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 [email protected]. 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.

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".

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But the photo on the page disturbs me. I have never seen a group of software developers where everybody wears a white shirt.

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.

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.

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.

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There is even more space around the items, which seemed to be one of the things which disturbed some people, so I don't know how this change will be accepted. How do you like it?

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.

Hacking on KDE 4 is fun. There is so much goodness in the development platform.

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!

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.

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.