I found this really nice project called Metatheme. From their website:

"MetaTheme is a project dedicated to unification of appearance between different graphics toolkits (currently GTK2, QT and Java)."

More screenies here, here, here, here and here as well.

So yesterday we (Armin, Tobias, Cornelius, Frank and me) went into Amsterdam to have some dinner. So after some lingering we decided to try our luck in a greek restaurant. We had some nice chats about the KDE community, about Akonadi the new Pim Storage Service for KDE4 and new exciting programming languages. Also it seems that one of my gripes with the KDE desktop is being addressed in SUSE Linux 10.1.

After consuming some beer and too much garlic we left the restaurant for a little walk on Leidseplein where there is always a lively atmosphere. I hope Tobias will send me some pictures as well.

Something else now. As FOSDEM2006 is approaching Cornelius told me he will be present at FOSDEM in Brusselsl (man this guy is travelling a lot) for the OpenSUSE project. If you plan to go to FOSDEM (I think you should), then be sure to check out the Wiki. Sebas and Adriaan, our friends from KDE-NL, are organizing the KDE presence this year.

Great to hear that the KDE New Years Meeting was again very succesful. In my opinion the KDE Dutchies should not stop with this tradition. It gives a good starting point for discussing the activities and plans for this year. I hope to see some pictures soon.

Well I should be leaving in a bit for Day 3 of the Dutch OpenSync Meeting at Amsterdam. No doubt I will blog a bit about it this afternoon.

Day 2 of the Dutch Meeting OpenSync started today. You will find some pictures as links in the text.

These hackers seem to have plenty of energy. Also on pictures it seems that eating is the main theme at this meeting. As long as we don't have something like 'Action Coding' you will have to do with these kind of pictures.

In my previous blog I forgot to mention one person who has been very supportive of this initiative. His name is Jeroen Visser, an amiable guy who does open source consulting at IBM Netherlands. It seems that Frank moved his blog to some space of his own and meanwhile he posted another informative entry (it could be that some DNS servers aren't yet aware of the move of the blog).

The Dutch press has noticed the event as well and Webwereld has a news snippet on the meeting (English translation). It is always nice when mainstream press writes about innovative projects like OpenSync.

Bart Knubben, a colleague of mine who works as an advisor on open source software for the Dutch government also paid us a visit. It was nice as we had some discussion about OpenSync, the opportunities of cross platform open source software and the current state of open source groupware.

Today we helped ourselves with an Senseo coffee machine as we are not able to find a working coffee machine in this IBM building. BTW that's a cool shirt Tobias is wearing.

As a final remark ... I hope that the people of KDE-NL will be blogging as well about the KDE New Years Meeting and what is happening there. I heard a lot of new people signed up for this meeting. Great job guys.

Long time ago that I have blogged! A lot happened in my life. In short: I am pretty happy these days. Perhaps more about that some other day

Now something even more important .

Currently the Dutch Meeting OpenSync is taking place. OpenSync is a synchronisation framework which is to be used on several platforms and even more easily within several desktop environments we currently enjoy. Let's hope that we can now really say that syncing Just Works ™ in KDE.

First of all I would like to thank our sponsors NLnet and IBM Netherlands for making this meeting possible. Also I would like to thank Frank Zwart, my partner in crime for organizing this event (he even started blogging now).

We have taken some pictures ... and I promise that tommorow I will try to blog a bit earlier.

The website Podcastinfo.nl, an initiative by Bernard Flach, mentions Amarok as an excellent player which comes default with podcasting support.

Today I was asked on IRC (#kde-nl) if we have a decent wifi manager in KDE. KWifiManager does not work for him (hi rikva) as it has no support for WPA. To be honest I think we do not have a decent wifi manager in KDE currently. On KDE-apps.org you can find quite some tools. Some of them are really aging like KWirelessMonitor and KWlanInfo. When digging even further on KDE-apps.org you can find KiFi.

Luckily we also have the wonderful Wireless Assistant and the informative PyWireless. And KNemo? Does it know how to manage wireless networks? Nope. However there exists a nifty random WEP/WPA Key Generator.

Then I read this article about Network Manager.

You can click on your network of choice if you need to select a specific one. Otherwise the open network with the best signal strength is automatically selected. If you manually select a network, your network configuration will be statically configured for that network and you may have to go into your network settings program to erase it when you're done.

Woow ... that sounds great. Do we have such a thing in KDE? If so can anyone point me to it please?

said George Staikos on the kde-promo mailinglist. So it seems that the August edition of NewsFactor magazine quoted some of our members of KDE community like Chris Schlaeger and Thomas Zander in an article titled "Revisiting the GUI Admin Debate". As I am not able to get that magazine here in the Netherlands I asked George for some proof.

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I noticed you can read the article online as well.

This nifty mail notification utility has popped up at KDE-apps.org now! Kudos to Kurt Granroth for maintaining this cool piece of software!

Tink sent me some divine mayonnaise from France.

Een blik in de toekomst is a corner on our Dutch KDE website were we offer Dutch translations of the series 'This Month in SVN ...' done by our lovely Jess . Currently the August edition of This Month in SVN now also has a Dutch translation thanks to Bram and Jos*.

* Joske, where is your blog?

UPDATE: Jos indeed has a blog. Use it Jos!