Yesterday was a busy day on the akademy-talks mailing list. Proposals were rolling in constantly. This is because today is the deadline for submissions of presentations for Akademy 2008. So you still have a chance. Have a look at the Call for Presentations and submit your talk now.

There are so many interesting topics we would like to hear about at Akademy:

• You have ported your application to KDE 4? Tell about your experience.
• You run KDE on one of the fancy small devices, be it an Internet tablet, a phone or a tiny laptop? Show us how this works.
• You are working on one of the pillars of KDE 4? Tell us how to make use of them.
• You are working on a distribution which includes KDE? Present to us what made your life hard and what made it wonderful.
• You were a GSoC student last year and are still with the project? Let us know what you have done.
• You have written a cool Pasmoid or a rocking Akonadi agent? Submit your talk now. We are also accepting lightning talks, if you feel like five or ten minutes are enough to present your work.
• You are working in the community as a non-coder? Tell us about what else than writing code is important for KDE.
• You are using KDE in your business? Share your experience.
• You are working on a related Free Software project? Give us ideas how to collaborate.
• You are doing something completely different which is related to KDE? Submit your talk now.

I'm looking forward to another wave of exciting talk proposals. Keep it going.

Last weekend I visited the seventh Linux info day at Augsburg, organized by the local Linux User Group and held a talk about KDE 4. It was a nice event and the talk was well received. There is a lot of interest in KDE and people are generally excited and looking forward what we will bring to them with the KDE 4 series. If you are interested have a look at the slides of the KDE 4 talk (in German).

As Franz already wrote there are a couple of exciting free software events coming up. From March 4th to 9th there is CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade show. KDE will have a booth there. If you want to help to show KDE to a broad variety of visitors there, don't hesitate to contact kde-events@kde.org. It's interesting, it's fun, and it's a great help for KDE. The KDE e.V. is able to help with travel costs if needed.

For me next stop will be FOSDEM this weekend. I'm part of the SUSE crew which will have a strong presence there. Check out the openSUSE developer room to get the latest info about the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 and a lot of other interesting topics around openSUSE. FOSDEM is great because there probably is no other place where you can meet that many free software people on one weekend. See you in Brussels.

I saw a nice form of recruiting software developers on web.de today. On the page which appears when an error on the server occurs they have a box saying "This wouldn't happened to us with you? Show it to us, apply for a job as software developer". That sounds like the commercial version of "Send a patch".

But the photo on the page disturbs me. I have never seen a group of software developers where everybody wears a white shirt.

From time to time I get overwhelmed by my passion for computer games and I buy a game which promises to be fun. So it happened a few weeks ago when I saw a special offer of Valve's "The Orange Box" in the local electronics store. This box contains all kind of Half-Life 2 stuff including the new Episode Two and the very promising looking game "Portal". But boy was I wrong. This was one of the worst buys I ever made.

The box comes with two DVDs, but to be able to play you need to connect to "Steam", an online restrictions management server, which then downloads tons of data to "update" and "activate" your game. It took almost an hour before I was even able to start the game. Needless to say that of course Steam gets autostarted on each login and annoys you with advertisements. What a "steaming" pile of crap.

After this unpleasant experience I thought I would be ready to play the game, but no, I was caught in the nightmare of graphics card drivers for Windows. Trying to be helpful Steam told me that I would have to upgrade the graphics card drivers to the latest version, so I did that. But then when starting the game I only got a cryptic error message. Fortunately problems like that are so common, that it was relatively easy to find an entry in a forum which offered an solution: Downgrading the graphics card drivers to a specific version. So I went again to the ATI site, downloaded some more Megabytes and finally it worked, but another hour was gone. If you think that graphics drivers on Linux are a problem go back to Windows and you will see that it can be worse.

The game itself is brilliant, by the way. What a pity that Valve ruined it with their crappy restriction management concept. But it also had a good side for me: I was reminded again how precious the freedoms of free software are. It feels so good to know that we are doing the right thing by writing great free software instead of inventing strange concepts to annoy users through restricting what they can do with the software they bought.

Today the final version of the openSUSE Guiding Principles has been announced. The Guiding Principles describe what drives the openSUSE project, our identity, our goals and our values.

It has been a long process to create this document. It was discussed broadly in the community as well as internally at SUSE and Novell. But I'm pretty confident that we have reached a version now which has a very broad acceptance. If you look at the initial announcement you will notice that it's signed by community members from inside and outside of Novell including Novell top management. The open openSUSE user directory holds an extended and constantly growing list of additional supporters. You can go there, express your support for openSUSE and its Guiding Principles. Don't hesitate, become part of this great community.

Together with the Guiding Principles the first openSUSE Board of Maintainers has been announced. These group of well-known openSUSE contributors will have the task to channel communication and provide leadership to the project. I'm sure this will help to maintain and hopefully even improve the openness and transparency of the project.

openSUSE as open Linux distribution has a lot of momentum these days. It's incredible to see how much support it gets and all the exciting things which happen around it. I'm happy and proud to be part of this community.

I was surprised to get so much feedback about the KOrganizer agenda items after I posted the screenshots in my last blog entries. There seem to be some strong opinions about rounded corners. Michael Lentner did the right thing and sent a patch. I applied it and suddenly the agenda items look much more slick.

There is even more space around the items, which seemed to be one of the things which disturbed some people, so I don't know how this change will be accepted. How do you like it?

It also doesn't seem to respect the resource colors anymore, but I'm not sure if that wasn't broken before already. The selection also has a slight problem as it isn't visible when there is no header displayed, but I guess that's fixable.

It has been a fun week. Sitting together with Andre, Daniel, Dirk, Jared, Klaas, Stephan and Will in the openSUSE office and hacking on KDE 4. There was one point in time when seven of ten KDE commits where coming from this office. I'm pretty much convinced now that we are on track with KDE 4. There certainly still is some way ahead, but we are getting there. This will be an exciting release. Of course I'm writing this blog entry on a KDE 4 desktop.

I made a lot of progress on KOrganizer. It's pretty usable now. I fixed stuff like the creation of all-day events, the event indicators, coloring of events, got rid of some old cruft and Qt3 remains, and implemented header labels for the great multi-timezone view in the agenda view.

Casper did some work on the Oxygen style and fixed some bugs. This is nicely coming along. I really like it. It's beautifully elegant and if you tweak the color scheme a bit, it also doesn't suffer the lack of contrast it apparently has by default. Tobias worked on KAddressbook and fixed the bug which prevented creation of new address books. Lots of other work happened as well and I also had a couple of good chats on IRC. As most of my KDE time is spent on the e.V. these days, it feels particularly good to be in development mode for a change.

Hacking on KDE 4 is fun. There is so much goodness in the development platform.

This begins with all the nice stuff Qt brings, little things like the addictive foreach, the beautiful API, or the amazing performance, and big things like the rich-text system Scribe or the model-view framework Interview. One of my favorites are the dockable toolbars. I could move them around all day and watch the smooth sliding in effects.

But it doesn't stop at Qt. The KDE platform adds so much useful stuff that it's hard to imagine why anyone still would want to write pure Qt applications. For example I'm deeply impressed by the timezone handling classes David Jarvie has written for KDE 4. They do an incredibly thorough job at addressing the problem of timezones and come with extensive documentation. There is not much left to be wished for if you have to work with timezones. Another thing which make me smile all the time when debugging code is the new incarnation of kDebug, now with sane class names, magically included function names in the debug output and no need to put countless endls or formatting spaces in the code.

Running KDE 4 applications is fun as well. Startup time is now at a level which sometimes made me wonder, if I had correctly closed the app before. I haven't analyzed the reasons for that, but I guess it's due to all the nice
optimizations in Qt and things like the icon cache which was written during the Google Summer of Code. KDE 4 applications also run flawlessly on a KDE 3 desktop (or any other desktop for that matter). So if you are not ready for Plasma yet you can still get a part of the KDE 4 experience, on your very own desktop, right now, for ultimate pleasure.

Hm, seems I'm getting carried away, and I even haven't mentioned Oxygen yet. Ok, there are still lots of bugs and some unfinished corners, so I will get back to hacking now.

This week is KDE 4 hack week for me and some other colleagues at SUSE. We have thrown in some of our ITO time (that's a certain fraction of our work time we can flexibly spend on innovative projects which aren't necessarily related to our day-to-day jobs) to help making KDE 4 ready for release before the total release freeze comes into effect on Friday. Some of the KDAB folks were attracted by this idea as well and will also chime in and do some serious KDE 4 hacking. So hopefully we will have a well-working KDE PIM in KDE 4. It certainly will be a fun week!

I have a KDE 4 desktop up and running now and am looking at KOrganizer, the project which initially brought me to KDE. It's nice to see how far it has come. The KDE 4 version already runs pretty well, but there a still lots of small glitches and I will spend some time on getting rid of these. Enough blogging, back to hacking now.

If somebody wants to be part of the fun, get your SVN checkout ready and join us on IRC.