Sad news today, but... Matt, just thanks for all your contributions in Kopete. You dude rock. I hope to see you in Akademy. Good luck in your new projects! We will miss you a lot.

2004 has gone. Nice end-of-year celebrations like Christmas, time to spend with family. Got some neat gifts, like a coffee machine
to make real coffee. Scott complained while being in Chile about we drinking nescafe. New year was also cool, had a nice dinner with
family and cousins and then I went to a cool party in a big house. Unlimited bar and good music.
On the KDE side, I finally fixed the photo displaying issues in the contact list. They are now centered, bordered and nice scaled.

Now, I am trying to port Richard Smith's modular qt:QListViewItem Component classes from Kopete to KickPIM. I already ported the photo stuff, even the newest border and scaling patched. The component classes would allow me to make new display styles more easy. I haven't received an email back from the author about my patches, and they start to grow. What can you do in that situation? fork?... no, I would not be able to maintain a fork of it.
On KDE-Chile's side and accessability, Mauricio Bahamonde (a.k.a elkrammer) just finished a kttsd plugin for Kopete. He was new to KDE development and I showed him bug:95529 . He used that bug to develop his first plugin and he had success. Sadly we are in feature-list freeze so the plugin will not be in KDE 3.4. But surely it will be a great jump for kde-accesibility for KDE 4.0

After 7 years of hard work I finally finished University. No more classes. I should now work hard to give my MSc. thesis a final polish so I can present it in the following months, and then I'll able to graduate both as a Civil Industrial Engineer in Computer Science and as a MSc. in Engineering at the same time. I am very happy with this.
These days without the stress of the final weeks have been fun. Celebrating, parties, Pubs, Karaoke. Even Kopete Latex plugin got some love thanks to the free time. Closed all bugs and implemented every wishlist except one.
Now time to go bed, as my thesis deserves some love tomorrow too...

We were discussing about the pro/cons and ideas around this. There is a wiki page, feel free to comment. Here

Chapter III of the crusade is done. Kopete now supports displaying KABC pictures both in the metacontact tooltip and in the contact list itself.
Further integration with specific protocols avatars and this property is coming. How it looks by now?

After upgrading my kdepim to HEAD (nicely, I did a PKGBUILD for archlinux that grabs and builds it). I started to fill my kabc pictures with the nice kde:KPixmapRegionSelectorDialog from Antonio and other developers (This dialog should be used in Kopete to select the MSN display picture for instance) (yes I coded a similar one too and then realized it was already commited). Then I modified the nice applet kickpim (I can't live without it) to show the kabc pictures. Kopete contact list should be next victim. Even KMail's quick address selector is a good candidate. Any place where you look for a person quickly is a good candidate if you can match faces instead of reading the name.

When iChat was released and I saw the contact list with big face avatars I remembered inmediately that humans can recognize faces much faster than reading a name. Since that moment I wished that KDE could drop text everywhere it is not needed and start using faces (w/text as an addition if it makes sense).

I am invited to give a talk to a Business Summit on Thursday, in La Serena city. As I am used to, the audience are business people and my talk will have to be very general. My current plan right now is to talk about technology as a tool for entrepeneurs, opensource, copyright, licenses, creative commons, and other cool stuff, and of course, can't wait to decide where to put a big KDE logo somewhere in a slide to tell them about the project. Known city for me since it is where I lived before coming to University in Santiago.

Uhm, after reading other developers journals for some time, I logged in for first time... this is my first post yay.