Just in case anyone is following me on kdedevelopers.org, I moved my blog to http://blogs.fsfe.org/gladhorn.

Yesterday I arrived in Oslo just in time for pizza and talking to Will, Darío, Thiago, Olivier, Knut and the students working on mobile broadband connections.
We had a great time so far, discussing apis and cleanup of our network manager bits.
Working with Will and Darío is fun! We kept planning even on our little bar prowl with Olivier.
Darío and I kept giggling about the never ending night. Three in the morning felt like late afternoon... Good thing we came during the summer to visit Oslo.
Now it's time to start improving the applet and libs after a great breakfast.
Time to get some work done

Björn of the FSFE initially triggered the organization of a joint KDE 4.2 Release Party and FSFE Fellow Meeting in Stuttgart. I'm very happy that our local team grew quickly so everything went very smooth. So Friday it was time to meet and celebrate. At this point we had no idea how many people would show up.

At the time we were supposed to meet and start preparing the few things we had to it was not exactly very warm outside. Me being extra double plus busy all week, I arrived slightly late at 5:45 at the Unithekle where our release party was to take place. To my surprise I found some brave souls standing in the cold outside. They quickly enlightened me, that being outside was not a voluntary decision, but because the place hadn't opened yet. Blame goes to me, since I booked the room - oops. Seems like FSFE and KDE people are not only very nice but also forgiving, I didn't get thrown into the next dumpster or any of that kind. A few minutes later the nice guy on duty this evening opened the doors for us (relive). The only downside was that this evening they couldn't serve food since the kitchen wasn't open

After these initial hurdles we happily moved inside (getting warm again, yay). I have to thanks everyone for helping so much, getting the projector set up, posters pinned to the wall and being great! While everyone got stuff done I finally managed to my slides in place so I could do the official welcome.

We were more than 40 people crowding the room we had reserved! The evening stared with a welcome and quick introduction to KDE 4.2 by me. Björn gave an overview of the FSFE activities. We had a short break to get something to drink and chat. Next up was a fun round of mini introductions so we'd know who we are. This is something I'd really recommend for meetings of this size, it went extremely smooth without anyone talking too long since we set up some rules. Everyone had to tag ("real life 2.0") her/himself with three words (I started taking four words which lead to instant booing ). This way introductions were really quick and we could place each other a little bit - great conversation starter for people that have never met before.

The official part then continued with Frank talking about getting involved with KDE and our community. Sven finished with a live presentation of Amarok 2.

Discussions lasted late into the night. Still, with so many people I sadly didn't manage to talk to everyone personally, so there's still some catching up left to do.

One idea that Kurt Pfeifle came up with is to have regular local KDE meetings. I think it's a great idea. We are enough people to have a good basis and I'd love to get more people involved. I think it would be great to have some workshops - for example how to start translating or hacking on parts of KDE. If you're interested in meeting KDE people in and around Stuttgart, please let me know (my mail is still my lastname @kde.org).


After many interesting discussions we enjoyed listening to Martin Konold who told us some fun storys about the first years of KDE. I enjoyed meeting everyone and I'm looking forward to other opportunities to gather. One thing that made me particularly happy was that I received lots of positive feedback, even by mail on the next day. It seems everyone enjoyed the evening and we had a broad enough spectrum of talks to offer something for all.

Hopefully Ingo will organize another Linux Day at the Hochschule der Medien soon, so we'll get together again. Kudos to Jörg for getting us a projector on short notice! And especially Björn who did lots of the organizational work and starting it in the first place! Thanks Frank and Sven for giving interesting talks!

Now I'm looking forward to meeting many of you at FOSDEM next week

Björn and I sat down (or rather mailed around) to get the FSFE Fellowship Meeting and KDE 4.2 Stuttgart Release Party going.
Of course that involved talking to people around here.
Ingo of RadioTux was on my list of locals, so I contacted him.
What I didn't expect was to be interviewed on RadioTux just a few days later.
I had a short interview on RadioTux.
So if you are really brave, you can listen to me (in German), stuttering here.
After some technical problems they got me on the phone at around 65 minutes.
And d'oh, could I think of many things to say when skipping through it afterwards... I guess I still need to work on my promo skills.
But it turned out much less embarassing than I had originally feared

Regarding the release party, I'm quite happy that we'll be a strong team to represent FSFE and KDE.
Now I'd be happy to know who else is comming... (yes, please drop me a mail at my lastname@kde.org if you plan to come).
I'm looking forward to meeting Björn and the FSFE Fellows, Ingo (RadioTux), Daniel, Frank, Vallerie, Jörg and Lydia (KDE all)

In totally unrelated other news...

I'm happy to announce a KDE 4.2 Release Party in Stuttgart. At the same time this will be the first FSFE Fellowship meeting here.
Together with the FSFE we will celebrate the release, meet, talk and have fun.
Of course everyone interested in Free Software is invited.

Björn Schiessle will talk about the FSFE and we will present the goodness that KDE 4.2 brings live on stage

Date: January 30th, 2009 (Friday)
Time: 18:00
Place: Unithekle (Open Street Map, Lageplan der LUG-S)

For a list of all release parties have a look at wiki.kde.org.

Ok, it's sort of late... - I wish everyone a happy 2009
And since I just found my camera:

What a way to start 2009 - Danimo enjoys his swimming pool and Lydia her green dragon.

Edit:
This was before they found out their drinks were mixed up and they switched, so Lydia has Danimo's swimmingpool and Danimo the dragon...

I have not investigated the QEdje-Plasma-Applets much, but here's how to get them working, assuming you compile your kde from svn.
Some info is on MoRpHeUz’s Blog.
Not enough for me though...
So here is a step by step walk-through.
You probably need libeet-dev or similar, I just got a distro package.
Get qzion and qedje:

Now the trick part - how to get the sample Edje files onto the desktop?
Take for example kdelogo.edj and save it somewhere.
Now simply open the "Add Widget" dialog from Plasma. Choose Install New Widgets->Install Widget From Local File...
Select your Edje widget. You will get an error message. Ok.
Run kbuildsycoca4. Now the edje widget is in the Add Widget list
Add the rotating K and be proud. No, I don't know why you should be proud either.

I added mouse interaction to the marble wallpaper, so you can spin your desktop now but that's a different story. No super-pigs included this time.

So M got a flying pig for his birthday. Imagine that! Awesomeness - aren't you jealous? I surely am. It's even pink! There are days (or does it only happen at night, when you can't sleep?) where flying pigs seem to be the secret rulers of KDE.

M told me that he used to have a moving earth as desktop wallpaper. At night when I should have been sleeping the pig came flying by to remind me of the marble spinning in space. The pig kept talking to me. It reminded me that I had read about patterns as desktop background and the Mandelbrot fractal. And there was a plasma applet based on marble already. All ingredients there right? So yesterday I sat down and started writing a moving earth desktop wallpaper. It's currently in playground/base/plasma/wallpapers and just an early proof of concept.

The great thing about this is that it took only approximately three hours to get it to work for the first time. To me that shows how easy to use our APIs have become and how much power KDE 4 offers. There are stil lots of things to improve in the wallpaper globe. Some are very simple like adding a sun and stars (maybe optionally) by simply switching them on as Marble plugins. Another great idea would be to enable mouse interaction with the background. It's all there, probably just a few lines of code missing to get the first truly interactive background in KDE. And how about a different perspective - some more tilt to get a more 3d impression when flying over the country. Thank you pink flying pig.

A few weeks ago I got a smart card to use with gpg for hardware encryption. I'm no security fanatic but I like the idea, so I bought a "lots of different cards all in one" reader. I got a MSI StarReader SMART which should support smart cards and was available locally (strange habit, I like to go to real shops instead of the online competition sometimes).
I played around with it, but it seemed to just sit there and do nothing (except read every variant of useless memory card). What made my day is that after only one mail to Ludovic Rousseau with some info about the device and getting a response the same evening, it started working. After adding its usb id it's listed on the ccid driver page
A big thank you to Ludovic Rousseau!
Time to get it to work with gpg and mail now.

I'll be giving a KDE 4 talk at the Hobby and Electronics fair in Stuttgart tomorrow (Nov, 16th). If you were planing to drop by the fair, come on over at 15:30. You probably won't learn a lot about KDE since I intend to prepare for a rather broad non-technical audience. Let me know if you happen to be in Stuttgart and want to have a coffee or just chat