It's about time: my photos from aKademy are online.

With aKademy being over for over two weeks already and the next aKademy in Glasgow already announced that's long overdue.

There are not many KDE-related pictures in there because I didn't carry my camera with me during the first few conference days. I tried to compensate at the end by taking pictures of Aaron Seigo handing over the big Konqi to Marcus Furlong to thank him for organizing this excellent aKademy.

(See the full gallery for more Konqi images.)

The rest of the gallery consists of pictures from Dublin. I'm especially fond of two pictures I took at night:

and

If you want to see more, just visit the gallery.

EXIF
For the technically inclined photographers who wonder why there's no EXIF-information, I have still been shooting film this year. The camera used is a Canon EOS 300V with Fuji Superia 200 ISO films.

As for the lenses, my main lense is the Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, which I used for the bulk of the photos. For some zoom shots (notably the birds) I used the telephoto kit lense that came with the camera, the Canon EF 90-300mm f/4-5.6. Because of the low-light conditions most of the night shots were taken with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lense.

One picture is special. The Wall of Fame is taken with a Sigma fish-eye lense, that I could kindly borrow from Hubert Figuière. My own wide-angle stops at 28mm, which wasn't nearly enough to fit the wall in a single picture. Thanks, Hubert, for allowing me to take an 'impossible' shot!

I haven't used any filters other than UV, though some of the pictures have seen minor retouching with Gimp before I put them online. I tried to leave most pictures untouched, or only cropped, however.

Enjoy!

For most people the KDE Four Multimedia Meeting (K4M) was concluded on Sunday, May 28th, almost two weeks ago.

Sebastian put up his picture gallery during the event, Claire has put up her pictures as well.

Mine were still missing.

As you've no doubt read on Adriaan's blog, the KDE Four Multimedia Meeting kicked off today. Previously known as K3M, we decided to extend the name to reflect the other KDE Four developer meetings that will be held later this year and give them a more common naming.

While Adriaan mentioned an after-dinner dip in his last blog, currently there's activity everywhere. The group is split into several brainstorming sessions and people hacking away deeply concentrated.

The atmosphere is as inspiring as last year, even while the weather is infinitely worse. Hopefully we will at least see the sun tomorrow, but the weather forecast is about as bad as it can be.

If you haven't done so yet, be sure to check out Sebas' pictures of the afternoon session. More pictures will hopefully follow later.

In my last blog I said that I expected my KDE business cards within a couple of days. One day later Adriaan and Sebas got theirs. I live at the other end of the Netherlands, I'm a West Coast guy, and as we all know the Netherlands are a huge country. It's at least 150 km from Adriaan and Sebas to my place. *cough* How long would that take a postal service?

Almost a week.

I guess they bridged the distance by tiptoe, because otherwise I just don't have an explanation for the 5-days waiting.

Or perhaps I do.

Package delivery services around the globe are all slightly different in their paperwork, but the basic idea is always that you fill in the data on a bunch of carbon paper sheets. You give one to the delivery service, keep one for yourself, stick one in the plastic bag and one is usually adhesive and is used by the postal service, especially if you're using normal postal delivery instead of some express service.

Judging by what I received Deutsche Post is no different. I shouldn't be able to know that, since I've never used them, I don't even live in Germany. But whoever prepared my package of business cards certainly didn't RTFM.

I got all of the sheets.

Inside the plastic bag.

Including the sticker that's supposed to show the address to the delivery man.

This bag is not meant to be readable to the postal service. So probably the package went to some central office where they opened the plastic bag to read the address, explaining the delay. In any case, I got the package with the plastic bag opened. I guess I should be happy the thing arrived at all

Being in the marketing working group and active at events has the privilege that I'm in the first batch of cards. The downside is that this batch went far from smoothly, and the text on our cards has slightly different formatting since we decided to change the text a bit.

Currently we're doing some more small batches, and hopefully we can offer the business cards to other KDE e.V. members in only a couple of weeks. If you want to see what you can expect, the public part of the process is almost finished and now visible on SpreadKDE.

(What you can't see is the amount of behind-the-scenes work that we still have to do to allow a smooth process, so please be patient. But the business cards are coming real soon now!)

This week has been interesting, to say the least. Monday was an official holiday in the Netherlands (called "2nd Easter Day") which I used to extend the break from work and KDE that I took last weekend.

Charged with fresh energy came Tuesday, the third Tuesday of the month, which marks the monthly dinners/meetings of the Holland Open Source Platform (HOSP) (Dutch version only). KDE NL attends most of these -- often very interesting -- meetings. Last month it was Adriaan and me, this time Claire and me went, to Utrecht this time. This month's presentation was about Business Models and making open source commercially interesting.

The real selling point however was the dinner, a tapas buffet. I just can't say "no" to that, and they had delicious food. Tuna salad that made me relive fond memories of Sevilla, garlic mushrooms that reminded me of Barcelona, and great marinated olives that you can find all over Spain basically. Too bad I took too much of these, so I couldn't try many of the other dishes, like the Paella. I know, luxury problem!

There were lots of familiar faces around, which was extra interesting given that many of them approached us about our sponsoring letter for the upcoming KDE MultiMedia Meeting, modelled after last year's extremely productive KDE PIM Meeting.

We heard a lot of interesting stuff during the evening. One of the bigger items was the announcement of a Dutch alternative for Google's Summer of Code. Other scoops are not official yet, but hopefully we can disclose more about them in a couple of weeks, if they indeed turn out useful for KDE.

The evening also showed once again that KDE really needs to collect presentations, since we got requests to give several talks, but so far we're severely lacking the manpower to prepare all of these, hampering our visibility. At least for me it's much more frustrating to have great opportunities and having to let go due to lack of time or other resources than it is to not get an opportunity in the first place.

On the way back home Claire and me discussed some ideas to leverage SpreadKDE to collect presentation material in a central location and streamline the process. This would depend on an upgrade from Drupal 4.6 to 4.7 and the resource framework that Tom has been working on. So he couldn't have done better than hand us exactly this the next day, even before we raised the issue on the marketing list! Thanks Tom! It will take a while until our backlog of work has dropped enough to start this, but it's pretty high up the priority list, so hopefully it won't take too long.

And to top off a pretty good week, today we got confirmation from enough sponsors to take the decision to go for the above-mentioned MultiMedia Meeting. During the HOSP meeting that was still uncertain.

Oh, and the KDE business cards are probably finally underway, I expect them delivered within a couple of days. The ordering process alone has probably cost me a year of my live because the web site wasn't really finished yet and we couldn't wait any longer or Wade would not have his cards in time for his talk on the Desktop Linux Summit. While fixing the remaining issues we'll probably do another small, controlled, batch before opening up the process for all KDE e.V. members, but the end is finally near!

In non-KDE news, Ice Age: The Meltdown is a great movie! Claire, me and a bunch of other friends went there last weekend and it was more than worth visiting. Back at Claire's place we played Settlers of Catan, which was new to me, and which was a nice twist from Carcassonne, which I usually play instead. The friend of mine who introduced me to Carcassonne once said that luck is less important there than it is in Catan, and I think that's true, but it was still lots of fun

Whew... I probably should have split this blog post in smaller parts. Anyone still with me until here?

Today I went back to the college where I got my Bachelor's degree a couple of years ago. This time to watch a good friend's graduation talk. It's almost impossible to compare school systems between countries, so even while the EU has unified on Bachelor's and Master's degrees it's hard to say where they are in other countries.

(Heck, if you go to university here in the Netherlands you also get a Bachelor's degree after completing the first 3 years or so of a Master's education, but that degree is not comparable to a college where it's the end result of the education. A university's BS will have taught you more theory but little practice in the business world, while a college's BS degree includes about a year's worth of internships, the last half of which is the subject of the graduation talk.)

Anyway, it was a very interesting talk. Half of Bauke's internship (and talk) was about moving all IT and communication infrastructure from two office buildings in one new building for a company with about 50 people working in those two offices. He has been responsible for most of the logistics, design decisions and other project management work, which is really cool for an internship -- most people don't manage but are being managed during that period

The second part was about consolidating the server park on VMWare ESX where, again, Bauke has been doing most of the coordination and design work. All in all it has been a smooth talk and he knew what he was talking about, prompting the exam committee to give him a very nice '9' mark. (10 being the highest, 1 the lowest, but you need at least a 6 to pass at all.)

So, Bauke, congratulations with your degree!

Updating a running KDE
Earlier today I continued the update of my KDE 3.4 at work where I left off last Friday. Even while most of it can be replaced in place these days we're not at the point yet where we can really do hot updates. I wonder how much of the stuff I noticed is distributor's work (post-install scripts in RPMs and DEBs for instance) and how much is really KDE's own task.

While any update to .desktop or XDG-menu files correctly caused kbuildsycoca to update I have been less succesful with other parts of the sycoca. During YaST's work I was doing my own job, but at some point I could no longer open a PDF anymore because the mime type database was unusable. Nothing a kbuildsycoca can't fix, but which non-developer knows that?

A bit later I needed to restart kdeinit when kdelibs was updated. Again, I've done this lots of times when doing SVN builds, but when updating through a package manager it would be nice to have this done for you. In theory a 'dcop --all-users kdeinit '' restart' from the RPM's post-install would have done, apart from the fact that kdeinit is not a DCOP client.

When the update was complete I had a desktop where Konqueror was still the KDE 3.4 version with a builtin widget style. Apparently some preloaded Konq was being reused. Kontact crashed on startup when I wanted to use the new desktop. A logoff and relogin later my desktop worked mostly as expected. Only artsd keeps crashing because libarts_mpeglib.so is nowhere to be found. Packaging error for Suse's 9.2 rpms? I don't need arts all that much at work apart from an occasional beep, so I'll look into that later. Everything I really need works now, it's just that it hasn't been a completely transparent upgrade while the process was busy.

KDE 4 Name
And to finish this long post, the KDE 4 slogan discussion that spontaneously started on IRC last week (and that Aaron, Tom and Wade already mentioned) is now continuing by mail between the marketing team members and a couple of others as Aaron already said he would do. Expanding on the basic idea that we pursued in that discussion Aaron has been thinking about some of the higher-level concepts that need to go with it. Currently we're tearing apart Aaron's bad ideas, refining the mediocre ones and keeping the great ones. All in all there's been a lot of useful input from all involved. So far we haven't decided anything for real yet, but given the progress that might not take long anymore. Looks like we will have some great concepts to show KDE to a bigger audience. Can't wait!

Today a friend of mine whom I haven't seen for a couple of weeks came by. Over dinner the subject came to the KDE Multimedia Meeting that KDE-NL is planning and the fact that we're looking for sponsors. (BTW, if you're reading this and are interested in sponsoring, please drop me or one of the other organizers a note!)

Anyway, he told me to send the relevant information by mail and he would try to contact a couple of people. So I looked for the latest version of the sponsor letter, which happened to be a .tar.gz sent by Claire last week.

Having used Unix for way too long and having done sysadmin work for a living I usually save such attachements, extract them, manually launch the associated app, and clean up the mess afterwards. Not very efficient.

I decided to see how well this thing would work without falling back to the console.

Wow.

Or rather: W-O-W.

Whoever says that in order to use Unix for everyday work you need the console should think again. Old habits are hard to kill, and I will probably be using the console for a while to come.

But how much more efficient it has been to not use it has been quite a bit of an eye-opener.

I opened the tarball in Ark, saw three OpenDocument files and clicked the first one to view if that was the right one. OpenOffice is still my default office suite for reasons including for a large part laziness, so I braced myself for its 15+-second startup time.

Much to my delight I got the preview of the document in one second! Even nicer, Ark just loaded the KOffice part and used that to view the file. After all, I didn't want a complete office suite, I wanted a preview.

If KOffice lives up to its expectations and delivers tools that are feature-wise comparable to OpenOffice then the future will be KOffice. This integration totally rocks, and it's something that OpenOffice will have a hard time to deliver. Its code base has proven hard enough to KDE-ify (and it still doesn't feel entirely KDE-ish, since e.g. middle clicking on the scrollbar doesn't work as expected), breaking it up even further into embeddable components seems like a pipe dream to me.

In the mean time, KOffice already delivers.

And it's fast. About a second on a Pentium M running at its energy-saving 600 MHz is amazingly fast. Nothing preloaded, KWord wasn't even in the cache. *gasp*

So, if you want to hack on the office suite of the future, join the KOffice team! After this revelation I can't wait to see it become mature enough to allow a switch

(And this was using KOffice 1.4, I haven't even tried 1.5 yet. How much more will they deliver with that?)

I really should blog more often. My last blog has been over four months ago. And it's not like nothing happened since then.

KDE promotion and marketing hasn't been so alive in years. After aKdemy Sebastian, Wade and me started the first Marketing Working Group and together with the help of several other people (notably, Tom, who has done a tremendous amount of work there) we launched SpreadKDE back last November.

Since then Sebastian, Wade and Aaron have done a nice job of keeping people updated on our achievements and attracting new people. And me? I've done the boring behind-the-scenes stuff, like keeping track of things, maintaining the task list and all the other things that will never give me rock-star status.

On the upside, it's rewarding work to do since I can help turning chaos into order, and it gives me the gratitude of my fellow KDE marketing friends, which of course makes it all worth it.

The developments for SpreadKDE look promising, we have work underway on a new look, events tracking, hardcore research, screenshots and our booth gear, amongst several other things. Exciting to say the least, especially when comparing this to a year ago!

My only personal peeve is the current task management, which is little more than a wiki page maintained mostly by me. Real task management is on the way, so I really have no right to complain (besides, I don't have time to work on it, giving me even less rights to complain). It's just that the task list is slowly getting outdated because I can't keep up with all the good stuff we are discussing, and that frustrates me.

So, while all of you are looking forward to fancy stuff like nice screenshots and a new look I'm looking forward to something as boring as a task manager

And I'll try to blog more often.

No, I didn't drop off the Planet. I just haven't blogged since... hmm, since when? Well, since a while. There's been plenty of stuff deserving a blog, but due to several lousy and less-lousy reasons they never ended up here.

This time I can't remain silent though. Somehow I managed to get myself volunteered for the KDE Marketing Working Group. That of course requires an explanation...

When I started to write yesterday's blog I planned to add all kind of information about KExtProcess. It turned out that my blog became pretty big when I was only about halfway the stuff I planned, so I changed plans and promised some extra updates this week.

So here comes the first bonus chapter: documentation.