Who doesn't want to enjoy the good things in life longer? I'm talking of course about the battery life in your laptop. Intel released PowerTOP this week, a power monitoring tool for Linux. PowerTOP helps you identify which processes on your system keep your processor from going to deeper sleep states. Deeper sleep states consume less power and make your battery charge last longer. Visit www.linuxpowertop.org and give it a try!

...finally. And no, I'm not talking about their dealings with Novell.

Last month Microsoft finally figured out how to work with open standards:

Microsoft enhances Interoperability with Ecma Office Open XML Formats

(Oct 25, 2006) Microsoft is applying the Open Specification Promise (OSP) to Ecma Office Open XML to further enable the
implementation of these document formats, by anyone, forever. Microsoft already offered an irrevocable covenant not to
sue (CNS) to anyone wishing to implement the formats, and now implementers have the option to use the OSP or the CNS.

See the OSP FAQ for details.

Critics are raving

“Red Hat believes that the text of the OSP gives sufficient flexibility to implement the listed specifications in software
licensed under free and open source licenses. We commend Microsoft’s efforts to reach out to representatives from the open
source community and solicit their feedback on this text, and Microsoft's willingness to make modifications in response to
our comments.

Those of you who are tired of battling with binary graphic driver blobs will be pleased to learn about Keith Packard's announcement today.

The Intel® 965 Express Chipset represents the first product family that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset family includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. By open sourcing the drivers for this new technology, Intel enables the open source community to experiment, develop, and contribute to the continuing advancement of open source 3D graphics.

Following the release of this driver, future work will continue in the public X.org and Mesa project source code repositories. The project Web site, http://IntelLinuxGraphics.org/ , will serve as the central site for users of Intel graphics hardware in open source operating systems.

Update: More coverage at CNET News.com

Last month I complained about Apache refusing to support OpenDocument. It seems there is progress in this area now that Eben Moglen published a
legal opinion on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation giving OpenDocument a clean bill of legal health.

Unfortunately the related bug reports still don't seem to have received any attention.

Ola! So my return from GUADEC got shorted when the Seniorita at the Delta-air check-in counter looked at my passport and wondered why the laminated picture-ID part wasn't attached to the rest of the thing. I wondered along with her. Apparently dutch passports often break down like this if you tend to sit on them. The implication was that I wouldn't be able to get into the US with a passport like that. After rebooking my flight to Monday (cancelations willing I might even have a chance for a fight tomorrow) it was off to the dutch consulat here in Barcelona to get some replacement papers. Friendly people over there as well but still a bit of a scramble to get new passport-photos before they closed down for siesta. With no minutes to spare I made it back with new pictures of myself. It must be said that I look a bit overheated on them.

After spending the noon-hours (they have about 3 of them overhere) in the local starbucks, I could fetch my new temporary replacement passport. Now I hope that I will not get into trouble on re-entry for having my US work-visa in the old broken passport and not in the new one. We'll see how that is going to work out.

In the meantime I'm stuck in sunny Barcelona. Oh the agony

You look at the code of this new KDE application and you immediately notice several of the mistakes that you made in your first KDE application as well. Sounds familar?

Then it's time to share your experience at this years aKademy. Tell the world how to write KDE applications the right way. There are still two days left to submit a presentation proposal for this years aKademy. It's a 5 minute job: xdg-email akademy-talks-2006@kde.org --subject 'My aKademy presentation about ...' --body 'I would like to give a presentation at this years aKademy about ...' You only need to fill in the blanks. Be a KDE Hero(m/f) and do it now.

Suggestions:
* Getting on top: Things you need to know about focus stealing prevention.
* Out of the way DCOP, here comes the DBUS.
* Writing KDED modules that don't suck.
* Supporting KIOSK, what you can do to keep Sysadmins happy.
* Make fast, 10 tips to stay in the left lane of the digital autobahn. Common patterns to avoid that make aplications slow.
* ...

Just wanted to say hi from Atlanta airport, where I'm waiting on my connecting flight to Barcelona, on my way to this years GUADEC.
Trying to get my outbound e-mail working but port 25 seems to be blocked (or my providers SMTP after POP3 is messed up). The tech support of AccessAnytime couldn't find "Atlanta" in their system and weren't much hep either... bunch of clueless f*cks.

I should also point out that the wireless on my Intel Centrino powered IBM T42 worked flawless in Linux. getting it to work from Windows was a lot harder (I hope that now the network knows my MAC it will work once I reboot)

There are a lot of delayed flights here in Atlanta due to bad weather. My plane seems to have arrived at the gate so I'm hopeful that it will depart on time. To those of you who will also bring GUADEC a visit, see you there. I will give a very nice talk about the Portland initiative on wednesday. There is quite some press interest in Portland as well.... exciting times.

The Apache foundation steadfastly refuses to include support for the OpenDocument filetypes to its distribution despite the mimetypes being registered with IANA. Appearantly the ASF doesn't agree with the OASIS IPR policy seemingly unaware that the OASIS OpenDocument TC has switched to a most liberal IPR policy (Royalty Free with restrictions on possible licensing conditions) earlier this year.

It's not that the Apache foundation is developing a better open standard for office documents (ASCII maybe?) and so far they do not seemed to be bothered the least shipping mimetypes for proprietary formats such as QuickTime (video/quicktime), MP3 (audio/mpeg) or *gasp* Microsoft Word (application/msword). I'm sure it makes sense in their world, it doesn't in mine.

No, the Portland Print Dialog isn't about design by committee. It's about letting the platform provide the print dialog (as opposed to the toolkit). If you run a GNOME desktop that will probably mean a Gtk Print dialog. If you run a KDE desktop that will probably a dialog based on KDEPrint. Incidentally, there already is a Portland file dialog, and no it isn't designed by committee either (give it a try!).

To make these kind of dialogs really viable as a platform service there are still some barriers that need to climbed. In particular it will need to be possible to extend such a dialog in a toolkit-neutral and out-of-process way. That's currently not possible. I hope that we will be able to present a proof of concept of such an extensible dialog somewhen later this year. Until that happens it is indeed highly premature to talk about any of this in an LSB context.

Most of the other functionality currently provided by Portland's xdg-utils will be ready well in time for LSB 3.2 though. So there are enough other interesting Portland bits to talk about on LSB day 2!

The Gnome Journal has an interview with me on the Portland project courtesy of Sri Ramakrishna.