GNOME on SWiK

Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen: Features out of Abstruseness

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:03:37 -0700

Twitter and Identi.ca in Deskbar

The deskbar Twitter module I blogged about earlier is in deskbar trunk now. Since it was brought to my attention that Identi.ca exposes as Twitter API as well I jumped to the task of extending the Twitter module to cope with both Twitter and Identi.ca. Needles to say the fact that identi.ca is based on open source software was pretty much the motivating factor to do this.

There are some new handy utility classes added to deskbar as well. Mainly used to do async http requests with authentication via Gnome keyring. Look at the new twitter.py for a usage example. I am going to document it properly in the deskbar module hacking document soonish.

Abstruse Goose (Web comic excellence)

I am most flabbergasted that nobody ever brought the excellent web comic Abstruse Goose to my attention before today. It was described to me as “XKCD quality, but a tad nerdier”. Knowing the quality of XKCD I was a bit skeptic, but gave it a go. Man, was I positively surprised. Turned out the description matched pretty good.

Christopher Blizzard: ogg encoder improvements

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:03:56 -0700

Since we’ve announced ogg support for the next version of Firefox I thought it might be worth it to point out that there has been a lot of recent work to improve the state of the OGG video encoder. We’re only including a decoder, which just displays the video stream that is handed to it. Real improvements in the quality of video often happen in the encoder, which is what this post is about.

Monty (don’t call him Chris) has put up a post explaining some of the work that he’s been doing with samples of much-improved ogg video. Note that these samples actually played very poorly in the Quicktime plugin that I have for ogg on my mac but worked great on my Linux box. Figures.

Chris has been calling his work “Thusnelda” because he clearly likes words that are hard to pronounce. Either that or all the good names are now taken, I’m not sure.

Anyway, If you really want to see the difference between them you only need to watch the first 10 seconds of each video. Note the pixelization in the back of the silver chair as it moves across the screen in the old video. Then watch it in the new video. The difference is really something you can see. I’ve uploaded pictures here. I suggest that you click through to both of the below images in different tabs and flip between them. (The links will open in new windows/tabs.) The difference is pretty amazing.

Old and Busted.

New Hotness!

Ruben Vermeersch: Gegl# bindings updated

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:03:38 -0700

After finding out that the Gegl C# bindings were completely broken, I took the time to update them. In the process, I've also replaced the build system to make sure they are installable.

In short: Gegl# is now usable, start hacking!

Federico Mena-Quintero: Fri 2008/Aug/08

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:03:38 -0700

Two-stone handicap for me on a 9x9 go board, and the birthdayful HPJ still manages to kick my ass by twenty-something points.

They must have put something in the cake, as I had two big slices while HPJ had a single tiny one.

Robert Love: Hummers, Cristal, and Cambodian Children: Hello, Nouveau Riche!

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:03:41 -0700

Hat tip to loyal reader for making me a billionaire:

Expires six months after issue

Somewhat unrelated, Amazon is running a special this month wherein you can try Amazon Prime Free for One Month—in other words, get a month of gratis two-day shipping. US only, unfortunately.

Benoît Dejean: Cybermanifestation

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:03:36 -0700

Si ça vous intéresse, venez cybermanifester avec RSF devant le stade olympique de Pékin.
Sur la forme, il n'y actuellement que 9000 manifestants, ça n'a peut-être pas de poids aujourd'hui, mais ça pourrait devenir un mode d'expression efficace...

Pedro Villavicencio Garrido: A la vuelta de la esquina!

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:03:36 -0700

That’s right! the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam is just around the corner and the Chilean Team is going to participate on it too and if you want to join us please fill your name on the list of the event page, we’ll be posting more information about it at the same page, so you already know it the bug hunting season is open… be ready to squash them now!

Rodrigo Moya: Olympics’ hopes

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 05:03:54 -0700

With the Olympic Games about to start, here’s what I hope to see:

While I fully support the protests for a Free Tibet (and against the Chinese regime), Beijing was chosen 6 years ago, and if people did want to boycott the Olympic Games in China, it would have been wiser to do it so 6 years ago. Of course, I’m not saying all protests should stop, it is nice to have the dictatorial regime get nervous by all the international media’s attention to protests, but I really hope nothing like this (skip to 4:30) happens again. That is, please protest as much as you want, but please pretty please, don’t ruin the years of preparation of the sportsmen and women that have dedicated a big part of their lifes to get here. Doing so would be like having someone remove all the GNOME (or any other free software project) subversion code, for instance, to protest against the Chinese regime. I’m sure we wouldn’t like that at all, even if we support the protests.
No dopping cases please.
I really hope to see a USA-Spain final in basketball, for a Los Angeles 84 revenge. Although it’s going to be hard, with Argentina, Russia and Greece being part also of the favorites for the medals.
In cycling, the Spanish team is one of the best in history for this kind of race (Freire, Samuel Sánchez and Valverde, accompanied by Contador and Sastre, the 2 last Tour de France winners), so, like every year in the World Championships, it seems it’s going to be a very nice race, specially since the Italians are very strong also (with Paolo Bettini). Also, mountain bike/BMX competitions are quite funny to watch on TV.
I hope to see as many (and as long as possible) Cuban women volleyball team games as possible. If you want to know why, just watch their games
Won’t miss any of the Athletics, Swimming and Gymnastics competitions.
After my experience in the river Sella, I’m willing to watch also some rowing/canoeing action.

Anyway, good luck to everyone, and please, try to not stay too much time in the sofa watching the games You can just do some exercises while you watch the sports or when going to the sofa to somewhere else and back, so as to feel the Olympic spirit also

David Trowbridge: Code Review

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:03:34 -0700

A lot of the initial responses we get about Review Board go something like this:

Review Board looks cool, but it's designed for pre-commit reviews. I don't like the idea of needing review before committing, for a number of reasons. Can my use case be supported?

The short answer to this question is "Yes, it's supported, but our UI isn't optimized for that case." In particular, it requires using the post-review command line tool to create the review request instead of having a nice web UI for selecting a revision to review, and it's almost completely undocumented.

While we're interested in generalizing Review Board into a tool which supports a variety of workflows, I'm not writing this today to explain how to make it work. I'm writing this to explain why all of you who think this are wrong.

Before I finish my attempts to offend everyone, some people should leave the room:

If you're working in an industry such as telecom or aerospace, and you have a very intensive code review process to ensure perfection, this probably doesn't apply. I appreciate your hard work ensuring that the airplane I'm flying in won't fall out of the sky, and that I can call 9-1-1 when needed.

Next, if you're not using version control, stand up, hang your head in shame, and go set up a server. SVN, Git, Mercurial, it doesn't really matter. Visual SourceSafe is maybe a bad choice, though. Seriously, version control is number-freaking-one on the famous Joel Test. Once you're up and running with that (get a bug tracker too, while you're at it) you can start thinking about code review.

Okay, now we're down to just those enlightened, version-control-using hackers (ahem, software engineers) working on the sort of normal software that we do. I promised to offend the rest of you. Here we go.

It's often kind of hard to define code review, since so many people do so many different things. It covers the spectrum from "occasionally glancing at a diff when a commit message sounds dubious" to those autopilot engineers I already told to leave. In the absence of any sort of authoritative definition, I'll go with Wikipedia's:

Code review is systematic examination (often as peer review) of computer source code intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers' skills.

Why should I care?

That's probably as good a definition as any, and I almost fell asleep before I finished reading it. Yawn. What the heck is this good for, anyways?

The big, super important reason anyone does code review is finding mistakes. We all make mistakes, sometimes. Even those superhuman hackers who seem to write 10x as much code as everyone else where every line looks perfect. It's really easy to stop really looking at code after having read through it a few times. Ever spent 10 minutes trying to get something to compile before noticing that you missed a semicolon? A child could look at that code and tell you what's wrong in seconds. It's not that you're dumb (well, maybe), it's probably that you stopped reading and started remembering.

I remember a paper I wrote in college. I think it was about medieval Japan. My mother offered to read through it for me, and I wasn't about to refuse some free editing, so I sent it to her. In one sentence, I had two "the"s. That's right. It said something like "In the the Heian court...". I must have read that paragraph twenty times before I sent it, and I had just stopped paying attention to what was on the page. I said that even superhuman hackers make mistakes, and that means even me.

Finding mistakes is pretty obviously a good thing, I think. After several decades of using software, people have pretty low expectations for quality. You wouldn't believe how often I tell people where I work and they start talking my ear off about how our software never crashes, and how it's such a different experience from, well, almost everything else they have to use. It turns out that writing software is really hard. Shocking, I know.

The next big reason for code review is training. Most large software projects have some underlying architecture and design principles which can take some time to learn. One example that immediately springs to mind is the way we use signals and slots in our UI code at VMware; this sort of asynchronous design can take a while for people to get the hang of, and providing suggestions during code review is a great way to get people up to speed in the context of doing real work.

Code review also helps us improve our truck factor. This is my term for "if you were to get hit by a truck tomorrow, how many people would understand the code you've written?" If it's been peer reviewed, that number will be at least one. Gas prices may be driving down SUV sales, but there's still a lot of trucks. Be careful out there on the roads, guys.

And last but not least, it's so we can learn from each other. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen something I didn't understand in someone's code and ended up learning a new trick. Everyone likes new tricks, right?

How to ruin everything

So, overall, code review seems like a pretty good thing. We can improve the quality of our software, train new employees/contributors, and learn stuff all at the same time. Now lets look at how people do it wrong.

The first extreme I've mentioned is where everyone gets together and pores over some code to find every problem with it. If you're doing this and your software doesn't have lives on the line, stop it. Perfect code is a nice ideal, but "sometimes it is not worth fixing a bug." There's no way that an entire codebase can be scrutinized in this detail and still live in the fast-paced world of software.

On the other extreme, the easiest way to do it wrong is just not to do it. Sure, you may get an extra few hours a week to surf pornography and make faces at the dude in the adjacent cubicle, but it's not gonna help the quality of your software.

So, assuming that you're somewhere in the middle, and you're doing code reviews without interrupting your developers' lives too much with hours of meetings, you've probably fallen into one of two camps: pre-commit and post-commit. There are some pros and cons for each, but to me, the choice is obvious. Here's why.

In a post-commit environment, a developer makes some change to the code and submits it to version control. At this point, usually in an automated fashion, that change is sent out to the other developers. This almost always takes one of three forms:

The commit message and a list of files is sent to a mailing list (lame).
The commit message and a diff is sent to a mailing list (slightly less lame).
The change is automatically made available to a tool like Review Board or Trac (okay, I guess)

At this point, those other developers can look at the code and see if there's anything they disagree with. The big, major, 600-pound hairy smelly gorilla of a problem with this is that /they don't/. For example, one of the people who checked out Review Board and asked about post-commit reviews wrote this:

Sure, some bugs can (and do) creep in because they are missed in larger commits where we don't read the entire email, but I'm not worried because QA should catch those...

It's exactly the larger commits that need the most review! Any developer writing a three line trivial bugfix patch can convince themselves fairly easily that it's not going to completely fuck shit up (that's a technical term). It's a bit harder when the patch is thousands of lines and implementing complex functionality.

Also note that unless you're working on a private branch (which is fairly rare), committing that big patch before review has a good chance of breaking stuff. Raise your hand if you've done an svn up (p4 sync, git pull, whatever) and the code you pulled down didn't build. Or crashed in a super obvious place as soon as you tried to run it. Everyone? Yeah.

The reason for this is because most people are amateurs, and those who aren't sometimes get sloppy. Shortly before I started working at VMware, they split the main perforce depot into three separate main branches. They couldn't componentize the code, so they decided to componentize the developers into branches based on the organization they worked on, in some meager hope of making it so people could actually get work done instead of spending all day hunting for a changeset that wasn't broken.

That's right, with the most amazing group of hackers I've ever had the pleasure of working with, they couldn't keep *main* building cleanly once there were more than a few hundred people working on the code. I've heard similar stories from many other engineering organizations that I deeply respect. If they can't do it, what makes you think that you can?

Realistically, you can't. Noone can. That's why we have to take steps to try to prevent it. Steps like branching. And, surprise surprise, code review. And tools. Because if the build is broken, it's not just you and your QA contacts whose time is wasted, it's every single engineer you've got.

Why would anyone want to do it wrong?

So why do people do this? I've seen two common reasons.

REASON NUMBER ONE! "Because that's how people are used to doing things." This is a powerful reason, and I won't deny that it's very hard to get people to change their ways. However powerful inertia is, it doesn't mean it's right. It took a lot of effort to get doctors to start washing their hands, but I'm pretty happy that it changed.

Number two, and this is the big stupid one. "Because we're a fast-paced development shop, and it would slow us down." I've heard this from several people. It's particularly hilarious to me, because they talk as if slowing down is a bad thing. How many MP3 players hit the market before the iPod? How many search engines came and went before Google? Being first to market is great, but being best to market is better.

And finally, a silver bullet

So how do we solve this big morass? Simple. Review code before it's committed. If you've got branching that doesn't hurt, commit to a branch and review it there, but before it affects anyone other than the original developers. Slow down, pay attention to what you and your teammates are doing, and you may find that you're not quite so good at what you were doing as you thought. And once you've realized that, it's hard not to want to take every possible step to improve.

Finally, before you comment, keep this in mind: I intentionally wrote this in a confrontational tone for my own amusement, and to encourage people to talk. I've been doing this software thing for a while, but I don't have anywhere near all the answers. Think I'm wrong about all of this? Let me know!

Vincent Untz: Leaving for Akademy

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:03:34 -0700

I saw many people using this image and then I saw this post. Heh.

I guess I'll have a good time with the KDE people there. Belgium, here I come!

Open Containing Folder in Firefox under Linux (or X Window, period)

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:14:38 -0700

Are you running Firefox in X-Window with multiple Desktop Environments? Here is an example of how to get Firefox to open a file with your file manager of choice.

Jeff Waugh: Fiscal Conservative vs. Tax & Spend Liberal

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 02:03:31 -0700

Hans Petter Jansson: Tick tock

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 01:03:28 -0700

As of yesterday, I have survived to 31 years of age. That is all for now.

Free open source project hosting - Gitorious

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:08:18 -0700

Mantendo A Sanidade Com O Glade - CInLUG

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:11:12 -0700

Bastien Nocera: Neologisms

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:03:30 -0700

Today, I saw Girnomous being used on TV. I felt dirty.

Eyecandy for your GNOME-Desktop - GNOME-Look.org

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:18:06 -0700

Jason Clinton: Breakin for hardware testing

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:04:28 -0700

My day job is in Beowulf clustering (I work for Advanced Clustering Technologies in Kansas City); it's pretty cool because it draws on every conceivable computer-related skill that one mights have: programming, scripting, architecture, data center design, Linux kernel hacking, user interfaces, message passing, compiler optimizations, BLAS, semi-high level math, hardware ... the list goes on and on. It's challenging enough without having hardware failures get in our way.

So, we developed an automated way to find and report hardware problems using a combination of the kernel's EDAC and MCE and lm_sensors, S.M.A.R.T., and hddtemp. It's a little initrd that boots up and puts the system under heavy, heavy load using a program called HPL (well-known in HPC) compiled against Intel and AMD-specific BLAS libraries. We've been using it internally for a few years but decided that others might benefit from it as well.

So, I set up a public git mirror here:

git clone http://git.advancedclustering.com/git/bootimage.git bootimage

And I put up some pre-compiled binaries and an explanation here: http://www.advancedclustering.com/software/breakin.html

If you have ECC memory, be sure to enable multi-bit checking in your BIOS.

Gabriel Burt: Banshee 1.2.1 Planned for Tuesday

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:04:28 -0700

We're planning a Banshee 1.2.1 release for next Tuesday, primarily to ship updated translations. We have quite a few languages with good coverage, but it could be a lot better. Translators, please make sure Banshee is available in your language!

Christian Schaller: cdparanoia now LGPL v2

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:03:19 -0700

Some time ago I blogged about cdparanoia switching from GPLv2 to LGPLv3 on our request. After that time we have been discussing in the GStreamer community about licensing and what is the exact and implicit licensing promise we are and have been making with GStreamer. The conclusion was that since the LGPLv3 is more restrictive than the LGPLv2 we do not want LGPLv3 dependencies in gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-base. As mentioned before we always tried to be very serious and coherent with our licensing in GStreamer and suddenly reducing the rights we offer application and plugin developers is not something we feel should be done without very good reason. This is a policy I hope also other important libraries decide to follow, personally I would think it would be a very sad thing if Glib and Gtk+ for instance started taking away rights from their users without a very well reasoned explanation.

Luckily Monty is a very kind soul, and starting from yesterday there is a new version of cdparanoia III out, 10.1, which is dual-licensed under the LGPLv2 and the GPLv2. So even in the future there will be cdripping support offered in GStreamer gst-plugins-base package.
So go to the cdparanoia download page and get yourself this minty fresh version of cdparanoia. We recommend distributions to update to this version as soon as possible to ensure there are no licensing conflicts in their distribution.

Federico Mena-Quintero: Thu 2008/Aug/07

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:03:33 -0700

How to use rpm2git

Here is a second screencast on rpm2git (Ogg Theora, 69 MB). This one tells you how to use rpm2git to take the patches from a SRPM and put them in a Git branch.
During GUADEC in Stuttgart and in Dublin, Evangelia Berdou was interviewing people about how they contribute in GNOME. She used this information for her dissertation, Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects. Over 100 people from the GNOME Foundation contributed to her study!

There is very valuable information in this work: how many core-platform hackers, core-desktop hackers, secondary-desktop hackers, translators, and peripheral contributors do we have? Which of them are employed to work only on GNOME, on GNOME and other free software, or are not paid for their contributions? How do people move from being peripheral contributors to core ones?

For people thinking about which sub-group of GNOME needs better tools (translators!) and support from GNOME at large, this is exactly what they need to read.

Christian Schaller: Twins

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:03:34 -0700

I was watching The Daily Show yesterday and Seth Rogen was on as the guest. For those who doesn’t know him, he is a comedian who has starred in movies such as Superbad, Knocked up, Pineapple Express and the upcoming Kevin Smith movie ‘Zack and Miri Make a Porno’. Anyway when listening to him it struck me that I had heard that exact voice and accent somewhere else recently. Then it struck me, vocally Seth Rogen and our own Luis Villa are identical twins. So if you are doing a podcast and Luis is not available for an interview take comfort in knowing you can hire Seth Rogen to do the interview instead and nobody will know the difference.

John Palmieri: Federico is awsome

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:03:24 -0700

For my Fedora friends who don’t read Planet GNOME (you should):

Federico’s screencast of rpm2git tool - we should be using this or something similar

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

Ken VanDine: Hot deals during Linux World

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:03:28 -0700

Celebrating Linux World Expo, Shuttle is offering a 10% off discount on all KPC systems that have Foresight Linux pre-installed. Please visit the Shuttle site and enter LINUXW2008 to participate in this promotion. This promotion is good through August 21st.

Andrew Cowie: What to do when dodging a hail of bullets

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:03:35 -0700

After watching my copy of the Bourne Ultimatum the other day, I started wondering how a newspaper like The Guardian feels about being portrayed in such a film. Via one of the footnotes in the Wikipedia entry, I found my way to an article on their website on this very topic:

Obviously, I would have preferred to see this Guardian journalist do a little more ass-kicking, or indeed any ass-kicking … Nevertheless, he gets to show a fair bit of courage under fire. He and Bourne are shadowed by a creepy CIA surveillance spook who has already given a chilling order to “prepare rendition protocols”. Huh! Bring it on! Guardian journalists aren’t scared of Guantánamo.

The best part was the insight into the newspaper’s style guide:

They wind up in Waterloo station where they have to dodge bullets from a CIA sniper, that of course is the sort of thing which happens to us all the time. But there are inaccuracies. The Guardian stylebook clearly states that if you are under a hail of bullets in a public place from an assassin run by a deniable intelligence unit, you have to duck into the nearest internet cafe and start blogging about it to keep the readers informed.

The BBC’s website, by contrast, advises readers not to risk themselves when submitting comments from dangerous places like the scene of a protest being violently suppressed by the faceless state police, or when an earthquake is destroying the building they are in, or when walking down the streets of London. How can we possibly defend democracy in the face of such reticence?

:)

AfC

Comments have been disabled so that readers do not endanger themselves replying to this blog post.

Stanislav Slusny: Memory requirements of “browsing-the-calendar” operation

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:03:36 -0700

These operations:

Opening Evolution
Browsing through the calendar (going back about 30 months)
Closing Evolution

generated more than 180 live queries:

Cache size

and caused that heap of EDS process grew by more 2,5 MB on my testing calendar:

Heap grew by more than 2.5 MB

Notes:

Going back by month in Evolution generated 5 live queries (for day, week, work week, month and list view)
One can notice, that not all queries were freed, when I closed Evolution. However, I verified, that only live queries generated by evolution-alarm-notify process were not freed. This process stays alive even when Evolution is closed.
The first increment of heap size (from 506K to 8180K) is caused by opening Evolution (opening calendar).
The next smaller increments of heap size are due to live queries.
The last decrement is caused by closing Evolution.

David Zeuthen: Resolution Independent GTK+

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:03:40 -0700

Got one of them big laptops where you feel tempted to use a looking glass because the pixels are so tiny? Ever feel cheated when you adjust the font size but the rest of the UI looks like crap in comparison? Or maybe ever felt dirty when hard coding pixel values in your application?

there’s also a tiny and a normal version…

Today I sent a patch to gtk-devel-list adding Resolution Independence to the GTK+ toolkit. Let’s see how that goes.

Matthew Garrett: 6 Aug 2008

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:03:45 -0700

Testing 2.6.27-rc2 with the current released (not development) BIOS on the Foxconn G33M reveals the following:

There are no ACPI errors on boot, other than the (irrelevant) OEMB table (there are in previous kernels, stuff's clearly been fixed in .26 or so. Can't really be bothered digging through to find out what)
The system fails to reboot if it has been suspended and resumed. The fix is three lines long, one of which is a comment and one of which is blank.
The system is otherwise perfectly stable.

Summary: Almost all problems caused by bugs in Linux, one problem caused by BIOS vendors interpreting the ACPI specification differently to the Linux implementation and trivially worked around. No sabotage.

Thanks very much to Carl at Foxconn for being able to get me information about what was causing the reboot issue - I spent significantly longer putting the system together than I did fixing it.

Federico Mena-Quintero: Wed 2008/Aug/06

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:03:45 -0700

Two things that made my day today.

First, Andrew Jorgensen packaged Meld for openSUSE 11.0, based on Pavol Rusnak's version, which makes git-mergetool awesome.

Two, Ivan Zlatev packaged git-merge-changelog (README), which makes merging ChangeLog entries surprisingly painless. You can even cherry-pick from other branches, where the ChangeLog's diff would not apply cleanly to the destination branch, and git-merge-changelog Just Works(tm) without any manual intervention. This *is* magic.
rpm2git screencast

Here is a little screencast about the problem that rpm2git tries to solve (Ogg Theora, 12.5 MB):

You can also watch the rpm2git screencast in opensuse.blip.tv.

(Screencast recorded with recordMyDesktop. Man, my voice sucks. I swear it sounded better inside my head.)

Akademy

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:12:59 -0700

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully booked schedule so I won't be able to actually make it to Mechelen for either days of the conference. Sad because unless we have a conference in Antwerpen some day soon it's probably going the to be the closest FOSS event to home.