KDE Blogs 

On a related (to my other blog post today) note, while I'm giving credit where credit is due: my personal KDE hero at the moment is Anne Wilson, who has been helping KDEPIM users for years on our lists and at meetings and has been a voice of reason, courtesy, constructive feedback and positiveness that makes a huge difference in the atmosphere of our community. I much admire her work with the documentation team (userbase, anyone?) and the community working group and ever since I first met her in person (in Glasgow, I think) I have been impressed by the fearless and all embracing manner in which she has found her way amongst us weirdos and become a gentle, well respected leader and wrangler of geeks. I don't know when exactly it is, but happy 70th birthday, Anne, all the best from us PIMsters, we thank you and look forward to many more Akademy meetings with you. Read More

With all the excitement and energy surrounding Akonadi and the ongoing porting of our main applications to it at the moment (over 100 commits to KDEPIM yesterday alone!), it's easy to get the impression that we've collectively abandoned our stable versions and the many users relying on them today. Not so. While Volker Krause and his team at KDAB (currently Kevin Ottens, Frank Osterfeld, Sebastian Sauer, Leo Franchi, Stephen Kelly and Laurent Montel, with various others pitching in occasionally, like Marc, Guillermo and Romain) are ripping through KDEPIM trunk, Allen Winter and Thomas McGuire (again aided by Marc and others) are faithfully watching over the stable branches. They are making sure that all relevant bugfixes found by the Akonadi port make it back into the 3.x and 4.x stable branches and are doing many bugfixes and features in those branches themselves, every week, which are then merged into trunk. This results in a steady stream of improvements into both the 3.x and 4.x series, all of which make it to our users (i.e. you out there, probably) via the Linux distributions and via the KDE Windows and Mac packages regularly. This is mostly unglamorous and sometimes boring work which they carry out with great professionalism and personal commitment, both during their KDAB work time and well beyond, in their personal time. They hardly ever get any recognition for what they do, so this is an attempt to remedy that a bit. Rock on, boys! Read More

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing Adam:                                

Once again we need testers, this time for the candidate images for Kubuntu 9.10. CDs, DVDs, netboot and upgrades all need going through their paces in triplicate. Join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate and log your results on the ISO testing site. Read More

This weekend I visited my parents in law, because my wifes paternal grandmother celebrated her 90th birthday. I noticed that the laptop they use was still running Kubuntu Feisty with OpenOffice 2.2. On this machine, reading emails, managing photos, surfing the internet and working on office documents are most important. Digikam is used for photos. Kmail and konqueror from KDE 3.5 are installed and a mix of OpenOffice and Microsoft Office 97 on wine is in use for editing office documents. in short, a horribly outdated setup of more than two years old. IT is still moving fast. Feisty was not a long term release and no updates for it anymore. Read More

One important feature for photo management is missing in the FOSS world:an application for creating photo albums that can be sent away for printing at a printing service. There is however a pretty slick closed source application that works on linux. It can be fiound at for example Pixum (also in.nl and .de). It is based on Qt 4.4 and installs using a perl script which downloads the artwork and the required libraries. The application is customized for different printing companies that have these customized downloads available from their website. Not all of them offer the linux or even the macintosh version. This is a shame and probably done to limit the number of different questions users might have. A standard for these photo album ordering services would be great, but I'm not holding my breath and will recommend Pixum for now. Read More

Kubuntu 9.10 CDs are now available for pre-order on the Kubuntu Shipit site. Can't wait a month for the CD to be delivered? Download the release candidate now for one last round of testing. Thanks to everyone who helped test the RC releases, see you again next week for the real thing! Read More

Amazing Blog This is the amazing idea that came with Amanda from the new local KDE-MG group. Simple, beatifull and the most interesting way to get conference people to enjoy your booth, put his ideas out of the mind and getting everyone close. At this picture, you see Tomaz ( no tap dance included ), and the board, saying ODEIO ( I Hate ) on left and AMO ( I Love ) and everyone can express their feeling about our beloved project where we can improve it or not, writing a note, whatever you want to write. Our small booth is really more interesting:-) Right now, i'm in the talk table to introduce Anne-Marie in her's bugsquad presentation ! Later will talk more about our second Latinoware experience, getting better and better... Ahh, i forgot to say, there's a nice tipical "Minas Gerais" prize waiting for one of the guys writing the note ! Read More

All hands on deck for the release candidate CD (and DVD and USB and upgrades) testing day. See the ISO tracker for what needs tested (duplicates tests always welcome) and join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate.

You may remember two of my recent blogs. One was about a project to parse powerpoint files and another one was about porting hexdump to the browser. So how about a combination of those two topics: parsing powerpoint files in the browser. It is quite a feasible task. The powerpoint file format is largely described in an xml schema now. From this scheme one would need to generate a parser like there is for c++ and java already. The parsers for java and c++ are both less then 700 lines of code. Read More