Stock Quote 2.0

KDE 4.2 has been released, and I thought I should bring out an update to the stock plasmoid. I have done alot of work to make it more usable, and still have plenty of ideas to implement.

The main changes for this release are:

• Data engine backend
• Dockable in panel
• Improved theme
• Improved percent display
• Clickable stocks link to yahoo finance
• Position/resize bug fixes
• Supports stock with commas in description
• Supports kde 4.2

Stock Quote 2.0 is downloadable from kde-look.org.

No I haven’t dropped of the face of the earth, my life has just been boring recently, so I haven’t bothered posting anything :S Unfortunately this post will pretty boring to most people, especially those gnome fanboys.

KDE 4 now provides plasmoids, which are along the same lines as widget in Mac OSX, or those things in Vista that no-one ever uses. The current offerings are pretty slim, so I decided to rework an existing financial stock quote plasmoid to make it more usable. Overall writing the plasmoid is pretty much like writing any other Qt application.

Here is the final product, it can be downloaded from kdelook:

Stock Quote v1.1

Fractanoid is an experiment in multi threaded programming to allow the processing load to be split across multiple cores in a computer. The image area is first split into 200×200 pixel blocks, each of these blocks is stashed into a list which is being monitored by a series of threads within a threadpool. The blocks are processed and the results signalled back to be displayed.

The image area also always full panning support with new blocks calculated continuously as they appear on the screen. Zooming in and out results in clearing of display and recalculation based on the new zoom level.

Fractanoid 0.1

Through the preferences dialogue, the number of threads can be modified to take advantage of extra CPU’s available in the system. This results in extra threads being added to the thread pool.

Download the source tarball: fractanoid-0.2.tar.bz2

Amarok recently released the ability to synchonise music to your iPod, so I was finally able to stop using iTunes to transfer my songs. However I was still stuck using the Mac to sync my addressbook.

Well not anymore, after some quick poking around, and a simple script, I am now able to transfer my complete KDE addressbook (including photo), with a simple command line.

Just mount the ipod, and execute the script, passing the ipod’s root directory as a parameter. That’s it! The script loads your KDE addressbook, makes a few simple modifications the iPod requires, and copies it across.

Download kde_ipod_sync.rb