Brad Hards: thanks!

I met up with Brad Hards who was in Sydney yesterday. It's really great to meet someone in person that until now, I had only known on the internet (the only other person I've met in this way was Bart Oldeman from DOSEMU).

We had a very short meeting but he gave me some of his "old" hardware: a P4 3GHz HT machine and a P3 1GHz laptop, both with loads of disk space and importantly, RAM (1GB and 512MB respectively). This is truly impressive stuff that will dramatically improve my productivity:

With the hardware I was using before (and will still be using for a few days until I get the new stuff setup), a 2 line change to kdelibs/kdeui meant that I had to wait several minutes for cmake/make to rediscover libkdeui's dependencies, compile and install (and yes, I am compiling in the kdeui/ directory only), while the computer was thrashing due to the lack of RAM (224MB), worsened by a slow hard disk (10MB/s maximum sequential read). Not to mention the lack of disk space (7.6MB remaining).

So this new hardware is really, really nice stuff and super appreciated - less time waiting, more time coding. Thanks Brad!

I hope Scott Wheeler's Adopt-a-Geek program will restart at some point so that other KDE developers can benefit from such generous donations as well.

An interesting suggestion that Brad made was that perhaps some of us KDE devels in Australia (e.g. also Seb Ruiz, Hamish Rodda) could get together to do a state-of-KDE-4 talk at linux.conf.au in Sydney 2007. I think that would be a great idea so stay tuned :)