On Monday, I drove to Guelph to hang out with some friends and then take the VIA Train to Ottawa. We arrived around 5pm today.

About the only thing done that was productive today was order a Pizza and sync rawhide and pray wireless will work tomorrow morning.

I wish Other KDE people where here

[ Insert I'm Going to OLS! banner here ]

Pictures to come ...

I've been in Berlin since Thursday, where we're having a meeting and hacking session about language bindings and Kross scripting. I like Berlin - it's a bit like Amsterdam - plenty of hippies on bicyles although without the canals, the Dutch or the narrow buildings.

For the past few months we've been working on getting our bid to host GUADEC and Akademy in Gran Canaria for 2009.
Agustin has done an amazing job in pulling it all together, and Alberto has been relaying his enthusiasm about the idea of co-located conferences to the Gnome guys.

Yesterday I arrived (too early for my taste) in Karlsruhe, to present KDE at the Open Source Expo. The OpenExpo is a rather new fair, so it was not very full but there was an audience for the talks.
I gave a general KDE 4 introduction, with the help of Martin Gräßlin.
We started early since the talk before ours did not take place for some reason. That took away a little from my pre talk meditation time

I'm at II Guademy 2008, the Spanish conference combining aspects of GUADEC and Akademy this weekend. I arrived yesterday, had lunch with my Novell colleagues Rodrigo Moya and Vincent Untz, then got straight into our presentations, which are a combined call for more cooperation and communication between the two Free desktop environments communities, leading to more effective sharing of data and infrastructure.

I wasn't chased out of the place or pelted with fruit, but I think it will be a long road. In the long term it should bring benefits for both desktops in the face of expanding ambitions and growing maintenance requirements. At breakfast Aleix Pol, Richard Hughes and I had an interesting discussion over breakfast, echoing a thread on the XDG list, about the possibility of standardising KDE's KNotify and reworking GNOME's libnotify to use it, so there is some real interest in the idea outside the Novell desktop group.

I've been pimping the openSUSE build service to anyone who'll listen. It's a bit surprising, when you jump out of the openSUSE pond, how few people have heard of all the features like packaging for distributions besides openSUSE. More effort needed there...

Today I'm going to present Akonadi, the PIM data server. Last week we moved it out of KDE main modules and into kdesupport, divesting it of the last bits of KDE dependencies, so I'm able to sincerely present it as a desktop-independent way to store and access your PIM data, emails, contacts, calendars and everything else. So I better stop blogging and make sure it is ready to demo...

One last thing. Dinner last night was 'interesting'. I can't get into specifics, but a visit to the Los Bestias restaurant should be mandatory for inter-desktop geek conferences. They really shake things up.

Well, not yet.

I am currently at Graz airport, about to begin a journey to Austin, Texas, where I will be attending the Linux Collaboration Summit.
Special thanks go to the Linux Foundation for covering my travelling costs and KDE e.V. for the hotel, specifically Ian Monroe who took the burden of doing the hotel reservation.

Ah, right. Houston.
The summit takes place from Tuesday to Thursday, however I am not returning until Sunday. Interestingly any return flight earlier doubles the fair, so I basically have to stay two days longer
My plan is to a day trip to Houston and visit the Johnson Space Center there, though I have still to figure out how to get from Austin to Houston and back again.

Anyway, boarding will begin soon (hopefully).

Some people already think we do a damn fine job packaging KDE at openSUSE. But we're just a few guys and we'd do it even better with your help. Tonight at 1900UTC we're having our latest openSUSE-KDE IRC meeting in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode and we'd love to see you there. This is addressed to anyone who uses KDE on openSUSE and values the way KDE works there, whether you just booted a KDE 4 Live CD or if you can remember KDE 1.1 on SuSE 6.4 and have your name on half of kdelibs. In return we value your attention, so we can tell you what's coming up, your feedback, so we do it right, and your time - if you can help us plan features or organise squashing our bugs or tell us about the things we overlook because we are used to them, KDE gets better.

Together we make an even bigger difference to the Free Software desktop, and every single contribution you make creates hundreds or thousands of individual moments of satisfaction as others use KDE.

Yesterday I made an excursion to CeBIT. Despite some major names missing and three halls staying closed it's the world's largest IT fair - and my legs remind me today of my marathon. Many halls were rather boring, the ones where the World Cyber Games took place were in opposite rather crowded. Dunno why watching others playing computer games is popular. Or the spectators were all their girl-friends who had free entrance on World Women Day. AMD wins the biggest bag contest. And many exhibitors seem to want to win in the 'Germany's Next Top-Hostess' contest.

openSUSE and KDE were present at the Novell booth and in the rather disappointing sized Linux Park:

Martin blocked the hall corridor with his openSUSE talks at the Novell theater. The last picture shows Michl giving a talk (in German) about the openSUSE project in the Linux Park forum. It will be repeated today at 15:15 CET and streamed by Linux-Magazin (records will be available later).