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People like clowns, they are funny! A clown figure is the image of a very clumsy person, sometimes even stupid. They wear oversized clothes, huge shoes and have ridiculous makeup. They do things way too stupid for normal people to even consider, their jobs is to be whereever there is a need to from someone to laugh about. Read More

Who doesn't want to enjoy the good things in life longer? I'm talking of course about the battery life in your laptop. Intel released PowerTOP this week, a power monitoring tool for Linux. PowerTOP helps you identify which processes on your system keep your processor from going to deeper sleep states. Deeper sleep states consume less power and make your battery charge last longer. Visit www.linuxpowertop.org and give it a try!

In between porting some of my older KDE 3 C++ over to Python and Qt/KDE 4, and also fixing some bugs in Guidance, I've had a little play around with QtJambi. QtJambi is Trolltech's new bindings generator and bindings for using Qt4 on Java. Or to be more accurate I should say that the bindings are for the Java Virtual Machine, and not just for programs written in the Java language. One of the interesting features about VMs is that they don't have to be tied to a single programming language. You can run all sorts of different languages on the Java VM or the .NET / Mono VM. Now, one of the not just interesting, but really /cool/ features of VMs is you usually don't need huge slabs of binding code if you want one language to call code written in another, provide both languages are running on the VM itself. To put it simply: you can use QtJambi with a whole swag of different languages that run on the Java VM. Here is a little example of the Qt analog clock example written some other weird and wacky language: (anyone know which?) Read More

KDE 4.0 Alpha 1 has been released, code-named "Knut" (btw my reasoning was: "small but growing and being forgotten soon"). And of course it's accompanied by a new KDE Four Live version and packages for openSUSE. Just keep in mind that it's the first Alpha release which is totally unusable and not representive for KDE 4[.0]. :-)

Yesterday, the usability review cycle for KDE4 started. As the HCI working group is poor on man-power, we started an experiment to include the community into the search for obvious infringements of the KDE Human Interface Guidelines: The HIG Hunting Season. Read More

When I was 12 we had a question in the school's annual general knowledge quiz "What is Georgia?". The three correct answers were: a country in eastern Europe, a state in the US and the dog of my English teacher. The dog died and I don't know much about the US state but we had a nice talk about the country this morning. Read More

When I get an email blaming me for doing something wrong, I typically stop and think. Its important to me to be open to feedback from others and 'do better'. Now; when some mails further in the thread you notice all arguments get ignored, and everyone that speaks up gets accused of conspiring with the others, you know you've got a conspiracy theorist on your hands and you know that whatever you say will have zero effect anyway. (yay for KMails 'ignore thread' feature!) I was in a couple of such threads recently, and reading this perfectly timed edition of a rather geeky comic lifted my spirit quite a bit :) Enjoy it for yourself at; http://xkcd.com/c258.html

UDS is back underway, this time in the sunny city of Sevilla in southern Spain. As usual we are working on specifications for the next six months of Kubuntu. Areas being looked at include desktop search, dolphin in KDE 3, bluetooth support (it's all going to break apparantly), making sure the user is properly informed of removable media, improving Guidance and moving it to Qt 4, adding an on screen keyboard for accessibility and of course packaging KDE 4. Read More

A great example of grass roots; educate the educators about the brave new world and supporing critical thinking about MSWord and .doc Critical Thinking About Word and .doc One of the things most of us hate most about flying is that you always get the feeling you get ripped off. Naturally, the airliners are just following the basic economy rule of charging what people are willing to pay. It seems some people have found a way to do the same with open source software. See; How much is Free Software Worth on eBay? Read More

The openSUSE Survey results are in: thanks to the over 27k people who participated. And over 70% of those use the best desktop environment! :-) Read the complete results (PDF) if you have doubts which is it...