with the latest alpha of Kubuntu 9.04. It’s not perfect (what OS is?) but it’s pretty good so far. I have high hopes for the final release. My biggest problem with it so far has been fonts. They’re broken in so many ways. I’m typing this in Firefox right now, and I have it set to use KDE’s fonts. The WordPress console looks OK, but the text that I’m typing looks horribly broken. Varous parts of the UI look too big, while other parts look too small.

One thing I’m really glad to see is choqoK, a newish KDE client for identi.ca and Twitter. However, it too suffers from the screwed up fonts. It’s only at 0.4, so it’s got some time before I start seriously criticizing it. I’m actually planning to download the source and see if there’s anything my limited coding skills can do to help.

I like the new Network Manager Plasma applet. It still needs some polish, but it looks good even now, in its alpha form.

I’ve missed having a usable KDE since the 4.0 release. I’ve liked where KDE was heading, but I just couldn’t make the pre 4.2 releases usable for my day-to-day computing. 4.2 has finally done it for me. I can’t wait to see where it goes next. There’s so much potential in the 4.x series. It should be exciting.

So, I obviously haven’t been blogging regularly. I don’t know what my problem is. It’s not for lack of ideas. I have things popping into my head all the time. I guess it’s more of a motivation thing. Well, I’m still working on it. I haven’t given up yet.

I’m also considering switching away from WordPress… again. This time I think I’m going to go for something more homegrown. I’ve been playing with Django lately. I kind of like it, although I’m nowhere near ready to throw up my own creation. I’ll continue to use WordPress until I come up with something that I like, most likely with Django. We’ll see how that goes.