Again work has kept me from doing anything other than work-related things but such is life. I’m doing something I enjoy and have enough of a stake in it to make it worth my while.

For the longest time I’ve been using the text editor vim for writing code. It doesn’t have all of the fancy features of a full-fledged Integrated Development Environment (IDE) but it suites my needs of being flexible and fairly easy to use. Scott has been talking about Kate lately so I decided to give it a try. Despite my misgivings about changing the status quo, I’ve discovered that Kate is very functional without the traditional bloat and overhead of your normal IDE.

Along with Kate I’m also giving KDE another spin. KDE 3.5 hit Ubuntu Dapper recently. I will probably end up back in GNOME, but I like to experiment with various window managers to see what others are doing. I really dig the window memory features that kwin has to offer. That, in my opinion, is my biggest gripe with GNOME/Metacity. It seems that while GNOME is making nice strides, Metacity is sort of just sitting there gathering dust. Enlightment 17 is also looking really good. Kyle may not believe it, but I think there could be a release in the not too distant future. I mean, even Duke Nukem Forever is going in full force. The end times must be close at hand.
I’m going to be doing a bit of travelling this year. So far we have trips planned to Nashville in March, upstate New York in June, Detroit, for Penguicon, in April, and potential work trips to Las Vegas in March and California spread through the year. I suppose I should sign up for frequent flyer miles now. Hopefully I’ll have enough free time during my trips to meet up with some people. I know Linux World is in Boston this year and I’m secretly scheming to arrange the time to go. It’d be good to actually meet some of the people doing the good deeds out there.