john.layt.net

#include <KDE/KLongTimeNoBlog>

It's been a quiet few months on the blogging and KDE front, with very little time to achieve what I wanted for SC 4.5. I've spent a fair amount of time away from home on some archaeology projects, with limited connectivity and after a day in the field little energy left for hacking.  The last couple of weeks I've been trying to catch up and make sure what I did get it into SC 4.5 actually works :-)  I'll post a couple of blogs in quick order about what I did get finished.  I really need to clear out my draft e-mail folder, there's a few offline replies there I forgot to send :-)

One consequence of being away is my blog got overwhelmed with more than 12,000 spam comments in about 2 months! I guess the Drupal captcha has been defeated, so I've upgraded to the latest Drupal and installed reCaptcha which hopefully will fix that problem.

I've just booked my tickets and accomodation for Tampere, so:

(and as a bonus to Estonia too, seeing as it's only a 2 hour ferry from Helsinki)

Which has got me to thinking about what I want to achieve while there. Code is good, but it's facetime that is the true value of Akademy. There's quite a few topics I'd like to talk to various people about, a couple of which probably deserve a full BoF session. I'll try blog about them in the next few weeks, but here's a short list for now:

• Bof on Localisation on other desktops/platforms: how to get KDE to respect the locale settings when running apps on Windows, OSX, and non-KDE POSIX desktops (Gnome, XFCE, etc).
• BoF on Astronomical calculations: There's a couple of places in KDE already doing some basic astro calculations, such as sunrise/sunset times and moon phases, and I need some for lunar calendar systems and holidays.  Do we continue with a piecemeal approach, do we write a new shared KDE library, or do we depend on an external library?
• BoF on Location services: Again, we have independent implementations in 3 or 4 different places, and I need some basic location info for the astro calculations for calendars and holidays which is lower in the stack than any of them.  Is it time to co-ordinate these efforts?
• BoF on Printing: Yes, it's still painful and I'm taking far too long to sort it out. We need to 'make a plan', especially with the Qt'ies around features in the dialog, but also co-ordination around the new config tools.
• Sorting out how to use the isocodes project as a source for country, region and currency codes and their translations.
• What next for the Plasma calendar widget?
• More improvements in KHolidays
• Alternative calendars in KOrganizer / kdepim

Good thing Akademy lasts a whole week, eh? :-)