KDE Blogs 

openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 5 was announced today (major changes): most exciting novelty are additional one CD installation media giving you a rather complete English desktop. Compared to the default desktop installations from DVD most of the missing applications are games. Before installation (and of course after) from these medias one can register online repositories to get the full default SUSE desktop experience. Read More

Now that there is a final release of QtJambi, I've downloaded it and had a good look at the sources. I'm happy to report that it looks very well written, very thorough and with much attention paid to issues such as performance tuning and working well with Java threads. Read More

so since 6 weeks I'm now working at Kitware, Clifton Park, NY, USA. Since it's the first time that I'm in America this means a lot of new impressions for me. Friendly people, suburbs, beautiful nature, huge cars, baseball everywhere and much more. Are there actually any other KDE developers here in the Capital Region ? Read More

After a weekend of being slightly ill and not sleeping because of that, as well as the hot and wet wheather, I get up at 7am on Monday morning. I have to get to a meeting at the other side of The Netherlands about the OOXML standardization track in ISO, which starts at 10. Traffic was pretty Ok and I actually get there 5 minutes early! After some 10 minutes with most of the people having arrived we learn that the time mentioned in the Agenda was incorrect and the meeting is actually starting at 10:30. As mentioned in another communication. Well, that explains the confused and surprised looks from the organizer when most of the people arrived around 10 :) Read More

Or rather Flash news? One of Adobe's Flash player developers, Tinic Uro, today used his blog to tell us users about upcoming features. Among the list of changes we can read about a change regarding the Linux Flash plugin: The Linux plugin now uses the XEmbed protocol. This is work in progress. The downside is that konqueror and Opera do not support this right now, so the Flash plugin will not work until these vendors update their plugin support. Read More

QT/Jambi, recently released, works on Solaris 10 with Sun Studio 11 and QT 4.3.0. Mandatory pretty screenshot: http://www.stefanteleman.org/qtjambi/jambisolaris.jpg. And some patches for Sun Studio/Solaris: http://www.stefanteleman.org/qtjambi/. :-)

The long awaited 1.1.3 release is available. These were long months when I shared my time between 1.1.x development, 2.x development (careful porting) and Windows version. Aside from many fixes, Kexi 1.1.3 even brings new features, requested by users: Read More

I have been invited to join a subcommittee at the Dutch national institute for standards, NEN. This subcommittee is about document formats, and thus the new OOXML format is being discussed there as that is in its 5 month period for the fast track as requested by Ecma. Read More

According to this commentary in the online version of The Independent, there are now more hired mercenaries in Iraq than there are regular US and UK troops. Of course, information about this practice is not officially released by any government: instead, the mercenaries are very often called "security contractors", "civilian operatives", or "reconstruction workers". The author of the commentary says: "Britain alone has 21,000 in the country, raking in $1.6bn a year." American mercenary companies such as Blackwater seem to take a big slice of that particular business cake too. They seem to hire men from around the globe to fill in their vacancies, including many from third world contries such as Colombia. I don't expect you to read the full article now. But keep in mind to make up for that leeway, next time you watch some TV news about a topic like "Again 3 US civilians reported to have been kidnapped and killed in Iraq"....

I'm back from vacation / LinuxTag 2007: met many openSUSE, Trolltech, KDE and GNOME people - more than expected. Jump over to some pictures. On other news, Novell will be Silver sponsor of both aKademy and GUADEC this year. I will only visit aKademy though.