After spending an extra week after GCDS hiking around on La Gomera (another one of the Canarian islands), I finally got home and had time to process some of the photos I took during the desktop summit, so you can go ahead and take a look at them in my gcds gallery on my smugmug page (so if anyone needs a smugmug referral code you can also ping me).

At conferences like the GCDS there is so much going on, and you get bombarded with information from all the talks one after that other, and that means that sometimes it takes a while for the meaning of it all to sink in. For me the two biggest themes of the conference were firstly the emerging Semantic Desktop, and secondly the increasing importance of visual design. We actually are in the process of inventing new ways of visual communication, and it was very exciting to be right there in the middle of it happening.

The GCDS, and particularly the Akademy ended. Mostly everyone is still already back home, so all I can say is: Thanks to Agustín, Rodrigo, Miki and the rest of the local organization team for the great conference. Everyone I've talked with agreed that they were having a very good time, and I can only reassure that. The only "problem" I can find is (and I thought I would never say this) there were too many parties . So, congratulations for a very successful event!

This past week has been quite interesting to say the least. Being at GCDS has been very interesting and educational. I got to know quite a few KDE(and some OSS) people, to chat and work with. It was pretty hard to start taking to people (most people are really shy in person), but after you get to know some people you know everything is for real(and they like to party too!).

The Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria is very enjoyable. The conference center is very
luxurious. It comes with uniformed assistants in every presentation room helping by changing the name signs and refreshing the water. The main conference hall has a wonderful view on the ocean. There are people from KDE, GNOME and many other projects here, so there are many interesting people that I have not met before. The conference is located near the ocean, so attendees can go swimming for lunch. The talks are all recorded with the slides as insets, so if you are not here or cannot attend two talks at the same time, you can view the talks later.

My presentation (odf) about libstreamanalyzer went well. The announcement that Tracker 0.7 will use libstreams and libstreamanalyzer was received with a round of applause. The audience was an equal mix if KDE and GNOME developers and the many questions after the talk indicated that people get what the libraries are about and are interested in using it.

Strigi 0.7 will come with a new set of ontologies as a default. Previously we used the ontologies from xesam.org. From 0.7 we will be using the ontologies from semanticdesktop.org. These ontologies are also used by Tracker. So we will have one set of ontologies for both KDE and GNOME. Expect Strigi 0.7 in the next weeks.

For me there are only two more days here. I will be busy with semantic desktop and koffice meetings before I fly home on Thursday morning.

A small status report about the Python bindings and support in the almost arrived, KDE 4.3. All of the APIs have been updated of course and I've added support for polkit-qt. This makes it possible to write applications and configuration tools which feature the much needed (and working) "Administrator" button.

Yes, I'm down here in Gran Canaria with the rest of the geeks. It's shorts and T-shirt weather 24/7, even when it is cloudy and "bad" like it is now. (Actually this is better. The full on sun is a bit too much.) There are a lot of old familiar faces around and a lot of new ones. Speaking of which if you are at GCDS and are working with Python on KDE then please come and find me and introduce yourself. (I'm the geeky one with glasses with the Kubuntu T-shirt on.) I'm curious to know what you are developing, what is working well in Python bindings, what is not and what you would like to see in the future. Help me help you.

I'm currently sitting at a table in the still empty Qt Software / KDAB booth, listening to the awesome KDE Linuxtag team get the KDE / Amarok / Kubuntu presence behind me ready for another day. Throughout all of Linuxtag they have been, and will continue to be, proudly showcasing what we have collectively already achieved and helping new contributors make their way into our community so we can do even greater things in the future, with their help. Today the conference program features a KDE track, full of diverse and interesting presentations for a wide range of audiences. Claudia, Luca and their team have done an amazing job getting this conference presence and the many talks lined up. KDE is again making a very good impression, I think. Yeah, us!

The joking and chatter behind me has reminded me how much I'm looking forward to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. It will be great to catch up with everyone, like every year, but unlike every year, this time I'll also be able to catch up with friends from outside the usual KDE circles, since many friends from Gnome and related projects will be there. I'm sure this co-located event will be awesome and will bring our two communities, which share so many of their core goals and ideals, even closer together. I'm going there a few days early to do some hanging out on the beach, diving and general R&R. Good times.

But now I need to get going, the KDE track starts in a few minutes and my presentation on transitioning from Qt/KDE 3 to 4 as a developer is the second one.

The Akademy program is almost done. Speaker notification deadline was yesterday, but we are still busy sorting out some last details and haven't sent notifications yet. Please bear with us and have a bit more patience. We have a lot of great proposals, more than we can fit into the schedule. So it's not easy to decide what we can take, and the co-hosting with GUADEC adds another dimension of complexity to this task. But we are on a good track, and we will have a fantastic program. Stay tuned...

There are still five days left to submit a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2009. The deadline is on Friday, April 10th. Akademy happens as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this year. See more details about what we are looking for in the call for presentations. Akademy is the prime occasion for meeting the community, and present and discuss your ideas. Lots of great initiatives were kick-started at Akademy. Don't miss out on this opportunity and submit your proposal now!

Personally I'm particularly interested three kinds of presentations:

• First I would like to see presentations about the beauty of KDE. KDE 4 shines, and I would love to meet the people who make it shine at Akademy, and hear how they did it, and what we can expect in the future. That's not only limited to beautiful graphics. Elegant code, organic user interfaces, beautiful APIs, engines which enable a beautiful desktop, fluffy-bunny themed Chuck Norris, all this falls under this category.
• Second I would like to hear about projects which go beyond KDE or which serve as a foundation for KDE. The state of X, cross-desktop infrastructure like Akonadi or other freedesktop.org projects, general interesting desktop computing concepts, all this would make great presentations for Akademy and the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in general.
• Third, and that actually might be the most important category, I would really love to have lots of application developers at Akademy, especially the people who stand behind the thousands of "third-party" applications which create the richness of the KDE experience. You might think that your application is not important enough for a big conference like Akademy, but that's not true. All the little tools, which were created to scratch a special itch, they make up for an essential part of the KDE software universe, and they should be represented at Akademy. This also includes all the nice Qt applications, which only use a small or no part of the KDE libraries. They share the same base with every other KDE application, and are a natural fit for the KDE community. So, if you are the author of one of the great applications on kde-apps.org, don't think twice, submit your abstract.

I'm looking forward to a special Akademy in a beautiful surrounding with lots of exciting content. Be part of it, submit a talk.

2008 has been a great year for me Free Software wise.

Not only did I get the opportunity to attend three awesome KDE developer meetings/sprints, I also got invited and attended the Linux Collaboration Summit.

However, personally the most important aspect of 2008 is me returning to serious KDE development. Hmm, probably not returning since my contributions in the early years more or less where heling other developers, doing a couple of fixes and enhancements, mainly in the KDE Games and KDE Edu areas.

Due to time being available to me only in small chunks of a couple of minutes but all over the day, I moved on to doing support. Both end user support as well as developer mentoring, the latter mostly on web forums such as mrunix (German), qt-forum and I am actually one of the initial guys behind QtCentre.

That was a great time as well as I find helping and receiving many people's thanks extremely gratifying more so when I discovered that people within the KDE community where actually aware of my work there, something I discovered after I did a talk on user support at Akademy 2006.
Special thanks to people like Anne" to whom I can trust our help seeking followers.

Anyway, back to topic. Doing only proprietary software development grew boring pretty fast, so I really longed for doing real team work again, working on a vision rather than stupidetly implementing dull specifications.

Some years back I had started to work on a command line client for KDE's address book so I used it as a starting point for searching for new challenges quickly found all I could have dreamed of in Akonadi.

I thought that if I were a third party developer using KDE's address book API in my application, I would quite likely be angry if that API would become useless from one day to the other. So I investigated whether it would be possible to make this API work together or on top of Akonadi. The rest is history

Hopefully the coming year will allow me to continue working on that and probably other bridges, e.g. for libebook/libecal or Mozilla based products.