KDE Blogs 

The elections that took place in the Netherlands last Tuesday were about more than the government. In the province of Noord-Brabant, there was an additional question. This question was about a unique aspect of the province: the absence of an anthem. The Queen's Commisioner decided this should change. Three songs were proposed, all less than a hundred years old. One of them, from the same composer of the emotional song 'kadeng kadeng', is a disgrace to good taste. The other two are nice to sing along in the pub. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week happens next week and has a plethora of intersting looking IRC sessions on how to develop for Ubuntu. Among talks specific to one of the Ubuntu teams is the Kubuntu talks being done by Brandon, which should be really interesting. Read More

Strigi is moving along at a nice pace. To keep you all posted I'd like to report a bit on what exactly is the progress that has been achieved. Part of it is in SVN and will be in 0.3.10. Part of it has been released in 0.3.9. (0.3.10 is not too far away). Read More

We had an IRC meeting about Portland's DAPI today and while most people seemed to have joined to discuss API related things, it more or less turned into a session to clarify positioning in relation with other projects cleaning up some misconceptions. Read More

Ok, time for another screenshot. It actually shows most of the recent improvements in kwin_composite: [image:2548 size=original] At the bottom-left there's KWrite with the file dialog open. The dialog is transparent because I have MakeTransparentEffect enabled - it makes moved/resized windows transparent and it also makes dialogs transparent (hey, I need to test the stuff somehow). The KWrite main window is de-saturated and has reduced brightness - that's DialogParentEffect and support for saturation/brightness, patches from Rivo Laks. Read More

After a few weeks of hunting for mentors and projects we proudly declare the Season of Usability opened: Season of Usability 2006/2007 - Call for Student Application Season of Usability 2006/2007 is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Freee/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Read More

Last week I released Kerry Beagle 0.2 in preparation for openSUSE 10.2 (whose release candidate is scheduled for Thursday). I think this version is a nice improvement over version 0.1: new interface, more supported hit types and a more complete configuration module than the original beagle-settings. Thanks must go to Debajyoti Bera for adding more Beagle KDE backends (KAddressbook, KNotes, KDE Bookmarks), and my SUSE colleagues Robert Lihm for the nice icons and Sigi Olschner for being beta tester and giving usability advice. Finally thanks to the KDE translators for providing translations for the first time. Read More

After our previous router died after a lightning strike, we got a new one. Since that new one was active, though, I had the strangest experience: when my KDE session reloaded my Konquerors, it would often claim the hosts did not exist. That's quite a big WTF, I'd say. For some reason, all DNS requests stopped working over UDP for a small while. (Manually dig'ing with +tcp worked.) Which is pretty annoying if your session also starts Akregator, which also wants to look up lots of hostnames. Read More

This year's SQIL seems to have attracted less attention from the local Linux community. I was invited to provide a conference on a topic of my choice. I decided on a much more philosophical discussion compared to last year: Qui? Quoi? Pourquoi? Comment? (French for "Who? What? Why? How?"). Read More

Since the Novell / Microsoft deal a lot of people have told stories on how Novell should not have assumed there are patents, and how the deal is written to sidestep the GPL with regards to patents. And all this time Novell was putting out FAQs, press releases trying to state that its not about patents at all, and how Novell is sure that there are no patents on the GPLed software Novell ships. Read More