KDE Blogs 

So they say necessity is the mother of all invention... personally I tend to believe its the affections of a woman ;) Basicly it started last week, my wife is working on her masters in EE, and found out that the lab at work didn't have Matlab installed for his DSP class. So I told her about GNU Octave http://www.octave.org and she was for the most part thrilled. Read More

Chris Howells posted a synopsis of his CS syllabus, and it sounded really dull to me. If someone has been making useful contributions to KDE like Chris, what is it that they need to learn from their teachers? ie what about the teacher who asked the question "who has used a computer before?".

Most KDE users probably know what pressing ALT and F2 does, it's opening the "Run Command" dialog. But did you also know that this little dialog can do magic? Try "2+2 ", try "schumacher@kde.org", try "www.kde.org", try "help", try "logout", "gg:sin 5 ", "leo:warzenschwein" or "ggi:warthog". Read More

I'm not sure what the definition of enterprise is, it sounds a lot like a meaningless buzzword to me, but I suspect that what I saw last Friday comes into the category of enterprise. I was invited to visit the finishing touches being put to the nice new building below and more importantly their new computer system which uses KDE on the desktop. There will be about 250 users moving in this week and so far they love it. There has been only one person complaining, he can't move the icons on the desktop. That would be Kiosk. Read More

Today I was told by a friend that minicli contains a... calculator. Just press Alt+F2 and type e.g. 23-5. Then press enter. Seems like there were alterantives to kcalc that predate the current calcualtor war. Now: anyone willing to implement a solver for differential equations? ;-) Read More

Everything is set up for the expo tomorrow. Matthias Ettrich will be there, which will be groovy. There are piles of leaflets to give away. We will have news of a 250 (going up to 1000) machine deployment of KDE. We have lots of shiny computers on which to demo KDE. I even helped to contrust the dreaded Debian shelves of doom. Read More

Yesterday, I did some calls with Skype. Amongst others I talked to Fabrice Mous and afterwards we even did a conference call with Stephan Binner. Later on I called my father. This is even more remarkable since my provider (which I luckily will get rid of at the end of this month) blocks UDP ("It's stateless, we can't control it, therefore it's dangerous."). This usually means the end to any VoIP solution which require UDP for low-latency. Still Skype simply works -- remarkable well. Read More

I've just read this story about AT&T trying linux. The story tells us that they might deploy linux to 70,000 computers. Of course, this might be the case that AT&T is just trying to get some leverage against Microsoft to get a better deal, but I began imagining 70,000 KDE boxes runing. Read More

I've got a new job (actually I've had this job for about 4-5 months). In telling where I work now, I started to realise why I've been away from KDE development in the past two years. Read More

A few days ago I wrote that I got my copy of The System of the World, the latest book by Neal Stephenson. Yesterday I searched for the "The System of the World" on Google and learned to my surprise that the link to my blog entry was the 3rd top hit. Interesting. The first hit was Slashdot, the second one Amazon, then me and then lots of book sellers. The original "A Treatise of the System of the World" by Isaac Newton was something like number 33. Read More