KDE Blogs 

The IRC talks series Ubuntu Open Week is under way now in #ubuntu-classroom. Coming up at 20:00UTC is Kubuntu Development - Richard Johnson. See the timetable for a whole week's worth of talks.

XFig is not young. It's not beautiful either. It is still in use though. Even on Windows, there are people setting up cygwin only to get xfig. And that is because it has one killer feature. Export to Postscript/LaTeX in a way that lets latex replace the text in the drawing. That way the font and text size etc are consistent with the rest of the latex document. And you can add LaTeX text relatively easy and comfortable to your drawing too. Usability wise XFig is a killer... Even though it is possible to work fast with it thanks to keyboard shortcuts and quite advanced functions below the gui. I wish there was something like this available in a modern graphics application like Krita. Looks like I will have to learn getting along with XFig... Read More

I'm at II Guademy 2008, the Spanish conference combining aspects of GUADEC and Akademy this weekend. I arrived yesterday, had lunch with my Novell colleagues Rodrigo Moya and Vincent Untz, then got straight into our presentations, which are a combined call for more cooperation and communication between the two Free desktop environments communities, leading to more effective sharing of data and infrastructure. Read More

Lynyrd Skynyrd rocks, but you already knew that. Will Stephenson rocks as well and you quite likely also already knew that. Free Bird is one the reasons why Lynyrd Skynyrd rocks and one of the reasons why Will Stephenson rocks is that he took over the gargantuan task of moving the Akonadi server to is KDE independent location in kdesupport. Read More

As Tom announced a few days ago, the Akonadi team is looking for a logo and an icon for the little system tray application. So far we have three submissions, but us kdepim hackers at KDAB thought we'd give folks an extra incentive by donating a Canon Powershot digital camera, new and unused, to be given to the creator of the work we will chose in the end. This fine and only slightly out-of-date (as digital cameras are doomed to be the moment one takes them off the shelf) piece of gear can be yours, yes, yours, if you add your submission <a href=http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/PIM/Akonadi/Logo>to the techbase page and we end up selecting it in a process that will very likely be utterly subjective, unfair, unprofessional and morally objectionable. So there. Keep those submissions coming!

Avgoustino Kadis works on a summer of code project for Parley and has ambitious plans: Hi! I'm a fresher in Computing at Imperial College London and I've the luck to participate in GSoC this year with doing something for Parley. I'm going to make it easier & faster for someone to create a vocabulary file for Parley by providing automatic translation and retrieval of unknown words from a text. At the same time I'll get involved in open source development for the first time and if I like it I'll keep on helping on making Parley even more useful, easy and fun! And then!! I'll get deeper and deeper into KDE development, become the leader of all the development team and force all KDE desktops have me as background and no way to change it!! Just kidding! :D Have a nice day ;) Read More

It's been a little while since I've last posted an entry. My own personal life has been busy and hasn't given me much time to work on code. That will change soon though :-) Read More

speaking of logos, and while I'm in 1:N communication mode and have your kind attention, large and lovely N that you are: we're in need of a vector version of the current Kontact logo, for purposes of blowing it up indecently in size for use in a poster or two (for Linuxtag). If you, dear k \in N, happen to be in possession of such, or happen to know j \not\in N, but the creator of said artwork, or happen to be j \in N, said creator, yourself, please get in contact with me at your earliest convenience for the overall furtherance of the ascent of the K (assuming |K| > |N| without loss of generality).

David Capel will work on Parley during the Summer of Code. I'll let him speak for himself: Hello, I'm David Capel, an 18-year-old from Minnesota in the USA. I'm going to be a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Madison this fall and will likely major in computer science of some sort. For my summer of code project I'm rewriting Parley's practice interface so that it uses SVG themes and will be easy to extend in the future, and I will likely create a few new practice modes along the way (if anyone has ideas or requests, feel free to email me). Finally, I'm looking forward to joining the KDE community. :) Read More

Other mentors have already blogged about their GSoC projects, so I am going to do the same for Akonadi. Basically Akonadi got three slots from KDE and one from OpenChange. Lets start with the one from OpenChange: Brad Hards will be mentoring student Alan Alvarez, who's goal is to implement an Akonadi resource based on the OpenChange MAPI library. If he succeeds it allow Akonadi and thus all Akonadi-enabled clients, to access mails, contacts and calendar items stored on a Microsoft Exchange server, using the same access mechanism as Micrsoft Outlook, i.e. not requiring that the Exchange administrator enables any additional transport such as OWA Read More