I've been neglecting QtRuby recently, although I've wanted to do a major rewrite for some time. I finally bit the bullet last Thursday, and decided that I was going to take time off work and enter a hacking frenzy until the new version of QtRuby was well underway. After six days I've just got a 'hello world' working and commited the project to a 'qtruby-3.0' branch in the qtruby KDE repo.

Alberto Ruiz asked me to post a message on Planet KDE about Codethink is hiring! He says:

"Codethink is currently looking for bright university graduates looking into joining a young open source company. As you may know already Codethink is an Open Source consultancy focused on helping our customers to make the most out of open source and create great innovative products with it.

We've been working on QSparql for a few months now, and I feel it is starting to be something that could be used by a wider audience. It is a simple QSql-like library for accessing various RDF stores such as KDE's Nepomuk data in Virtuoso, SPARQL endpoints on the web via HTTP, and Gnome or MeeGo Nepomuk data in Tracker stores. It differs from Soprano in that it is much smaller and lower level, and it is asynchronous and uses Qt slot callbacks by default, whereas Soprano is usually a synchronous style api.

I've been fascinated by the Oracle attack on Google's Android. I don't follow sport and just couldn't understand why so many people were getting excited about the World Cup at Akademy. But to me these epic disputes are a great spectator sport, as well as an opportunity to participate individually. The trouble is that it is all a bit slow, even slower than cricket - if it is like the SCO vs Linus train wreck, it could take up to five years to be resolved.

Ryan Melton announced on the kde-bindings mailing list that he had set up a project on github called 'qtbindings' with the aim of doing cross-platform gems for QtRuby. This is great news, and congratulations to Ryan for making it happen

Ryan announced:

By and large I don't really care about what Microsoft do - I don't use their software, and I actively avoid making my career dependent on them. But I am a fan of the C# programming language and think the Qyoto/Kimono bindings for the Qt and KDE apis are pretty neat.

It's official the combined KDE Akademy and Gnome GAUDEC conferences will be held in Berlin in 2011, next year and this is great news! I played a small part in organising the joint conference in Gran Canaria in 2009, and really enjoyed working with the Gnome guys most of whom I hadn't meet before, as well as the familiar KDE people. It was great fun to see how it turned out. I don't think anyone really knew in advance - we didn't know if too much collaboration would spoil the 'community bonding' aspects of the conference and their individual identities.

I have a bit of a depressive sort of personality, usually seeing the cup as 'half empty' rather than 'half full'. And lately I've been a bit depressed about the state of the KDE project despite an awesome Akademy in Tampere. Amongst things that bug me about KDE, are the very slow migration to git, and that Windows 95 look and feel that we can't seem to escape despite having brilliant graphics programmers, usability experts and artists. I just loathe those complicated menus, toolbars and Microsoft's complete lack of aesthic sense that we have copied perfectly.

I've just added an idea for a Google Summer of Code project to the wiki; a Language Bindings Documentation Extractor/Generator tool.

I read an interesting blog this morning Freedom vs. The Cloud Log where Glyn Moody interviewed Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen was General Council of the FSF for 13 years and helped draft various versions of the GPL. He talks about the implications for software freedom caused by the rise of services in the 'cloud' where your data is owned by the service provider, and the fact that they don't usually release the code of their applications that run on the servers.