Finished something, finally

The last weeks were actually a busy time for several reasons. Well, there's one less now: at work, yesterday Friday evening at around 21:00 I finally submitted a manuscript (5Mbyte pdf) for publication that we have been preparing for ages.
The whole story started with measurements done in our lab last year, where we look among other things at electrical currents through single carbon nanotubes at very low temperatures of a few millidegrees above absolute zero. In this particular case, the metallic contacts to the nanotube were made of a magnetic PdNi alloy, which means that you have to take into account the magnetic moment (the spin) of the electrons in the contacts and of the electrons passing through the nanotube. Models for such systems have been developed and measurements done for some time already, but together with our theory colleagues from Chonnam, Poznan, and München we have shown for the first time that even quantitatively these models can be reduced to the non-magnetic case with a rather straightforward transformation, and that still the calculations fit the data very well. That is a pretty nice result, since for the emerging technology field of spintronics control of all these current transport effects is quite important.
Now it's time for new projects (and for awaiting the referee reports)...

Things I always wanted to do... :)

Andreas K. Hüttel changed:

           What    |Removed              |Added
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                 CC|                     |alpha@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |amd64@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |arm@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |hppa@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |ia64@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |ppc64@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |ppc@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |sparc@gentoo.org,
                   |                     |x86@gentoo.org

--- Comment #4 from Andreas K. Hüttel 2011-04-27 21:31:53 UTC ---
Here comes the big one. On behalf of the Qt and KDE teams:
Arches, please test and stabilize the ebuilds listed in the
attached text file. The list includes core KDE and Qt packages,
their depedencies and extragear/misc KDE/Qt apps as well

:)

KDE 4.6.2 news & upgrade guide

Just to give everyone a quick heads up, the stable request for KDE SC 4.6.2 plus KDEPIM 4.4.11.1 is likely going to be filed soon. On the whole, the upgrade should go very smooth. In case there are problems, we now have a Gentoo KDE 4.4 - 4.6 Upgrade Guide, covering the most frequent issues. In addition, it probably never hurts to look at the general Gentoo KDE Guide.
If you want to test before the actual stabilization takes place, just grab the keyword file... Cheers!

KDE 4.6.2 - looking for testers!

You may already have heard that a new version of the desktop environment came out today. (No, not the other one.) I'm talking about KDE 4.6.2. It is in my opinion shaping up rather well, and we in the Gentoo KDE team consider it a candidate for stabilization in a while. (It's about time, since upstream considers our "stable" KDE 4.4 rather "dead".) You can look up the list of important known issues on our bugzilla; some of this definitely has to be fixed before stabilization, but on the whole the list looks manageable.
So, we need testers. Especially since we all from the KDE team have been running newer KDE versions for ages by now and have never tried the direct step from 4.4 to 4.6. If you are brave - sync your portage tree, grab the keyword file, place it in /etc/portage/package.keywords - and update your system! As additional bonus, you will get also updates for QT, koffice, digikam, and some more packages...
If there are dependencies missing in the keyword file, please file a bug! If you encounter any build problems, please file a bug! If you see any misbehaviour after the upgrade, please file a bug! Thanks a lot in advance!
Oh yes, one last note. The kdepim guys obviously don't feel like releasing at all, so everything from kmail to blogilo will remain at trusty version 4.4. This is, however, nothing to worry about. (I'd worry a lot more about the kdepim update should it ever happen...)

Impressive sci meeting

As you can see from the above picture, it's travelling time again for me. The weather is great, the snow as well, there are a lot more photos to prove it... :) However, not all is skiing and vacation. The real reason for the stay here in La Thuile at the top end of the Aosta Valley is a scientific conference, "Rencontres de Moriond 2011: Quantum Mesoscopic Physics". This is indeed one of the scientifically best meetings of this field, with worldwide attendance. (The excellent skiing opportunities and the great Italian food may of course help attracting people.) Talks go from 9:00 to 12:30 and from 17:00 to 20:00. (I'm writing this at ~22:00 of the last evening and don't count the coffee cups anymore.)

I met here a friend again, one of the powerusers who initially introduced me to Gentoo. As we're at a conference we got talking about doing presentations with Linux, and he showed me a really neat Python program for that. (Normally I don't touch anything Python except with a very long stick, as it would interfere with my daily prayer to Larry Wall. Just kidding, well about the prayer at least...) I found out that a previous version of it had already been available in Gentoo before as "keyjnote". Keyjnote development is not continuing, but a new project named Impressive picked it up. With its new upstream name the program also got a new ebuild name: app-office/impressive. Apart from being a pretty stylish pdf viewer, and integrating/cooperating nicely with dev-tex/latex-beamer and (open|libre)office impress, one of the great advantages of Impressive is that arbitrary python hooks can be added to each slide. Want to play a sound, a video, ...? Want to have a robot voice read out your presentation? Sure, can do! Give it a try!

Gentoo's Reform and Future @ FOSDEM

For all those interested who could not make it to Brussels, the talk by Petteri, Roy, and Jorge on "Gentoo's Reform and Future" is now online at YouTube - or below. Cheers!

Most obscure e-mail of the year (so far)

I have the vague feeling that somehow this is out of my field of responsibilities.

From: xxx xxx <xxx@gmail.com>
To: dilfridge@gentoo.org
Date: Today 05:24:03
Spam Status: Spamassassin 0% probability of being spam.

Andreas K. Lord Huettel

gcam-2010.07.27.ebuild USD?

A DEMO PLEASE AND MANUALS

THANKS

FERNANDO