This is a big day for me: after 15 years, my last day as an astronomer.

I didn't get to be one of the cool-kids at Akademy this year, but it's still a pretty exciting week for me. I won't drone on about it too much, but since I mentioned here a while back that I'd just founded a new company I thought I'd drop in a link now that we're actually talking about what we're doing.

Directed Edge is doing a graph-based recommender system for web sites that we partner with. Basically, we take a page or user as a starting point and find related or interesting stuff. We built a prototype based on Wikipedia's content to show what the system can do. There's still a lot of room to make the system better, but we're pretty excited to get something out there for folks to start messing with.

The announcement, with more details is here.

It's been a long time since my last entry here, so I think I'll start by giving an update of my life lately. I've been a bit away from KDE development for too long (but not from the KDE community fortunately). Some of you probably know what it's like: long work weeks that makes the recent EU proposal of a 65 hours work week look as a game (my personal record is around 96 work hours in a week and never below 50 hours), deadlines, more deadlines ... you know how it goes.

Anyway, on the bright side of life, I started to do more exercise from some months ago (biking mostly) which is quite convenient at relieving stress even if in Spain riding a bike is a high risk sport. Also, I'll start teaching at the University of Málaga in the next academic year (which starts in September here), which is something I've been longing to do for years. I'll teach "Real Time Systems" to industrial engineers and "Operating System Design" to computer engineers. I've given lots of talks and workshops about KDE and KDE development (more than 70 the last time I counted them), but of course this is totally different and I'm sure it will be a nice experience (for me, and I hope, for the students too). Any tip is appreciated .

Well, it's been so long since my last entry that I could keep writing for ages, but I better leave something for other posts (I really hope I can improve the frequency of my updates )

Ah, and last year I missed it, but this time I've managed to arrange my holidays in such a way that I can I say ... [image:3551 nolink=1 size=original style="vertical-align: top"] . Hope to see you there!

There are a few scattered updates in the world-o-wheels of late. The biggest of which, as a number KDE folks are already aware is that I'll be leaving Native Instruments, where I've been for the last couple of years and starting my own company with a friend or two rather soon. I'll post a link once we're to the point of launching a public beta. It's not desktop software, and it's not a consulting service, but this will mean that my primary (professional) development platform will be Linux once again.

I've been considering founding a company for a long while, and having recently been granted permanent residence in Germany it's now legally possible. I've been going crazy the last couple of months trying to sort out all of the technical, financial and administrative details that will go into getting that off of the ground. Above is the table next to my bed.

In other news, coinciding with a meet-up for startup founders on the same weekend in Prague, I'll be around the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Sprint on Thursday and Friday. I'll also be around some of the time at LinuxTag in Berlin the following week. There's a reasonable chance that I'll make it out to Akademy this year too. My specialty at conferences seems to be taking embarassing photos, so I'll try to do my worst.

My current employer is also in the process of switching over to using TagLib and so last week as one of the tasks that I wanted to finish up before I'm away from there I implemented, per request, tagging and audio properties for AIFF files. More or less for free along with that came a generic parser for RIFF formats. There's been a lot of traffic on the TagLib development list of late, and once life slows down a little bit it looks like it might be time to do a quick 1.5.1 or 1.6 release and then go for a 2.0 push.

Tomorrow morning, I will start my new job at axentra.
I must admit I'm a little nervous but also excited by this new job. After 3 years of being self-employed, and with all the shit I had last year and until this May , it's a definitly a welcomed change in my professional life. Sure I will miss the fact that I was able to wake up late in the morning, not having to dress to go to work and also the 30 seconds commute times, but for a more steady income it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

You can find more blogs from here at this space; labs.trolltech.com

Last year I turned 30 and I know people still wonder when I end up being as old as I look. But on the way to this I pass today the next prime number - and I must say it feels much better than last year. The main reason is that I have a new job. This may suprise one or two, but it shouldn't.

Don't panic, I still work for SUSE. But I teamed up with my wife, who is also a software engineer and we decided to create a product on our own in the after hours. This is also the reason you may have missed me on the release-team mailing list so far. I just don't know how much time I will have left for KDE and openSUSE over this other project. It's a pretty radical change, so please bear with me if you expect me to do something that I don't do in the timeframe you're used to.

Anyway, what is this project about? I can't really say much about it at this point. It basically just passed early beta tests (which is also the reason I had some time for KConfig love) and we're both already pretty happy with it. I uploaded an early Screenshot in case you wonder what it looks like.

Of course it will take some time before we can release it - but as you know me, I'm the born release dude: we schedule for early august and perhaps KDE 4.0 can rally with it - I wouldn't mind if KDE beats us.

After three years at relevantive, I decided to work as a freelancer again - and moved in to a shared office in Berlin Kreuzberg.

While the relevantive office was beautiful, this is sure a small upgrade:

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It's the first time in my job life that I do not share an office with other usability people, but with people of many different backgrounds: Hardware developers, security consultants, web and software developers, and a trick film company. I'll sure miss the cross-table usability talks we had at relevantive... but am also looking forward to see how a trick film is produced, hehe!