KDE Blogs 

The wee 80x15 website banners have become a popular to show your allegiance and make a much more sophisticated alternative than the old style of banner which started long long ago with "Netscape Now". Read More

I'm unable to rsync with the cvs repository, so no digest is possible. It seems everything is in flux until the subversion changeover is done. Hopefully all will be back to normal next week. Read More

It looks like my thesis will be late (Gee, what a surprise), and since I soon have to buy the apartment I've been renting, I've been looking for a job, and finally found one. Read More

Today KDE's culture is one of our most important assets. It's also one of our worst enemies. KDE's culture has been ideal to bring us to where we are today. More or less, our goal for years has been to produce a desktop -- something that can actually be called a modern desktop. Read More

Today I counted: I have lots of files on my systems. 1,635,315 files on my main workstation (SUSE-9.1); 80 GBytes on one disk filled up by 50%. 1,493,166 files on my other workstation (SUSE-8.0); 20 GBytes on 4 disks filled up by 93%. 418,769 files on my company notebook (Win XP Prof); 40 GBytes on one disk filled up by 88%. OK, there probably is no better way for now than organize these files in a structure of directories, subdirectories, files and accessing them by "paths". But is it really the best way to present these data to me in the same hierarchical view as the file system stores them? Read More

Whenever something in KDE has frustrated me in the last month I've added it to a list: Tidy Konqueror. Konqueror has hardly changed since KDE 2 although the settings menu has gained a few extra unnecessary entries (which should be merged into the main Configure Konqueror dialogue). The sidebar should maybe be part of each tab not global to the window and a context sensitive sidebar for file manager would be nice. Kicker's Add to Panel and Remove from Panel menus should be dialogues. HAL support in KDE 3.4 is nice but Konqueror should pop up into the forground when a device is entered not have to wait for the user. The Help Centre suffers from much the same usability issues as Konqueror, it's got too much stuff in it's user interface. I'm not convinced that long manuals are the best format for documentation, shorter articles on specific actions which can be easily searched might work better. So in KWord if I search for mail merge it can give me a two or three paragraph article about how to do a mail merge. Systempreferences (in kdenonbeta) makes a good KControl replacement, of course there are larger plans afoot for KControl. Share folders sensibly. kpf is nifty but the user interface is all wrong (in kicker when it should be in Konqueror). And I've never got the right click on folder->share folders to work. A single download dialogue to replace all those file copying dialogues. Being able to pause and resume downloads would be nice to. KGet can do that but there's no reason for it to be separate from KDE core. Improved KNotify. This is where dbus needs to replace dcop since then everything down to syslogd can pop up friendly messages on screen as required. Juk pops up messages when playing a new song and amarok pops up slightly more pretty looking messages but there's no reason why that can't be done through KNotify. See Growl for this being done well on MacOS. Search in minicli. I should be able to type something into minicli and it will pop up with all the relevent applications, recent e-mails, files on my hard disk, contacts in address book, etc. See Quicksilver for MacOS goodness. Sounds like a perfect use of Tenor (klink). An option to say that actually I really would like to quit when I close the window and please stop telling me you're going to be hiding in the system tray. abakus, because I've wanted something like it for ages. Maybe a new icon theme, one that actually is based on SVG so that it can be maintined. Maybe call it Appeal. Standardised icon names too. Nicer website, with photos and pretty things. More usable wiki.

The Kubuntu announcement and preparations kept me up until about 5 o'clock last night just in time for a couple of hours kip before the announcement this morning. The feedback has been good and there's been a few sightings of Kubuntu in the wild. Many thanks go to the helpful people at Ubuntu who put up with us being somewhat newer to this game than them. Read More

I read this article in today's Guardian. Call it a touching act of altruism or a curious assertion of maternal capability, but the bottom line is 40-year-old Hla Htay is breastfeeding a Bengal tiger cub. ... As to why Ms Htay has offered her services, when bottled milk could do just as well? "I don't even want to go there," says Strike. Read More

Job interviews really, really suck. The traditional upbringing of an Australian fundamentalist christian renders you almost incapable of 'selling yourself' effectively in an interview. As a child, you learn that to state your own talents is 'bragging' or 'being up yourself'. It makes it very difficult as an adult to then learn how to market yourself to an employer. They ask you 'So, why should we give you this job?' and you look at them blankly. 'Uh.... um, cause I wouldn't suck at it too much?' Read More

KDE is not only developed worldwide and being translated into over 75 languages making it the most and broadest translated Free Software graphical desktop environment. kde.org/international shows that the KDE community also consists of many, mostly non-English speaking, local groups worldwide who promote KDE in their country or region (like KDE Chile at the Latin America Free Software Install Festival recently) and help KDE users in their native language. Read More