KDE Blogs 

Since I'm on a blogging kick, here we go again: There's a hard balance in the Open Source world in answering "I'm interested in...but where do I start?" mails. I think one thing that invariably people that write them don't realize is that you're doing really good if 10% of those turn into contributors. 10% actually sounds way too high. 2% is probably closer. Actually, thinking about it, I've probably written a few hundred of those and I can only think of maybe 3-4 that translated to patches coming in. Read More

After having worked the whole week with an icecream farm at Rob's place, I couldn't cope with the fact that my other pcs (two older linux machines, one windows macine) are mostly idle... So I started the creation of a "OpenSuSE 10.1 Icecream Slave Live-CD" (nice name eh ;-) Read More

As previously blogged, openSUSE 10.2 will have a redesigned KDE start menu created by the KDE and usability team at SUSE, after doing usability testing with other start menus. We now have a working prototype, code-named 'Kickoff' (started during world soccer championship, obviously), which is currently being tested with real users in the SUSE usability lab. At aKademy 2006 in Dublin, Coolo will give a Start Menu Research talk about what we learned during this project. Also, we are preparing a web-page to document our research. Click on the screenshot for the whole Kickoff sneak preview experience: Read More

While my account on kdedevelopers.org exists for quit a long time, I just got the feeling that it may an idea to blog a bit about the progress done lately on Kross, the scripting framework and in what direction it moves with kde4. Read More

We had a KSVG meeting last week, I made a small report here: http://www.rwlbuis.nl/photos/ksvgmeeting/

Reposted from the Dot: Didn't knew about that. On the other hand its still the only information that looks relevant. The official kde.org site does not give any hint on the status of neither Kat, nor Tenor; the latest information I found is dated 2005. SVN activity is at a low level (latest update 4 month ago). Read More

This week I'm at the Ubuntu distro sprint in Wiesbaden near Frankfurt. If you're in the area do drop by and say hi.

I found this blog entry on coding as a career limiting move interesting, how could being really good at writing code possibly be a 'career limiting move'? I've been a professional programmer for a very long time, and I've come across very, very few people who are brilliant at writing code - maybe a handful before I came across the KDE project where they seem to be all over the place. So how come the Java community thinks you can separate 'architects' who don't code from the lowly coders that the architects tell what to do? Read More

So, OpenSolaris got zing'ed at LinuxWorld by IBM. Of course, that sent Sun's PR Department to DEFCON 5. On first appearance, this could just be IBM's PR Department "engaging our competitor's peers in a constructive yet competitive corporate dialogue" [mouthwash, please]. Instant Blogger Blast. How Web 2.0. I found the whole thing funny. Mr. Frye is not even entirely off the mark in his remarks. I just don't happen to think it takes one full year to "Evaluate Subversion". Read More

For KWord I have progressed nicely in the layout department. In my last blog I started researching linespacing. It turns out that are two accepted methods of doing linespacing and the different results was (partly) due to the different models. Funny thing is, the OpenDocument Format spec has a configure setting for it. So I just made KWord do both to honour that config setting. :-) Read More