At times when we have only 512MB Compact flash, we always had to download the pictures off the camera, but with these affordable 4GB cards, it can take a while before we see the need to download. So here is my favorite.

Imagine you have a family - so something like one wife, 1.5 children and a dog - and you decided that it's better to feed them at least once per day and to provide some kind of home to survive during the cold days.

Both of those basic requirments are not that simple any longer since prices continue to increase on a monthly base while you still earn only around 4 Euro per hour (what is at least close to one meal for one person - ok, there are still those taxes that eat half of the 4 Euro, but it's at least still >0!) on your day-(and night-)job(s).

I've received 2 emails asking for more blogging and info about current klik2, especially since FOSDEM 2008.

Unfortunately, I don't have much time these weeks for 'FOSS-work', due to pressing 'work-work' duties. Since about October, I'm entangled deeply (too deep, if you ask me) in a major project that leads me to spend 5-6 days a week in Frankfurt (250 km away from home), with 12-14 hours a day on a customer site. Now compute: how much time does that leave me on evenings (in the Hotel) and weekends (at home), given that one-way travel time Stuttgart <=> Frankfurt is about 3 hours, and daily travel time inside Frankfurt is about 30 minutes?

This project takes much longer than initially thought. (Also, it involves only a very little bit of Linux, Solaris and Open Source, and much more MS Windows and proprietary software.) However, now there's the first light at the end of the tunnel. A few more weeks, and sometime mid-May my routines will be back to more normal.... *sigh*.

Anyways, while there are some more current klik2 development news, here's just one item for now: GSoC!

The klik team has submitted to become a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008. If you are interested in some of the possible student projects, visit our GSoC idea's page.

We give a short description of each idea, as well as listing required skills and expected difficulty level to implement it, the programming language to use and some reference links to study:

• klik2 Updater
• klik2 Security Framework
• Enhancement/Replacement for fakechroot
• Packaging the klik2 client
• Porting klik2 to *BSD and Opensolaris
• Automate klik Recipe Testing
• Replacing Server-side APT with Server-side Smart

Say hello to our new baby daughter, Vivian:

She was born on Feb 25th. Her middle name is QiHui, which is Mandarin for "bright angel". Haiyin and I are very happy, and not a little tired!

Some day, I will have time to work on KStars again...but it probably won't be soon!

It may work earlier for other couples, but it didn't work out earlier for us. So yesterday was officially the first evening mom was out alone - that is without being called home at 7pm because coolo ran out of ideas how to calm the baby.

So, after Saturday's FOSDEM KDE Group Picture, perhaps it's now time to give a slightly fuller account of FOSDEM 2008 (with pictures). Since most of my pictures from the main tracks were too blurry anyway, I'll just focus on some of my pictures related to the KDE FOSDEM 2008 presence (leaving out some pics of individual persons and overview shots). Photos have only been resized and cropped where somewhat appropriate. Perhaps to do for next year: buy a lens which captures more light, or a bigger flashlight (Shooting at ISO 1600 is rather noisy )

Let's start with a picture of the KDE stand, featuring Adriaan and his fancy box (btw Adriaan, another piece of consumer electronics that people willingly pose with would be the OLPC).

The first KDE talk was by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen about Amarok 2, and introduced a live mascote for Amarok. I noted that Amarok 2 really should try to get the ability to download and manage live performances and other music available from the Internet Archive. Let's hope they try that again (given that he actually looked into it already).

The following talk was by me about KOffice 2, but since I did that talk myself, I don't have pictures of that I was followed by Sebastian Trüg talking about Nepomuk. I could really have used his proposed feature of using FOSDEM speaker information to find mails from them

Knut Yrvin then talked about Free Software in telecom. Not only did he pass around a Greenphone (unfortunately no decent pics of that), but he also gave away a free book to the first person in the audience that could answer a tough question about what code TT GPLed at some point last year. It was so hard that he had to ask an easier question to be able to give away the book

Unfortunately I had to miss most of Holger Schröder's KDE on Windows in order to meet someone, but I was still able to snap some pictures of him in action (actually I made more decent pictures of him than of most other speakers, intriguingly enough).

The last talk on Saturday was done by Josef Spillner. He talked about multiplayer gaming for KDE4 games, which apparently exists already even though the functionality is hidden somewhat. I can't really check that because I don't actually compile KDE4 games, but it's still interesting to know about.

The first talk on Sunday morning (way too early for my taste ) in the Crossdesktop room was done by the dynamic duo Simon Peter and Kurt Pfeifle (Simon doing the talking, and Kurt demonstrating Klik on his laptop/the projector while Simon discussed it, very nice interaction). They talked about Klik (2). I guess their target audience was me, because they showed a Klik error dialog about Krita not working

Unfortunately I had to leave early during their Q&A session, because I wanted to see part of the Xen main track talk. I arrived late, and the room was completely packed and rather hot. So instead of staying in that room for the next talk about VirtualBox, I left in the break to go to the other main track about build tools, just in time for the SCons talk. (I was planning to meet a friend of mine during the CMake talk anyway, so now I just met him slightly earlier.) It was a lot less crowded there, and even a bit too cold (but that might've been because there was a draught). While I moved rooms, I was still able to quickly make a picture of the questions section of Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kuegler's talk on KDE4.

After the CMake talk I had to leave early again (and miss the next devroom talk), because we had a small meeting on the grass field next to the devroom about the upcoming aKademy 2008 in Belgium. That meeting finished just in time to catch another talk by Knut Yrvin, this time on Free Software in Education (he gave a total of 3 devroom talks, but his other talk about Free Software and phones was scheduled at the same time as the Klik one). No free books this time, but he did tell us about how teaching young kids how to use an office suite is a bad idea. I guess Inge won't like the sound of that

After the main track CMake talk by Bill Hoffman, we also had our own version of a CMake talk, this time by Alexander Neundorf. I guess I should really try if that excluding of unit tests also works with the Krita unit tests, since that does sound like a nice feature to use. Bill attended the talk as well, and gave a free CMake book to a happily surprised Peter Rockai (mornfall) during the questions section, after Peter asked a question about integrating Java in CMake projects.

After that, we first had Øyvind Kolås (pippin) talking a bit about GEGL (we had to switch his talk and the Deb Packaging Jam, unfortunately). It seems that the current development version of Gimp has a checkbox in the main GUI to 'Enable GEGL', which is rather interesting (amongst other things, it provides them with live previewing of filters, a feature the current Krita development version has as well, and which I also demonstrated the day before). As seems to be typical with talks by pippin, he used a custom presentation interface to do his presentation (this time it appeared to be a graphically 'enhanced' file system browser )

Following that I had another scheduling conflict: there was both the Deb talk, and another Klik talk (this time as a main track). I resolved it by quickly visiting Simon and Kurt to take a picture, and then go back to the Crossdesktop room where Jonathan Riddell explained us all about making Debian Packages. He did this by using the rather amusing example of packaging the GNU Hello World program.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances, we had to cancel the last devroom talk, so no pictures from that. After that, I hung around a bit with mornfall and Pino Toscano (who doesn't like me taking pictures of him, yet is on the group picture ). After Holger talked a bit with us, FOSDEM 2008 was unfortunately over already. Let's hope next year's FOSDEM will be at least as good as this one

PS: I bought a Debian T-Shirt at FOSDEM, I guess that makes up for my rant about them I actually wanted to buy one last year already, but they were sold out then. I made sure to buy one on Saturday this year, and indeed they still had some (FYI: like said in the comments there, that issue has been temporarily fixed in their kernels now. I tested it, and it indeed works, yay ) (And generally speaking, I really like Debian, and that's mainly why I get angry at it sometimes: I care about it)

Edit/PS 2: Seems like Jonathan Riddell put up all of my KDE related FOSDEM pictures on his Flickr account, so now you can have a more extensive view of them

So, not only is it FOSDEM this weekend, I also organized a group photo for the KDE related people who are here. We went to the small field of grass in front of the KDE devroom. Luckily, the sun just started breaking through the clouds, so there was nice lighting (unfortunately I forgot to switch my ISO back from 1600, so it's a bit noisy nonetheless).
Here's a very small version (WiFi is a bit slow here, so no big version yet)

I just decided for myself I should try to use a text based presentation software, since GUI-based presentation apps require you to think about what goes on which page from the beginning, usually you see only the current page, you have to think about the layout (fontsize, decorations etc.), you have to use the mouse, etc.

This is what I was able to see this morning, out of the window in my new Dutch apartment.
As ERASMUS student, two weeks ago I moved to Leiden for my studies, and here I am, facing myself with the Dutch environment. And its weather as well, that today kindly remember that we are still in winter. (Although last weekend was really nice, sunny and warm.)

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