It's been a while, but I'd just like to bring the following 2 upcoming events in to your attention:

• FOSDEM. As always, the yearly free/open source software is being organized in Brussels again. I think there's something interesting for most of you, so be sure to have a look at the schedule (even though it is not finalized yet) Of course, for all the KDE people among us: don't forget the KDE Group Picture! As for people wanting to know which talks I'll probably attend, I put a tentative list on my website.
• Vlaamse Programmeerwedstrijd (Flemish Programming Contest). This is a programming contest, open to almost everybody: senior high school students, 'hogeschool'/university students (bachelor, master and PhD), and other people that have graduated from one of those options. This year, it's being organized at Ghent University, which happens to be where I'm working. That means I'm obviously attending it (using Haskell and/or C++). So if you ever wanted to make fun of me or humiliate me (and my teammate, of course) in a kinda-official setting: this is your chance

I'm not at Camp KDE, but instead at LCA 2010 (in Wellington, NZ).

Andrew Tridgell, Andrew Bartlett, Jelmer Vernooij and I will be running "birds of a feather" (BoF) sessions during the last part of the conference (Friday 22 January 2010 starting at 1430 in the "Civic 3" room, which is over in the Town Hall building).

At the last minute I'm getting away from the snow and ice to visit Camp KDE in San Diego this weekend. I'll be there waving the openSUSE flag, giving a talk about using the Build Service to package and distribute your KDE applications for many Linux distributions, generally enthusing people about openSUSE and thinking about ways for KDE to be better as distributed. So if you see a guy with an SUSE t-shirt on staggering under a huge pile of DVDs, say hi! I hear San Diego has a very good zoo, perhaps they'll lend me a chameleon for even better recognisability...

It's that the year again when KDE PIM developers attend the annual meeting in Osnabrück, traditionally hosted by Intevation, one of the companies which continously excels in acquiring funding for KDE related development.

Tom already blogged about it and there will be a Dot article as usual.

Unlike other developer meetings such as the Akonadi sprints, the Osnabrück meeting doesn't involve a lot of hacking, for some of use no hacking at all.
It has more a strategic character, i.e. where we evaluate where we stand and what we want to achieve over the next year(s).

There are a lot of awesome developments in KDE PIM space about to unfold in the coming year, proving the value of Free Software for tasks which involve personal data, secure communication, privacy, etc. and that this does not necessarily come at the expense of stability, professionality, or even "bling".

Speaking of bling: PIM is usually not something anyone would associate with bling, especially since the underlying technologies and standards are sometimes hard to understand, old, broken but necessary for compatibility, etc.

However, through the introduction of Akonadi, we now remove these obstacles from the application level, opening it for developers who are more interested in doing new and cool alternative user interfaces.

We will keep working on the traditional applications because there are a lot of user who prefer those, but this shouldn't stop e.g. developers with a Plasma background to do a fully Plasma based PIM experience.
If this sounds like something you want to try, we certainly can and will help you with low level parts such as data engines or services.

This weekend we, the KDE PIM developers, met again in Osnabrück to develop and discuss the future of kmail, korganizer, kjots, akonadi and other software for Personal Information Management.

There you can find all meeting minutes, time tables and results, here I want to outline what was most important to me.

Given the pile of awesome that was Camp KDE 2009 in Negril, Jamaica, how could I not attend this year as well? I'll be presenting and doing some Qt training sessions again, like last year, on whatever topic the audience wants. There'll be sun, there'll be hackery, there'll be merriment. You must not miss this, so make sure to sign up now and meet us in Sand Diego in January.

This Sunday, I gave a presentation at UbuCon 2009, the German Ubuntu Developers and Users conference, held at the wonderful historic town of Göttingen, in northern Germany. The conference covers a variety of distribution development topics, with about 250 participants, and a 5-track presentation schedule (!). The talk I submitted was about a topic that fascinates me a lot lately - the convergence of Free Software desktop technologies under the hood, which makes Qt developers get in touch with GTK based technologies more and more, and vice versa, and about our experience at KDAB with developing such technologies. It was called "Qt for GTK Developers", purposefully slightly on the provocative side, with a smirk. After all, I am used to working in areas with unusual risk conditions, so why the heck not? Also, this comes not even close to the stress levels created by parenting. The talk was about how Qt and GTK are both used for developing base desktop services, which toolkit dominates in what areas, and what our guesses are on what the future brings. The central part was an overview of Qt technologies and practises, presented in contrast to GTK. The talk consisted of four sections dubbed "Everything was better in the old days", "Everyone does what he wants", "Qt is not what it used to be", and "This is as good as it gets". There were quite a few good laughs between the audience and me. Read on for more details.

Yesterday nokia gave away 300 pre-production n900 devices to all attendants of this years Maemo summit in Amsterdam (in the form of a six months loan, after that they'll have to go back to Nokia). I'm also attending, so I also got one. Deciding what the first thing to port to a new device is is always hard, but in the end I figured that something with plasma might be nice.

I'm just back in from the first day the openSUSE conference. The day started badly when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming that OpenOffice ate my presentation (again), but it was still there when I resumed my laptop and so I biked the 5km into the Berufsförderungswerk Nuernberg, the technical college where the conference is a guest. A good number of people were in for Lenz Grimmer's keynote on virtual development teamwork, which was a relief, then I sat in for a bit of the openSUSE Weekly News talk by Sascha Manns. Running a news magazine is an important and demanding part of a project's internal and external communications and I'm grateful that Sascha and team put in the effort, and hope they get more contributors. Then I earwigged at the back of the GNOME team meeting, while Andy Wafaa demoed me the SUSE Goblin image. It's impressively polished and will give the Plasma netbook interface a tough act to follow.

Over lunch I mingled with openSUSE users and developers old and new, and a good number of KDE people including Frank, Alexandra, Danimo and Frederik who had made the journey to Nuernberg. We had a cross-desktop meeting afterwards to figure out how to improve the general openSUSE desktop experience. Following the recent decision to set a desktop choice in openSUSE, I feared there might be some tension, but it was all very amicable and constructive. I had to leave early to give my talk, 'The Future of openSUSE KDE', moved forward from the weekend. OpenOffice behaved, nothing crashed, and I gave my manifesto for producing the best desktop distribution with exemplary cooperation with upstream projects. And interspersed it with previews from openSUSE 11.2, so nobody fell asleep. KNetworkManager4 drew the most questions, and even managed to detect Danimo's phone on hotplug, something I'd never tested.

Finally we had a BoF session led by Cornelius to plan a KDE Showcase image for use at shows and by reviewers, which has a lot of potential, if also to be a lot of work.

Tonight we're unwinding at Joe's Bar, a refactoring of the Novell/SUSE office as a den of iniquity, hosted by our Community Manager, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier. Don't speak too loudly to me in the morning...

Two days of KDE Wiki Meeting are over. Danimo, Frank, Lydia, Dominik, Milian, Thorsten and me met in Berlin with the goal to get some more structure into the KDE Wikis and provide a plan for the future, where to put content. I'm happy to say that we accomplished this mission.

While we have TechBase for high quality technical documentation for a while, and the corresponding UserBase for end-user information since last year's Akademy, we were still missing a proper place for community content, especially for content which is mostly community internal, of more transient
nature, or just not finished yet. The idea to create a dedicated Wiki for this community content was floating around since a while, and now we created it at community.kde.org.

To make it clear which content belongs where, we created a mission statement, which gives clear guidance about which Wiki serves which purpose. You'll find it at wiki.kde.org in a few days. The basic idea is that userbase.kde.org provides end-user information, techbase.kde.org contains high-quality technical content for third party developers, distributors, and system administrators, while community.kde.org acts as a collaboration space for the community.

Actually community.kde.org already existed. It contained the charter of the community working group. But to keep things short and to the point we decided against creating another base, but go with the logical and short community.kde.org domain. The charter of the CWG will find a new home on the KDE e.V. web site.

With the creation of community.kde.org we can also shut down at least two places where community content ended up due to lack of a proper home. We'll shut down the old Wiki, which was available under wiki.kde.org, but whose content wasn't that well maintained, and which didn't fit too well in KDE's infrastructure because of technical reasons. We'll also move all the pages which piled up under the Projects directory on techbase, but in almost all cases didn't really belong there and also didn't match the quality requirements of being polished content targeted at technical people who aren't necessarily familiar with the community. Most of these pages find a proper home on community.kde.org, though.

In addition to the general cleanup and structuring we also worked on some improvements of the existing Mediawiki installation. Danimo replaced the OpenID login UI by a much more usable version, Milian finally managed to get rid of the annoying horizontal scrollbars inside the page on code samples, and we also discussed some more improvements, like the intensified use of templates and the introduction of a way to rate and classify documents on the Wiki to indicate their quality and make it more obvious what needs more work.

As a side track, we had an interesting discussion with some Tiki developers. They have an amazingly powerful and feature rich system, which would
be able to solve some of the problems, we still have with our Wikis, such as translation infrastructure. For now we decided for the sake of consistency and simplicity to stay with the current Mediawiki installation, but maybe Tiki is an option in the future.

Working on the Wikis was fun and satisfying because we got some concrete results, which will simplify maintaining KDE web content in the future. But besides all the work we also didn't forget to relax with a great dinner at a Chinese restaurant at Berlin-Adlershof, enjoying a great buffet, including cheese cake for dessert.

Thanks go to the KDE e.V. and Qt Software for supporting the meeting.