KDE Blogs 

Unfortunately FOSDEM is over already, it was a lot of fun. Today started with me getting there at the much too early hour of 08:55, meaning I'm very tired today ;) This morning I mostly was in the Crossdesktop session of the GNOME room. It started off with a pretty impressive demo of Metisse, which apparently is some kind of X hack that looks and works really well. Some impressive features were the customized UI and the 'flipping' away of the screens on top of a lower screen when you select text from it. Next was Jos van den Oever's talk about Strigi internals, which I think will be very neat in KDE4. I tried my best to get a picture of him in action, but unfortunately it was too dark for the small camera I borrowed from Jos Poortvliet; hopefully the GNOME people took a pic, that would be nice. After that was a talk about Wasabi: a proposal for a standard on stuff like desktop search engines and things a user can query. Read More

I went to Fosdem this year, mostly to see people I have not seen for quite some time. And that part certainly was successful! Seen so many familiar faces. People I know from Java (Sun) that I met for the first time, people that I know from free-java that I saw again, and naturally quite a lot of KDE people. One of them was Annma, whom cancelled a meeting years ago and she moved a couple of times since then. So it was good to finally see her in real life :) Read More

... many things happens, uhm... the start of support of PDF forms. But let's start explaining piece by piece. :) Thanks to the work of Bradh Hards and Jiri Klement, the [w:XML_Paper_Specification|XPS] backend of okular has been improved a lot. It can now render pages in a way that starts to match to the expected behaviour, and get some information from the documents. Read More

Ahh, today was a lot of fun at FOSDEM 2007 :) In the morning, I first went to the talk about software patents, then the One Laptop Per Child talk (really nifty stuff) and then the liberating java one. Then I wandered around a while at the KDE booth waiting for the afternoon talks to start. At the KDE booth, I was pleased to see that Jonathan Riddell had actually come, despite his claims to the contrary ;) The Semantic KDE talk by Jos and Stéphane was very interesting and promising, I just hope some of those promises actually get implemented. Would be very cool indeed. After that I went to the AIGLX talk, so I unfortunately had to skip Flavio's Strigi talk :( After that came the GEGL talk, which was very interesting. I thought it would've been nice if it had even more details, but I realize that for a generic hacker audience, this was already detailed enough (it even included creepy C #define-hackery :P). My day ended with Sander's documentation talk, which I thought had some interesting ideas. In between and after the talks, there was a lot of chatting amongst the KDE developers, which was pretty fun as well. Hopefully tomorrow will be at least as fun as today was! :)"

Last year I turned 30 and I know people still wonder when I end up being as old as I look. But on the way to this I pass today the next prime number - and I must say it feels much better than last year. The main reason is that I have a new job. This may suprise one or two, but it shouldn't. Read More

Only a few hours left until FOSDEM starts. I'm about to leave for the airport to fly to Brussels together with the rest of the SUSE crew. There will be an openSUSE developer room and I will be speaking on Saturday afternoon about "Packging made easy". The intention is to present some of the tools we have created with the openSUSE Build Service which make packaging of software much more fun than it was before. Read More

FOSDEM 2007 is approaching very rapidly: this weekend a lot of KDE and other FOSS people will gather in Brussels to meet and talk. There are two small changes to the KDE Devroom schedule that might be interesting. The first one is that we had to change the speaker of one talk: unfortunately Sebastian Trueg is ill, so now the Nepomuk-Semantic KDE talk will be done by Jos van den Oever (of Strigi fame) and Stéphane Laurière (from Nepomuk, EDOS). Should be a very interesting talk! The second change is the addition of a new talk: 'KDE e.V. - The organization behind the project' by Sebastian Kügler (of KDE e.V. Board and MWG fame). Hope to see you Saturday or Sunday! (Here you can find a very incomplete list of KDE related people who will be attending, you can add yourself if you're coming. Dot article for some more info.)

Two days ago the first incarnation of sidux was released, code-named "Chaos". sidux is a desktop-oriented distribution. It comes as a Live CD based on the "unstable" branch of Debian, but is easily able to install onto harddisk from the running Live CD using a completely new graphical installer frontend. Read More

Since my last blog I've been working on various different projects in KOffice. Most are not really screen-shot interresting so I declined to blog about them. After all, who wants to se that if I type text in a text-frame the frame will grow automatically when the text would not fit anymore. That's soo boring :) Read More

Just the other week I was talking to someone that is a big supporter of the Open Document Format. He was arguing that we need to find a way to get KOffice and OpenOffice to open all the documents made in MSOffice without any loss and any change in layout. He argued, if that's impossible, then what is the advantage of ODF? Read More