Will Stephenson 

We (as a UI shell project) see the limits of our territory as the window, when there is the assumption nowadays that MDI tabbed interfaces are where most significant user activity takes place. Yet interacting with different views/documents within those windows is not standardised, so the user has to remember which app they are using, then select the appropriate actions to: Read More

Everything's booked: the weekend after next I'll be in Bilbao at KDE's tenth Akademy meeting. Catch my talk about the latest happenings in Klyde, the lightweight presentation of KDE at 14:30 on Saturday in the New Ideas track. Read More

It's Hack Week 9 at SUSE, and I'm working on a cracking project this time around. I've codenamed it 'KLyDE', for K Lightweight Desktop Environment, and it's an effort to point KDE at the lightweight desktop market.  Surely some mistake, you say?  KDE and lightweight kan't fit in the same sentence.  I think they can. Read More

Yesterday I woke up to the news that Canonical are no longer going to fund Riddell to work on Kubuntu. I've trying to figure out what that means for KDE and for community Linux generally. Read More

Flat things are good. I'm at Tokamak 5 in Nijmegen, the KDE sprint where we plough a deep furrow into the future of the Free Desktop and sow KDE seeds that will grow into exciting, novel interfaces and make the stuff we already have even faster and more reliable. Read More

Did that get your attention? Good, it was supposed to. Now get back to making KDE 4 rock in whatever way you are able and resist the temptation to put 'KDE 5' in your blog title to get some clicks. KDE 4 is not going anywhere in the foreseeable future because GNOME just increased their major release number. Read More

I'm feeling very lucky today. Why? Because in a few hours I'll be getting on a plane to Bengaluru, India and attending conf.kde.in. Pradeepto has been asking me for years to look outside the cosy confines of the US-Europe Axis of KDE, and thanks to my role in the openSUSE Boosters team, this has finally become possible. Read More

I couldn't resist snapping as many KDE folk at the openSUSE conference as I could, and editing them together into: a short video. Read More

Next week is openSUSE Conference week! I'm using both my openSUSE and KDE blogs to remind everyone that we're having a pre-conference meetup at 6pm for the KDE team before the real conference begins at Barfüßer in the Nuernberg old town. Remember a morning of keynotes is only fun if you have a thumping hangover from microbrewed beer (and if you're a keynote speaker, from local schapps too)! If you are attending the conference or if you are just a friend of KDE in the area, please join in. Read More

Yes, this is basically a job ad. The openSUSE Boosters team is expanding again (when will it ever stop?) and we're looking for another member. If you want to work full time on Linux, enjoy the idea of building a community around the distribution and think you have the right skills why not apply and have the chance to work with me, Lubos Lunak, Stephan Kulow, Klaas Freitag and many other people you know from the KDE and wider Free Software scene? Read More

Today openSUSE 11.3 is released, concluding 8 months of intense and enjoyable work. This release has been especially enjoyable for me, as it was the first openSUSE release where the community KDE team really took the driving seat and made decisions about what to include, updated packages and intensively tested. Instead of just being a slave to a feature list this release, I was more occupied in enabling, advising and reviewing others' contributions. I'd like to say "Excellent work!" to the whole openSUSE team here in Nuremberg, Prague, the rest of Novell and to every openSUSE contributor who has tested milestones, reported bugs, learned how to use osc and

Did you know every app built with KDE 4 can save files as easily to a FTP server or a remote computer using SSH as easily as it accesses your local hard disk? You should! This is a feature that I take for granted since it was introduced in the days of KDE 2.0, but it's easy to forget that the majority of KDE users only started using it since then. Read More

KDE Developers may have noticed that the developer documentation server at api.kde.org is down. This is due to a hardware failure which will be recovered next week. That need not put the brakes on your work though, since if you have the source code on your system you can build the API docu locally yourself, as HTML, as man pages, or as Qt Assistant help files to view in Qt Assistant or Qt Creator. Read More

Aaron, Sandro, moofang, Shantanu and Diego have been hacking up a Plasma storm lately on the Javascript bindings for Plasma and the Plasmate builder tool. Since good code is running code, and running code is a lot easier when somebody else builds it and packages it, I've updated the Plasmate packages in KDE:KDE4:Playground to 0.1alpha2 and have updated the javascript bindings in our KDE SC 4.4.1 packages to include Aaron's latest errata - no need to update yourselves. Read More

Create a folder somewhere eg ~/Desktop/My Favourite Apps Drag and drop the folder onto a panel Choose "Folder View" from the popup that appears Drag apps from the menu, documents from Dolphin and other stuff onto the new panel icon Click it and enjoy your new menu!

New KDE Four Live CDs with KDE 4.4.1, and much more are up. They were built with openSUSE Build Service's KDE:Medias project and SUSE Studio and consist of openSUSE 11.2 plus all updates, KDE 4.4.1, upstream branding, Nepomuk enabled and Strigi disabled (because it's a Live CD). Read More

At the last minute I'm getting away from the snow and ice to visit Camp KDE in San Diego this weekend. I'll be there waving the openSUSE flag, giving a talk about using the Build Service to package and distribute your KDE applications for many Linux distributions, generally enthusing people about openSUSE and thinking about ways for KDE to be better as distributed. So if you see a guy with an SUSE t-shirt on staggering under a huge pile of DVDs, say hi! I hear San Diego has a very good zoo, perhaps they'll lend me a chameleon for even better recognisability... Read More

If you've been paying attention at the back there, you'll know that openSUSE started using a new community-driven online update administration process for 11.2. As well as Novell employees, community people are taking care of the workflow of examining and approving online updates to buggy packages. Now I have a favour to ask of you - the online updates that are ready to go out need testing to make sure they don't inflict gross mischief on users' systems. Read More

Since today is the big day when KDE trunk starts to depend on Qt 4.6, Raymond Wooninck (tittiatcoke), community packaging hero, has worked to provide packages of the unreleased Qt 4.6 in the openSUSE Build Service. Read More

I'm just back in from the first day the openSUSE conference. The day started badly when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming that OpenOffice ate my presentation (again), but it was still there when I resumed my laptop and so I biked the 5km into the Berufsförderungswerk Nuernberg, the technical college where the conference is a guest. A good number of people were in for Lenz Grimmer's keynote on virtual development teamwork, which was a relief, then I sat in for a bit of the openSUSE Weekly News talk by Sascha Manns. Running a news magazine is an important and demanding part of a project's internal and external communications and I'm grateful that Sascha and team put in the effort, and hope they get more contributors. Then I earwigged at the back of the GNOME team meeting, while Andy Wafaa demoed me the SUSE Goblin image. It's impressively polished and will give the Plasma netbook interface a tough act to follow. Read More

The main openSUSE users' mailing list are a demanding bunch who know what they want. Over the last few months the KDE group have been asking them what they still miss from KDE 3 in KDE 4, and one of those things has been the ability to add a submenu of the main app launcher, whether Kickoff or traditional, to the panel as a button in its own right. Read More

KDE needs as an entire project to support a Web browser that everyone can use in 2009. That's the simple message behind this blog entry and my talk at LinuxTag on Saturday. Read More

On Sunday the work continued at a furious pace. Dario carried on moving the connection list generating code out of the applet and into the KDED module. This makes the applet much simpler and easier for Plasma specialists to improve. We considered using a Plasma DataEngine or Service, but decided not to for now because it adds another layer of indirection. For NetworkManager at least, if the settings service process leaves the system bus (due to a deliberate or accidental exit) you fall offline. The settings service and Plasma are both complex programs, so combining them increases the chances that a bug in one can crash the other. So we put it in a different process, forcing one layer of indirection already. Read More

I felt like the grumpy grandpa of the NM sprint when the others hammered on my door at 9.30am after I'd rolled over for just another 10 minutes two hours earlier. The grey cells do still work once you hit your thirties but they need more care and feeding if I want to be able to speak intelligibly the next morning - not going to rock bars until 3am! Read More

I pried my eyes open at 0430 and stumbled to the airport. This all started about a month ago when we had the idea of having a developer sprint to get Network Management into shape in time for KDE 4.3's release. Now I'm sitting in a meeting room in Oslo listening to the progress report of 3 Norwegian students Peder, Sveinung and Anders who are investigating ways to make setting up mobile broadband connections easier. Thanks to the KDE eV's sponsorship, six of us are meeting this weekend. TODOs include cleaning up UI glitches, fixing some exotic VPN types and auth types and deciding how to abstract different backends like wicd and ConnMan. Read More

Martin Schlander already said the most important things but repetition never hurt a good message: KDE 4.3 is coming to KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop<. If you do nothing and use this repo you will get KDE 4.3beta1 installed soon! The stable KDE 4.2 packages will continue to be available in the new KDE:42 repo. The Extra-Apps repo is gone, its packages merged into Desktop, Community or Playground according to their level of support and release readiness. App packages which have both KDE 3 and KDE 4 versions are being renamed to show that KDE 4 is the default. Eg for digikam, we have kde3-digikam and digikam-kde4. This will cause a package upgrade to the new stable version. If you want to keep the KDE 3 version, install the kde3- package instead of the new KDE 4 based package. The Geeko is a quiet and stealthy animal. It doesn't make a lot of noise. But it produces solid, well engineered Linux distros year after year. Stephan 'Unstoppable Force Beineri' Binner has produced a respin installation CD of openSUSE 11.1 containing the latest and greatest KDE 4.2.2, and all the online updates since 11.1 came out in December. Is the longer openSUSE release cycle making you twitchy for a hit of something new? Do you want a rock solid openSUSE with the best KDE has to offer and none of this repo-fiddling nonsense? Get the respin from: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/.

A promising student was talking with me about working on Network Management in GSoC 2009, but decided to concentrate on his studies this summer. Out of the discussion I've created this idea proposal. In case anyone is interested in making mobile broadband connections really easy to do in Network Management, see the KDE Google Summer of Code 2009 ideas page. Read More

A helpful chap just popped into #opensuse-kde and asked about our c# bindings. It turns out that our packages exclude them in the most violent way possible. This made me curious as to why, as AFAIK they are a high quality binding that exposes the Joy Of KDE to an untapped pool of developer talent. The reason is lack of obvious demand and anyone to test them. So I'd like to know, if we enable building the (stable) Qyoto bindings for C#, would you use them? Read More

I'm drinking my Saturday morning tea and looking back on a pretty crappy week. I was burning the candle at both ends to get various enterprise stuff finished in time, and didn't have enough energy to really enjoy FOSDEM. Here are the openSUSE devroom slides from FOSDEM 2009. Read More

I took a few pictures of KDE people and the area around the hotel most were staying in. Click for the rest: Read More

I'm nearly ready to move NetworkManager-kde4 to kdereview now, after a crazy week of rehashing the connection layer (the bit that writes your configured connections to KConfig (and optionally KWallet) into something that I actually want to support for a few years. Read More

I was going to make it "Konsole Tabs Are Session Managed Again" but it's a restored KDE 3 feature and all the kids know that commandline hacking is not cool. Read More

I'm a bit slow off the mark, but I was busy fixing a few last bugs in openSUSE 11.1 and entertaining krake. Today I noticed that Ars Technica have chosen openSUSE as one of the distributions of the year, with a special mention for the quality of our KDE environment. Thanks to my colleagues and the determined #opensuse-kde team, and here's hoping we can make KDE on openSUSE in 2009 even better! Read More

Those of you've been around desktop computers for a while know the calming effect of a simple desktop. One of the things I've missed is the ability to have a basic tiled pattern with user defined colours. So since I wanted to learn a bit more about Plasma wallpapers for another project, I rolled up my sleeves, had a look at the old kdesktop sources, and reimplemented it using the latest technologies. The result is in playground. Everything old is new again: Watch out, panel. You're next.

Here we are on the steps at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. From left to right: Igor Trindade Oliveira, Bertjan Broeksema, Stephen Kelly, Ingo Klöcker, Kevin Krammer, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause, Will Stephenson and Tom Albers. We had a very intense and productive couple of days filled with presentations, knowledge sharing and of course dawn till dusk hacking. As usual Volker, as the Akonadi visionary and lead, was mobbed by the rest of us with questions, which he answered with his trademark infinite patience and good explanations. Read More

Mostly convenience foods are fun but loaded with sugar and salt. But building software needn't be inconvenient or make your waistline or disk requirements start to bulge. I've been pushing the openSUSE Build Service to anyone in the KDE community who'll listen, since making tiny tweaks to existing codebases with minimum effort is exactly what it's designed to do. Read More

Back in May I blogged about the network management architecture in KDE 4. It's October now and I can't believe we still don't have a native NetworkManager frontend. But there's nothing like a imminent openSUSE release to focus my energies, and now we're a big step closer to having one. Read More

I just updated the Build Guide for KDE on openSUSE for 11.0, some fixes for recent package splits, and some better formatting. Unless you are or want to become a developer, our Build Service 4.1 Beta packages should be new enough for you - they are updated weekly. Read More

openSUSE 11.0 is out and with it are a set of KDE PIM (Personal Information Management) packages from KDE 4.1. This is part of the KDE 4 desktop choice and they have been extensively patched to work with the KDE 4.0.4 libraries on 11.0, and contain backports from KDE 4.1 trunk. They have been tested thanks to our devoted opensuse-kde community, but fixes are still happening in trunk so here's the skinny on what will happen via online update as we approach KDE 4.1: openSUSE 11.0 released with kdepim 4.1beta1 DONE post-gold-master online update containing selected critical bugfixes DONE. This fixes some ugly bugs (kde#153740, #156319, #156990, #158354, #162673, #162707, #162711, #162897, #163159, #163268, and #163408, and the infamous bnc#398807 Kontact plugins missing beastie - we like to take care of our users pre-4.1 update when we feel 4.1beta2 has settled down to be an improvement over the above. Update to 4.1 final upon release Read More

Today I took the plunge and merged the Solid network management infrastructure into KDE SVN trunk, where it will soon be released as part of KDE 4.1. Here's a summary of what it includes. Since what follows is Long, Save Planet[KDE|OpenSUSE] and read more for details. Read More

I'm at II Guademy 2008, the Spanish conference combining aspects of GUADEC and Akademy this weekend. I arrived yesterday, had lunch with my Novell colleagues Rodrigo Moya and Vincent Untz, then got straight into our presentations, which are a combined call for more cooperation and communication between the two Free desktop environments communities, leading to more effective sharing of data and infrastructure. Read More

I've just published the Building KDE on openSUSE guide over at the openSUSE wiki. It makes it insanely easy to build latest KDE 4.1 in a minimal number of steps, but the goal is not just to make it easy, but to give people the tools and the skills to go from just building KDE to developing it. If you're the type of person who always stays up to date with the latest alphas/betas, or are a Power Bug Reporter who wants to report bugs with full debug output and maybe try applying a patch from a developer or twiddle a few bits yourself, this is a way to get the freshest KDE 4 Plasma or Amarok around. Read More

Google have extended the Summer of Code 2008 student application deadline until April 7 so if you were busy last week or concerned your application wasn't good enough, now's your chance to get it in. Read More

Student? Love KDE and/or openSUSE? Want to get 0x1194 bucks for improving them? Then check out the openSUSE Google Summer of Code ideas page or suggest your own project. There are a number of projects listed already which would improve KDE on openSUSE and upstream. As well as getting paid, it's an opportunity to work on a real world project, and learn from the experience of some leading KDE and openSUSE developers. Read More

Some people already think we do a damn fine job packaging KDE at openSUSE. But we're just a few guys and we'd do it even better with your help. Tonight at 1900UTC we're having our latest openSUSE-KDE IRC meeting in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode and we'd love to see you there. This is addressed to anyone who uses KDE on openSUSE and values the way KDE works there, whether you just booted a KDE 4 Live CD or if you can remember KDE 1.1 on SuSE 6.4 and have your name on half of kdelibs. In return we value your attention, so we can tell you what's coming up, your feedback, so we do it right, and your time - if you can help us plan features or organise squashing our bugs or tell us about the things we overlook because we are used to them, KDE gets better. Read More

Over in Salt Lake City, Utah, Novell's BrainShare 2008 event is taking place. This is where the faithful come to see what's new and good in the big red N world every year, and what would be better to liven up a wintry landscape than a colourful talk about KDE 4? The KDE Team here at Novell have worked our KPats off all over KDE 4 to make it great and the Novell customer base deserve to know about it. So I put together a presentation to communicate the advantages of the brand new version of the other desktop on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and since 1839kg of CO2 is not to be sniffed at, got my colleagues Adrian Schroeter and Zonker who are big KDE fans and were already attending to present it. So the interested but not-a-techy introduction to KDE 4 can be found here (Novell login eg Build Service, forums or bugzilla required) along with a lot of other interesting stuff about what Novell does with Linux. Read More

I'll keep this short because my mental batteries are running a bit low. Yesterday Dirk, Cornelius and myself from SUSE travelled to Mountain View in California for the KDE 4 launch event at Google. So far we had BoFs on marketing, distributions (always fun), and now it's Plasma's turn. Apart from that we had a nice lunch - even if the food didn't quite satisfy all the hungry hacker appetites present. I've had fun meeting all the north american community members and hackers for the first time, spoken briefly on the phone to LugRadio with Aaron, and patched KUser to fix a bug the Slackware guys were experiencing. There's a nice vibe here, much like at aKademy, and to me the turnout proves that with good planning, it would be possible to hold an aKademy here in the future. Read More

The nice thing about a community event is the way it brings everyone together. I just gave a presentation to all my colleagues at the SUSE office here in Nuernberg on KDE 4.0, what it brings to the table and where it's going in the future. It was great to have our two largest meeting rooms joined together, with a capacity audience. For the last few weeks Dirk, Stephan, Lubos and I on the KDE Team have been working all the hours we can to add the final polish to 4.0 and to make sure the openSUSE packages of KDE 4.0 are the freshest and highest quality KDE binaries available. Read More

I decided a couple of weeks ago to sort System Settings out and here is the first result: I reworked the views using Qt4's InterView framework, reusing the KCategorizedView from Dolphin. This gives us a better quality view than the hard coded view used until now - item layout should work at large font sizes or high res displays. It will also make it much easier to improve the UI with custom delegates and category drawers in future - just by reusing code. I was able to chuck out a couple of classes entirely which will make System Settings easier to maintain. Read More

Not mine, but one Korneliusz Jarzebski (in Polish) has done the numbers (pro-linux coverage in German) and produced a chart showing exactly how the RAM consumption of comparable KDE4 and KDE3 sessions measure up. The result is a mindblowing 39% smaller memory footprint in KDE 4. This just goes to show, that it's worth making large-scale changes to your desktop environment to get the fruit hanging on the higher branches. Wait for the mini- and micro-optimisations to start happening in KDE 4.x, too. Read More

So someone just asked in #kde4-devel whether it was worth trying KDE 4 on a 2500Mhz/256Mb computer and I was characteristically careful and guessed "It will work, but won't be good.". Then I decided to put my money where my mouth is and booted my Thinkpad X60 with "mem=256M maxcpus=1", logged into KDE 4 and set the power saving policy to "Powersave", which throttles the CPU to 1Ghz and locks it there. And then I used KDE 4 some, started Konqueror, browsed about a bit, configured a few things with System Settings, started Kopete and chatted a little. And I was pleasantly surprised with how well it all works. With a "debugfull" build from SVN. With kwin_composite 3d eye candy, on Intel. With KDE 3 libraries loaded too (for KPowerSave, since it's not ported yet). As they like to say here in Franconia, it's like "a'Traum". Read More

[image:3123 align=left hspace=20 node=3123]One of the big things about KDE 4 at an app level was moving from KControl to System Settings. The major complaint about KDE (from non-KDE users) is that it is too configurable, where 'too' generally means they can't find the thing they want to configure. System Settings is the product of usability-led design, and kcontrol was dropped some months ago, but it seems very little has happened since it was ported to KDE 4. So rather than just give myself an ulcer about it, I've decided to take System Settings in hand and make it good. I started by fixing a couple of little bugs but as the size of the task became apparent I decided to organise System Settings' development and maintenance first. So spent today doing this. I've started a project on TechBase to: Read More

Today and tomorrow are the first openSUSE KDE/GNOME Packaging Days. In all timezones. A truly global event. One of the goals of openSUSE is to get SUSE packages in the care of non-Novell employees, so Dirk Mueller and Michael Wolf have been organising a couple of days where fearless peeps can get on board the openSUSE Build Service with a little help from the pros. Read More

So I'm doing a bit of hacking on Kopete and System Settings tonight and thought I would compile kdemultimedia for the first time in ages and see what KDE4 sounds like. And I'm pleasantly surprised. Sitting here listening to Crystal Castles and some random chiptunes from 8bitpeoples is a suitably retro techy soundtrack for the future of the desktop. Read More

As Cornelius blogged, this week the KDE people at SUSE are spending our hard-won innovation time on polishing KDE 4. The vast majority of our new development time is now allotted to KDE 4, so to make sure that our efforts go in the right direction and to coordinate them with the work the rest of the community, we'd like to announce an inaugural openSUSE KDE IRC meeting happening tomorrow, Wednesday 17 October, in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode, at 1800 CEST. That's 1700 BST, or 1200 EST or the same time of day as the openSUSE project meeting if you exist in the shadowy planes of hacker-time. The agenda so far is to discuss how to make KDE openSUSE 10.3++ the best ever, how you can contribute via the Build Service, and how to use KDE 4 already. Read More

So after 2 days of frantic hacking we made some good progress on Akonadi - including sorting out the database schemas with professional help for performance, producing benchmarking tools to find areas to improve in other layers, fixing MIME parser bugs, improving KMail in KDE 4.0 and KOrganizer's layouting. Read More

A couple of weeks ago we had the openSUSE hack week and at last it was the newly renamed KDE Team's turn to share our thoughts with the Novell Open Audio team. They're Novell's podcast unit, who travel the empire of the big red N finding what the company and its community are doing, record it then mix it all up with their idiosyncratic wit and what I've come to believe is the Novell rock anthem. So I jumped on the opportunity to tell our team's story, communicate everything that's possible with KDE on openSUSE, and highlight all the good things that KDE 4 will bring to the community distro and Novell's enterprise products. Tune in here. Read More

I'd like to inform you all of my tutorial on instant messaging development for Kopete (the KDE instant messenger), at 10.00am (huh?) on aKademy 2007's tutorial day. In an act of breathtaking opportunism I noticed that the no-one else has promoted their talk yet, so with a massive First Post!, be cognizant that both chat protocol and utility plugin development for the KDE 4 Kopete API will be presented to you, with lots of detail on the tricks and tips needed to make a useful extension to KDE's number one IM application. Read More

Something I read on aaron's blog just now struck a chord with me, and cut through my morning head haze nicely. We are the renaissance geeks. Some of the stuff we do is indescribably technical and abstract, but it all has the end of increasing general utility, that is, by letting people use their computers in ways that grow their happiness and productivity. Read More

With apologies to Public Enemy, but KDE has now got recognition of its usability, in that KDE 3 officially meets ISO 9241. We might not be the best at marketing it, but more and more people are finding out for themselves about KDE's goodness by picking it up themselves. Read More

The geeko is hungry, so for the past few days Coolo and I have been feeding it the carcasses of many of the more serious bugs in KMail. Our focus has been on online IMAP, as that has had the most egregious bugs in our opinion, but we're also after low-hanging fruit anywhere else in KMail. We're basically doing it because We Care A Lot, but we also want some tangible improvements in KDE 3.5 in openSUSE 10.3, besides all the KDE 4 work we're doing at the moment. The fixes are all going into 3.5 branch, of course, and are being ported to the enterprise branch and 3.5.5+, so rest-of-world benefits too. Read More

About an hour ago the Decibel hackathon in Darmstadt started. Hosted by Basyskom, this weekend brings together domain experts in instant messaging, VoIP, PIM data and contact management to create the real time communication infrastructure for KDE 4. At the moment we are all bringing each other up to speed on the state of each others' technologies. We're all very excited, and it's not just the coffee - stay tuned for updates. Read More

The NetworkManager backend for Solid in KDE 4 is ready to announce. Since writing the frontend in September I hadn't gotten round to making it useful, but after a lot of encouragement from ervin I picked up my tools again. Read More

I was feeling a bit poorly today so I decided to spend the day doing something fairly easy but productive and beneficial for openSUSE: re-familiarising myself with the Build Service by packaging some software. Read More

The recent couple of distro release posts on the Dot touch a nerve with me. One could say that publicity is all good - after all, don't we in KDE want the world to know how many quality distributions include KDE? Read More

Most of my development effort at Akademy this year has been on the network management part of Solid. I gave a talk on the present and future of KDE network management and this went pretty well. This year I learned not to even bring my laptop near a projector and used Aaron's instead. Before giving my talk I had been worried that the content was a bit obvious but I wanted to go through how to monitor and respond to changes in connectivity in KDE 3 and 4 so that app developers can give their users a better time when the network goes a way, so i just presented everything step by step and it was pretty well received. Read More

... your fridge contains less than the one at work. A couple of years ago, when I was new in Nuremberg, Adrian told me that most people at SUSE never eat at home, and some people who had newish flats still had the cellophane on the kitchen hardware and appliances. I laughed at the time, being a cook-it-yourself type of guy, but now, on my way to Akademy and making sure that nothing will go off, I realised that there was pretty much nothing to spoil there. So, in an obvious attempt to kickstart another geek blog meme, here's the contents of my fridge: Read More

Got into Trysil, Norway for KDE Four Core at 10pm and it was still sunny. Now (00:17) it's still quite light outside which is playing silly beggars with my head, I've lost the ability to speak German. Anyway, I'm here to work on Akonadi, Solid's networking support and any other jobs that come up. The team that the Technical Working Group have assembled here are a highly motivated group and we're going to work our socks off for eight days to get kdelibs to a position where the rest of the KDE community can pick it up and start to write KDE 4 apps without the rules changing every week. Read More

Since Licq got integrated with the rest of the KDE desktop using KIMIface (nice work Kevin), it's inspired me to make a couple more changes to improve our integration. Now it's easier to link IM contacts with people in your address book, and you can use your calendar to switch your IM presence. Read More

Everyone else is doing it so why can't we? Today Kopete jumped on the Hot New Stuff bandwagon by letting users fetch and install new emoticon themes from the Configure dialog. Read More