The first quarter of 2001 was quite a ride. Especially, there was a lot of Free Software stuff going on, not all of it was KDE-related. It included legal matters, Free Software politics, marketing, conference preparation and other activities. In the great tradition of quarterly updates that I am starting today, allow me to entertain you with what happened...

Lawyers and Free Software

KDE and Gnome together again - the Desktop Summit this year will take place in Berlin, Germany, from August 6 to 12, 2011. It will be one of the biggest and most interesting Free Software conferences in 2011, and Berlin is also always worth a visit. You have seen the announcement, and the web site at http://desktopsummit.org, but you might be asking yourself how you can register, where to submit your talk, and how you can help with the preparations. Read on.

Heated discussions are going on in the KDE community in the aftermath of the announcement of Nokia's platform strategy change. Rationality often goes out of the window when people feel such a change goes against their personal values or beliefs. In the past days, I worked on an analysis of the impact of the changes on KDAB, Qt and the Free Software communities we work with, especially KDE. KDAB is rooted deeply in the KDE community, and many of our developers work with Qt and KDE for years now.

This Sunday, I gave a presentation at UbuCon 2009, the German Ubuntu Developers and Users conference, held at the wonderful historic town of Göttingen, in northern Germany. The conference covers a variety of distribution development topics, with about 250 participants, and a 5-track presentation schedule (!).

KDE is moving from X11 only to be a good citizen on Windows and Mac Os X. For those who like to code on Mac Os X, here's a bit of good news for you: icecream in KDE trunk now supports Mac Os X machines as compile servers. This means that compile jobs can be distributed between Mac Os X machines with the same Xcode version. And if somebody goes the extra mile to make a Linux-Mac cross compiler, even between Linux and Mac Os X nodes.

At last year's Akademy, I had the chance to ask Bill Hoffman, one of the key figures behind CMake, a couple of questions about it. One of them was the availability of the full CMake documentation, which seemed to only in print. It turned out that this is not the case: CMake is well-documented and easy to learn. Read on for more.

Bill said that the documentation in the CMake wiki is nearly as complete as the book, and in parts is even more detailed or accurate.

This weeks c't magazine furnishes an article on ThreadWeaver programming as part of their long-going series on articles on concurrent programming. An interesting feature of the article is that is describes ThreadWeaver as a component of the upcoming KDE 4 platform.

The next step release of ThreadWeaver has been tagged. Say hi to a couple of new features: Queue policies can be used to adapt the queueing behaviour of jobs. Resource restrictions (a kind of queue policy) can be used to limit the number of jobs of a certain group started at the same time. Job queueing priorities are there to control the order of execution. Jobs can now return whether they are successful. The unit tests have been widely extended. The API polished. The interfaces pimpled. MacOs is now a supported platform. That should be enough for a step release, right?

Only recently, thanks to KDAB, I got my hands on one of the brandnew MacBooks running MacOs X on the Intel dual-core CPUs. One of the main reasons to get it was to measure the effect the two cores have on ThreadWeaver's tests and examples. And what do you know - besides a little makefile fix and some adaptions to different dynamic library path setups, all of it runs fine - and amazingly fast. Exact measurements will follow lateron, but so far the results are very promising.

This morning, I went to Tegel Airport by bus. On one hand, this is becoming a routine fast. On the other, it is always enjoyable, because I love the city in the early morning light. The bus (TXL) goes past the Reichstag building and the brand-new Hauptbahnhof (central station). What struck me is the new, open culture when it comes to integrating the government buildings into the city never, a fact that never appeared to me earlier. When I first came to Washington DC, I was amazed at how the Washingtonians played baseball and flew kites right in front of the capitol. I admired the Americans for their openess. Today, there are bars and restaurants at the river Spree located right within sight of the big wigs. How is this for a change in political culture? And yes, you can have a beer outside in the sun and enjoy the view (this is Germany, remember, no brown bags required).