A scratchpad full of useful information, rants and old scriblings
Today I started to process the results of the N7Y Keysigning party.
Before, i did a gpg –refresh-keys which ended in the following result:
gpg: Total number processed: 830 gpg: skipped new keys: 1 gpg: unchanged: 537 gpg: new user IDs: 29 gpg: new subkeys: 1 gpg: new signatures: 20095
Today I made an excursion to Styria, I visited Schloss Kapfenstein a Castle near the slovenian border, Bad Gleichenberg a health resort and an original styrian “Buschenschank”. Unfortunately it was already evening when I drove around the Riegersburg, which looks very impressing.
Yesterday I visited the local Virgin and bought some new CDs. My recommendation
is Quixotic from Martina Topley-Bird.
Martina was the female voice on Tricky’s “Maxinquaye” album. Quixotic is more mainstream but nearly as good as Maxinquaye. My favorite songs are “Anything” and “Too Tough To Die”.
I spent my holidays last week on Baltrum, a small island in the North Sea. It belongs to the East Frisian islands. Reaching it by train is a long journey, since the trains in East Frisia are slow and stopping at every milk can. From Norden you have to take the bus to Nessmersiel were you enter the ferry.
Weather was beautiful, the Beach broad, and the North Sea surf was inviting. Maybe I will make some photos available later.
You can eat excellent fish everywhere, but unfortunately most restaurants are closing at 21.00, so it is not easy to get something to eat at night. I can recommend Café Kluntje.
Finally I am back in Vienna. A detailed summary about my holidays will follow
later. Of course my Mail Partition overflowed, most of the 2000 Emails were bounces from the latest MS-Worms.
I am sitting on packed bags. I will leave this evening to the north sea which means probably no blog entries for the next week.
Here is the promised summary of the last days at Nove Hrady.
On Sunday morning there were two interesting talks about the KDE Build system by coolo (unsermake) and David Faure. After lunch i listened to a talk about KCachegrind. Looks really colorful and mighty. Unfortunately it relies on valgrind, so it will not be available on FreeBSD. After that there was a talk about KDE’s internal organization by Andreas Brandt which resulted in an interesting discussion with various people. The day finished with a talk by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer about the History of KDE.
On Monday I only attended the Keysigning and had to travel home after that. I took the train with Chris Lee and Andreas Brandt to Linz.
Unfortunately i lost my Notebooks Powersupply somewhere in N7y. I hope someone finds it, but I already tried to get a replacement, since I am leaving for holidays next week. Medion has them still available at a more or less reasonable price, but they refuse to send them to Austria :-(.
Ian Geiser showed me today some funny applet, he programmed a doomloadmonitor. The standard face from doom is modified like in the game in relation to the system load. Unfortunately the Icons are copyrighted by ID software. He asked me if it compiles on BSD. I made it compile with much help from Stefan but unfortunately it won’t run on my KDE HEAD.
I also configured my desktop to use the new transparent Kicker feature. It looks really nifty, but it is not yet perfect. The clock background isn’t adapted and some other items aren’t adapted right.
Of course I also went to a lot of talks, but I am too tired to write something about this now. Perhaps tomorrow.
Don’t worry, I am still alive, since I finally found something to eat. So I am here to keep you informed about the second day at Nove Hrady. Yesterday, after I found something to eat I kept on hacking in the Hackcenter, which was quite crowded, although the Organisators planned not to open it before Monday.
After a short night Saturday started with a breakfast at the monastery.
Then the conference was officially opened and various talks started. See the Conference program.
After the opening I attended Harald Fernengel talk about KDevelop/Gideon. It was quite impressive, perhaps I should try to compile it from CVS. Although I normally don’t like IDEs.
Later I attended the talks from Marc Mutz about Design Patterns and Gunnar Schmidts talk about KDE and Accessibility.
After the Lunchbreak at the monastery Holger Schroeder demonstrated KDE on Cygwin. The Highlight of the Afternoon was David Faures talk about KTrader.
After the coffeebreak there was a talk about Usability and the last one was Talk about TaskJuggler a project management program from Chris Schlaeger. Although Chris claimed that “every good distribution ships a TaskJuggler package” there is no FreeBSD port. I should change that when I am at home again.
I did not attend the overcrowded talk of Havoc Pennigton about Freedesktop.org and people told me that I did not missed much.
The evening started with a 2 hours talk from Matthias Ettrich about new features in QT4 and ended with the social event, a Barbecue in the garden of the Kastle.
A strange local band played czech Dixieland music but later they luckily switched to Ballads. Everybody had a nice time drinking, eating & socializing.
The local Organizationteam is very hospitable and are very proud that so many international guests are visiting their institute.
Now i finally found the way back to the Hackcenter getting my Weblog up2date 🙂
I arrived at NoveHrady. On the train I met Jowenn and Lucijan Busch.
At the Station, Rudi Ettrich awaited us and drove us to the Kastle.
There is a very nice banner across the entrance telling everyone that the KDE
Developers Conference is there.
The Kastle is quite old and a real maze. I needed quite some time to find my room, the toilet, the Hackcenter, the Conference room everything. What I still haven’t found is something to eat….