cornelius schumacher 

I finally decided to move my blog. kdedevelopers.org has served me well, but now I want some more features. Blogger provides some killer features, such as using my own domain, blogging by email, or the powerful comment system. Read More

Two days of KDE Wiki Meeting are over. Danimo, Frank, Lydia, Dominik, Milian, Thorsten and me met in Berlin with the goal to get some more structure into the KDE Wikis and provide a plan for the future, where to put content. Read More

The next three weeks will be pretty busy. I'm looking forward to three exciting events which will take place during this time, and I'm happy to be able to attend them. Read More

Marble is one of my favorite applications. I especially like it in combination with OpenStreetmap. Free software and free maps, a brilliant combination. But I also love the historical map or the moon view. Read More

The Akademy program is almost done. Speaker notification deadline was yesterday, but we are still busy sorting out some last details and haven't sent notifications yet. Please bear with us and have a bit more patience. Read More

There are still five days left to submit a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2009. The deadline is on Friday, April 10th. Akademy happens as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this year. Read More

I'm doing my last preparations for FOSDEM right now. Together with the other SUSE guys I will go to Brussels later today. On Saturday at 17:00 there will be a presentation about SUSE Studio in the openSUSE Track. Read More

I'm developing and maintaining a small application called Plutimikation for my daughters. It's a math learning game for children. Today I did a release of the current state as Plutimikation 0. Read More

It's Friday now and hackweek comes to an end for me. It was exceptionally fun and we got some decent work done. The team was fabulous, a combination of SUSE and external community guys. Read More

While browsing through kde-look.org I found a cool idea for visualizing a daily agenda. This reminds me of the Akonadi architecture diagram and I even have code (probably not up to date) for drawing this kind of diagrams. Read More

This week is hackweek at SUSE and people are frantically hacking on all kind of stuff. Fun. My project is the Social Desktop, which is the buzzwordy title for an implementation of the Open Collaboration Services API (see specification on freedesktop. Read More

When thinking about how to implement a client for the Open Collaboration Services API which Frank presented at this year's Akademy keynote I came across the question of how to generally access a REST web service on a client. Read More

It has been a tough decision, because we had three awesome proposals, but after a period of getting feedback from the community and some conversations between the boards of the KDE e. Read More

Two great pictures brought to you by Wordle in combination with my blog and Planet SUSE. <a href="http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/49581/My_Blog" title="Wordle: My Blog"><img src="http://wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/49581/My_Blog" style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd" ></a> <a href="http://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/49578/Planet_SUSE" title="Wordle: Planet SUSE"><img src="http://wordle. Read More

Today I'm writing in my role as a member of the program committee for the Akademy 2008 Contributor's Conference. We have received a lot of great proposals for presentations and are still in the process of selecting and assembling a program. Read More

LinuxTag is a blast. I'm here for the third day, have met a lot of fantastic people, listened to great talks, and had a lot of fun. On Wednesday there was Aaron's KDE 4 keynote, where he also showed the tremendously exciting Marble with OpenStreetMap integration. Read More

At SUSE I work in the incubation team. We are exploring new technologies, creating prototypes of future systems, and trying to find and shape some of the features that will be part of upcoming SUSE products and the ecosystem around that. Read More

[image:3467 align=left hspace=16 vspace=5 size="original"] Akonadi is hot. I completely realized that when I saw the fantastic submission by Nuno and Thomas for the Akonadi logo contest. This logo captures the essence of the Akonadi architecture in a very beautiful way. Read More

Yesterday was a busy day on the akademy-talks mailing list. Proposals were rolling in constantly. This is because today is the deadline for submissions of presentations for Akademy 2008. So you still have a chance. Read More

Last weekend I visited the seventh Linux info day at Augsburg, organized by the local Linux User Group and held a talk about KDE 4. It was a nice event and the talk was well received. Read More

As Franz already wrote there are a couple of exciting free software events coming up. From March 4th to 9th there is CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade show. KDE will have a booth there. Read More

I saw a nice form of recruiting software developers on web.de today. On the page which appears when an error on the server occurs they have a box saying "This wouldn't happened to us with you? Read More

From time to time I get overwhelmed by my passion for computer games and I buy a game which promises to be fun. So it happened a few weeks ago when I saw a special offer of Valve's "The Orange Box" in the local electronics store. Read More

Today the final version of the openSUSE Guiding Principles has been announced. The Guiding Principles describe what drives the openSUSE project, our identity, our goals and our values. It has been a long process to create this document. Read More

I was surprised to get so much feedback about the KOrganizer agenda items after I posted the screenshots in my last blog entries. There seem to be some strong opinions about rounded corners. Read More

It has been a fun week. Sitting together with Andre, Daniel, Dirk, Jared, Klaas, Stephan and Will in the openSUSE office and hacking on KDE 4. There was one point in time when seven of ten KDE commits where coming from this office. Read More

Hacking on KDE 4 is fun. There is so much goodness in the development platform. This begins with all the nice stuff Qt brings, little things like the addictive foreach, the beautiful API, or the amazing performance, and big things like the rich-text system Scribe or the model-view framework Interview. Read More

This week is KDE 4 hack week for me and some other colleagues at SUSE. We have thrown in some of our ITO time (that's a certain fraction of our work time we can flexibly spend on innovative projects which aren't necessarily related to our day-to-day jobs) to help making KDE 4 ready for release before the total release freeze comes into effect on Friday. Read More

As Aaron is reading Spook Country I also wanted to chime in with some Gibsoness. I finished Spook Country, the latest novel of William Gibson, a couple of weeks ago. It's a very stylish work of art with lots of amazingly sharp ideas. Read More

One of the nice aspects of being a software developer is that sometimes users come up with using your software in creative ways you never have thought of. They discover surprise features. Read More

A few days ago a kind soul reminded me of kandy.kde.org, the ancient home page of Kandy, an application to sync mobile phones I wrote six years ago. [image:2942 size=original hspace=100] Read More

One should think that reading and writing XML are solved problems. But interestingly there still is heavy development going on in this area. So Trolltech includes their new QXmlStreamReader and QXmlStreamWriter classes since Qt 4. Read More

This week is Hack Week at Novell. All the Linux engineers are hacking along on their favorite projects. There is an incredibly long list of great ideas on idea.opensuse.org. I'm working on some kind of fancy aggregating portal. Read More

I just added a proposal for an interesting project to KDE's Summer of Code Ideas page. It's about kxml_compiler, a tool to automatically generate C++ code for parsing XML data from XML schemas. Read More

Provo I'm at the Novell office in Provo this week. We are having some pretty productive meetings here. The conference room we use is impressive. It's on the fifth floor and has an amazing view on the mountains. Read More

Only a few hours left until FOSDEM starts. I'm about to leave for the airport to fly to Brussels together with the rest of the SUSE crew. There will be an openSUSE developer room and I will be speaking on Saturday afternoon about "Packging made easy". Read More

I was doing a bit of historical work today. While moving the content of the old KOrganizer home page to the Kontact web site I came across all kinds of interesting stuff of the past which I had completely forgotten. Read More

It's the fifth time that I'm at Osnabrueck, always for the same reason, the KDE PIM meeting we hold each January since 2003. So now it's the fifth meeting and that's a small anniversary. Read More

It's party time. Today we celebrate the tenth birthday of KDE. It all started with the famous post by Matthias Ettrich on October 14th 1996 calling for programmers to create a piece of free software he called KDE. Read More

This summer was a good summer for syncing. A couple of days ago the OpenSync project released their version 0.19 which now finally is able to sync the KDE desktop data also when using the KDE frontend KitchenSync. Read More

In two hours aKademy will be over for me. I'm going to head back for Germany. The last week was truly awsome. I had planned to blog a bit, but there was so much exciting stuff happening, that I didn't find any time to actually do so. Read More

I'm done with packing. Tomorrow early morning I will leave for Dublin for aKademy 2006. It promises to be an awesome event. We have an excellent program</>, fantastic speakers and a full week of BoFs and hacking. Read More

I wrecked my wrist nine days ago. My doctor says I will be able to use it again in a week. Hope he is right. I would cross my fingers, if it wouldn't hurt so much. Read More

The last couple of months I have worked on the openSUSE Build Service. The goal of the Build Service is to make it dead easy for developers to provide installable packages of their software on a broad variety of distributions. Read More

Aaron took on his asbestos suite and made a case for Python as a VisualBasic replacement for the free desktop. Ok, let's give him some fire and play the "my language is better than yours" game. Read More

KDE is again participating in Google's Summer of Code. We did this last year and got 24 exciting projects running. They had all kinds of results, from widely successfull over interesting concept to mild failure. Read More

Today apparently was board-gets-back-to-coding day. Since I was elected into the board of the KDE e.V. last summer in Malaga most of my KDE time is eaten by non-coding jobs. But today I had one of my productive days and got a lot of done on kxml_compiler and kxforms. Read More

The first big thing today was the release of KDE 3.5.1, made possible by the hundreds of dedicated contributors which make up the wonderful KDE community. Especially the translators did some great work, so KDE 3. Read More

Ruby is rolling. It's amazing how much enthusiasm it accumulates. There seems to be a broad movement of people exploring Ruby, using it and getting addicted. Especially because there is Rails. Read More

After spending some time with Inkscape I came up with a computerized version of our nice Akonadi architecture diagram. Inkscape is a great tool. It crashed once and I wasn't able to figure out how to put text on an arc path in a way that is also readable when the arc is upside down, but other than that I really enjoyed working with it. Read More

It's the last day of the OpenSync meeting in Amsterdam. Our fantastic organizing and press squad, Fab and Frank, have already spread the word. It has been a productive weekend. Lots of code got written. Read More

I'm here at the OpenSync meeting in Amsterdam and we were talking about when KDE 4 might be released. We discussed how long it took for previous Qt releases to be adapted by KDE, but didn't really get the dates together. Read More

Last day of the Osnabrück meeting. Some people already have left and I'm also about to catch my train back to home. The meeting once again was great, fun and productive. Read More

We are making progress here in Osnabrück at the KDE PIM meeting. We had lots of interesting discussions yesterday, throwing around crazy ideas and collecting all kind of requirements for the new PIM Storage Service. Read More

Today starts the KDE PIM meeting at Osnabrück. It has become a real tradition. We are now meeting for the fourth year in a row on the first January weekend. Read More

It's getting winter here. I drank my second "Glühwein" today and the day after tomorrow the "Christkindlesmarkt" at Nürnberg will open, one of the most famous Christmas markets on the world. Read More

Most people have lots of different ideas during the day. Some are good ones, some are, well, not so good. But sometimes you realize that one of your ideas was special, just the right thing at the right time. Read More

The final round of voting for the 2005 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards has begun. KDE is nominated in no less than eight categories. What I especially like is that individual KDE application are nominated together with the top open source projects. Read More

Today the second generation of the Kolab groupware solution was released. It's incredible how far this project has come. I still remember when Martin Konold first told us about his ideas about "How to escape from the Outlook trap" at Linuxtag three years ago. Read More

Today is the sixth anniversary of my first KDE patch. I was a fix for the development version of KOrganizer which made it not crash on startup. This was during the time of porting to KDE 2. Read More

A while ago I blogged my thoughts about future KDE releases. I promised to post the list of some of the things I have in mind for KDE 3.5 and 4. Read More

Usability is one of my favorite buzzwords. It sounds great, people get emotional about it and it even has some real meaning. In addition to that it's a very interesting area to work on in KDE. Read More

KDE is used all over the world. We have a truly international community. Our desktop is translated to 79 languages. KDE is everywhere. To express this better I thought it would be nice to put our beautiful new logo on a voyage throughout the world. Read More

It's interesting to observe KDE development these days. Since the 3.4 code was branched from the main line, the repository is open for new development again. For past releases this meant committing frenzy with new features flying in, development branches being merged and all the creativity bound by the feature freeze breaking loose. Read More

Found on Planet GNOME: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 123. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Read More

If you want to learn something about developing software look at Jamie Zawinskis funny story about Hula. I know I'm not the first one to reference Jamies blog and I'm also not the first one to mention Hula, but I still have the hope that I will get a bunch of flowers and a voucher for three free downloads for being the one millionth. Read More

One of the cool features of KMail I discovered while running the current development branch is the support for X-Faces. These are small black-and-white pictures which are sent in the mail header. Read More

It's getting colder. KDE CVS now is in deep freeze for 3.4 beta 2. All messages are frozen so that translators can start to strive for the perfect translation in 79 languages. Read More

It's cold. Fortunately I rediscovered my tiger boots.

Over Christmas I wrote a new recipients editor for the KMail composer: [image:808] The old one was really annoying because of two big problems: First, when having multiple recipients the line edit used for the To/CC/BCC fields wasn't really suitable because it only showed a part of them and when trying to get an overview about who gets the mail, you had to scroll around a lot with the cursor keys. Read More

It's a strange day in a strange world. But it's nice to see that the Linux desktop seems to be able to adapt to this strangeness by some means or other. Read More

Most KDE users probably know what pressing ALT and F2 does, it's opening the "Run Command" dialog. But did you also know that this little dialog can do magic? Try "2+2 ", try "schumacher@kde. Read More

A few days ago I wrote that I got my copy of The System of the World, the latest book by Neal Stephenson. Yesterday I searched for the "The System of the World" on Google and learned to my surprise that the link to my blog entry was the 3rd top hit. Read More

Today I received The System of the World which makes my Neal Stephenson collection complete again and me a happy guy. I just have finished Quicksilver and am about to start to read The Confusion. Read More

Meta-Programming is becoming an increasingly important part of my life as a software developer. It's a fascinating way to take programming to a new and higher level. Ian has blogged some thoughts about Meta-Programming. Read More

Many software developers stumble over the "Joel On Software" columns at some time and like them. Sure, Joel was a Microsoft employee and he develops proprietary software, but still his columns are inspiring and fun to read. Read More

One morning at the youth hostel during aKademy I had an interesting conversation with Eric Laffoon. He told me about an idea to give more credit to bug reporters. Right now there is a statistic for the most active bug closers, but for bug reporters there isn't such a thing. Read More

This week at aKademy I asked Reinhold if he would be willing to take over the maintainership of KOrganizer and he said yes. So now after five years of being the KOrganizer maintainer I pass the torch to Reinhold. Read More

Here at aKademy Icecream is an essential tool. Compiling is just so much more fun when it takes no time. Today I finally managed to find the time do to some coding and implemented the long-outstanding feature of properly colored job halos in the star view. Read More

The conference is over. We had a lot of good talks. It was interesting and it was fun. Now we are heading for the coding marathon and the evening promises that this will be even more fun. Read More

A couple of weeks ago I was waiting at the Frankfurt airport for a connection flight to Nürnberg. I had three hours to wait and so I was sitting at the gate hacking on Plutimikation. Read More

When going to Boston for the USENIX conference I started to read Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson in the plane from Frankfurt to Boston. I didn't know much about about the setting of the book, so it came as a surprise that the book starts with the execution of a woman at the Boston Common. Read More

The last months have been a busy time. Some special things like the USENIX conference, the KDE Free Qt Foundation agreement, the final phase of the KDE 3.3 release cycle or the preparations for the upcoming KDE conference aKademy took a considerable amount of my time in addition to the usual having a job and a family. Read More

We will have our second Kontact Bug Squashing Day on Sunday 25th July. As CVS is feature and message frozen for the 3.3 release we are all in bug-fixing mode and want to intensify our efforts to get a Kontact 1. Read More

I'm experimenting with KBlog. I have no idea if this will work, post embarrassing texts or delete all my data. But it's worth a try. It at least looks like it could once become a useful tool. Read More

I just discovered Planet KDE and immediately got addicted. Planet GNOME was one of my favorite readings on the web the last months, but I think I have to switch now. Read More

While compiling KDE once again I found some time to work a little bit on icecream and revived Frerichs star view. This is a cool thingy, especially when there are many hosts, where the 'gantt' view reaches its limits. Read More

What's up with freedesktop.org? Daniel says KDE people don't care about it, Ian says we have to abandon it. I say let's embrace it and make it what it's meant to be, a common building block for all desktops, KDE, GNOME and whatever else. Read More

We are approaching the 3.2 release. That's exciting. I just collected what's new in KOrganizer for 3.2 and was impressed. I didn't remember that it was so much cool stuff we implemented in the year it took since KDE 3. Read More

This week brought a couple of new exciting things to KDE. Having a closer look at what was announced these days I'm pretty amazed. It started with kde-apps.org on Monday, the followup to the highly popular kde-look. Read More

On Sunday we held the first Kontact Bug Squashing Day. A couple of core developers met on IRC and tried to fix some Kontact bugs. We started with 431 open bug reports (Summing up the reports of kontact, kaddressbook, kmail, knode, knotes and korganizer) and ended with 419 open bug reports. Read More

Some time before KDE 3.0 David Jarvie, the author of KAlarm, asked me some questions about the KOrganizer alarm daemon. I answered that it would be a great thing, if KOrganizer and KAlarm could share the same daemon, because I thought that by eliminating redundancies development would become easier and we could use our development resources more efficient. Read More

Today I fixed the oldest KOrganizer bug which was in the bug tracking system. The report was more than three years old. It was about the "awkward implementation of the 'add event' use case" and said that it should be possible to select a time range with the mouse and then create the event by just typing the summary. Read More

This evening there was a great firework directly in front of the castle in Nove Hrady where we are sitting and hacking. That's a stylish ending for a great week at a stylish location. Read More

kdepim/libkdepim - (KDE CVS Commits) This is going to be something really cool. I now have an example configuration dialog which is automatically generated from an XML description of the configuration options. Read More

Hooray, there is a new NEdit release! Today the first release candidate of NEdit 5.4 was announced. There were three features I was missing from NEdit up to now: Start scrolling before the cursor has reached the end of the screen to make sure you always have the overview of a few lines in advance An option to show whitespace at the end of lines Hiding the mouse pointer when you start typing All these features are implemented now (and a couple more). Read More

Keep a smile :-) ;-) :-( :-P on your face ;- )

Tim Jansen has committed the new look for KOrganizer's agenda view (Screenshot). This is a big improvement. People were complaining from time to time about the "boring" look of KOrganizer. Now they don't have a reason for that anymore (Well, I'm sure somebody will come up with another reason to complain ;-). Read More

After reading the announcement on the dot, compiling kblog and creating an account, I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog myself. Let's see if anybody reads it. Read More