Posts 

I read this article in today's Guardian. Call it a touching act of altruism or a curious assertion of maternal capability, but the bottom line is 40-year-old Hla Htay is breastfeeding a Bengal tiger cub. ... As to why Ms Htay has offered her services, when bottled milk could do just as well? "I don't even want to go there," says Strike. Read More

Job interviews really, really suck. The traditional upbringing of an Australian fundamentalist christian renders you almost incapable of 'selling yourself' effectively in an interview. As a child, you learn that to state your own talents is 'bragging' or 'being up yourself'. It makes it very difficult as an adult to then learn how to market yourself to an employer. They ask you 'So, why should we give you this job?' and you look at them blankly. 'Uh.... um, cause I wouldn't suck at it too much?' Read More

KDE is not only developed worldwide and being translated into over 75 languages making it the most and broadest translated Free Software graphical desktop environment. kde.org/international shows that the KDE community also consists of many, mostly non-English speaking, local groups worldwide who promote KDE in their country or region (like KDE Chile at the Latin America Free Software Install Festival recently) and help KDE users in their native language. Read More

Everywhere I look on the web these days there seem to be enthusiastic articles about Ruby on Rails, the web application framework. On Slashdot, with nearly 500 comments posted in a matter of hours. Or Linux Journal or an O'Reilly blog where Rael Dornfest discusses what a great combination Rails and Ajax form. Read More

I'm wondering about kicker and kasbar in KDE 4. If we can make kicker's abilities powerful enough to support the features kasbar needs, then maybe it should be less of a standalone app. At the moment, maintaining kasbar is nightmare because it makes kicker do a bunch of things it wasn't designed to support (assuming kicker was ever designed at all!). Read More

With Linspire 5 out and the sources tracked down we can now get to see the new Crystal icon set commitioned by Linspire. Very shiny. They're under a proprietry Linspire licence at the moment so the question of whether KDE will use them hasn't come up yet and just maybe the artists are working on their own super sekret plans in the icons area. Also there's no SVGs yet, sigh, anyone caught adding icons to KDE without SVGs will be thrown to the gimp. Also alert viewers might spot the folder_{voliet,yellow,orange}.png icons in the lower pane of the screenshot below, they were made by me and licenced under the LGPL so quite how they end up in a .deb which does not include any mention of the LGPL is a mystery. Read More

First, greetings to everyone who is still (already 2nd April here) reading this entry on http://planet.gnome.org. :-) I wanted to complete my collection of distributor patches with the ones Linspire has applied to the Qt and KDE packages in their Five-0 release. So I contacted them because I didn't find a hint where to get the sources. Their support offered to send me a CD with the source code. I again stated that I'm only interested in Qt and KDE related patches and would prefer a download. Seems I was the first asking for that or for sources at all. :-) They put up two Source CD images on a slow server which they linked in their warehouse (http://my.linspire.com My Products/CD Downloads). So I registered there, downloaded 1.2GB 10+ hours long and then had to diff myself against the original tarballs. I guess the (L)GPL is not talking about getting patches, convenient and fast. :-( The result of all efforts are compressed 845KB big (size is partly due to release->branch diffs) Linspire 5.0 patches. On first sight Linspire didn't patch much, at least much less than SUSE or Mandrake in comparison. Read More

I'm probably a rare example of someone that has worked in the same job for over 6 years already, where the job was the first one I got after finishing university. At birthday parties of friends I know for over 15 years there was always someone that recently changed jobs, and I got a look of unbelieve when I told them I still worked at the same company. Read More

My flight back to California is on the second of June, from Heathrow. I leave San Francisco back to England on the 14th (arriving on the 15th) of September. That gives me three and a half months of attempting to avoid saying things like "That's five dollars and 50 pence." Read More

I decided I didn't like the photo I had here before, so I drew a new avatar. What do you think?