For the past few months we've been working on getting our bid to host GUADEC and Akademy in Gran Canaria for 2009.
Agustin has done an amazing job in pulling it all together, and Alberto has been relaying his enthusiasm about the idea of co-located conferences to the Gnome guys.

I've been playing with using KIO::get() to make queries on the DBPedia SPARQL endpoint, parse the XML result set and convert it to be used by a Plasma Data Engine. I'll explain how it works as I think it is pretty useful and makes it very easy to link up applets with Semantic Web/Desktop data.

This is the basic SPARQL query, it takes the name of an artist and retrieves details of all the albums they've made - the album name, the urn of the album's DBPedia resource, creation date and cover art picture:

It sounds as though exciting things are happening at the Milan Tokamak Plasma sprint, with an api review and the Widgets on Canvas changes happening at the moment. Meanwhile, I've been having my own 'mini-sprint' this last week in Gran Canaria. I've ported the digital clock as well as the analog one, along with the web applet, plasmoid viewer and data engine browsers apps, and the time data engine to Ruby.

We can't have too many plasma clocks in KDE4, and I'm pleased to say that the Ruby analog clock is now working pretty well. I've been using it to time brewing a pot of tea this morning, and there is certainly a more delicate taste to Earl Grey timed with a Ruby clock as opposed the the slightly coarser and more acidic flavour that using a C++ based clock applet as a timer, can give to your cuppa.

I've added bindings to the KDE 4.1 trunk for using Soprano with Ruby. It allows you to add and remove statements from the Soprano RDF database and to make SPARQL queries over D-Bus. Also included is an optional adaptor to use ActiveRDF with Soprano.

I recently upgraded from Kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy, and all went well apart from one thing. Konqueror began putting up a crash dialog everytime it accessed a site with Flash, making it pretty much unusable. In fact until I had this problem I didn't realise quite how many pages on the web use Flash.

Last night I was discussing how to load KParts in Korundum with CapitalT on the #kde-ruby IRC channel. It took me a bit of googling to work out what to do, and I eventually realised I'd left the KDE::PluginLoader class out of the Smoke library that the KDE4 version of Korundum uses.

Once I'd fixed that it was pretty straightforward, here is some example code to load a Kate part in a KDE::MainWindow:

I was just completely amazed to read that British MPs think that the Galileo project is unimportant. To me the combination of accurate and cheap global positioning systems, combined with the infrastructure to determine the relative position between one thing and another, and a semantic web that allows that GPS meta data to be annotated ubiquitously to all information on the web, is so important that every 21st economy will depend on it.

A BBC article MPs urge action on Galileo costs suggests that:

This week I've been at the Jornadas de Software Libre conference in Tenerife. One thing that struck me was that the Spanish don't have a word for 'Open Source', which would be something like 'Codigo abierto'; they always use the term 'Software Libre'. The conference program even had the four freedoms of Free Software written on the back, along with an explanation.

I personally think that we should try and stop using the term Open Source to describe KDE, as it just sounds like it is a slightly tweaked business model, and completely leaves out the community aspects of the project.

There has been some discussion on the kde-core-devel mailing list about a change to how the active window should be distinguished from the inactive windows, where different color palettes are used for the widgets inside inactive windows.

I tried out the change yesterday, testing flipping between Konsole and Dolphin, and don't personally like it much. Here are a couple of screen shots of what I saw so you can judge for yourself (with a KDE3 kicker in there):

[image:2992]
Konsole at front with Dolphin

[image:2993]
Konsole with Dolphin at front