It's a strange day in a strange world. But it's nice to see that the Linux desktop seems to be able to adapt to this strangeness by some means or other.

Most KDE users probably know what pressing ALT and F2 does, it's opening the "Run Command" dialog. But did you also know that this little dialog can do magic? Try "2+2 ", try "[email protected]", try "www.kde.org", try "help", try "logout", "gg:sin 5 ", "leo:warzenschwein" or "ggi:warthog".

A few days ago I wrote that I got my copy of The System of the World, the latest book by Neal Stephenson. Yesterday I searched for the "The System of the World" on Google and learned to my surprise that the link to my blog entry was the 3rd top hit. Interesting. The first hit was Slashdot, the second one Amazon, then me and then lots of book sellers. The original "A Treatise of the System of the World" by Isaac Newton was something like number 33.

Today I received The System of the World which makes my Neal Stephenson collection complete again and me a happy guy. I just have finished Quicksilver and am about to start to read The Confusion. It feels good to know that two and a half kilograms of words are still ahead.

Meta-Programming is becoming an increasingly important part of my life as a software developer. It's a fascinating way to take programming to a new and higher level. Ian has blogged some thoughts about Meta-Programming. I would like to respond to them:

Many software developers stumble over the "Joel On Software" columns at some time and like them. Sure, Joel was a Microsoft employee and he develops proprietary software, but still his columns are inspiring and fun to read. Sometimes he is completely wrong, though.

One morning at the youth hostel during aKademy I had an interesting conversation with Eric Laffoon. He told me about an idea to give more credit to bug reporters. Right now there is a statistic for the most active bug closers, but for bug reporters there isn't such a thing. I think it would be very interesting to give people doing bug reports of high quality bug more credit for their contribution by introducing something like a list of the top ten bug reporters. Maybe this could give bug reporters an incentive to make better bug reports.

This week at aKademy I asked Reinhold if he would be willing to take over the maintainership of KOrganizer and he said yes. So now after five years of being the KOrganizer maintainer I pass the torch to Reinhold.

Here at aKademy Icecream is an essential tool. Compiling is just so much more fun when it takes no time. Today I finally managed to find the time do to some coding and implemented the long-outstanding feature of properly colored job halos in the star view. Take a look, update to the latest version and enjoy the hypnotizing effect of watching colored bubbles.

The conference is over. We had a lot of good talks. It was interesting and it was fun. Now we are heading for the coding marathon and the evening promises that this will be even more fun.

I sat down together with Reinhold and went through the latest usability report on KOrganizer from OpenUsability.org. We came up with list of things to change. These are in particular: