KDE4! I Finally Got There

Well, it is now official.  I am running KDE 4 SVN as of today and I dont think that I will switch back to 3.5.  My poor laptop has been compiling for what seems like an eternity.  I am running Gentoo with the newer Paludis package manager (this is a requirement of the genkdesvn overlay for the live ebuilds)  I think that it is safe to say that it is not yet as polished as the KDE 3.5.x series but it certainly has come a long way since I last looked at it.  There are currently two or three silly hangups for me right now.  The first is the battery applet.  Currently I think that it is showing the battery left in my mouse instead of my laptop battery and there seemingly now way to change which battery it is reporting on.  There is also no way to change the ordering of the applets in the panel.  But that will come soon (I see in 4.2 from the other blogs).  Ok, so now for the required screenshot…..

In this screenshot I have the standard clock applet and trash applet running.  What I think is cool is the KGet applet telling you what your downloads are and the download progress.  That’s right, I am downloading work stuff…  In the lower left hand side you will see three instances of the picture applet which just grabs pictures from a directory at random and displays them.  I have this set to change the images every 30 minutes.  In addition to these applets are two instances of the folder applets.  These are cool.  They allow you to display the contents of a folder in the bounded and color offset regions.  The one on the right has my work CVS directory in it so that I can get to my analysis code quickly and the one on the left is my downloads region.  I can drag and drop from there right into the trash if I want to remove something (or I could just do it the quicker and old school way “rm -f <file>” which I prefer).  Left in the center is the cool krunner program.  This is what pops up when you hit <ALT>-F2 or select “Run Command” from the desktop context menu.  Here you can start to type a command and then all the programs that have that in the name will start to appear so that you can click on them.

One thing that I do have running that is not KDE on the desktop is compiz-fusion.  I just can not get away from it.  I know that KDE4 has its own effects built in, but they are not as polished as the effects from compiz-fusion.  So, in short, for a fun environment to work in I can recommend for the non-newbie user KDE4 SVN + compiz-fusion.

All this is nice and everything, and I really digg it, but to be honest, the first thing I do when I sit down is open a terminal…

Home At Last…

Well,  here I am after the 3.5 hour drive home sitting at my parents house.  I was just thinking how nice it is to be able to sit here at home listening to a strange combination of Pink Floyd and Michael Buble.  I never said that I had a coherent music taste |-)…  Home for my parents is in Strafford which is just outside of Springfield Missouri.  It is a nice community of about 2000 people.  The really nice thing (most of the time) at the sounds of the woods.  Our house is situated on a 20 acre plot of undeveloped forest area.  The sounds are really quite soothing.   Ok, well time to go and continue reading about the great piece of software from D0 called “Collie” which really stands for “COnfidence Level Limit Evaluator”.  This is for my research work at Fermilab.  Ok, off to the bed

Good Night Everybody…

And yes, there really was almost no real content in this posting…  |-P

Jamup Cave

I just got back the other day from a great caving trip. The group that I went with planed a four day and four night trip down the Jacks Fork river in Missouri. I have floated a lot of the rivers down in the southern Missouri region and I have to say that I really enjoyed the Jacks Fork. There were not as many springs on the river as the North Fork but as far as wild goes I think that the Jacks Fork has all the other rivers trumped. Out of the 15 or 20 caves that we stopped at along the river (there are probibly like 100 caves along this river) one of the most impressive was Jamup Cave. Location of Cave (you may have to switch to satellite view and zoom out to see location) The size of the cave is one of its most impressive features. Climbing up a small hillside one approaches the mouth of the cave.

Evan aproching the cave

Once you get to the top of the hill (not the bluff, that was much harder) you can get to the river entrance of Jamup Cave

Look closely… I am standing there on the rock in the middle… (This is HUGE)

The cave has several different regions, there is the lower region which is composed of a large pool and a fairly short side passage off to the left hand side of the cave entrance. There is an upper region that one can get to by entering the rear entrance of the cave (requires hike to the top of the bluff). In the upper area one can get to the “windows” at the top of the waterfall and look back on the river entrance. There is a skylight which is from a 40 foot sinkhole and one can go back to the source of the water in the cave which is Jamup Creek. All entrances are large. I will leave you with a few other pictures of the cave… (What a great trip)

Lower room with the large pool of water and waterfall. Notice the windows to the left and right of the waterfall

Me before I went into the side passage on the left. It goes for about 100 to 200 feet before terminating at a very small waterfall