Franz Keferböck

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).

Before actually getting to where i wanted, hi and hugs to the planetKDE readers! I’ve been around in mailinglists and with work for a while now, but i never managed to introduce myself on the planet – not even blog at all! Well, here i am, in Dresden right now taking the chance of a break to report…

The fair is pretty small – but quite nice and is doing some good for free software here, there’s a lot of potential users, mostly young students and elderly people who on the one hand happen to show up at the “wrong” booth asking the “wrong” questions (but how should they know the differences between KDE, Kubuntu and Linux – i’m not complaining here), on the other hand really show interest and want to be informed (rather than just taking CDs). Giving insight on this layered ecosystem of choice is actually a lot of fun! The questions it whether we come up to their expectations (system wise as well as presentation wise).

And you know what? We do! Jos is doing a fantastic job in showing all the cool mini-features that make KDE so pretty (even to us…), and Tobias Pfeiffer and me are given little time to relax either. I gave a Plasma workshop this morning, introducing plasma applet development with ECMA Script (the outcome of an improved script-applet and the scripts used will be made available soon), Jos was presenting a visual guide to KDE4 and Tobias König did a more advanced introduction to it. KDE is very strong and getting stronger with people getting their hands on a current KDE4 build.

OK, now that i’ve finished writing (using several of these “breaks” mentioned above) it’s almost 6pm. Pictures will follow soon, promise

Some while ago Sebas was posting a picture of a classy, cool car on his blog. It was classy and cool mainly for three reasons:

• it’s my car
• there was 20 bottles of the world-famous and brilliant austrian beers in there (details)
• there was those coooooooooool KDE Logo stickers on each door

Now i brought a stack of close to 40 of those stickers here to aKademy, where they where gone within seconds (hm, it was explicitly told to use these on CARS, as this is some special sticker foil to _stay_ on the car and thus really expensive. And i don’t think some people is gonna expose their laptop to some carwash or go 200KM/h on some german motorway exposing the lid to the wind…whatever ).
I was told that there was more people interested than i brought stickers, so herewith i will offer to produce them on request. I could also put a description on here on how to make them, but you do need a special needle-plotter and the foil. In case you still want to know though, tell me and i’ll publish the procedure…

I can do them at a friends fathers office, they’re producing this stuff there in small amounts. It’s quite timeconsuming manual work (those 38 stickers took us more than four hours!) and the material is quite expensive (for two Logos and twice the URL-text it’s something like 12€+), so i cannot give any more out for free (these i got for a few beers i pay that friend of mine – greetz Sengsti!, and we used rests of foil – which is now all gone). Now to get these two things covered for the next ones, i will have to ask you for 15€+shipping costs per Set (2x logo, 2x text). Further, this is some private thing i do, so please be patient, i won’t do every sticker quick snap as i can only use the equipment when it’s not used for actual customers…

Drop me an email in case you want some – pictures of these to come soon (for those who don’t have seen the now-lost picture on sebas’ blog…)

Guess that’s pretty much it, i’m hungry and tired, will change the hacking room for a pub soon (given somebody’s willing to join me…)

Wow, there’s been four days of aKademy now, and there has been so much exciting happening to me… first off, i’m on PlanetKDE (so hi there!). Second, i was accepted as a member of KDE e.V. – thank you very much, it means a lot to me! Thanks especially to Sebas and Adriaan for supporting me with actually showing me how valuable promotional and marketing work is – so for KDE. And that’s just about what i intend to push further, i guess i can do it, it’s good fun, and there’s so much i get back (now that’s cheesy, but yes, the feeling to be active part of the community).

Then there’s one thing i’d like to do – and i’ll start with this post: Aaron was complaining once, that people is well posting about their technical process they’re having, but it’s only him giving those nice insights into his reallife. Well, i’m not a celebrity (well, yes, that term was actually used by some guy in a pub, telling his girlfriend who we where – greetz in case you read this) and generally doing so would just so bore you. But there are quite a lot KDE related incidents, that i guess are worth being told…

So yesterday – after the official evening programme – a whole cluster of KDE people moved over to a pub cross St. George’s Square. Been there before, cheap, nice. When an older guy (hi, Leo!) next to the table we decided to occupy came to ask if us was some international students, having some student’s night in there (not sure if he was kinda scared of this idea…). Telling him that we were not, i happened to end up in a longer conversation with him (i’m talkin’ ’bout hours). Thing is, i really stayed with answering his questions, not distracting him with technical detail, kept things simple. And he was oh soooo interested, kept on asking, and really got hooked up by the ideas of open source – and KDE. I managed to get him a LiveCD (thanks, Jos) and explained the problems of proprietary formats, the problems governments impose on citizens by (implicitly) forcing certain software on people – sometime not even realizing so!
OK, now usually even people who’s sitting alone in a pub will turn a conversation on computer science down (well i would, if it wasn’t in my explicit interest), so either he was _really_ brave, or just plain interested. Still it was really cool!