Akademy, the big yearly KDE conference, is only three and a half weeks away. Novell sponsors at Gold level this year and will by last count be represented by 8 people (me, Dirk Müller, Will Stephenson, Lubos Lunak, Vincent Untz, Danny Kukawka, Klaas Freitag and Cornelius Schumacher) and involved in three talks during the conference part. I am looking forward to show/distribute openSUSE 11.0 to everyone and spread how lot of fun it is to work on/for [open]SUSE ...

It has been a tough decision, because we had three awesome proposals, but after a period of getting feedback from the community and some conversations between the boards of the KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foudation we have settled on the Gran Canaria bid for holding Akademy and GUADEC as co-hosted event in 2009.

This event will be something new and it will be big in many ways. If you read about this year's GUADEC which is happening in Istanbul right now and see the anticipation of Akademy in Belgium on Planet KDE you get a glimpse of what energy will come together at the co-hosted event next year. We have a chance to put the Free Desktop on a whole new level by exploring areas of collaboration between the two big free software desktops in yet unknown depth and showing the world that the free software ideals which unite us are more important than the competition which sometimes is between our projects.

I'm happy that we have a strong local organizing team behind the event, and I'm looking forward to work with them and the GNOME people to make Akademy 2009 an outstanding event for both our communities and everybody else who wants to take part in the future of the free desktop.

Like every year, so far, and as befits a patron of KDE, KDAB is covering the travel and lodging expenses of all KDABians who want to attend Akademy. Yeah, for Kalle . A few of the KDE folks in KDAB have chosen to stay behind, this year, and keep the customers happy, but most of us will be there. The current list includes myself, David Faure, Kevin Ottens, Laurent Montel, Andras Mantia, Volker Krause, Pradeepto Bhattacharya, Thomas Moenicke, Thomas McGuire, Andreas Hartmetz and Marc Mutz. We thought of renting a bus, collecting everyone in Berlin and then driving over, but the logistical aspects of that seemed dauting, for a bunch of geeks. So planes and trains it'll be. The talk schedule looks particularly interesting this year, but the best thing, as always, will be to catch up with old friends, make new ones and generally hang around the nicest, smartest, most enthusiastic and engaging group of people ever. Magically diverse, but filled with a common spirit and love, this community continues to fascinate and inspire me, as it does, I'm sure, all of my colleagues. See you soon, at Sint-Katelijne-Waver.

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!

Today I'm writing in my role as a member of the program committee for the Akademy 2008 Contributor's Conference. We have received a lot of great proposals for presentations and are still in the process of selecting and assembling a program. So speaker notification will be delayed by something like a week.

Regardless of the question, if you will present at the Akademy conference or not, I highly recommend to join Akademy. Register at the Akademy web site, book your travel, and go to Belgium in August. I can promise that we will have an exciting conference program and I'm pretty sure that Akademy as a whole will live up to the high standards of community gathering we are used to from previous Akademies.

Yesterday was a busy day on the akademy-talks mailing list. Proposals were rolling in constantly. This is because today is the deadline for submissions of presentations for Akademy 2008. So you still have a chance. Have a look at the Call for Presentations and submit your talk now.

There are so many interesting topics we would like to hear about at Akademy:

• You have ported your application to KDE 4? Tell about your experience.
• You run KDE on one of the fancy small devices, be it an Internet tablet, a phone or a tiny laptop? Show us how this works.
• You are working on one of the pillars of KDE 4? Tell us how to make use of them.
• You are working on a distribution which includes KDE? Present to us what made your life hard and what made it wonderful.
• You were a GSoC student last year and are still with the project? Let us know what you have done.
• You have written a cool Pasmoid or a rocking Akonadi agent? Submit your talk now. We are also accepting lightning talks, if you feel like five or ten minutes are enough to present your work.
• You are working in the community as a non-coder? Tell us about what else than writing code is important for KDE.
• You are using KDE in your business? Share your experience.
• You are working on a related Free Software project? Give us ideas how to collaborate.
• You are doing something completely different which is related to KDE? Submit your talk now.

I'm looking forward to another wave of exciting talk proposals. Keep it going.

So, Akademy 2008 will be in Belgium! Yay \o/ ! Some of you might have known this already if you'd have read the planet closely (troy leaked it already...), but still I'm terribly excited to be able to say it officially After all, I've been asking about Akademy (the yearly KDE Developer's Conference+Hacking/BoF sessions+eV General Assembly) coming to Belgium for like 4 years already... The location will be the De Nayer Institute in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, and the pictures I saw of the building we'll be in look pretty awesome.