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I've made it to my second lot of annual leave this year, so I've bought a nice shiny new digital SLR (the Sony a100) and am going to Japan for two weeks for a holiday. Read More

...finally. And no, I'm not talking about their dealings with Novell. Last month Microsoft finally figured out how to work with open standards: Microsoft enhances Interoperability with Ecma Office Open XML Formats (Oct 25, 2006) Microsoft is applying the Open Specification Promise (OSP) to Ecma Office Open XML to further enable the implementation of these document formats, by anyone, forever. Microsoft already offered an irrevocable covenant not to sue (CNS) to anyone wishing to implement the formats, and now implementers have the option to use the OSP or the CNS. See the OSP FAQ for details. Read More

Since Ellen's wish is my command, I'm happy to report that as of yesterday I can be considered a bonafide Berliner, having received the keys to our lovely new apartment in what is rapidly becoming the KDE capital of the world. My wife and I are looking much forward to having about twice as much space as before, 17 million times as many decent food and coffee places, galleries, bookstores, concert venues, clubs, and friends and KDE hackers within walking and biking distance. Of course there's the actual move to take care of first, which is about as much fun as debugging random memory corruptions without valgrind. It is for the greater good, though, and the prospect of spending my working days at the brand new KDAB office in Berlin soon, with a bunch of friends (most of them fellow KDE hackers, yes, we're hiring ;)), is an exciting one. Good times. :)

Our first OpenUsability sponsored student project is making good progress: Last weekend I participated in a meeting to collect use scenarios for the GIMP, which was part of the student project offered by Peter Sikking. Read More

A few weeks ago the spam filter at Canonical which was doing a good job of keeping the flood of viagra opportunities at bay was turned off, and I've had trouble keeping up with my e-mail since then. Most of the servers I have access to are virtual servers and not powerful enough to run spamassassin without killing the other virtual servers on the machine. So I've turned to another option which is to send all my e-mail to GMail and set GMail to forward it back to me, which has the handy side effect of filtering out the spam. There's surprisingly little delay in the extra roundtrip and it has the handy side effect of keeping a copy of all my e-mail should I accidently run rm -rf / on the server that I read it from. In the 24 hours since settings this up I've got 800 real e-mails (not that many considering I subscribe to kde-cvs, kde-bugs-dist, ubuntu-wiki and other high traffic lists) and 300 spams, with only 1 false positive. Read More

Look at it this way for a moment: If I, as an end-user, bought a car from Ford, that does indeed contain technology infringing some patent owned by DaimlerChrysler -- would there by any likelyhood that Ford would sue me, the end-user? However, if I, as an end-user, buy a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, that *may* contain (well, it doesn't, and never will, as Novell strongly reassures me) software patented technology owned by Microsoft -- would there be any likelyhood that Microsoft would sue me, the end-user? Let's do a little thought experiment. Read More

Jason Matusow, Microsoft's Senior Director for IP and Interoperability, emailed me to point to his blog entry. There he responded to my own one that hints to the fact that Novell calls a "joint letter to the Open Source Community from Novell and Microsoft" a document that Microsoft calls "An Open Letter to the Community from Novell". Read More

Oh, cool. Novell's PR department needed only a week to produce FAQ that'd actually answer frequently asked questions. Press releases full of quotes, long words and other strange stuff are simple, but a plain and clear explanation of what's going on apparently takes time for some unknown reason. And, since pretty much everybody has already tried to interpret various aspects of the deal, including here on Planet KDE, why couldn't I as well? I'm no lawyer, I don't understand it that much and I don't know anything more than what's written in the FAQ and the announcements, but after all that didn't stop many others either. Read More

Bugs are bad, I think we all agree on this. One of the most evil kind of bugs are those that appear only during installation or installation related procedures. I wrote in an earlier blog that I have been helping the Debian-KDE packagers fix a bug. Unfortunately, due to a side effect (I hate side effects), a newly installed KDE would no longer find the KControl modules! The bugs does not appear when upgrading the packages since the old, wrong, directory is still there. So it took someone with a fresh installation to even discover the problem :( Read More

Novell has published some more details about their recent business agreement(s) with Microsoft. This time it is about some financial details involved. (Looks like they are required by law to reveal these details to the SEC.) Read More