Zogje 

Who doesn't want to enjoy the good things in life longer? I'm talking of course about the battery life in your laptop. Intel released PowerTOP this week, a power monitoring tool for Linux. PowerTOP helps you identify which processes on your system keep your processor from going to deeper sleep states. Deeper sleep states consume less power and make your battery charge last longer. Visit www.linuxpowertop.org and give it a try! Read More

...finally. And no, I'm not talking about their dealings with Novell. Last month Microsoft finally figured out how to work with open standards: Microsoft enhances Interoperability with Ecma Office Open XML Formats (Oct 25, 2006) Microsoft is applying the Open Specification Promise (OSP) to Ecma Office Open XML to further enable the implementation of these document formats, by anyone, forever. Microsoft already offered an irrevocable covenant not to sue (CNS) to anyone wishing to implement the formats, and now implementers have the option to use the OSP or the CNS. Read More

Those of you who are tired of battling with binary graphic driver blobs will be pleased to learn about Keith Packard's announcement today. The Intel® 965 Express Chipset represents the first product family that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset family includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. By open sourcing the drivers for this new technology, Intel enables the open source community to experiment, develop, and contribute to the continuing advancement of open source 3D graphics. Read More

Last month I complained about Apache refusing to support OpenDocument. It seems there is progress in this area now that Eben Moglen published a legal opinion on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation giving OpenDocument a clean bill of legal health. Read More

Ola! So my return from GUADEC got shorted when the Seniorita at the Delta-air check-in counter looked at my passport and wondered why the laminated picture-ID part wasn't attached to the rest of the thing. I wondered along with her. Apparently dutch passports often break down like this if you tend to sit on them. The implication was that I wouldn't be able to get into the US with a passport like that. After rebooking my flight to Monday (cancelations willing I might even have a chance for a fight tomorrow) it was off to the dutch consulat here in Barcelona to get some replacement papers. Friendly people over there as well but still a bit of a scramble to get new passport-photos before they closed down for siesta. With no minutes to spare I made it back with new pictures of myself. It must be said that I look a bit overheated on them. Read More

You look at the code of this new KDE application and you immediately notice several of the mistakes that you made in your first KDE application as well. Sounds familar? Read More

Just wanted to say hi from Atlanta airport, where I'm waiting on my connecting flight to Barcelona, on my way to this years GUADEC. Trying to get my outbound e-mail working but port 25 seems to be blocked (or my providers SMTP after POP3 is messed up). The tech support of AccessAnytime couldn't find "Atlanta" in their system and weren't much hep either... bunch of clueless f*cks. Read More

The Apache foundation steadfastly refuses to include support for the OpenDocument filetypes to its distribution despite the mimetypes being registered with IANA. Appearantly the ASF doesn't agree with the OASIS IPR policy seemingly unaware that the OASIS OpenDocument TC has switched to a most liberal IPR policy (Royalty Free with restrictions on possible licensing conditions) earlier this year. Read More

No, the Portland Print Dialog isn't about design by committee. It's about letting the platform provide the print dialog (as opposed to the toolkit). If you run a GNOME desktop that will probably mean a Gtk Print dialog. If you run a KDE desktop that will probably a dialog based on KDEPrint. Incidentally, there already is a Portland file dialog, and no it isn't designed by committee either (give it a try!). Read More

The Gnome Journal has an interview with me on the Portland project courtesy of Sri Ramakrishna.

What an exciting week! After many years I finally met Cristian in person at the OSDL Printing Summit that was held in Atlanta this week. The event was great fun and it was really nice to meet with Celeste, Ellen and Jan from OpenUsability.org as well. HP provided all the attendees with free lunches to go along with the free (as in speech, not as in lunch) HP printer drivers. They also provided large bowls with really nice fruit. A shame that a lot of it was still left over at the end. Wish I had one of those bowls here at home. We had really nice facilities for the printing summit thanks to Ricoh/Lanier. Really nice to see so many hardware companies so supportive of Linux. The printing summit went better than I could have hoped for, everyone was really cooperative and I think a lot of common ground was found. I think there will be some very interesting printing related announcements the coming weeks. But now I need to catch up on some much needed sleep! Read More

[image:1931 size=original] OSDL Printing summit group photo. Maybe I'll try to add names tomorrow.

Want to go to a woop-ass desktop developers conference and don't have the patience to wait till september? On July 17-18 the 2006 Desktop Developers Conference (DDC) will be held in Ottawa located in visa-friendly Canada. OSDL DTL has partnered with the DDC organisation team and will be providing financial assistance to cover travel costs of a number of selected speakers. THAT CAN BE YOU! You still have till the end of the month to send in your speaking proposal to DDC. Let the world know about the groundbreaking developments that you are doing. Read More

I'm deeply disappointed in the Superbowl ref's. I'm new to this football thing, us europeans play soccer instead, but after having taken my time to learn about all the weird rules, several of these calls didn't make sense at all. Now don't get me wrong, the refs in soccer make bad calls all the time, but with soccer you have only 1 ref and 2 linesmen. With football you have a soccer team worth of referees running around, "the people upstairs" and instant replays that the referee can watch. With all that I naively had expected that games wouldn't be decided based on arbitrary referee calls. Read More

Congratulations to all the [http://www.digikam.org/Digikam-SPIP/|DigiKam] developers with winning the [http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000150|TUX 2005 Readers’ Choice Award]. Being able to provide users with great software is what makes working on open source software for me one of the most rewarding activities. It's great when users acknowledge that they really like your software with an award like this. One of the nicest moments at aKademy this week was when a gentleman came up to David and me and thanked us for making KDE. He had been using KDE for a few years and it had improved his computer live considerable. Read More

Danese Cooper [http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog/2005/08/catchuposcon_li.html|asks] where all the women are in Open Source. I don't know about all of them, but several of them can currently be found in Malaga at the KDE conference. Among them is Lauri who received one of the first ever KDE aKademy awards in recognition of all the hard work she has put in KDE. Congratulations Lauri, it's well deserved! Read More

Maybe you still think of it as an Java IDE, but with this weeks release of [http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/|Eclipse CDT 3.0], Eclipse has become a much more interesting C/C++ IDE as well. Eclipse has a powerful plugin architecture that allows all kinds of powerful tools, from content assistence, [http://subclipse.tigris.org/|SVN integration] to refactoring assistants. See what's [http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/checkout/cdt-home/news/cdt30-whats-new/CDT-3.0-News.htm?cvsroot=Tools_Project|hot] for yourself. Read More

I just returned from a week of Canadian hospitality in Ottawa. First I attended the Desktop Developers Conference, later in the week followed by the Ottawa Linux Symposium. It was also a chance to meet for the first time with some of my colleagues at Intel. The group I work in is spread around the globe, with me being based in France, some others in Bejing and the rest spread across various locations in the US. In October I will be moving to Oregon to be a bit closer to some of them. Read on for some impressions of the Desktop Developers Conference. Read More

Thank you Google! It's quite exciting to see so many people with so many new ideas for making KDE better. Best of luck to all 24 winning contestants!

I like Aaron’s suggestion to label more clearly the adoption status of the various drafts at FreeDesktop.org I also believe that at some point we must be able to say “this is something that is widely adopted and deserves to be a standard Read More

When thinking about a future configuration system it's nice to have an idea about current usage patterns. So I did some measurements to see how many different configuration keys KDE applications look up when starting up. Some results: Read More

The month of May has started with a big milestone: the approval of the OpenDocument 1.0 specification as an OASIS standard. Part of the credits for that go to our very own David Faure who has done a great amount of hard work in the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Commitee. The importance of a truly open file format for office documents can not be understated and the OASIS OpenDocument standard helps to bring competition back to office applications. I expect the OASIS OpenDocument standard to make headlines in the near future as it has been eagerly awaited by governments around the world. Read More

In response to Aaron's blog about D-Conf I explained in my previous blog why I think a common configuration system is desirable. I didn't go into the issues that Aaron raised about FreeDesktop.org because I wanted to stay a bit focused and I found Aaron's blog a bit too confusing as to what his point with FreeDesktop.org actually was. This week I managed to dicuss the issue with Aaron on IRC and I think things have become more clear to both of us. Let me share me my new understanding here with you. What Aaron somewhat correctly noticed is that there is a certain aversion growing among some members of the KDE community against FreeDesktop.org . The reason of the aversion seems to be a fear that FreeDesktop.org could become an unstoppable influx of bad technology. Although it may be easy to dismiss that, I think there is indeed reason to be concerned. In my experience open source projects are vulnerable to well intended people adding badly thought out code or concepts. Once added to a release a project is often doomed to maintaining such code until it is possible to drop it at the next major version. It happened to KDE and, acoording to Havoc, Gnome hasn't been spared either in this regard. There are two factors that make this a bigger problem with FreeDesktop.org. Within a project like KDE there tend to be developers around that are comfortable enough to challenge bad ideas before they end up in a release, such challenge is often backed up by the reputation that the challenger has build up in the project over the years. But within an environment like FreeDesktop.org such safeguards are much less likely to work, challengers run the risk of being branded one-sided agenda-pushers and a reputation among developers of project A is less likely to bear any weight among developers of project B. The other factor is that KDE can filter contributions based on the "show me the code" concept: show me the code first and then we can discuss whether it's suitable for inclusion in KDE. Although tempting to use the same approach in relation to FreeDesktop.org as well, I think that for a FreeDesktop.org project to be successful it's more important to build a solid mutual understanding about the problem and the direction to venture in before any code gets written at all. Having code out there without a solid mutual understanding only flames the fear that the codebase may not address the right problems and concerns but will somehow still invades other projects. If the above is the problem that faces FreeDesktop.org, the question then becomes what we should do to let FreeDesktop.org overcome these problems? I think the first thing here is to understand and acknowledge that there will be FreeDesktop.org projects that are bound to produce very bad technology, be it misguided standards or badly written software. This is no different from KDE, we have large kdeplayground repositories, formerly known as kdenonbeta, full with software that is most likely never to see the light of day in a KDE release. Still we cherish the kdeplayground repositories because once in a while, out of maybe 20 failed attempts, one piece of software emerges that is truly worthwhile. And just as we have learned in KDE that along with such a success we have to deal with a fair share of failed attempts as well, FreeDesktop.org is likewise doomed to produce the really bad in the shadow of the really great. So now that you know that FreeDesktop.org is going to produce some really bad standards and software, how are we going to prevent such bad technology from ending up in your software? There are two answer to that. The first one seems trivial and childish but is probably the most important one nonetheless: If you don't like it, don't use it in your software. It's important because the value of shared technology comes from the fact that it is shared. The fact that it is commonly used makes it extra valuable, if it isn't used it's sharing value drops to 0. Developers working on to-be-shared technology who realize this, will also realize that they will need to make a real effort to reach out to others to adopt their work for the sharing value to materialize. [1] The second way to prevent bad technology ending up in your software is by being actively involved to make sure that the right technology decisions are being taken. After all, it's your software we are concerned about and you know probably best what the technological requirements and constraints are for your software and what, from the perspective of your software, makes the difference between bad technology and good technology. So go out there and make your concerns heard. If you don't raise them who will? In all this there is a large responsibility on those who work under the FreeDesktop.org banner. There is a responsibility on all of us working under FreeDesktop.org to reach to others who could be affected by our work, to take note of their requirements, to acknowledge their concerns and then to work together really hard to address all that and make things work for everyone. I think it was Aaron's point that this sometimes doesn't happen enough. I think the above explains a major problem that FreeDesktop.org faces and how to deal with it. I would also like to point how not to deal with it. That is by looking at FreeDesktop.org as a standardisation stamping organisation that blesses technology that everybody should be using. FreeDesktop.org mission page puts it like this: Read More

Yesterday, Aaron made some interesting comments on the unified configuration system that has been discussed on the xdg-list over the last few weeks. I think some of his comments are spot on, unfortunately some others seem to be of the more paranoid hallucinogenic kind. I'm not into mushrooms myself so I will concentrate on the productive parts. Read More

In France you can get prosecuted for reporting security problems. I think this is a good approach to security. After all, recent studies funded by Microsoft have shown that Microsoft Windows is more secure than Linux because Linux had more security patches applied. It is obvious then that we can improve security on the Linux platform enormously by actively discouraging people to report security issues. This will result in less security patches and thus a more secure computing environment. It will also give us more time to work on fun stuff. Read More

I start with a little rant, because that's the category I have chosen for today's blog. You see, we have about 30 possible categories on this blog-site and yet I couldn't find one that is appropriate for the title... that was todays rant :-) Read More

I think the new picture for the monitor used with the background preview doesn't entirely work as-is. This border looks weird. I tried to come up with a borderless version. This is a bit of a challenge because the code pretty much likes the actual preview to be square but the monitor really looks better with round edges. Read More

I'm a fairly happy puppy with little to rant about at the moment but as I explained earlier, I have a problem coming up with good titles, so I stick with this one. Read More

Boy ksim was in a mess, fixed the obvious issues with it over the weekend. I somewhat fail to see why ksim is implemented as a kicker extension, wouldn't it make more sense as a normal stand-alone application? I guess I should see if I can make the disk-log-widget-thingy scale to full width, I use the "Aliens" GKrellMM-theme (who comes up with these names?) and around the disk-log-widget-thingy I have purplish uglyness. Read More

Since I'm not so good in thinking of innovative titles I have decided to stick with the current one. In turn, that obliges me to rant a little. The subject of my rant today is kwallet. Thanks to kwallet I can now use secure passwords such as "@&fR(e6FSdkf%" and "n#hkghgHGJkjf^$z" which would otherwise be impossible to remember. This is good. The bad part comes when you start to rely on this. The password for my blog account is equally cryptic as the two examples above (still good), but kwallet REFUSES to remember my password for the login page. I have a somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the thing anyway since it DOES insist on popping up on every Groklaw article that I read. Read More

I said Rant because this thing is clearly marked as "personal blog" and yet it forces me to pick a KDE category, that's hardly personal now is it? A lot of people are curious about the New Project. I can't say much about it at these early stages but I did some digging today and made good progress, I hope to have phase 1 completed by the end of this week. The patch starts to look good as well. Read More