People, who tried to create parallel Bash scripts, are probably aware of -P parameter of xargs utility. In conjunction with find it allows to execute a specified command for each file and distribute these commands among several processes. This scheme is perfect when you need, say, convert all files in the given directory.
When I started to write such scripts, a certain inconvenience is revealed. Commands, that should be given to xargs, usually appear to be more complicated than a single call of some utility with arguments. It's often needed to pass a set of commands, especially when progress indication and error reporting are required. Finally, a separate script for processing a single item is created in addition to the script that has the xargs call.
I analized how to combine these two script into one...
Nikita Melnichenko.
One month has passed since the first public release of Make Progress plasmoid and it's time to sum up. The most important thing is that the program appeared to be useful for people. It's shown by the first place in the user voting on the KDE Javascript Jam Session and high rating on KDE-Look.org. This interest motivates me to continue development. I've received many feature requests and it's clear that people really use the plasmoid on their desktops. For example, Andrew Andrianov even shared a task management script that uses PHP, MySQL and my plasmoid. Some unpleasant bugs were also discovered. For instance, Plasma bug #234781 that causes crash when plasmoid intensively used with the Make Progress data engine. This means that we should not use DBus interface for some time. KDE team didn't devoted their attention to this issue yet and it's not known when it will be fixed. If you want to help then vote up this bug on its page.
Nikita Melnichenko.
Jam Session is a contest for the best plasmoid written using a new javascript engine appeared in KDE SC 4.4. For those of you who doesn't know these words — KDE SC is a great desktop environment, plasmoids are little programs that are placed on a desktop and extend it by providing you different features. They are also could be placed on panels. For example, clocks, tray, task bar are all plasmoids. It's a great idea to compose your own desktop from bricks. So the goal of this contest was to write your own javascript program.
I've already had an idea of a small application, interactive progress bars that could help to plan my time better and to show progress of my tasks so I could have a visual representation of the point where I currently am. I was very excited with the API. It provided many features and seemed to be suitable for my program. Actually, I reached the limits pretty fast and had to find many workarounds to implement what I want. That was interesting. I like to find another ways to solution when there is no a straight way. Some workaround methods were not good so if you find some sort of a strange behavior of my plasmoid, the reason could be in a lack of possibility to do it right. I tried to do the best I can in the limited time and I know that there is still a room for enhancement.
Nikita Melnichenko.
