KDE Blogs 

Today I'm writing in my role as a member of the program committee for the Akademy 2008 Contributor's Conference. We have received a lot of great proposals for presentations and are still in the process of selecting and assembling a program. So speaker notification will be delayed by something like a week. Read More

liquidat has posted some notes on what was presented regarding KDE-PIM on LinuxTag 2008. As people started to ask about native look, let me add three more screeenies, all from May 2008. Read More

The Ubuntu Develpers Summit finnished a week ago in Prague. Unlike conferences, summits have written output in the form of specifications which form the basis for work on Kubuntu for the next six months. You can find the Kubuntu ones on this wiki page. Read More

Yay, Daniel gave Parley's html export via xsl an overhaul to make it look way better. Two bugs fixed :) one of them would prevent counting answers as wrong in the tests... Pretty nice bug I'd say. Personally I'd have kept it for good.

LinuxTag is a blast. I'm here for the third day, have met a lot of fantastic people, listened to great talks, and had a lot of fun. On Wednesday there was Aaron's KDE 4 keynote, where he also showed the tremendously exciting Marble with OpenStreetMap integration. Yesterday Till talked about Kontact, which now runs on all platforms including Windows. Liquidat has screenshots, or check it out live at the BSI booth. Another fascinating project I saw is the Open Bicycle Computer, a bike computer built from scratch as open project. Read More

Really. I just got my awesome KDE metal gear award for my work on K3b and I have to say: work of art. This is so cool and such an honor. I can't find better or more words.... Read More

Today, the BIPT (Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunication) released a draft of the implementation of the EU directive regarding data retention in Belgian Law at the request of the minster for Enterprising and Simplification (dunno how else to translate 'minister voor Ondernemen en Vereenvoudigen') (downloadable in Dutch and French). It seems the idea is to introduce some form of public scrutiny (instead of just making the law and be done with it), so that people can comment on it. I'm of course completely pessimistic about real chances of influencing it for the better, but one never knows. Read More

While working on Improving OpenDocument in KWord for gsoc2008 we enjoyed today again one of this very productive pair-programming days. The todays goal was not that difficult: get those svg:x and svg:y positions for text-anchors (which are used to position frames like e.g. an image relative to there anchor) working. Read More

Yesterday I arrived (too early for my taste) in Karlsruhe, to present KDE at the Open Source Expo. The OpenExpo is a rather new fair, so it was not very full but there was an audience for the talks. I gave a general KDE 4 introduction, with the help of Martin Gräßlin. We started early since the talk before ours did not take place for some reason. That took away a little from my pre talk meditation time :o I started with some slides about KDE 4 based on what Lydia already used a while ago, but very reduced. I soon switched over to live demoing of what will become KDE 4.1 and it was great fun. I could even show how nice the crash handler looks, though that was somewhat unplanned. Having a nice benevolent audience with good humor and me being in a good mood too, I got pretty positive feedback after-wards anyway :) Martin then gave a ten minute KWin tour showing compositing and explaining some of the backgrounds, very nice! He'll be working on the desktop cube KWin effect this summer. Marble with open street map is quite a looker too. Sven later gave a talk about Amarok 2 which also got quite a bit of attention. What surprised me (yeah, call me naive) was people requesting documentation (books on KDE 4) to get started :) And maybe I should start using a localized version of KDE for this kind of presentation, something that I usually don't do. All in all the fair could have benefited from more visitors but was nice. Great catering :) I enjoyed meeting new people again, Stephan and Martin for KDE as well as some nice people from Python, Ubuntu and Open Street Map. Seeing the local crowd (Sput, Sven and Lydia) in Karlsruhe again was great too, I found out Nini is as good a table soccer player as I am. Sven (the one with the good taste in music:) ) provided me with a place to sleep, thanks! Read More

At SUSE I work in the incubation team. We are exploring new technologies, creating prototypes of future systems, and trying to find and shape some of the features that will be part of upcoming SUSE products and the ecosystem around that. It's a fascinating job, challenging, fun, and always exciting. For somebody like me who loves to create new things and enjoys working with an awesome team of innovative people this is a dream job. Read More