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Category: KDE-Edu (Page 2 of 3)

April of KDE

24 March 2011 / / 0 Comments

Hi!
Some intensive days are coming let’s talk about it a little :).

Next week I’ll be going to San Francisco because I’ll be attending to Camp KDE. It’s specially interesting to go there because it’s a very nice opportunity to get in touch with a KDE community that is not usually around in the events I’ve been going (it’s going to be my first KDE meeting outside of Europe). There I will be talking about KDevelop and KDE Edu (no wonder), two beautiful projects from a beautiful community like KDE, can’t be more proud of it :).

I'm going to Camp KDE!

The day after I come back I’ll be going to Bilbao where we’re celebrating this year’s KDE Edu sprint. I feel like it’s an important step for KDE Edu because it will be the first time where we are celebrating it in an education context and because we will be gathering some important people from this country who is interested in education. Hopefully we will be able to take our project to the next level, so yay us! (again :)).

I'm going to the KDE Edu Sprint!

And last but not least, I’ll be going to Vigo the week after that, where I will give the KDE talks in the Free Software master by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Igalia. I’m happy to see these initiatives happening here and proud to help to take it to the next level. (yay us! bis bis).

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

And last but not least, thanks to all the sponsors the KDE eV board and, in the end, all the people who makes this kind of things possible :). See you soon!

Social KDE

4 February 2011 / / 0 Comments

In barely 5 hours I’ll be taking my plane to Bruxelles, on my way to FOSDEM, where I’m going to meet a bunch of people interested on a lot of things like I do, mainly Free Software (and chocolate :D, but that’s off topic I guess). Also there I’ll be talking about KDE in Education at the Cross Desktop devroom. I’d like to tell anyone interested on education to come and share with us their opinion and thoughts regarding Free and Open Education.

I’d also like to remind you all that we’ll be celebrating the KDE 4.6 dinner in Barcelona (well, this time Badalona, but it’s still close 🙂 the next 19th february, if you want to come, please just follow these instructions: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.6#Barcelona

Last but not least, it would be good that anyone interested in coming to this year’s KDE Edu sprint says so on KDE Edu mailing list so that we have a correct appreciation about how much people is interested in coming. There will be hacking, talks to the local community and lots of fun with the local folks in Bilbao :).

See you soon!

KDE Memory game and MeeGo conference

23 November 2010 /

Hi!
As some of you know already, last week I was in Dublin trying to understand what MeeGo means (I got some conclusions, maybe some day I’ll share them). More importantly though, I also met a bunch of KDE hackers and we decided to start to work on some project together. I wanted to work on a KDE Memory game for a while and there I found some time to work on it, here there’s a demonstration about what we can do.

video source: http://proli.net/meu/los_otros/kmemory-presentation.ogv

If you’re interested on it and want to help get it in shape for the next KDE (now 4.7) release, here’s a list of what you can do:
– Think of a good name (yes, kmemory sounds fishy)
– Create a theme
– Create an icon
– Give ideas on how can we improve the theme specification (see kde.theme example in the git repository)
– Give ideas on what UI do we want (not how can it be improved, but what we want, it’s a little different).
– Just try it and enjoy yourself 😀 (no, that doesn’t mean an X theme ¬¬)

You can find the project here: http://gitweb.kde.org/scratch/apol/kmemory.git

Cheers!

Free Software Day

14 September 2010 /

This saturday we will be celebrating the Software Freedom Day in Barcelona. I’ll be attending and I’ll talk about KDE and Education.

If you’re close and interested on the subject feel free to come and we will discuss anything you like! 🙂

See you there!

Preparing presentations

28 June 2010 /

When preparing these KDE presentation we usually need some artwork from the KDE icons and sometimes I’m too lazy to find them. That won’t happen anymore since I created this really small tool that solves part of this problem :).

Works like that:

This generates a 128px kalgebra.png file with the KAlgebra icon:
kde-devel@tatilx:~$ kicons kalgebra 128

This generates a 128px kalgebra128.png file with the KAlgebra icon:
kde-devel@tatilx:~$ kicons kalgebra 128 kalgebra128.png

And of course, the real reason to post 🙂
I'm going to Akademy 2010

Buzzing

28 May 2010 /

I haven’t found the laptop of my dreams yet (yes, I’m a romantic, probably I should write some series about How I Met My Laptop when I’m done) but life has not stopped, au contraire, it just kept moving on.

For starters, I spent last week with the KDE Edu and KDE Multimedia teams in Randa where we gathered to get our projects some steps forward. Personally it was a great experience, I was actually looking forward to discuss some issues with the KDE Edu people mostly and I think we did great, we’ll see how it turns out in the future but I’m quite optimistic about it :). Also I could meet Percy, our new KAlgebra contributor in person, so we could discuss about some technical issues we found and about how are we going to rule the world in the future. 😀
On the other hand, with my Kamoso developer hat on, it was a nice experience also to get to talk to some VLC developer to sort our problems out which is going to mean a new version soon. \o/ Great, and kudos to Alex who is doing some really tough work (VLC has bugs too! we had a hard time to realize that). And last but not least it was great to be able to show KDevelop to some KDE developers who had not realized its awesomeness yet, I even think I convinced some of them so, yay us!

Other than that, I keep working on my GSoC, I’ll have some flash visit home tomorrow and much more to come :D.

KAlgebra Everywhere

7 November 2009 /

Today when I got home I felt like doing something big, something new and something fast. As many other times, this turned into some KAlgebra coding rush but today it was a bit different, because it involved a new project in KDE: Cantor.

So what happened? Cantor is an interface for mathematical engines (supports Maxima, Sage and R) that works on worksheets instead of just a console as we do in KAlgebra currently, like many other programs that you might know like Maple for instance. What I did was to implement a KAlgebra backend for Cantor.
I have to say it was quite straightforward. Alexander Rieder, the developer, has been helpful and everything worked fine, which is great and surprising for such a young project, so kudos for Cantor! 🙂

This backend already supports code completion, syntax highlighting and some embedded help, it doesn’t support plotting or latex exporting ¿yet? though, but I hope this will be added at some point. I’d like to remark that it’s good to have such backend because it makes Cantor a project that properly integrates the tools that KDE-Edu provides and doesn’t just rely on (probably better) choices from 3rd parties.

So now we have 4 KAlgebra interfaces: GUI, Console, Plasmoid and Cantor. What’s next?

Here you can see what it looks like:
Cantor with KAlgebra

Cantor with KAlgebra showing help

Enjoy!

KDE for students

23 December 2008 /

Last week Albert and I made a couple of talks related to KDE on the Térmens Lan Party event. One of these talks was about KDE-Edu. We reviewed every application one by one, showing some of their strengths.

There was a teacher in the audience (who is concerned about free software, afaik), he said that he was trying to get to use gnu/linux on his school but that he was facing some problems when it comes to use KDE.

One of the issues he mentioned (and that I don’t really know about) is the lack of accessibility tools, the other one is that KDE-Edu applications don’t really fit teachers needs.

It is this second point the one that I would like to focus now. We have quite good applications, but we developers (despite the ones that are both developers and teachers, of course) do what we ponder that’s useful, but not what it is in the actual classroom, so I just wanted to point out that we are open to requests, or at least I am.

In this direction, I wanted to mention that someone contacted me since he wanted to see some features happening on KAlgebra because of some study he is doing. I’m just mentioning that because it was a feature that I was not intending to add in a near future but that can indeed be useful in a real scenario, and it is implemented and hopefully will be in for KDE 4. Here you can see a screenshot of it and you can download and try it here if you wish, even if it is not ready still.

In conclusion, I just wanted to say that if you miss anything, just ask for it. If you don’t know what we have, just check all the (maybe too little) information we’re offering and if you want to contribute but you don’t feel like coding, you can help to improve this communication channel, that is actually failing, so that this education software reaches its goal, students.

KAlgebra release and further work

19 January 2008 /

I didn’t plan to make an entry about the KDE 4.0 release, but I just realized something which is important to me. It is the first KAlgebra release into KDE, which is great because it will have a larger userbase and it lets me focus more on development instead of poking people to get the translations and packages :). Now I wonder if I still should update the berlios and kde-apps sites… I’ll think about it.

Said that, I’d like to thank all the people that have supported to get KAlgebra into KDE-Edu and have helped me through the way.

A week ago I was a bit worried, because I had exams. I said to myself “It won’t be nice if the next KAlgebra release, with KDE 4.1, looks all the same as the 4.0”. I really was! I had lots of plans in my head and I thought that I would find any time for KAlgebra. Well, since my last monday’s exam I have been working on KAlgebra, and I have been making some great changes (IMHO).

The first one is that I am adapting it to the MVC, so that we can share the variables and functions all over the session.

The second one is that I have been adding the possibility of using multiple types in KAlgebra expression, so that we can work with Real numbers and Vectors, Matrix and so. By now I only have the Vector support working, but I think it will be useful. 🙂

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