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According to this commentary in the online version of The Independent, there are now more hired mercenaries in Iraq than there are regular US and UK troops. Of course, information about this practice is not officially released by any government: instead, the mercenaries are very often called "security contractors", "civilian operatives", or "reconstruction workers". The author of the commentary says: "Britain alone has 21,000 in the country, raking in $1.6bn a year." American mercenary companies such as Blackwater seem to take a big slice of that particular business cake too. They seem to hire men from around the globe to fill in their vacancies, including many from third world contries such as Colombia. I don't expect you to read the full article now. But keep in mind to make up for that leeway, next time you watch some TV news about a topic like "Again 3 US civilians reported to have been kidnapped and killed in Iraq"....

I'm back from vacation / LinuxTag 2007: met many openSUSE, Trolltech, KDE and GNOME people - more than expected. Jump over to some pictures. On other news, Novell will be Silver sponsor of both aKademy and GUADEC this year. I will only visit aKademy though.

Well it's a long time since my last blog entry, but i was almost busy. In my personal life, there were no big changes, so it's almost annoying blogging about it. In the meantime KMobileTools had a great speedup, helped also by the joining of Matthias Lechner, who almost finished the gammu engine. So KMobileTools 0.5.0-beta3 was just released, bringing us very close to the final version. We also moved to extragear, since it's nearly stable code. Also i've started the port to KDE4. Actually it's almost completed, but it still rely on QT3 Support. But it's enough for the moment, so now KMobileTools is part of KDEPim, thanks also to Pinotree who helped a lot in the porting process, and to Allen Winter, the PIM coordinator :) Development now was just a bit slow down, due also to exams incoming, but it's still active, i just committed some code to fix some bugs, and to improve compatibility with more phones.

Yesterday I watched a talk given by Trolltech on Qt Jambi where we saw the presenter create a widget and use it in QtDesigner afterwards with an ease that is really compelling. This tied in with the points raised on Aarons blog earlier this week: on-mistaking-internet-for-interface. Read More

Google uses the same db backend as Kexi for offline operations. I mean: SQLite. http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_database.html Interesting times. This makes it possible to implement live connectivity to offline resources from KOffice and KDE itself. Then, after going online, the data can return to Google's server. With KexiDB it could also be automatically exported/replicated to your very own database, no matter it is MySQL, PostgreSQL or ODBC-compliant backend. Read More

Something I read on aaron's blog just now struck a chord with me, and cut through my morning head haze nicely. We are the renaissance geeks. Some of the stuff we do is indescribably technical and abstract, but it all has the end of increasing general utility, that is, by letting people use their computers in ways that grow their happiness and productivity. Read More

On Friday I'll fly to Milan for the upcoming Oxygen coding sprint. The objective is to get the Oxygen style into shape so it can be imported into kdebase. There is a lot of work for us to do, but Nuno and David are there for the artistic side and Riccardo (ruphy) and I will be coding on the spot. In addition Thomas will try to be online as much as possible from his home. Read More

A couple of days ago I was hanging out on IRC, doing some work on a new Gui widget for KWord. Now, creating Guis is the most boring and annoying thing I can think of, hence the IRC. It still beats kpat as that is mouse-only and RSI is not on my wanted features list. Read More

For Google Summer of Code Sven Langkamp was assigned the project of adding different kind of selection visualisations for Krita 2.0. Being his mentor is very easy as already now before gSoc has even started officially he has completed 2 out of 3 items in the project description. Krita 2.0 is now capable of showing selections as: Read More

Adam Gierek's report on Innovation (INI/2006/2274: "Putting knowledge into practice: A broad-based innovation strategy for Europe") has been adopted in plenary this Thursday 24 May with amendments. The report is probably the largest document related to innovation since launching the "Lisbon Strategy" in 2002. One of the most interesting points for those who follow battle over standards and patents is a definition of open standard: Read More