The Linux Foundation organizes this year's OpenPrinting Summit in Montréal.

I will be there on Monday and Tuesday, trying to represent KDE.

In order to heal some of my procrastination-induced bruises, I decided to do a little social experiment, that tends to prove to myself (once again) that we, humans, are inherently good, only sometimes misguided (read below for the excitement).

Gavin Beatty, GSoC student for the KDEPrint's online OpenPrinting drivers fetching and installation, provided his latest report today. It's refreshing to see enthusiasm and excitement from new young faces joining our community. It's perhaps this kind of effervescence that makes me eager to meet my students in class each autumn. Or to try to put some time in projects like GSoC. We need new energy. We need evolution.

Rutger Claes, KDEPrint's GSoC student for the new UI design, published his report on today's most common forms of printing interfaces. He also offers the fruit of his analysis of how the main dialog should appear in KDE.

Work is still incipient, but I'm pleased that things move ahead. There's big hopes for out printing platform, in spite of my lackluster maintainership...

News here and here

/me wide-eyed but neutral (still).

I don't have a good knowledge of the internals of the CUPS community, but from my ignorant viewpoint, Michael Sweet had the largest hand in that code. It's now mostly up to the community. Which is a great one, for having produced the most dependable printing platform 0$ can buy.

It's quite long since I want to write about this:

I used to use the audiocd: ioslave to rip my CDs. But since almost a year, I started to constantly use kAudioCreator. Nifty little tool! Does one thing and does it extremely well. Congrats Benjamin. Hope you keep this one up with KDE4.

Now, I am partisan to Ogg, so I ripped all my 300+ CD collection to this wonderful format, using kAudioCreator. But, of course, not all can be rosy. Or I wouldn't have what to procrastinate about.

Yes, time passes too fast. It's almost time for this year's Summer of Code midterm evaluation.

During the week-end I "met" my two students online for a more in depth checkpoint than what we usually have and I'm quite pleased! I looked forward to Rutger and Gavin to pass onto me some of their youthful energy again. KDEPrint needs it.

Things progress interestingly. I can't wait for the near future moment where we'll get to commit their work to the kdeprint proper.

I've got pointed to

http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/4030/first_look_asus

Look! KDE as default on a laptop! And a meant-to-be-very-popular one!

Big thanks, ASUS.

I'm a juk kind of guy.

Yet a few weeks ago, frustrated with my inability to make akode or arts play the 50 mp3s from my collection of 2000-odd pieces (mostly ogg, personal CDs-ripped), I gave Amarok a new try. I still feel (very) awkward with the interface. But I kinda like a) the default classifications available in "Collection"; b) the automatic refresh/update of the collection and c) the statistics tool.

What I find impressive at different (socio-cultural) level is the cool integration with Magnatune. I just hope more music artists of this world will wake up some day and will realise in what magnificent ways Magnatune is another sign of the future social revolution of which the surely want to be part.

Thanks, KDE (and Amarok), for getting me accustomed to another great concept.

I added three projects related to KDEPrint in the page of ideas for Google SoC
2007:

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_UI_redesign
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_CUPS_.3E_1.2
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_Qt-4.3.2FKDE-4

I hope we have an even better summer this year!