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The KDE project has elected its first Technical Working Group. Three Novell/SUSE employees are among the seven elected members (the others either didn't get elected, are busy with KDE e.V. board work or didn't candidate ;-) ). It seems you can still surprise some people with Novell/SUSE's continued strong KDE support hence this short note. Read More

A new year -- a new chance to spread the word about our favourite desktop environment at linux events. In Germany I already had the pleasure to attend the SkoleLinux Gathering 2006 in the sprawling city of Erkelenz. Carsten Niehaus, author of the popular award-winning chemistry application Kalzium, held a nice Qt 4 Workshop as well as a presentation about KDE-EDU there. After the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2006 the next stop for a pretty huge event will be CeBIT 2006! Read More

A bit too silent in my opinion voting within Novell's Bugzilla was enabled: you can now vote for bug reports and enhancement requests which are filed against the "SUSE Linux 10.1" product. During discussion whether to enable it or not KDE's Bugzilla and its success (most hated bugs, most wanted features) was a strong argument for it. Until now not many users have voted, don't miss this opportunity to give feedback! Please keep in mind that as with KDE's Bugzilla votes are looked at for orientation purposes only -- not for specific priorisation / resource allocation. Read More

According to a recent C-Net Police Blotter, email surveillance without any evidence of criminal behavior has been approved. The new law only allows monitoring of email headers (hence justifies as 'constitutional'), but the fact that they can freely monitor and log email traffic is alarming. Read More

I'm deeply disappointed in the Superbowl ref's. I'm new to this football thing, us europeans play soccer instead, but after having taken my time to learn about all the weird rules, several of these calls didn't make sense at all. Now don't get me wrong, the refs in soccer make bad calls all the time, but with soccer you have only 1 ref and 2 linesmen. With football you have a soccer team worth of referees running around, "the people upstairs" and instant replays that the referee can watch. With all that I naively had expected that games wouldn't be decided based on arbitrary referee calls. Read More

Let's have a look at font settings: In Konqueror, pressing Defaults resets the fonts to the current Control Center Default font. In Konversation, pressing Defaults resets the fonts to the Control Center Default at Konversation's startup. This is not necessarily the current one. Imagine you change the Control Center Default, but Konversation and some other apps have not adopted the settings. You go to each of them and change the font settings manually as the Defaults button has no effect. A lot of work - and all for nothing: Restarting the X Server would have done the same job. In KMail, you either use custom colours or you do not (the latter will set the current Control Center Defaults). The Defaults button, however, has no effect. So there is no way to base a new colour scheme on the Default, once you've changed it. Resume: Three applications, two different types to visualise the font settings, and three different behaviours to reset to the defaults. Read More

After a long autumn working on various embedded linux related contracts, writing way to many version of a business plan, trying to get some order back in my life (still working on it), and various other thing ... most of them family and looking for a job kind of stuff ... Read More

Friday is my last day at .gov where I will be moving on the bigger and better things. For the past 14 months Ive been through three natural disasters (Indian Ocean tsunami, Katrina/Rita hurricanes, Pakistani/Indian earthquake), watched a few funerals on TV (Pope John Paul II, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King) and scandal galore (too many to list). Read More

... because you pressed this button? [image:1800 align=center width=320 class=showonplanet] The Defaults button in KDE's Configure... dialogs resets all application settings to the factory defaults. In a tabbed dialog design, this does not become clear at all: The label does not tell if it refers to the current tab or to the whole dialog. For the user, this is especially difficult to learn as KControl behaves differently: Here, the Defaults button refers to the currently active tab only. Read More

hmmm... not sure if I should really leak it. Because it is totally untested. I've currently only a remote connection from a Windows/PuTTy box to a SUSE Linux server with no FreeNX or NX server installed. So I couldn't test it. But I used isaac's Debian packages (not knowing if they are for Sarge or for Sid -- I'm assuming Sid) to update the klik://wesnoth-latest recipe. Previously it built a Wesnoth 1.0 klik image -- meaning it wasn't really "*-latest". Now it builds a 1.1.1 image -- it is really latest! :-) Read More