Franz Keferböck

…which actually happen to be right today, and it’s day two already…

I sort of missed that blogs today happen to be something like the main channel of public communications, else i’d done that earlier, but here we go: Today i’ll give two talks at the Austrian LinuxWochen in Linz (at the danube that is, not the one in Germany, one on KDE 4 and one specific on KDE EDU apps and KDE in schools!

So if you are still in school, if you are teacher or parent, and want to see what is coming up on the educational side of KDE life, or if you want to show how off to your friends how sexy KDE 4.devel and how helpful KDE EDU apps are, come and join me today at 4pm for the first talk on KDE 4 or at 5pm for the KDE EDU one!

Hoping to see you there, let’s rocK the Kunst University!

or: How to not instruct a delegate

Plasma Sprint, Milano, Italy; it’s Saturday now, the main plasma crowd has already been working for a day, i just arrived yesterday in the late evening after having had a nice day in Bologna.

First thing for me to do in the morning was to drop a box of beers at our hackplace (remember, that ain’t bad: put beer and KDE work in front of KDE people, and they’ll first do the coding, then enjoy the beer - not a bottle is missing yet!), so i pulled up in front of Ruphy’s house with my VW Kolf, where Aaron and Kevin were already eagerly expecting me and my delivery. And as nice as we all know Aaron is, he offered to lend a hand, meaning he instructed a delegate - Kevin - to bring in the beer, overseeing a major bug: beer won’t get any chilled when you put the box next to the fridge (that bug is resolved by now).

After lunch, Nuno and i where addressed by famous p. to fight a scary monster waiting in front of Ruphy’s house. We then figured it ain’t that scary and enjoyed a cup of tea and cookies with it, arranging to meet up later for the social.

So, dear reader, if you is confused now and questioning the productivity of the sprint, wrong you are: I only had some small fizzy red wine (yet more to confuse people) and the general noise-level is mostly composed by keyboard-hacking-sounds and people discussing on whiteboard and at tables.

Just a short note, as i’m kinda busy atm, but as mentioned earlier we welcome any help at KDE events, next to come being CeBIT in Hannover. There’s a WIKI page for you to make helping even easier

Been a while (again) i’ve been seen here, obviousely i’m leading a rather boring life where most things that happen to me are either uninteresting - or … hm … probably just not of “public interest”. Funny enough, now that i look at these few entries in the past i’d mostly blogged cause i needed something. Guess what: same now… but for some reason this has yet always worked way better than asking in mailing lists where people’d already done the step of registering…

The next couple of months are packed with events around Free and Open Source Software, each important for us to be there and show off the latest and greatest (and hell, we do have something to show off!) to the people visiting. Booth work is very important for the project - and it’s great fun too! And most important: YOU can do it! Yes, YOU, reading the KDE planet (reading just my blog being an obviousely bored geek might even over-qualify you…) on a regular basis, following KDE development, maybe fiddling with packages of pre-release KDE versions or even compiling trunk every now and then. YOU who you are using this great software for a while now, YOU who you always wanted to do something for KDE, or meet the makers.Contributing to KDE is more than writing code; We’ve seen the importance of the Oxygen team for the KDE 4 release cycle, we never credit the translators enough for their important work. Usability experts (and hell, they are!) help making the KDE experience slick and neat and easy to use. And not the least there’s all those people giving their time to the project and present it at Fairs and Shows, may this be at the booth or by giving talks.

Now what I got back through that? Recognition by people I admire, now friends of mine! Fun at and after the shows, at parties or relaxed evenings in a Cocktail bar. The chance to give back to KDE (and in fact getting even more out of it, it’s not for others or even to “show off”, it’s for myself that i am proud to be here).

Now’s the time to jump the boat and help contributing to your favourite FOSS project. There is several events coming up that will need your help:

• CeBIT / Hannover (March 4th - 9th) - Heck, that’s soon! We need people especially during the week days, but also for the weekend more staff is well appreciated.
• Grazer Linuxtage (April 19th) - This is part of the Austrian Linuxwochen, where i am just about to figure more details, but the folks from Graz asked us to have a booth and a talk on KDE, which i am happy to do. Yet some people for a booth is missing, another chance for you (show me that there’s a healthy Austrian community!)
• LinuxTag / Berlin (May 28th - 31st) - Yet far off we can’t start on that too soon. It’s great fun - and hey, you’re in Berlin Baby, you’ll have a hard time choosing what to do as there’s so much the city offers!

Hope to see plenty response, you won’t regret, believe me! Send your eMails to kde-events@kde.org

OK, blame on me, it’s been way too long till i finally managed to have (almost) all videos of the KDE 4.0 Release Event in our free and beloved Ogg/Theora format up and online on my server, mostly due to bandwith problems - and the fact that i need to work to earn my living, which hasn’t been too much during my time in CA in January…Anyways, click here to get to the - hopefully working - Ogg/Theora files, there’s one last one that don’t quite want to go out through my network (even on another server, but i can hopefully fix that soon).K, back to work - the Austrian Chancellor and some other folks including Chris Norman is to be put into good light tonight … whatever

When the coming days will be just to some extent as successful as today, we really hit it. There’s already been way more people than expected, a whole lot of locals (as in local to the US in fact) proved the world wrong when it says that the KDE community in the US is virtually dead: it’s as vital and energetic as it might have never been before!

Tomorrow will be the day of talks, presentations and - of course - partying. I can only advise everyone close to one of the organised release parties worldwide to go there! Despite having the chance to exchange yourself with people just as cool as you (c) (that must be a KDE thing i guess), there’s a little surprise for you - given that bandwith and processing speed will work it out:

We promised to have Aaron’s keynote upped to YouTube right after the it’s finished, however these parties will exclusively show Aaron’s keynote live from here, Mountain View, CA! Unfortunately exclusively, as we cannot come up with the bandwith for an uncertain amount of clients. Yet fortunately, as you’ll have one more reason to go to one of these parties…

Let’s hope for the best that bandwith will work fair for these few clients we intend to serve (i cannot quite test here from within my hotel room, as the WiFi connection is just too slow to even allow YouTube download only - not speaking of simultaneous up- and download of a higher-quality video…).

So, final scripting needs some work, ToDo for tomorrow is done, setup sketch is drawn… now time for me to catch up with sleep, to be able to help Aaron to make this keynote Rock!

An exciting day came to its end. After preparation work at Google to sort the final bits, tomorrow’s day 1 for KDE’s first conference of that size outside Europe. Lot’s of people came in today, reminding me why i not just like what i do here, no i love it: it’s the laughing with friends, talking tech - and non-tech - stuff, … there’s certainly some concentration of power (manpower, social power, brain power, whatever) that gives the hotel and the Google venue tomorrow a special mojo (see, i knew when i wrote the first draft for the event website!)

Another indicator for the get-together of KDE’s “Don”s: no emails fill up my mailbox anymore; all people writing those are either on planes or already on site and can speak in person!

Yet there’s a lot to be done tomorrow, so - schläfrig as i am - i really need to hit the bed now.

Been a while me blogging, but as for facing the very last days before the KDE 4.0 Release Event and me already on site in California i think it well makes sense to give some more input on that - and correct some people’s inferior view on Austrian’s knowledge on beer…

For one, most people know by now that the actual address of the event has changed to 1400 Crittenden Lane, Mountain View, CA 94043 - Wade already blogged about it and we’d sent emails out to ensure people show up at the right place.

Unfortunately also the Schedule for the 18th had to be changed a bit, i’m afraid Chris DiBano couldn’t quite make it on time, but mighty “Ade” Adriaan De Groot stepped up to give an introduction to Aaron’s keynote, and Sebastian Kügler took over Wade Olson’s talk on the Marketing Working Group - thanks!

While writing the Caterer for the social on Thursday evening stopped by to check details with me and Wade, and BOY this guy was well prepared - wish i had this in my job back in Austria that way… Folks, look forward to some really great evening with plenty of food - including a variety of vegetarian choices - and alcoholic as well as non-alcoholic drinks.

Now /me in the US: i was rather scared of the immigration process, which turned out to be less intimidating that some of my flights to the UK. This being my first time in the US, i have to admit i did not think that things would be that different here - and i actually like it! I try to put all my pictures here for my friends at home - and whoever else might be interested…

Finally: Beer. Big issue for an Austrian (you know, They Think They Know Beer®). I was warned by pretty much everybody i’d spoken to - Europeans as well as Americans - not to have any of the mass produced US beers for obvious reasons, however as my travel policy usually is “live as local as possible” i was kinda forced to do so. So i got myself a canny of “Bush” last night to prove all them people right (the picture on Wade’s blog is actually right after just smelling it, i haven’t even had a sip of it then!). So to make sure that we Austrians don’t just think we know beer, but we actually do, convince yourself by getting a Stiegl at BevMo (oh, and get the “Goldbräu”).

Oh, and there’s more reason for this title other than it a great song by Kate Nash (you guessed that i’m sure), but also that’s what i needed after my Bush-experience: some German beer (i couldn’t get Austrian on at Safeways) to get rid of the odd taste in my mouth…

Right, so now back to work and let’s streamline that last bits and pieces of our Release Event, yay!

The KDE project was recently invited to come and present itself at the OpenExpo 2008 Bern, Switzerland, which i am happy to take up and organise. However, though the event will not be until 12th/13th of March, the Call for Papers ends already this Friday, Nov. 30th!

Busy with University and the KDE 4 Release Event MV, CA i completely missed that it’s already Tuesday, so my personal “punishment” will of course be to do a presentation on the KDE community and structure (i guess, not completely decided on the topic yet…), and Mario Fux, also part of the OpenExpo organisation team, offered a talk as well. However, more input and possible talks very welcome, besides, we also need people to man our KDE booth (i’d seen Alexandra Leisse raising her hand already…)!

So if you are in Switzerland, southern Germany, south west of France, north western Italy, Liechtenstein or western Austria, and you are willing to meet people and get involved with the project (short: fun!) - or you know all the people already and are in the project and want to give a talk (short: also fun…) - then let me know (via the kde-promo list or the soon to be announced wiki page…)!So, and finally one paragraph not to end with an ! . But it’s so exciting!

update: the already mentioned wiki page can be found here.

update: there seems to be utter interest in KOffice 2 - which i think is cool! Anybody nearby who can serve this topic properly ?

Thanks Aaron for indirectly reminding me of this hilariously funny parody on our “most favorite” office application! Who said we’d need KSpread to be stupid…?

update: as the very first comment complained this would be offensive, i want to make clear that this is not meant to offend Hip Hop - i also don’t consider it to be against MS Word. I actually do listen to some Hip Hop, and the wording used it an exaggeration of an actually used language of today’s Hip Hop culture. If one reads carefully, i indirectly refer to it as “being stupid” - so this was through and through just meant to make people smile… Oh, and referring to the image’s origin: It’s not made by my obviously, but is from a friend’s friend (as far as i know he did some arts school).