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I'm feeling very lucky today. Why? Because in a few hours I'll be getting on a plane to Bengaluru, India and attending conf.kde.in. Pradeepto has been asking me for years to look outside the cosy confines of the US-Europe Axis of KDE, and thanks to my role in the openSUSE Boosters team, this has finally become possible. Read More

Heated discussions are going on in the KDE community in the aftermath of the announcement of Nokia's platform strategy change. Rationality often goes out of the window when people feel such a change goes against their personal values or beliefs. In the past days, I worked on an analysis of the impact of the changes on KDAB, Qt and the Free Software communities we work with, especially KDE. KDAB is rooted deeply in the KDE community, and many of our developers work with Qt and KDE for years now. We are sharing the same worries and hopes, so the results may be interesting for others as well. This post is about Qt, KDE, Free Software, politics, devices, markets, strategies - it does not get much better than that. Read on. Read More

In my previous blog I talked about converting ODF files to PDF files with WebODF. This is a functionality that is generally useful, but is also one that lets OfficeShots compare WebODFs ODF rendering to that of other office suites. Read More

It is quite common that one wants to send ODF files to people that lack the software to display ODF. One workaround is to convert the ODF to PDF. Most office suites that support ODF can export to PDF. To compare how different office suites do this conversion one can use the website OfficeShots. This website offers the ability to perform this conversion in many office suites at once and to compare the results. Read More

Not infrequently people ask what's the best cloud "solution" for KDE. This is not a very useful question since "cloud" is woefully overloaded as a term. But now there's a simple answer, I packaged OwnCloud, the file storage web app from KDE. It's in natty or maverick-backports for 10.10 users. The licencing was the most fiddly thing here, if KDE is to get into web apps we need to update our licence policy which doesn't take into account AGPL nor the annoying PHP licence. Read More

The yearly FOSDEM was excellent as always. I could not attend all talks; mine was on sunday afternoon and as usual I was still improving it at the conference itself. Nevertheless, I spoke with many people and saw some very good presentations. Now that the videos are online, I will mention some of them with a link to the video footage. Read More

The recipe is a draft only but shows the taste.

Late last month, I was fortunate to be invited to Microsoft for the Exchange RPC Plugfest as part of the OpenChange team. I decided to arrive into Redmond a few days early to get over the worst of the jetlag, and to spend some pre-plugfest hacking time with Julien Kerihuel and Jelmer Vernooij. That produced some excellent planning work, and a bit of new code. I also caught up with Tom Devey (a Microsoft consultant, who is basically the customer representative for Exchange RPC protocols) and enjoyed a nice wood-fired pizza lunch, and some night skiing at Stevens Pass. My skiing was never really good, and lack of practice and some pretty unusual conditions didn't help. It was still a lot of fun though. Read More

Thanks for the opportunity of presenting Kexi as the official Qt Ambassador Project! Since 2002 it benefits from the solid foundation of Qt (and KDE of course)! Just one note: Are you developer interested in adding features? Want to join the (paid) Summer of Code Project (even if you're not very skilled yet or have no clear ideas)? Would you like to attend the Akademy 2011 conference or Calligra developer meetings? Or are you a user with lots of innovative suggestions? Good :). Drop a note in the comments or write to kexi@kde.org. Read More

Here's this year's crossdesktop group picture of FOSDEM, featuring all your favourite developers that attended FOSDEM (and me)! \o/ (and yes I now also see that I focussed on the building instead of the people, but it's hardly noticeble ;)) Read More