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Most of my development effort at Akademy this year has been on the network management part of Solid. I gave a talk on the present and future of KDE network management and this went pretty well. This year I learned not to even bring my laptop near a projector and used Aaron's instead. Before giving my talk I had been worried that the content was a bit obvious but I wanted to go through how to monitor and respond to changes in connectivity in KDE 3 and 4 so that app developers can give their users a better time when the network goes a way, so i just presented everything step by step and it was pretty well received. Read More

In two hours aKademy will be over for me. I'm going to head back for Germany. The last week was truly awsome. I had planned to blog a bit, but there was so much exciting stuff happening, that I didn't find any time to actually do so. So here are some of my personal highlights of aKademy, all in one. Read More

Yesterday we had our Human-Computer Interaction Day with a very rich programme. There was an accessibility and a usability track, as well as a session on icon naming by the artists. Of course, I mostly attended (and participated in) the usability track which started with a session on reusable interface patterns in settings dialogs chaired by Florian. He introduced his Open Design Patterns library he created in the scope of his diploma thesis (best viewed with firefox!). It shows best practices to common design problems, e.g. how to design the main navigation in settings dialogs, how to reset changes, etc. Especially the pattern of "advanced preferences" caused a long discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of the feature-richness we have in KDE. Read More

The KPhotoAlbum splash screen contest ended today, and a winner has been found, namely Jaroslav Holan's submission. Congratulation and thanks for all the nice splash screen submitted.

Development of search technology is advancing at a mindmaming pace. The groupphoto of aKademy is now powered by Strigi. This allows you to search developers in the picture. You can search for names, projects or vaguely related ideas such as 'undulating'. Read More

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration treasure secretary, has written an article Why Bush Will Nuke Iran. It's scary. Read it. (Will it be possible to offset these plans? Who will block the Neocons' rampage?)

Project Plasmic-Raptor: Unified effort to build a appilcations and utility menu for KDE4. This project brings together all the people who are working on Menus for KDE. We are designing so that we can integrate the efforts from cools kickoff and ALI menu concept as well and Some things from KBFX. It's a nice feeling to be a member of such a team. Read More

The Strigi BoF went well and I'm pleased with the feedback. I'm glad most of the issues requested can be handle by Strigi or will be handled by the application coming from the Nepomuk project. Read More

I turned thirty yesterday. Still can't believe it... My wife came up with a really awesome present: a booklet containing an invitation for 100 different high sensation activities. These activities are as versatile as scuba diving, helicopter flying, bungee jumping, driving a Ferrari, an F3 or even a 2nd war assault tank (!), paragliding... Only problem: I must choose only one of them. And I'm afraid receiving the same present for the next years so that I can try the other activities is not an option... Read More

About a week ago, my laptop broke -- completely broke in the sense that not only does the machine not work any longer, it even trashed my whole harddisk. Now I'm at aKademy without a laptop and still one whole afternoon of the KDE e.V. general assembly left to sit through... Oh, how much I envy all those developers sitting in there with their laptops, hacking on KDE stuff! Read More