KDE Blogs 

Whatever you guys took out of the Malaga conference - for me it's this: I love my wife (knew that part before, but I better list it to avoid misunderstandings), my bed, my couch, the silence in my bedroom and speaking german (having meals without having to guess what it is pretty cool :). Read More

aKademy is over now - time for a final summary :) One of my personal highlights was Richard Moore hacking the What's this help. Improving the usability of the What's this help has been a concern to me for quite a long time, I had some ideas in mind but never found somebody to implement them. Thanks Richard! Our final goal is to make it part of a nested contextual help system: The user will be guided right from the descriptions in the interface (labels, tooltips e.g.) to the more descriptive What's this help and finally to the corresponding pages in the manual or in a tutorial. Read More

I'm now back from Malaga and have just about recovered, so I thought I'd blog a little about the discussions etc. I've been involved in over there. For me, obviously, the big questions were about scripting. Until now, KDE has been weak in the area of scripting applications - this will not be true of KDE 4. Read More

OK, this is my first and only blog entry during the Malaga conference. And so I have to report about what really bothers me about this city. Yesterday we decided to take a random trip through the city and then we found this nice little place with a huge obelisk on it. There was a cocktail bar on it and many many young people. So we ordered some drinks (and I saw for the very first time in my life a cocktail presented in a coconut - for just 6 Euro the guy opened a coconut, put lots of alcohol in it and put cream on top of it, amazing. I admit though that it didn't taste just as well, but I'm not that much of a cocos fan, but then again it wasn't my drink) and just sat there. And now the trouble starts: Read More

Another feedback re. my recent blog entry: there is now The First FreeNX Wallpaper available from KDE-Look. It is installable via the "Get Hot New Stuff". Looks pretty cool too (some non-Europeans say it is too Old-World-centric -- well, let them create stuff that suits their tastes better. The important point is that FreeNX can connect us all, no?)

It was only 10 minutes after my last blog entry appeared that one reader phoned me and objected: he thinks that the 280 msec latency he experiences from his currently Malaga/Spain-based notebook to his guest account on my NX server in Karlsruhe/Germany would be too much, and a data flow rate of 27 kBits/sec too sparse (he used a crappy and fairly saturated WLAN link to test this) to make users feel comfortable in using NX permanently, day-in and day-out over the network. He agreed NX was still performing very well, given the conditions he had to cope with, and that he could still be nearly as productive as he was used to from using his local machine. Read More

Some of you know already: since NoMachine released the 1.5.0 of their GPL'd Core NX Libraries, KDE applications run blazingly fast over remote internet links in "single window mode". Even modem connections work great. Previous versions hadn't yet built in X roundtrip suppression for single application windows, and you could enjoy the full speed of applications only when running them inside a complete KDE desktop environment. Read More

The nice things when meeting everyone at aKademy is that you can very easily talk face to face to people. I attended many BoFs including the working group meeting. I liked that everyone was sharing a common goal but it showed that if the group becomes too big making progress is not simple. Funny enough to me this BoF showed the need for structure within the KDE project very much and the intermediate result that a small subgroup shall draft a proposal is showing promise. Mirko did a great job in moderating the discussion. Read More

Roberto Cappuccio wrote: After lunch, Zack Rusin, another vegetarian of the KDE community, opened his Powerbook and performed, for our eyes only, the presentation of his improvements to KDE's graphical environment, which did not take place some days ago due to technical problems. It was simply stunning. KDE 4 will rock! However, it's more likely that KDE 4 will also wobble, and turn and shift, etc. :-) Read More

Lately I've been thinking about both my past and my future. What strikes me is how easy it is to predict the future (not necessarily the same as being personally able to make it happen). In the early 1970's Alan Kay at Xerox PARC used Moore's law to predict when it would be possible to create a flat screen display based portable machine, he called a 'dynabook'. You just take the graphs of expected progress in microelectronics, extrapolate, and see about what year the hardware would arrive. Read More