KDE Blogs 

finally, on thursday i've written the last of the 4-day written final exam series. from now on i've a lot more sparetime... i've 5 weeks until the oral part of the exams beginns. however there shouldn't be very much to learn. i'll use the resulting sparetime for continuing diskothek development and maybe with aids (porting, ... ) for kde4 Read More

Those who have been subject to my rants on this topic before are no doubt familiar with my views, but as they've mostly been on IRC and not particularly structured, and there's been some prompting in the KDE community in the last couple of days, so here goes. The "sexualization" of women in our community really has to stop. I really get sick of seeing every time a female contributor comes around, or everytime there's an article on the Dot that refers to our female contributors that it's just a matter of time before some jackass decides that it's the right forum to ask if they're single or make other comments that are just there because they're female. Contributors are important Contributors are important. We need them. We don't need male contributors or female contributors, we need contributors period. Despite their deficit in numbers, some of the most important members of our community are female. And who cares what gender they are, really? They're important contributors, and we as a community need to insure that we're not treating one segment of our community differently just based on their gender. The KDE social landscape In a normalized social environment -- one that's fairly well mixed between males and females -- this isn't much of an issue. In such an environment flirting and such things are a fairly normal, such is afterall our nature. We are sexual beings. However there are a few ways that KDE diverges from this. First, the majority of people in the KDE community are male. This in and of itself is not a problem. Some of the thought on the social foundations of engineering and sciences being largely male driven in western society is in fact interesting, but out of scope for the moment. However, this is coupled with a significant subset of our community being less than great with their social skills. Specifically, a lot of the members of our community simply haven't really interacted all that much in usual social settings with members of the opposite sex and quite frankly haven't got a clue how to go about such. The result of this tends to be anywhere from overt sexual objectification to accidental inappropriateness. At some point we may see things start to level out -- see, that's the interesting bit. If we aren't asses about this stuff, and we treat contributors more or less equally independant of gender, that will actually help things get closer to a balance with time and then we don't have to actively compensate for our present social dispositions. It's all fun and games until somebody loses a contributor And to be clear, while some of the lighter bits of this may seem amusing to some of folks the first go around -- like, I mean, being told you're cute in the right context isn't the worst thing in the world -- it does get old, mostly because of the baggage that comes with it. The problem is that often along with that comes an objectification that obscures what the person is actually part of the community for. Sure, having people think you're cute might be fun, but not if it's getting in the way of being taken seriously (or too seriously as can sometimes be the case) when trying to actually do something important. And I have known people who have actually left the community over this. Let's be pragmatic For those male members of our community that feel the need to try to pick up women via the Dot, well, I hate to break it to you but statistics are not on your side. Here's a little secret -- there are women all around. Many of them are even single. And if you can come up with something a little more subtle than saying as if they weren't there, "She's cute. Is she single?" they'll actually talk to you. No, really. This happens all the time. I've devised a step-by-step plan that may help some of you and I presume is easier to implement than Theobroma's scheming: Read More

I applaud the Turkish KDE community for founding KDE Turkey(cool website btw). All these local groups really do an enormous service to KDE by creating awareness in their own country. I truly hope this inspires more people to form a local KDE group. You really can make a difference! Read More

Hello world, I can't believe it - even I am starting a blog now :-) I'll try to keep you up2date with the kdom/ksvg2/kcanvas development process in future. Stay tuned! Read More

Aaron commented on the interview made by Free Software Magazin with the owner-boss of various IT websites, some of which had been the platform for a poisonous pro-SCO/anti-Groklaw propaganda campaign, culminating in personal attacks against Pamela Jones, the brain and heart behind Groklaw, orchestrated by one (now infamous) Maureen O'Gara. After senior editors of the "Linux World Magazine" threatened to resign over the scandal, O'Gara was ditched. I hadnt seen the interview Aaron mentioned. But I had read the "Letter to Our Readers", signed by Mark R. Hinkle (Editor-in-Chief), who also happens to be the COO of Win4Lin/NeTraverse. This piece prompted very mixed feeling during reading. It more sounds like marketing speak than anything else. It prays the prayer of "we are good, we do good, we do not harm anyone and we wish Pamela Jones all the best". I just couldnt take it for its face value. I rather felt annoyed by reading through it. Now Dee-Ann LeBlanc and James Turner, the two Senior Editors of Linux World Magazine have in fact resigned, refering to the interview Aaron also took issues with. (BTW, I'd not wonder if the links should soon be dangling, because their former bosses pullled their accounts.) I just wonder, if Sys-Con has any business connections with LinuxWorldExpo too? I'll look that up later. Just now, I dont want to know more details about that felt. I just feel too pissed off already... Read More

Last week new KDE contributor Ivor Hewitt committed the first version of an image blocker for Konqueror which ranked first position in the list of most wanted features at that time. When looking at the next top entries you will perhaps know that many are under development: Bittorrent support in kget is being considered to be added once the kget rewrite to support plugins is finished. Support for removing attachments in KMail is the first TODO of Don Sanders (he is currently busy implementing asynchronous filtering, the most hated bug). The themeable KDM greeter exists already in KDE 3.4 although it doesn't support all GDM elements yet and misses a GUI to set it up (but see KDM Theme Manager). Client side IMAP filtering is also being worked on by Don, a new contributor requested a VCS account to implement ACL support recently, Cervisia is getting Subversion support, smooth scrolling exists in HEAD/trunk and so on. In summary many features which will make many people happy in near-future KDE versions. Read More

Among my other numerous and intricate tasks at work, I also play the temporary role of informatics djin in our research group. I herd machines, mold users (yeah :-| ), tend for software (both sickly commercial licenced stuff and marvelous free gems), test compilers etc. I thus come regularly in contact with absolute new unix users (in the occasion of creating their accounts and guiding them around), that come from 3-4 years of windows history and are cruelly plunged, headfront, into a boiling sea of C++ & g++ & python & Finite Elements & Mathematics & Unix & KDE & XEmacs. People that see a command line for the first time in their life. I have to handhold them during the first days and explain to them why machines don't crash (thus no need to hit the pesky reboot button) and so on. Read More

Tx to a slashdot article about KDE and OpenUsability, I am really confused, perhaps sad. It was the discussion afterwards. I did not know that the world is devided into Gnome and KDE. But if I read (some of) the comments, I get the impression. True, the idea for the OpenUsability project came out of discussions during Nove Hrady two years ago, and many KDE projects do like it and use it, and the OU project learned a lot about potential workflows and how to ease cooperation from it. But, and let me quote: "Now getting usability expert on board to solve these issues sure is the right way and if KDE 3.4 is anything to judge from, there are great things to come for KDE." Hello? Again, anyone who produces free software can and should make use of OpenUsability.

On Wednesday evening I visited the podium discussion for the Open Source Jahrbuch 2005. Afterwards some speakers and visitors moved on to a nearby cafe and I chatted with Oliver Zendel of LinuxTag e.V. and also a bit with Eva Brucherseifer and Jan Mühlig about KDE and Appeal until early Thursday. Read More

Next week, on Wednesday the 18th of May, I will be overseeing a KDE Flamewar (and talking about how to tweak KDE) for the Nottingham Linux Users Group. Come one, come all! Read More