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Today, the BIPT (Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunication) released a draft of the implementation of the EU directive regarding data retention in Belgian Law at the request of the minster for Enterprising and Simplification (dunno how else to translate 'minister voor Ondernemen en Vereenvoudigen') (downloadable in Dutch and French). It seems the idea is to introduce some form of public scrutiny (instead of just making the law and be done with it), so that people can comment on it. I'm of course completely pessimistic about real chances of influencing it for the better, but one never knows. Read More

While working on Improving OpenDocument in KWord for gsoc2008 we enjoyed today again one of this very productive pair-programming days. The todays goal was not that difficult: get those svg:x and svg:y positions for text-anchors (which are used to position frames like e.g. an image relative to there anchor) working. Read More

Yesterday I arrived (too early for my taste) in Karlsruhe, to present KDE at the Open Source Expo. The OpenExpo is a rather new fair, so it was not very full but there was an audience for the talks. I gave a general KDE 4 introduction, with the help of Martin Gräßlin. We started early since the talk before ours did not take place for some reason. That took away a little from my pre talk meditation time :o I started with some slides about KDE 4 based on what Lydia already used a while ago, but very reduced. I soon switched over to live demoing of what will become KDE 4.1 and it was great fun. I could even show how nice the crash handler looks, though that was somewhat unplanned. Having a nice benevolent audience with good humor and me being in a good mood too, I got pretty positive feedback after-wards anyway :) Martin then gave a ten minute KWin tour showing compositing and explaining some of the backgrounds, very nice! He'll be working on the desktop cube KWin effect this summer. Marble with open street map is quite a looker too. Sven later gave a talk about Amarok 2 which also got quite a bit of attention. What surprised me (yeah, call me naive) was people requesting documentation (books on KDE 4) to get started :) And maybe I should start using a localized version of KDE for this kind of presentation, something that I usually don't do. All in all the fair could have benefited from more visitors but was nice. Great catering :) I enjoyed meeting new people again, Stephan and Martin for KDE as well as some nice people from Python, Ubuntu and Open Street Map. Seeing the local crowd (Sput, Sven and Lydia) in Karlsruhe again was great too, I found out Nini is as good a table soccer player as I am. Sven (the one with the good taste in music:) ) provided me with a place to sleep, thanks! Read More

At SUSE I work in the incubation team. We are exploring new technologies, creating prototypes of future systems, and trying to find and shape some of the features that will be part of upcoming SUSE products and the ecosystem around that. It's a fascinating job, challenging, fun, and always exciting. For somebody like me who loves to create new things and enjoys working with an awesome team of innovative people this is a dream job. Read More

Shortly after the Marble OpenStreetMap integration I'm happy to report that Simon Schmeisser has managed to integrate Marble as a Flake Shape into KPresenter. As a flake shape you can change the map according to your liking even after it has been embedded into the KOffice application. So it's not just a simple image but rather a component that allows the user to adjust the content: Which other Free Software office application has a virtual globe that it can embedd into the documents across plattforms? So that adds another successful application of KDE technology to Marble's capabilities: It's only a few weeks ago that our weather man Henry de Valence has started to work on a Marble WorldClock plasmoid: Of course apart from a Marble Qt Designer Plugin and the Marble KPart (which gets used by the Marble Desktop application itself) you can use the MarbleWidget in your very own application -- like Gilles Caullier has done for Digikam: The Marble Widget has no KDE ties, so even if your application uses only Qt you can still take advantage of Marble. So what's the next showcase that people will come up with? A Marble Netscape Plugin? I'm curious. In other news Shashank Singh has just joined us for GSoC 2008 and will provide Panoramio support for Marble. Welcome Shashank! Right now the Marble Team is heavily working towards KDE 4.1 Beta2: Jens-Michael is working on further improving Marble OpenStreetMap support, Inge is working on the Mercator Projection, Patrick is working on further improving KML for his GSoC 2008 project (which actually deals with vector rendering in Marble), Claudiu is working on his Satellite Plugin and Henry is working on texture colorization and Temperature / Precipitation maps. I'll continue to work on GeoPainter and Marble's new plugin architecture which will enable other developers to write Qt-Plugins for Marble to render their own layers and their own data. These are exciting times for Marble. Can you feel the Earth spinning?

Ubuntu Developer Summit is winding down here in the tallest building in Prague. You can preview the Kubuntu specs and I'll write more about them when I get back. Now we're off to dance at an Ubuntu music jam. Read More

Since some years I have the pleasure to maintain KArm, the friendly KDE timetracker. KArm allows users to find out how much time they spend on which task since longer than 10 years. For KDE 4, it was time for a big renovation. Read More

A bunch of exciting things have happened to Konqueror in preparation for 4.1 Beta 1 this weekend. First of all, KHTML guru Germain Garand has committed the bulk of the designMode/contentEditable editing code. It's not 100% done yet, but it's a monumental amount of work, and it should enable the various rich-text editor apps to work in KHTML. Read More

I would post a screenshot of what this is going to be about, but the screenshot would look remarkably similar to other KDE3 screenshots I could post. Unless I switched the decoration to Oxygen/Ozone, but then yours truly is still quite happy with the KDE2 decoration (and then, also not quite happy with all those people who think that anything that's older than a year, especially if it's not shiny, must be oh-so-bad), so let's just skip that. You can try yourself after all. Read More

The hero of the current Marble KDE 4.1 Beta1 release is Jens-Michael Hoffmann: He has successfully worked on getting OpenStreetMap integrated into Marble and KDE 4.1! This means that once you start our free software virtual globe and select "OpenStreetMap" as a theme then Marble will directly start to download OpenStreetMap tiles from the OpenStreetMap server: If you want to try it you can either wait for KDE 4.1 Beta1 packages to appear on the KDE Website next week. Or you start to compile current Marble SVN yourself. It's pretty easy: You only need just Qt 4.3 (or 4.4), or alternatively KDE >= 4.0 and Qt >= 4.3 including headers. Then you can start to build Marble according to our HOWTO. Once you have compiled Marble from current SVN you can start it either from the menu or from the commandline. You'll be greeted by our globe. If everything went well, you'll see that Marble now features a starry sky plugin (notice the constellation "Orion" right next to the earth in the following screenshot): If you have compiled the KDE version then you can adjust the quality settings for "Still image" and "During animations". We'd suggest that you use "High" for "Still image" and "Low" for "During animations" however you can adjust the values according to the performance of your hardware. Read More