KDE Blogs 

Usability is one of my favorite buzzwords. It sounds great, people get emotional about it and it even has some real meaning. In addition to that it's a very interesting area to work on in KDE. With initiatives as OpenUsability or APPEAL it gets more and more focus and we have structures in place which enable us to actually succeed in making KDE the most usable desktop one can imagine. Read More

My general mood is down. I'd like a "Personal Rant" category here... I am now compiling for the last time the KDE CVS HEAD source. No, I don't intend to kill myself. It's just that I'll switch to svn as everybody else. Read More

It's a small, small world. While staying in Wellington I thought I'd take the opportunity check out the local LUG. It seems to be a collection of some pretty nice people of varying geekiness, most of whom I'm interested in getting to know better. A nice man who has the same model laptop as I do. We exchanged some pointers on how we'd gotten various things working. A younger guy, burning with New Gentoo Convert Zeal. Seems very bright and funny in a goofy way. There was one other girl there - yay! Read More

Yesterday, Aaron made some interesting comments on the unified configuration system that has been discussed on the xdg-list over the last few weeks. I think some of his comments are spot on, unfortunately some others seem to be of the more paranoid hallucinogenic kind. I'm not into mushrooms myself so I will concentrate on the productive parts. Read More

My last blog entry regarding re. "HP supporting their printers and scanners with open source drivers" made 2 private mails come into my mailbox. They challenged me with the other product type mentioned in the LinuxToday feedback, namely notebooks. One of them said, that beyond printer drivers, HP did nothing to support OSS, and a well known big name company with a 3-letter name was much better behaving in that respect. What follows is a reproduction of my response to these mails (just HTML-ized and enhanced with inline-d hyperlinks). Read More

Late this afternoon, a talkback at LinuxToday annoyed so much that I had to respond. A PR story outlining that HP turns now to Linux as the OS for their new series of NAS devices (Network Attached Storage) prompted an extremely uninformed guy to headline his bickering. "HP -- Open Source Leech" and then go on: "...HP is again leeching on the opensource community. Hey HP, where are the drivers for your scanners, printers and all your laptops?" Read More

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.

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