After almost a year of no flights and two delays of launch because of bad weather Space Shuttle is finally flying again. As part of mission STS-121 the Space Shuttle Discovery was successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. The main mission objectives are to test new safety and repair techniques introduced after the Columbia disaster. There are also more then 2 tons of supplies that will be delivered to International Space Station (ISS). On board is ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter from Germany who will join Expedition 13 on the ISS and is expected to stay there for six months. Good luck to all the crew and the mission in general. I hope that from now on all goes well and that other missions will continue as planned. Modules for ISS assembly are already waiting to do their job.

Tags: space, astronautics, space shuttle, iss, nasa, esa

The summer holidays are finally here and I can take about two months of break from university. It will be nice blogging again. I’m sure you’ve all missed me a lot You may be wondering what I’ve been doing since the last post (has it really been three months allready?!). Besides studying and translating I’ve applied for Google Summer of Code with KPhysics project for KDE. Unfortunately I wasn’t selected. Harish Kukreja will be working on it and I wish him a lot of luck and fun. Can’t wait to test his code and when the SoC is over I’ll try to help him as much as possible. In May I also had a chance to meet Andrej Vernekar and Gregor Rakar for the first time. They are the coordinators of Slovenian KDE translation team. Andrej had an interesting presentation about using KBabel for localising free software. Unfortunately not many people showed up. On the same day, that is May 9 2006, I also got an account for KDE SVN repository. Now I can submit translations and code directly. Well, these are the most important things that I remember right now.

And what are my plans for this summer? Since I will not be working on my SoC project I’ll have enough time to do other things. I’ll monitor the code that Harish will be working on and get familiar with it as much as possible. Continuing to learn Qt and KDE programming is also on the list. Oh, by the way, there is a nice book being written about programming with C++ and Qt4. You can read it here for free: An Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4. This could be a nice basis if you would like to get into developing for KDE 4. At the end of September there will be aKademy 2006 in Dublin, Ireland. It is a annual KDE community conference and I hope I’ll have enough money to attend it. Speaking about earning money, maybe I’ll be making a web page for our local construction company here in Bohinj. The one that my father works for. I was also thinking about contacting our primary school and ask them if they need any educational software that I could write for them. If we come up with some nice project I could apply for some monetary help that Slovenian Ministry for education is offering for open source educational software.

Tags: personal, blog, summer