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The vector graphics package Xara Xtreme so far was only available for Windows. Back in October, the Xara company announced the porting of its flagship product to Linux and Mac OS X. Not only that -- the complete source code should become available, and subject to the GPL license. But at the time they consoled hopes for an immediate release to a later date. Read More

So aKademy 2006 was announced. The date is interesting, as it starts on my birthday. ;-) I wanted to go there, but didn't start any preparation before the final announcement. Now I looked at what do I need to go there. First a plane ticket: it is 220EUR+airport taxes. This is not that bad, and the fact that I don't have to go to the capital city, but I can use another one (where my mother in law lives) is a bonus. So traveling can be arranged. But I need a visa as well! Unfortunately Ireland is not part of the Schengen treaty and altough I don't need a visa to enter the Schengen states, I need one to enter Ireland (and UK for that matter). I couldn't find the local site of the Irish embassy, but I found some informations on a travel agency site and I was shocked. The amount of documents they ask is enormous and I'd say aberrant. Starting from proof that you work here the listed documents are: registration of the company (not clear if you need it also if you are an employee?), birth certificates of all your relatives (parents, sisters, brothers, spouse, children), official declaration that you don't want to work there, copy of all pages of your current and past passports where there are visas or stamps, bank account statement, reservation at an Irish hotel and whatever. All officially translated to English and everything in two examples. The waiting period for the visa is 4-6 weeks. Amazing. Not even the US or the UK has these kind of requirements. Of course it is well known that getting a visa for the US is a simple lottery, but for the UK on their site it is said that 93% gets the visa and they try to issue the visa for everybody in one day. Also for the US they decide on the same day you have the interview. I hate paperwork and usual treatment at embassies (most of them). I would also need to go to the capital city twice (800km in total), pay a lot for the travel, for the visa and for the translations (it's not cheap to do official translations) and after that you might still not get it. I found an email address (which does not bounce) and asked there again about the requirements to get the visa. If they don't answer, I will call them. But if the requirements are the same I read on the tourist agency site, I may not go. It would take far too much energy and money from my side and it may not worth. So happy aKademy for all the others. Read More

D3tails... See 4lso: P0w3r C0mb1n3d ;)

Reading the GNOME 2.14 feature guide you are told that "several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster" - which is nice. As example the GNOME Terminal is mentioned which a graph says is three times faster than the previous version and now being four times faster than xterm. If I remember an early draft of this document correctly it was measured with "time cat /usr/share/dict/words" so what do you think was measured? How long it took to print all the characters in that file? Likely by no means. Read More

Once upon a time there were some dwarfs who wandered around the earth and told everyone who liked to hear that they would produce a desktop including the distribution of their handcraft every sixth months. And some people believed them and the dwarfs' business grew a bit. But the dwarfs wanted to grow further and so they continued to praise themselves as the high lords of fixed release schedules - and it worked some times somehow. People who had an own project or business to place on the desktop started to trust the dwarfs' telling. The dwarfs were happy and built bigger and bigger furniture... Read More

Last week was the Kubuntu and Ubuntu UI sprint in London where kwwii got strict instructions to turn up the bling on Kubuntu's artwork. The Gnome Clearlooks developers were also there to turn Ubuntu orange. Read More

This is a hilariously good movie -- apparently from inside Microsoft. It outlines how MS would have marketed the iPod "the MS way". It is meant to be self-joking about the company's own marketeers; and indeed it is.:-) Read More

September 23nd to 30th 2006

Ever since Matthias Ettrich joked about it in the early history of the KDE project, focus-follows-mind has been a recurring meme in the KDE lexicon. Well, it looks like it's finally coming! Do you think the kernel will ship "thinking cap" drivers by the time we release KDE-4.0? :) Read More

Recently I went to Ohio to interview young students and their parent about a client's home schooling education system. They were surprised (although I wasn't) how the students were actually using the system (software, materials, teachers, etc.). It just reminded me of how important it is to identify your audience in order to have success. Here are a few things I took away from my trip which could be applied to KDE-Edu (grades K through 6)... Read More