speaking of logos, and while I'm in 1:N communication mode and have your kind attention, large and lovely N that you are: we're in need of a vector version of the current Kontact logo, for purposes of blowing it up indecently in size for use in a poster or two (for Linuxtag). If you, dear k \in N, happen to be in possession of such, or happen to know j \not\in N, but the creator of said artwork, or happen to be j \in N, said creator, yourself, please get in contact with me at your earliest convenience for the overall furtherance of the ascent of the K (assuming |K| > |N| without loss of generality).

As Tom announced a few days ago, the Akonadi team is looking for a logo and an icon for the little system tray application. So far we have three submissions, but us kdepim hackers at KDAB thought we'd give folks an extra incentive by donating a Canon Powershot digital camera, new and unused, to be given to the creator of the work we will chose in the end. This fine and only slightly out-of-date (as digital cameras are doomed to be the moment one takes them off the shelf) piece of gear can be yours, yes, yours, if you add your submission to the techbase page and we end up selecting it in a process that will very likely be utterly subjective, unfair, unprofessional and morally objectionable. So there. Keep those submissions coming!

Lily Aimée Adam, 2955g, 51cm, healthy, impossibly lovely. Publicity shot here. Righteous.

FOSS.in 07 continues to be a great conference experience for me. I had no talks on the first day of the main conference, which meant I got to listen to other people's presentations, chat with many interesting people and generally hang out and hack. In the evening we went to a downtown restaurant with a bunch of folks for a traditional south Indian style meal, which was excellent.

Today is the third day of FOSS.in, the first day of the conference proper. The past two days have seen the "project days" for Gnome, KDE, Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and IndLinux. These are full day tracks, organized by the community, each packed with technical and non-technical talks. The KDE PD was a success, I think, our talks were well attended and people seemed interested in what we had to say. The whole event so far is a blast, just like last time I was here.

Now that it's getting closer, I'm getting really excited about being able to go to Bangalore again this year, for one of the most fun conferences in the world, foss.in. It's extra special for me to get to return there, for several reasons: I get to go with friends and colleagues from KDE and KDAB this time, Volker Krause and Kevin Ottens (yes, he's been assimilated too), get to meet friends from Trolltech (who are sponsoring the event this year), I get to meet the wonderful KDE.in community and we get to present to them and all of Free Software-dom in India the wonders that are KDE 4 in general and Akonadi in particular. It's just great to see how far KDE in India has come, largely because of the amazing job done by a little guy who was following me and Taj around at foss.in 05, bothering us to do BOFs and meet various people, my friend and colleague Pradeepto Bhattacharya. Dude is famous now, as this poster clearly proves, and he has become a great leader of the KDE community in India and an inspiration to future contributors from his country. The KDE project day at this year's foss.in will be amazing, and a long, long way from the 7 person BOF we had two years ago. I'm also looking forward to picking up many conversations with various folks from other projects, Indian and otherwise, again. Can't wait.

Once again we have friends visiting, here at the KDAB Berlin office. So far Will Stephenson, Bruno Virlet, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause and Kris Koehntopp have arrived for a weekend of Akonadi hacking. Kris (of MySQL) has kindly agreed to have a look at our usage of their system and point out the various errors of our ways. It's already been very productive, we now have a much better idea of what not to do and how to debug what we are currently doing. The rest of the guys are working on benchmarking the other layers, with the goal of proving that Akonadi can actually deliver the kind of performance we need. Bruno has been doing great work on the models for Qt4's model/view framework, on top of Akonadi, as part of his Summer of Code project, and it's great to meet him in person. The picture below shows him in animated discussion with Kris. More exciting things to come as the weekend progresses, I'm sure.

Since Ellen's wish is my command, I'm happy to report that as of yesterday I can be considered a bonafide Berliner, having received the keys to our lovely new apartment in what is rapidly becoming the KDE capital of the world. My wife and I are looking much forward to having about twice as much space as before, 17 million times as many decent food and coffee places, galleries, bookstores, concert venues, clubs, and friends and KDE hackers within walking and biking distance. Of course there's the actual move to take care of first, which is about as much fun as debugging random memory corruptions without valgrind. It is for the greater good, though, and the prospect of spending my working days at the brand new KDAB office in Berlin soon, with a bunch of friends (most of them fellow KDE hackers, yes, we're hiring ), is an exciting one. Good times.

Since I've already written a very long on-topic entry today, I feel I can get away with an utterly off-topic personal entry, and a shameless plug. After years of translating fiction from English to German, writing articles and being a romance magazine editor, my wife managed to sell a couple of short stories to an American e-book publisher, and they were released on Monday. They've indicated that they'll be wanting to publish more of her stuff. I'm insanely proud of her and happy to see her succeed at what she loves doing. It's cool that she chose my last name (with an added "s", since the Americans always append that anyhow) as a pen name, after refusing it when we got married. Check out her website for details. Gotta love a woman who writes smut for a living and codes her own CSS.

Since the Osnabrueck IV meeting where we came up with the core of the Akonadi concept and design, the implementation and fleshing out of these concepts hadn't progressed quite as quickly as we would have hoped. We're all madly busy with real-world concerns and other KDE stuff, so that wasn't really surprising. To finally lift it off the ground and get it to a stage where hopefully more people can start to see the potential and contribute, we decided a few days of meeting face-to-face and hacking around the clock would be best. To keep it effective, we only wanted a small group of people who know the PIM stuff (old and new) intimately. Initially Nuernberg, Germany was to be the location, what with SuSE/Novell, Cornelius and Will there, but that didn't work out for logistical reasons. Ingo, who has recently moved into a larger apartment, then volunteered to host the meeting in Aachen. Cornelius and Will couldn't make it, in the end, so it ended up being Ingo, Volker (who lives in Aachen as well), Tobias and myself. Details and pictures after the jump.