For the first time, FrOSCon will take place this year in St. Augustin near Bonn, the former capital of Germany. Due to its location, it is also in reasonably short distance for most KDE contributors from the BeNeLux countries.

The conference is gonna be very similar to FOSDEM -- many open source projects have applied for an own room, as has KDE. Since the event will take at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, where I happen to study, I will organize the devroom.

People have been wondering what I have been up to all the time. Now let me tell you: For one uni and a project consume most of my time at the moment. It should get better as the time of exams has passed by (which is on the beginning of april). But even then expect me to have only limited time available until may.

... is love, peace and this little bugger. The iAudio X5 has all I really want: 20 or 30 GB of harddisc, a color display, and plays mp3, wma, ogg vorbis and even flac (and more, e.g. mpeg4 video, but I'm not sure I really can make use of this feature, given the tiny display). It has a high quality microphone build-in and can record to mp3. So that'd be a good alternative to an iPod, which I don't want since it's not capable of playing oggs.

Due to obligations at Uni, I was unable to attend all days of Linux World Expo and Conference in Frankfurt this year. However I spent most parts of Tuesday and all of Thursday at the the KDE booth.

Due to the more business-focused nature of the fair, most of visitors were consultants, administrators and developers. Many people asked about our position on KDE for use in the public sector and companies, our plans for the future and technical questions.

Ok, finally back at home. *Pheeew*.

This friday I went to the meeting of SUSE beta testers to the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg. The travel went pretty smooth and so I soon checked in and arrived in a meeting room with all the other testers. We got a nice introduction to the openSUSE project, covering the past, the status quo as well as future plans. Greg from Novell as well as Adrian, Sonja and Andreas from SUSE gave me a good feeling about the project's future.

So Tom's story hit Slashdot. A lot of responses, from simply requests to almost flame-like comments asked KDE4 to simply be fast. I feel urged to comment on that:

amarok podcasting rocks, but it's not only big in .nl, Fab! Deutschlandfunk (Cologne) and Deutschlandradio Kultur (Berlin) are two german nationwide broadcasters that deliver lots of informational content. Both recently introduced podcasting for some of their shows. On their page about podcasts, they introduce podcast reception with iTunes AND amarok. Go for it!

Ok, so we just had a meeting where discussed the redesign of kdelibs and kdebase. Although we have great technology in there, with Qt4 we have a good opportunity and reason to clean up the foundation of our very own DE.

Basic outlines:

The life of the traveling KDE developer is not an easy one. We put our lives on hold while we travel far from home to meet with other ardent souls to bring you Free Software par excellance. It's a hard life indeed, as you can see in the picture below. We are sitting in a square in the old town of Malaga with food, beer and the backdrop of a cathedral. Somehow we manage. ;)