KDE Blogs 

In recent months I acquired a habit of poking around from time to time on the Guardian/Observer website. Here is a collection of info atoms I picked up today: Some updates to Princess Diana's last 24 hours alive: the night she died, the American secret service was eavesdropping her telephone conversations. (What's funny is that the source article says this happened "without the approval of the British security services"... Remember, the night she died she was partying in Paris, which is neither part of the US nor of the UK last time I checked). the driver of her Mercedes, Henri Paul, (who also died in the crash) had a second job (I bet without having told her): he was in the pay of the French secret service. his 14 (!) bank accounts had a combined balance of +100.000 £ (that's roughly +150.000 €, or +200.000 $US) in between them.Funny coincidences, huh? The UK government used human Guinea pigs for chemical weaponry experiments, for more than 30 years. While initial tests of Sarin's effects on the human skin were conducted with German prisoners of war, up into the 80s the 'research' was conducted on British soldiers. One of the known crime sites was the Porton Down military base. There are hundreds of known victims who suffered health damage from these Mengele-like experiments. Their current diseases include memory loss, flashbacks and lethargy. I'm no longer surprised about the way these people are 'defending Western freedom' in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Just don't claim I agree with you.

On Thursday the download edition of openSUSE 10.2 was announced (screenshots). The interest seems to be high but from what I read users experienced a good download speed thanks to FTP mirrors being prepopulated the week before, some strong initial Torrent seeders and usage of Metalink. This week also the debuginfo repository will be filled and the Live-DVD will be uploaded. Development in Factory has also started again but syncing of the Factory tree has been disabled until above mentioned are also on the mirrors. Read More

Did you know that the FBI (and therefore, the CIA, and probably most police and secret service organisations around the world), have technology to remotely turn on your cell phone microphone to listen to you and all conversations around you? The technique even has a name: 'roving bug'. Read More

probono last week gave a presentation to the participants of the LSB packaging meeting, which took place in Berlin (hosted by SAP). His slides are available on the klik website. Expect some improvements and changes in klik in the next few months as a result from the discussions that took place there. Read More

Today KPhotoAlbum entered message freeze, and is now ready to be translated. The release will happen Dec 31th 2006. To bring a bit of attention to the great work the translators do, I've started a small prize drawing contest which those who have made a complete translation of KPA participating. The prize is $100. Read More

Since the OpenDocumentFormat (ODF) became a real ISO spec back in May, a lot of things have happened and continue to happen. The industry is really recognizing this open standard and many are already supporting it, where a large section even make ODF mandatory. I expected pick up to be slower, given how Office has such a huge majority of the market. If I look at how slow pick up of Linux on the desktop is (slowly but steady growth over quite some years) its very refreshing to see people recognize ODF as the better format so massively. In the last months I've seen ODF adoption in Malaysia, India, Brazil, the French Parliament [FR|DE], in Finland, The Spanish region of Extremadura, the Belgium Government and soon the Swiss. With some grass roots conversion happening in Holland as well (Dutch)! Read More

To all students of usability, ui design, interaction design or related: Three weeks ago we announced the Season of Usability, a series of sponsored student projects. We want to inform you that the application period ends in one week, on December 15th. So if you are interested to participate, send us your application now - including a short cv/resume and a few paragraphs about your prior experience with regard to usability. Read More

On the #kde IRC channel tonight there was some discussion about how bad english spelling rules were. I found out via google that there is a 'Simplified Spelling Society'. From the site, here is a description of how English spelling was invented: Read More

Photo applications such as KPhotoAlbum have shown that navigation by histograms can be very convenient. Prerequisite of such navigation is that you have fast access to numerical properties of the items you want to navigate. In Strigi, many numerical properties such as modification time, size, embedding depth, width or height are indexed. This enables Strigi to quickly make histograms of these properties. By clicking on a bar in the histogram, the user can quickly and intuitively focus on a subset the items that are shown. Read More

I'm sure every reader of this blog has at least once encountered the myth that Linux users, or more generally users of free software platforms, would not consider spending money on software. Read More