KDE Blogs 

I promised I would improve my blog rate, so here I start. The day started interesting: Got a mail from Martin Pool asking why we forked icecream and it took me a while to give a good enough answer. In short: We didn't fork, but wrote something similiar from scratch using distcc code. Will still be interesting how this story continues though. Still the thing that turns around in my head the most right now is this: I leave for two weeks greece next week and got already in this dangerous "doesn't really matter if I start with it now" mood. I still would like to make the icecream scheduler use even less blocking file operations and have the client send local jobs notifications async, so updating monitors doesn't block Simon's configure runs. The notification of monitors is right now blocking too (one thing that made the aKademy cluster behave so much different than the one at SUSE: the number of monitors), but Michael is not yet sure if he wants non-blocking TCP or UDP (I guess, if we go UDP, we need some way to reset the state of monitors). For those interested in KDE 3.3 release schedule: I return at 27th to full work, so I target that week for tagging/packaging and ~5.10. for KDE 3.3.1 (I now that's roughly 7 weeks since KDE 3.3.0, but I hope you agree that I deserved some kind of vacation) Read More

So aKademy is over for most people, only the aKademy press staff continues to publish stories based on content collected and interviews conducted in Ludwidgsburg and it will take some weeks to close all financial transactions. I only read positive comments until now so don't let me ruin the "perfect" impression by listing what didn't work or other than planned. :-) Read More

After reading this blog http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000292.html I thought I'd try out Instiki - it's a simple to set up wiki which can also export to an html website. Recently I've been using KJots to handle 'random notes' and todo lists, but what I really like to have is an outliner like 'Acta' that I used to use on my Mac a few years ago. Acta didn't do anything fancy - it wasn't trying to be a presentation package or a word processor that could also do outlining. But it was dead simple to use, and you could link in MacDraw figures if you needed any sophisticated diagrams. Read More

Just a quick completely KDE unrelated personal note: My wife's heart surgery was very successfull. They found out what was wrong and were able to completely fix it. Hats off to the debugging skills of these electrophysiological cardiologists, the amount of information they can read out of a few meters of EEG output paper is astonishing. Everyone is confident that she will be better than ever and free of heart related troubles for the foreseeable future. Thanks to everyone who sent good wishes and words of encouragement, they were very much appreciated. :)

Back from Ludwigsburg and things have settled down some at last. It was very nice to meet the rest of the PIM team again and of course all the other KDE people. I had a great time there and I'm glad I spent comparatively little of it hacking and quite a lot of it talking to people, having beer and meals with them and just generally hanging out. The downside of that is that I got none of the things done I intended to do there. :) Sadly I couldn't be there for either the social event on Saturday or the talk I was supposed to do with Ingo on KMail on Sunday, but I'm sure he did allright on his own. I'm pretty happy with the HP nx5000 I bought there at reduced price as part of HP's generous sponsoring of the event, it actually suspends to disk nicely and the keyboard is just great. I'm spoiled from my old Compaq's 1400x1050 display, but I've already mostly gotten used to being back to a smaller resolution. It's very quiet and light, which is a rather nice change from the bulky Armada E500. Oh, and the headphone out doesn't frizzle and hum, which makes listening to music on the plane/train much more pleasant. /me pets HP. Cornelius wrote a few days ago: "In addition to that I’m also happy about the progress kdepim made as a project and as a team as well. We had a kdepim meeting yesterday and it was amazing how easy it has become to find common ground and constructively work together into one direction. I really enjoy being part of this team." In short: So do I. What a team. And when I look outside of kdepim I find there are even more amazing people doing amazing work. And I'm happy and proud to be part of that larger team as well. Makes you feel all Olympic and fuzzy inside. Am I hearing the neighbor's kids hum the Free Software Song down there? Read More

One morning at the youth hostel during aKademy I had an interesting conversation with Eric Laffoon. He told me about an idea to give more credit to bug reporters. Right now there is a statistic for the most active bug closers, but for bug reporters there isn't such a thing. I think it would be very interesting to give people doing bug reports of high quality bug more credit for their contribution by introducing something like a list of the top ten bug reporters. Maybe this could give bug reporters an incentive to make better bug reports. Read More

Canonical Software is the name of a company making a new Debian based distribution. I suspect there isn't much knowledge of this among KDE developers so here is what is known. Mark Shuttleworth is the man who used to do the company that become Verisign (and was the first African in space) has hired the best Debian, Gnome and Python developers to make a freely downloadable distribution which I suspect is supposed to be Debian made good (shorter release cycles being one of the main features). Read More

Why is everyone so surprised when I tell them I walk to the youth hostel from aKademy rather than take the bus or shuttle car? Really it's not that amazing. Of course I'd rather cycle (or take a rickshaw) but I don't have one with me. It only takes 40 minutes and it might work off that pizza you had earlier today.

One thing that people constantly seem to carp on about in Open Source circles is the frequency with which there are several apps that do the same thing. They then generally go on to say that the developers should work on whatever their favourite application is. The implicit assumption here is that having multiple apps is wasteful, but I don't agree that this is the case. Read More

This week at aKademy I asked Reinhold if he would be willing to take over the maintainership of KOrganizer and he said yes. So now after five years of being the KOrganizer maintainer I pass the torch to Reinhold. Read More