Posts 

It's said that everything good gets to an end, and that's what happened to the akademy: Finally, it's over. Celeste asked me during the party at the beach if I was glad the akademy was over, after thinking about it for a day, I should say I'm not. I'm glad the work is over, but I'd have liked it to continue for at least some couple of weeks with all of you here :). Read More

I have to say that my first aKademy, first time travelling abroad, first time in Europe, first time in Spain, first time meeting so many absoultely cool people was amazing. Read More

Congratulations to all the [http://www.digikam.org/Digikam-SPIP/|DigiKam] developers with winning the [http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000150|TUX 2005 Readers’ Choice Award]. Being able to provide users with great software is what makes working on open source software for me one of the most rewarding activities. It's great when users acknowledge that they really like your software with an award like this. One of the nicest moments at aKademy this week was when a gentleman came up to David and me and thanked us for making KDE. He had been using KDE for a few years and it had improved his computer live considerable. Read More

Whatever you guys took out of the Malaga conference - for me it's this: I love my wife (knew that part before, but I better list it to avoid misunderstandings), my bed, my couch, the silence in my bedroom and speaking german (having meals without having to guess what it is pretty cool :). Read More

aKademy is over now - time for a final summary :) One of my personal highlights was Richard Moore hacking the What's this help. Improving the usability of the What's this help has been a concern to me for quite a long time, I had some ideas in mind but never found somebody to implement them. Thanks Richard! Our final goal is to make it part of a nested contextual help system: The user will be guided right from the descriptions in the interface (labels, tooltips e.g.) to the more descriptive What's this help and finally to the corresponding pages in the manual or in a tutorial. Read More

I'm now back from Malaga and have just about recovered, so I thought I'd blog a little about the discussions etc. I've been involved in over there. For me, obviously, the big questions were about scripting. Until now, KDE has been weak in the area of scripting applications - this will not be true of KDE 4. Read More

OK, this is my first and only blog entry during the Malaga conference. And so I have to report about what really bothers me about this city. Yesterday we decided to take a random trip through the city and then we found this nice little place with a huge obelisk on it. There was a cocktail bar on it and many many young people. So we ordered some drinks (and I saw for the very first time in my life a cocktail presented in a coconut - for just 6 Euro the guy opened a coconut, put lots of alcohol in it and put cream on top of it, amazing. I admit though that it didn't taste just as well, but I'm not that much of a cocos fan, but then again it wasn't my drink) and just sat there. And now the trouble starts: Read More

Another feedback re. my recent blog entry: there is now The First FreeNX Wallpaper available from KDE-Look. It is installable via the "Get Hot New Stuff". Looks pretty cool too (some non-Europeans say it is too Old-World-centric -- well, let them create stuff that suits their tastes better. The important point is that FreeNX can connect us all, no?)

It was only 10 minutes after my last blog entry appeared that one reader phoned me and objected: he thinks that the 280 msec latency he experiences from his currently Malaga/Spain-based notebook to his guest account on my NX server in Karlsruhe/Germany would be too much, and a data flow rate of 27 kBits/sec too sparse (he used a crappy and fairly saturated WLAN link to test this) to make users feel comfortable in using NX permanently, day-in and day-out over the network. He agreed NX was still performing very well, given the conditions he had to cope with, and that he could still be nearly as productive as he was used to from using his local machine. Read More

Some of you know already: since NoMachine released the 1.5.0 of their GPL'd Core NX Libraries, KDE applications run blazingly fast over remote internet links in "single window mode". Even modem connections work great. Previous versions hadn't yet built in X roundtrip suppression for single application windows, and you could enjoy the full speed of applications only when running them inside a complete KDE desktop environment. Read More