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Finally I arrived to my home. I've been for the last three days having a wonderful time at the Canary Islands with many great people (both, the organizators and the other speakers) at the 1st Free Software event of the University of La Laguna. The problems started when the plane from Tenerife to Madrid was delayed, so I arrived too late to Madrid and I couldn't get on the plane to Málaga. After being put in another plane (that also was delayed), I've arrived to my home something like half an hour ago, and I have to be at the airport again in less than 2 hours and a half to get a plane back to Madrid, and then another one from there to Dublin. This will be a loong night... Read More

Are the USA planning to attack Iran? According to news stories, the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships is prepared to head for Iran's western coast. The ships include the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship. Naval forces already received their formal PTDOs ('prepare to deploy orders') with a date set for being ready to go at October 1st: Read More

... your fridge contains less than the one at work. A couple of years ago, when I was new in Nuremberg, Adrian told me that most people at SUSE never eat at home, and some people who had newish flats still had the cellophane on the kitchen hardware and appliances. I laughed at the time, being a cook-it-yourself type of guy, but now, on my way to Akademy and making sure that nothing will go off, I realised that there was pretty much nothing to spoil there. So, in an obvious attempt to kickstart another geek blog meme, here's the contents of my fridge: Read More

2006 isn't over yet, but the KDE Usability Project has already invested a huge amount of time in usability research. I've now put some of this work online, including reports about information design of the Human Interface Guidelines, about Amarok, Kaffeine, Kivio and What's This Help: Read More

For the redesign of Kivio, Tina and me set up a user survey to learn more what people do with diagramming applications, what types of diagrams they create and what features they really need. The results of the survey are important in several ways: Read More

I'm done with packing. Tomorrow early morning I will leave for Dublin for aKademy 2006. It promises to be an awesome event. We have an excellent program</>, fantastic speakers and a full week of BoFs and hacking. On top of that it's the biggest gathering of the KDE community this year. Amazingly this always feels like meeting old friends, even if you know most of the people only per email or not at all. I'm really looking forward to it. Read More

Recently it seems to me that Ruby is now really taking off, everywhere you hear news about it. You know, there is Ruby on Rails, which is really the hype nowadays. And there is an effort to get a Ruby implementation for .NET: http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET/ . There has already been a project to implement Ruby on the Java Virtual Machine, and now the two main developers have been hired by Sun to work fulltime on JRuby : http://headius.blogspot.com/2006/09/jruby-steps-into-sun.html :-) ...since there are some processors which support Java execution in hardware (e.g. http://www.arm.com/products/esd/jazelle_home.html, http://www.jopdesign.com/) , does this mean these processors will be able to execute JRuby in hardware ? Ruby for embedded ! And as if this wouldn't be enough, there are also people working on running Ruby on Parrot, the Perl6 runtime: http://www.parrotcode.org/news/2006/Parrot-0.4.6.html . Read More

...and are on the way to Dublin's aKademy 2006 to "shape the future of the free desktop". :-) My last count resulted in 9 Novell/SUSE employees attending, 4 talks of and 2 BoFs with them. Another not so nice "nine": likely rain on all 9 days which I will be in Dublin. :-( Read More

The purpose of this blog: Test if the EBN aggregator works That is all. Apparently I need to brush-up on my HTML.

My first thoughts were: "This is hilarious! Too hilarious to be true..." Here is what I read: "With the slimming feature, anyone can appear more slender -- instantly." Yes, that's right: it says "appear", not "become". So this is not a TV ad for slimming pills or other chemistry. This is marketing for modern digital photographic technology -- on the very homepage of a well-known company. Go to hp.com and read more: Read More