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.

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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.

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.

I'm working on some kind of fancy aggregating portal. I'm not completely sure yet, where this will lead to, but I have already created a sophisticated design document and made a mockup.

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.

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.

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Summer of Code

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.