After almost one month, we're finally back in Bavaria. First I picked up my wife in Berlin, where she had a week of vacation. Then visited Rostock for almost 2 weeks and then drove back to Berlin on 26th where my mother married. Then we celebrated new year in the lovely St. Joseph's hospital because Felix got really, really sick and we had to wait over an hour for the blood values and it happened to be the midnight.

I was missing from development for about 2 weeks in August, because I had a vacation. With 3 friends of mine, we planned a hiking/climbing journey in the Alps for this summer. I haven't been on a real vacation for a long time, only for small 2-3 days of resting or one day climbing in the mountain.

I arrived yesterday from a 10 days holidays around Spain. There are some things that I'd like to share with everyone, so I'll try to tell a brief report about it.

As I said in my previous blog entry, I've been with other 4 friends on a rented car travelling around Spain. We did some late changes to the planning, so finally, we went to: Mérida, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Burgos, Fustiñana (a small town in Navarra), Zaragoza, Olite, Pamplona, San Sebastián and Madrid. In total: 3120 Km.

First, I'd like to say I think the people who manage the History Museum of Mérida (next to the Roman theatre), the Cathedral of Salamanca, and the Cathedral of Burgos are doing a fantastic job and should know that people thank them for that. On the contrary, the managers of the Cathedral of San Salvador (La Seo) in Zaragoza, the Basilica of El Pilar also in Zaragoza and the managers of the El Prado museum (in Madrid) are doing it quite bad in my opinion (specially the ones at El Pilar). Why? Because the first ones allow the public to make photographs as long as you don't use flash (which would damage paintings, walls, etc.) but the others don't allow to make any photograph at all, which I can't understand, since there's no difference between an eye seeing a picture and a photo camera capturing light to make a picture without flash. And why do you think that I said the worst were the ones at El Pilar? Because there's a professional photographer inside the basilica taking pictures of small children near the Virgin and later they sell the pictures to the proud parents of the children. And of course, he's even allowed to use flash. I guess his flash doesn't do any damage to the building. Incredible.

Talking about other things, walking around Salamanca I saw this, and I thought of Ellen, so I had to take a picture for her. A traffic light with an even improved usability from the ones at Málaga with leds on the other side of the street.
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In Zaragoza, we went to a concert of "Los Delinqüentes" (those learning spanish, ignore the spelling). I didn't know the group a month ago, but I heard a few songs since then, and was prepared for anything. In general it was a funny and nice concert with a flamenco accent. I counted 21 people I saw casually smoking something which smelled "nice".

In Pamplona, the city hall organized a trip to see the meteor shower of the Perseids and we enrolled to it from Málaga. So at 22:00 we were waiting for the bus which would take us to the mountain of Unzué to see the stars, when we noticed that the bus would take us there at 20:00 instead of 22:00 . Having nothing better to do, we searched for Unzué in a map, and went there by car. After arriving to the town of Unzué and asking a group of around 10 children (the only persons we found on the street) for a bus coming from Pamplona, we found them and joined the group . They were quite happy that we finally arrived, since they were waiting for us for a while, given that we organized the trip from so far away. Talking with some people around there, we talked about Linux and I took the opportunity to "evangelize" them into using KDE . Even after arriving so late and seeing few meteors (since we had a full moon), we have a good memory of that trip.

In San Sebastian, I found that the beach of "La Concha" (the shell) is even nicer that what I expected: quite wide, great sand, crystal-clear water... wonderful. I also found an interesting thing, a real d-bus !

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Our last stop was in Madrid, where I met some old friends with whom I had a great time taking pictures at the El Prado museum and along the afternoon.

In general a wonderful trip. Now I'll have to find some time to assign tags to the 2084 pictures I have from it (in total 6 Gb). Anyway, not all of those are mine. I only made 1500 ...

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.

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OSDL Printing summit group photo. Maybe I'll try to add names tomorrow.

What an exciting week! After many years I finally met Cristian in person at the OSDL Printing Summit that was held in Atlanta this week. The event was great fun and it was really nice to meet with Celeste, Ellen and Jan from OpenUsability.org as well. HP provided all the attendees with free lunches to go along with the free (as in speech, not as in lunch) HP printer drivers. They also provided large bowls with really nice fruit. A shame that a lot of it was still left over at the end. Wish I had one of those bowls here at home. We had really nice facilities for the printing summit thanks to Ricoh/Lanier. Really nice to see so many hardware companies so supportive of Linux. The printing summit went better than I could have hoped for, everyone was really cooperative and I think a lot of common ground was found. I think there will be some very interesting printing related announcements the coming weeks. But now I need to catch up on some much needed sleep!

I have been away from the blog sphere for some odd 3 months. Unlike most I don't have the excuse of being too busy, I have a rather different excuse. I have been out of the country and mostly away from internet during that time

To be exact; I have been travelling around the most beautiful country of, ehm, planet earth for 3 months. The country is New Zealand and unlike most travelling brochures the images you may have seen (well everyone saw LOTR, naturally) pale in comparison to the real thing. I loved every moment I was there. Not to mention that I was the first KDE person to actually meet our famous Canllaith, the only KDE dev living in NZ.

I understand the EU has had the coldest winter it has seen in over a hundred years, so I didn't miss much. Since I left the weather in NZ has been pretty sad as well; someone suggested that maybe it mourns for me. How lovely a thought!

The great thing about travelling is meeting new people, seeing beautiful places and having no deadlines. I could honestly live like that for the rest of my life; although saying goodbye to brief-but-good friends is something I could never get used to.
The bad part about travelling is that all those little things that make your life easy are missing. Upon coming home I noticed that unlike my expectations I did not miss the Dutch food most. The thing I missed most was having a lot of good herbs and good knives to cook with. It was having access to all my clothing, my books and music again. Basically I was missing having my own place to live.
Travelling for 3 months is enough for me, then I want to get back to a 'normal' lifestyle again.

The first (computer related) thing I did when I got back was upgrade my laptop as X11 was a cvs version and a rather flaky one. Now I have openGL and better support for my mouse-pad and my cd-writer is actually able to write cds Debian still rocks; the upgrade went pretty nice, and while I had to drop out of X, I didn't even have to reboot!

I'm slowly getting back into KOffice hacking, I intend to continue fixing bugs in KOffice 1.5 for a little while before I make the jump to get KDE4 and all that running, which is needed for KOffice trunk. While actually using KWord (yes, I sometimes use my own software: shock, horror!) I found some issues that need fixing, so I will work on them first. Its the small things that make things feel so much better, afterall

Oh, yes, I did get back in time to enjoy the KOffice 1.5 release. I certainly did help a lot making KWord the best it can be; but I only really spent half the time available on it. And people tend to agree its a LOT better than the 1.4 one. So; here is to hoping I can spent a lot of time on KOffice 2.0!