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. So from now on you'll find my blog at blog.cornelius-schumacher.de. See you there. 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. I'm happy to say that we accomplished this mission. 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. We have a lot of great proposals, more than we can fit into the schedule. So it's not easy to decide what we can take, and the co-hosting with GUADEC adds another dimension of complexity to this task. But we are on a good track, and we will have a fantastic program. Stay tuned... 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. See more details about what we are looking for in the call for presentations. Akademy is the prime occasion for meeting the community, and present and discuss your ideas. Lots of great initiatives were kick-started at Akademy. Don't miss out on this opportunity and submit your proposal now! 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. Daniel Bornkessel and me will show you how to create openSUSE based software appliances with just a few clicks. As special guests we will have Andrew Wafaa and Jordi Massaguer Pla at the talk. They will tell a bit about what they have done with Studio so far. 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 0.2. It's the second release. The first release was four years ago. It's interesting how tools and infrastructure have evolved since then. Today releasing software is almost fun. 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. Frank was here for the whole week and worked on the API and the opendesktop.org implementation of it. Sebastian joined us for two days and we had a lot of interesting and useful discussion how to put Nepomuk into the picture, Dirk started to write a Plasmoid for showing the activity log on the desktop, and Zack was here this morning giving us moral support and inspiration. We didn't completely realize the "Social Desktop" yet, but we laid some groundwork. The most visible result currently is this screenshot: 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. So I guess it would be doable without too much effort to implement a daily agenda viewer like this. Would be a fun project. 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.org). Frank Karlitschek has joined the fun and is at the SUSE offices for hackweek, so server and client implementations go hand in hand. The idea is to bring the community to the desktop and take benefit of the fact that free software projects are not only about software but also about community. This can provide a lot of extra value for our users, especially as the desktop is the place where all the social web data from different sites comes together and the user is in full control of what happens to the data and how it is combined. For some more background have a look at Frank's Akademy keynote. 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.V. and the GNOME Foudation we have settled on the Gran Canaria bid for holding Akademy and GUADEC as co-hosted event in 2009. 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.net/thumb/wrdl/49578/Planet_SUSE" style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd" ></a> 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. So speaker notification will be delayed by something like a week. 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. Yesterday Till talked about Kontact, which now runs on all platforms including Windows. Liquidat has screenshots, or check it out live at the BSI booth. Another fascinating project I saw is the Open Bicycle Computer, a bike computer built from scratch as open project. 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. It's a fascinating job, challenging, fun, and always exciting. For somebody like me who loves to create new things and enjoys working with an awesome team of innovative people this is a dream job. 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. I remember well when I drew the first version of the Akonadi architecture on the whiteboard at the Osnabrück 4 meeting more than two years ago. The round shapes made it hard to put it in digital form, though. So after taking a tour through the drawing applications of the free software world without lasting success, I decided to write a program to create the diagram. When I saw the Akonadi logo contest and some of the submissions there, I thought it would be great to have a three dimensional version of the architecture diagram, and now Nuno and Thomas just did that. Wonderful! 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. Have a look at the Call for Presentations and submit your talk now. 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. There is a lot of interest in KDE and people are generally excited and looking forward what we will bring to them with the KDE 4 series. If you are interested have a look at the slides of the KDE 4 talk (in German). 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. If you want to help to show KDE to a broad variety of visitors there, don't hesitate to contact kde-events@kde.org. It's interesting, it's fun, and it's a great help for KDE. The KDE e.V. is able to help with travel costs if needed. 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? Show it to us, apply for a job as software developer". That sounds like the commercial version of "Send a patch". 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. This box contains all kind of Half-Life 2 stuff including the new Episode Two and the very promising looking game "Portal". But boy was I wrong. This was one of the worst buys I ever made. 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. 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. Michael Lentner did the right thing and sent a patch. I applied it and suddenly the agenda items look much more slick. 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. I'm pretty much convinced now that we are on track with KDE 4. There certainly still is some way ahead, but we are getting there. This will be an exciting release. Of course I'm writing this blog entry on a KDE 4 desktop. 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. One of my favorites are the dockable toolbars. I could move them around all day and watch the smooth sliding in effects. 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. Some of the KDAB folks were attracted by this idea as well and will also chime in and do some serious KDE 4 hacking. So hopefully we will have a well-working KDE PIM in KDE 4. It certainly will be a fun week! 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. I really enjoyed reading it. His concept of locative art is fascinating (and I want a magnetically elevated bed as well ;-)). 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. I particularly like these because they show that you have great users and they often also are a sign that you took some right design decisions. 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. 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 4.3, which was released less than two months ago. Today I used these classes for the first time and was delighted. This is the first XML API which lives up to the high standard of Qt. 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. 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. There is some existing code, but it only barely works. Improving this code to become useful for a wide range of schemas and applications would be a great project. The proposed XML based KOrganier holiday description format provides a nice benchmark for this. The code is used in KDE, but it's pretty much self-contained, so working on it will mainly require solid C++ knowledge. kxml_compiler is part of the Kode suite. 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. I like working this way. 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". The intention is to present some of the tools we have created with the openSUSE Build Service which make packaging of software much more fun than it was before. 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. When I told Adriaan about the news entry on the KOrganizer web page from almost seven years ago that reported about me becoming KOrganizer maintainer, he quickly put on his SVN statistics guru hat and digged up some interesting numbers. Boy are we a bunch of oldtimers. 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. As always the meeting is hosted by Intevation. Many thanks to them for doing this for five years in a row. It always has been great. 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. The mission: "The idea is to create a GUI for an ENDUSER. Somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux, write some letters and play some nice games." Ten years later we have grown an amazing community of hundreds of developers and millions of users which made big parts of Matthias' original vision become reality. 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. Previously this wasn't possible because the event loops of the KDE plugin and the frontend got in conflict, when running in the same process. With a new architecture which allows to run plugins in separate processes communicating with the sync engine via an IPC protocol, OpenSync solves this problem. This work was started at the OpenSync meeting in Amsterdam earlier this year and now finally completed and released. Congratulations! 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. So here are some of my personal highlights of aKademy, all in one. 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. On top of that it's the biggest gathering of the KDE community this year. Amazingly this always feels like meeting old friends, even if you know most of the people only per email or not at all. I'm really looking forward to it. 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. Anyway, there are some exciting things I wanted to write about, so I'm blogging single-handedly now. 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. We presented a first preview at FOSDEM. At the Linuxtag 2006, which takes place later this week in Wiesbaden, we will show the current state. On Thursday, May 4th, there is a complete openSUSE track. I will give a talk about the Build Service architecture. You are invited. Don't miss the opportunity to learn about this exciting project. 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. I mentored three projects and it certainly was a great and enjoyable experience, so I will be a mentor again this year. 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. It was a nice surprise when I noticed on the kde-commits mailing list, that Eva also was heavily committing code working on Konqueror/Embedded. Five minutes before midnight Aaron joined the fun with a Kicker patch. Huzzah! We are back to the roots. The board is still coding. 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 3.5.1 is available in the incredible number of 63 languages. 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. If there ever was a killer application for a programming language, here it is. Three examples for amazing Ruby adoption: 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. The concept of immediately applying all changes you do in dialogs to the document is much more intuitive than having a complex "ok, apply, cancel" mechanism. The context-sensitive hints about the meaning of mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts in the statusbar also are really helpful. They remind me of a similar feature of XFig which still is my favorite vector drawing application. But I guess Inkscape is catching up. 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. Armin and Tobias were busy with implementing out-of-process plugins for OpenSync which finally allows to seamlessly sync KDE and which also is needed for applications like the ones from the Mozilla family. I did some polishing on the GUI frontend side and implemented a first version of a D-BUS frontend for OpenSync. 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. So I decided to dig into the press archives, collect the numbers and do the math. Here are the results: 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. We came up with an architecture for Akonadi, the PIM Storage Service for KDE 4 and also discussed a lot of API issues today. We all have the feeling that we really made the step which makes it possible for us to create a backend for the PIM apps which allows us to solve many of the problems we couldn't solve with the old one and to implement some new cool features. Without this meeting I'm not sure we would have achieved that. It's amazing how satisfying and successful teamwork can be. I love this community. 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. During this process we also came up with a mission statement and a name for the project: 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. Bicycling is only mildly fun because it gets your fingers, toes and ears frozen, but all in all I like this time of the year. Dark evenings at home provide the opportunity to do some of the things you always wanted to do. In my case that's finishing some tasks I accepted as board member of the KDE e.V., continuing on establishing OpenSync as the one unified syncing solution for the Linux desktop and preparing to get back into KDE PIM coding. This all is promising to be some fun :-) 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. Exactly this was my feeling when I realized that it was a realistic opportunity for KDE to join efforts with OpenSync. Solving the problem of syncing data between desktops, applications and mobile devices once and for all suddenly became a reachable goal. The path to the one unified syncing solution for the Linux desktop lay clear ahead. 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. KDevelop is competing with GCC and Eclipse in the development tool category. Kate runs with Vim and Emacs for the best text editor. Kontact is nominated with LaTex and OpenOffice.org for the office award. That shows again that KDE is not only a nicely integrated desktop, but also provides a fantastic environment to create world-class software projects. The final round closes 28 July 2005. Vote now! 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. We were sceptical, because it was all vaporware back then and the plans were, well, ambitious. But now with Kolab 2 we actually have a solid all Free Software groupware solution with full KDE client support through Kontact and even KDE as a project has begun to use it. 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. It was exciting and fun to make the applications work with the new libraries, quite similar to what's now going on with KDE 4. Energizing :-) 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 4.0. So here it comes. It's a long list and if I do it all myself it will keep me busy for years. So if you want to help or pick something up, please contact me, you are very welcome. 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. With initiatives as OpenUsability or APPEAL it gets more and more focus and we have structures in place which enable us to actually succeed in making KDE the most usable desktop one can imagine. 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. The first stop is Berlin. Here is a sneak-peak. The full set can be found on kde-look. By the way, all photos are real. 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. This time it's different. It's quiet. It's the silence before the storm. I know that there is new and interesting code around, but it doesn't seem to find its way into the main development line yet. So what's going on? 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. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you. The result: "To a novelist, there is no such thing as a 'good' sentence.". Can you guess, which book this was? 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. Other than that I'm serious, Jamie's lesson is one of the most focused contributions about software development I have ever read. 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. They are popular on the Usenet and when reading mailing lists it's fun to see who sends these X-Faces with which mails. In KMail it looks like this: That's refreshingly old school. It reminds me of the 80's when I did strange things like spending time on drawing pictures on checkered paper, converting them (of course manually) to hex codes and typing the results into a BASIC program on the C64 for finally showing them as sprites on the screen. In KMail it's naturally a bit easier to create an X-Face header. Just go to the configuration dialog, select an identity and activate the "Picture" tab. There you can specify a picture which is converted to an X-Face header: If you prefer to do it the 80's way you can also type in something like that: 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. The day before the freeze saw some frantic activity of people to complete their last-minute feature or to sneak in the messages required for fixing certain bugs. On the kdepim front we got a new Kontact welcome screen and were able to break compilation because of our wicked intra-module dependencies. 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.org", try "www.kde.org", try "help", try "logout", "gg:sin 5 ", "leo:warzenschwein" or "ggi:warthog". 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. Interesting. The first hit was Slashdot, the second one Amazon, then me and then lots of book sellers. The original "A Treatise of the System of the World" by Isaac Newton was something like number 33. 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. It feels good to know that two and a half kilograms of words are still ahead. 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. I would like to respond to them: 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. Sometimes he is completely wrong, though. 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. I think it would be very interesting to give people doing bug reports of high quality bug more credit for their contribution by introducing something like a list of the top ten bug reporters. Maybe this could give bug reporters an incentive to make better bug reports. 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. Take a look, update to the latest version and enjoy the hypnotizing effect of watching colored bubbles. 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. At some time a guy waiting at a table nearby for another flight came to me and asked if I would be a KDE developer. I was surprised. It turned out that he was a greek translator and recognized me because of the KDE logo on my bag. It's amazing that the KDE community now seems to be big enough so that you can meet KDE people by accident at some random place in the world. The project world domination seems to proceed well ;-) 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. Ten hours later I was standing at the place where Enoch the Red watches Jack Ketch doing his job. 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. But it was fun and still is. 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 1.0 which is as stable as possible. If you want to become part of this venture you can join us on IRC and help with reviewing bug reports, creating patches, testing fixes or generally cheering up the developers. 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. Have a look by yourself and enjoy the hypnotic effect of looking at colored bubbles. You will perceive compilation as faster than ever before ;-) 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 3.1. 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.org. On Tuesday we got KDEPIM on Mac. Wednesday brought integration of native KDE widgets in OpenOffice. On Thursday we saw a nice interview about Qt styles for Gtk apps and the announcement of KDE ioslaves for FUSE which basically means that they are now accessible by any non-KDE program, OpenOffice only being one of them. On Friday Zack released his QtGtk library which allows to use all the fancy stuff of KDE like the file dialogs or DCOP in Gtk apps. KDE seems to become the integrative desktop. That's good news. Let's see what will happen on the weekend... 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. This doesn't sound too impressive, but we were able to address some of the remaining major problems, so all in all it was a success and not to forget it also was fun. 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. So we imported KAlarm into the KDE CVS and David did a great job implementing the code needed for sharing the daemon. The result was that we had a new application and the shared daemon in KDE 3.0. So far so good... 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. Ok, now it finally works. I was always reluctant to address this issue, because it would have meant to implement in-line editing for events. Other organizers have this and it's confusing as hell, because it means that an event can exist in different modi and it's not obvious how to switch between the modi, how to switch an event that is being edited into a state where it can be moved by the mouse or where it just is selected etc. Other problems with in-line editing are that many events are so small that the line edit would only have room for a couple of characters and that it adds a lot of complexity to the implementation of the event widgets. We discussed this issue in Nove Hrady a couple of times. The relevantive usability study addressed this issue and some people had suggestions. So on the last day I decided to finally give it a try and try to come up with something which would solve the problem. The result is not in-line editing but type-ahead support for the event editor. When the user starts typing in the agenda view, an event editor gets opened and all the typed text is forwarded to the summary line edit. This way it's very easy to add new events, but it avoids the problems of in-line editing. I'm sure there will be people who dislike this behaviour, but after using it for a couple of days I have to say I'm quite satisfied with it. So finally bug 5241 got fixed. 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. After having sunshine all the days before it begin raining tonight. Seems like it's time to go home. Many people already have left and I'm going back to Germany with the KDE tour bus tomorrow morning. We accomplished a lot of things here. The KDE e.V. membership meeting finally managed to pass the new bylaws, we had a great conference with lots of interesting talks (The highlight certainly was Kalles talk about KDE history with lots of funny and some embarassing pictures) and we had lots of time for hacking, discussing and having fun. One very nice thing is that there were lots of kdepim developers here. The applications and also the developers are moving closer together. This gives kdepim an increasingly strong identity. Even Don and Marc got well along. There is not much reason left for conflicts. That's not surprising. Beer diplomacy works. Kontact is progressing. I integrated KitchenSync and fixed the about dialog with help from Simon. KOrganizer now provides its configuration as KCModules which can be included in the common Kontact configuration dialog. Matthias was ferociously hacking on KConfigureDialog which will automatically integrate all the config modules for Kontact including plugin configuration. It will also serve as a convenient way for other applications to provide a configuratin dialog. David worked on the toolbar problems and Tobias did a lot of work on libkabc and KAddressBook. Reinhold reorganized the KOrganizer printing support and the KMail guys got some improvements and bug fixes into KMail. There still are some issues, but most of them are solvable before the 3.2 release. The biggest problem currently is that the kroupware branch still isn't merged into HEAD. I hope that Bo will take this over and integrate the missing code, so that Kontact will become a fully usable client to Martins Kolab server. As a fallback we still have the option to make a separate kdepim release after 3.2 when the merge is finished. I also spent a lot of time on KitchenSync. Lots of cleanups, integration into Kontact, a new backup/restore part, bugfixes and now I'm trying to get the Qtopia Konnector to work again. But I'm still not sure if KitchenSync will be ready for 3.2 release. Let's see what the next few weeks bring. Josef hacked on KNewStuff and I talked with Frank about providing some of the cool stuff on www.kde-look.org via the "Get Hot New Stuff" feature. This also seems to work out well. Now I'm tired. Thanks to all the people organizing this event and all the KDE contributors who were here and made this meeting such a great success. See you next year :-) 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. This includes an automatically generated API to the configurations options for convenient access by the application, it will support all the fancy config stuff like immutable entries etc., and it provides a configuration dialog to edit the options without needing to write any additional code. The best thing: It will be incredibly simple for a developer to use this. Drop the XML description of the configuration options into the source code directory, add custom code, if necessary, and you are done. You will get the configuration dialog for your application for free. It also fits very nicely into the Qt/KDE framework along the lines of XML-GUI and uic. cfgc (the configuration compiler) will be for configuration what uic is for user interface. Maybe it might even make sense to add a configuration designer to provide a GUI for editing the configuration descriptions. Let's see... 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). I tried the new version and the new features and immediately liked it. That makes NEdit the perfect editor for me. Congratulations to the NEdit team for this marvelous job. See the NEdit homepage for details.

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 ;-). Now I just have to unbreak libkcal. Seems like my 200k patch from yesterday broke recurring events... 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... What I like about www.kdedevelopers.org is that there is a native client (at least there is the start of a native client). Web interfaces suck, but with KBlog this could become fun... Read More