Moving to Opera
Though I did move to opera as I’d said in my earlier post, I missed the extensibility of Firefox that I had much used. I had used the following extensions usually on Firefox:
Off the list, I do not care much about Adblock Plus or Google Gears except for the fact they made browsing easy to look at and faster respectively. Can do without them. (I know Opera has a way of blocking too, but am not interested in blocking ads for a while now, maybe when I get irritated by them again.). And Stylish like features is obviously well built into Opera, so 3 tasks done by default.
Coming to Gmail Manager and FireFTP, for Gmail Manager I looked for desktop packages called kcheckgmail and other widgets but some refused to work while the other required a dependency I was not willing to install. As always when this happens I headed to Qt-Apps and got myself QGmailNotifier. Built it with a [qmake - make and make install] and I was ready to launch qgmailnotifier and work well it did. Qt applications always ftw for me! For FireFTP, the existing Dolphin and Konqueror of my KDE sufficed. I created an FTP folder for my site and a WebDAV one for SourceForge and it were done, again too simply. 
The only thing missing now is a notifier for Google Reader. Maybe I’ll look into sources of some widgets and combine it with QGmailNotifier. But I guess that’d have to wait. Could there be an alternative way?
No Opera widgets please, they are just not how I need it. It has to be either a desktop tray software or a notifier within the browser in some toolbar as an icon.
KDE 4.1.0
Just upgraded to it on Gentoo (via kdesvn-portage overlay).
KDE 4.1.0
Its pretty much usable now than when I had tried before (4.0 alpha). I like the new way of selecting files Dolphin has to offer, a nice round clicker that appears on hover. Besides that, Dolphin’s file-preview has improved a whole lot, giving previews for almost anything under that hard-drive cover.
Plasmoids are nice things, but I feel they waste too much space and aren’t always persistent with their configuration options - making me have to re-enter my preferences all the time. But its good, I’ve even gotten used to KDE-Twitter as my desktop twittering application. But the Plasma and Plasmoids are a very unstable feature of KDE right now, with changes happening in the svn every other day.
I’ve been a GNOME user all these days, so the shift to KDE 4 was very much troublesome. In installation terms I mean. I don’t have, nor would like to have, KDE3 libs installed so am pretty much stuck with only what KDE4 wishes to offer and am using only those. Its got Okular (PDF Viewer), K3B (Burn Baby Burn) and GwenView (Image Viewer) and these suffice for my daily tasks as of now since I rely on irssi/bitlbee/ncmpc and rtorrent command-line applications for the other deeds of mine.
The worst part of KDE is the how it makes GTK applications look. You’ll have a hard time with Firefox, a really hard time. I tried for around 4 hours changing GTK styles, cycling through many and installing some more, but in the end I had to build Opera-Qt4 and be done with Firefox 3. It were slow too, on my Prescott P4 3.0 GHz system anyway. Will use Firefox again when I get my new PC. Opera is being okayish, I’ve hidden the menus so that it doesn’t look ugly too.
My Desktop
KDE4 Desktop
Konsole still needs a lot of work as a terminal emulator. Kate is awesome and I even configured it for my liking and it was way easier to theme it than it were for Gedit. I’ll quit using Kate in a few days as I learn more of vim (I’ve been very slow on this part) so there goes another KDE dependency.
About the media players, my KDE set had two basic ones included in it - Dragon and Juk. Dragon is a simple Video/CD/DVD player while Juk plays my music files. The quality exhibited by Dragon was far less than what MPlayer could show (I use SMPlayer as my MPlayer frontend) but nevertheless, its basic interface covered many features including video enhancements while playing etc. Juk on the other hand was nice as a media player but I feel it could do better with a differently styled media-browser than the vanilla Winamp style one it uses. Plus since it had no Last.fm integration, I decided not to set it as my default player and continued to use MPD/MPC.
The Control Center has gone away to be replaced with System Settings. It still lacks a switch to take you to root level for modifying certain special properties but that can be done via a sudo command from the command line. Apart from that the entire management application seems fine with a nice new interface for configuring things. I especially like the new color-setting interfaces available across KDE4.
Will be using this for quite some time, seeing how much its improved from KDE 4.0.0, I would be expecting it to get far better over the next 2 releases to become one of the best DE ever. GTK/GNOME seems far behind KDE’s awesomeness and Qt’s cross-platform power, way far behind.
Linux - Its all about choice
Freedom WIN
Found in Okular (KDE4) 
Open Source Games
I’m sure there has been a lot of incidents where you have cursed your most recently acquired game, be it anything from a silly to annoying bug, the lack of a feature that would have made playing more heavenly for you or even something as small as better detail on some object on screen.
Now what if the game were open source, to the fullest extent rather than just the “Extend”. You don’t like the character’s tail, you contribute an idea in form of a feature-request or by getting into the development yourself. So do million others. Together you can, over time, form a completely different game than the one you were being unsatisfied with!
Yo Frankie! - An open source game in active development.
The usual way of extending a game would be to add in map and skin packs while letting the functionality of the entire game remain constant. What if the game evolves with time, adding in new moves, more pick-ups and extras, and more elements to the game, such as weapons or collectibles?
Though these are present in some of the games alive today, it would be greater if the game were or went open-source, opening the game’s code to a world of never-before imagined possibilities and also getting in tons of optimization over time. Of course, building a game big enough like the heavyweights we have today requires the work of a large active team behind it, but once done with its release, getting in additions to the code would we amazingly easy were it supported by a good version-tracking system!
Playing such a game would mean endless hours of fun, repeated every couple of months for a completely different experience while still remaining the old charms that a player liked. New innovative concepts implemented by avid code-enabled gamers would add in more and more goodies, much like how Compiz-Fusion is today, an idea being born a day and implemented almost as fast.
Yes there would be a point where it would hit a roadblock and this is where the next game development has to begin. Ideas found in the older version could be tried out across a multitude of other genres, and what a learning experience would it be for creating that “ultimate” game many always dreamed about!
I hope some biggie in gaming gets onto this OSS bandwagon, with atleast a half-baked title cracked open, and pretty soon, since the game market is losing out on ideas really, and thats cause ideas are limited to them in the closed confines they live in.
You’d say what of the OSS games we have today, and I’d point at their evergrowing success till date. No game has ever been given a cold shoulder and kicked out of existence, right from Nethack to Nezuiz. Though this post was inspired by a particular game known as Yo Frankie!.
Dedicated
On cloud 9 for the past two months 
Kudos to her, for finally accepting, for being the most understanding person and for being there for me always.
I promise never to break this special relationship we share, of friendship, love and something much more than that, which words can not describe, but my heart beats can. You’re the best person I’ve met, and will ever do!
