Thanks to my unrestful ex-colleague and current coffee-buddy Ade, my blog is back online, as you can see. Now I have to figure out why Blogilo works fine on one machine, but has problems getting my blog’s metadata on another one (my laptop). Blogilo is another one of those applications from the category Internet I’d rather not live without. Writing blogs offline (on trains, for example), adding media (screenshots for example, those seem to be quite popular) to blogs is just so much easier if you don’t have to deal with the uploading yourself but get it done in the background. And now I’ve mentioned screenshots, I should probably also show one (since it’s that easy). I’ll pick the new interface details in the Network Management plasmoid. In the screenshot, you can see what you get when you click on a network interface, it’ll show you additional information about the interface, and if connected some basic traffic stats. For this, I’ve used the systemmonitor dataengine and the Plasma::SignalPlotter widget, so the patch to add this nice little feature weighed in at only about 50 lines of code. The widget only updates when the details are shown to save power cycles when it’s not in use, but you can switch to the details and then dismiss the popup (which happens automatically with our focus policy), and it will keep collecting data. If you switch back to the normal view (using the back button), it’ll stop updating. I’m also happy to have received Andreas Demmer’s first patch today, which looked good right away and has been merged already. He changed the back button in the details widget to be more consistent with other buttons, so that’s a nice addition. Andreas has been keeping an eye on the development of the networkmanagement plasmoid, and has been providing useful feedback in the process. So there’s another step on the ladder towards hacker-heaven. (Yes, Plasma development is *that* cool. :-))

Another thing that plays a rather important role in my daily workflow is the Quassel IRC Client, which is an IRC client that allows you to easily use different machines for your IRC needs, without the need of logging in and out all the time and losing the history of your conversations. So if you found my IRC presence to be wonky during the last days, it should be better now.

I hear you asking "The real relevance of this post is…?" Well, api.kde.org is also back online, so your Konqueror shortcut "kde:<classname>" works again — although I’d expect that by now, every sensible hacker has loaded this file into Qt Assistant (Edit | Preferences | Documentation | Add…) and have both Qt and KDE docs available in one place.