This is my first Akademy experience and so far it has been a great and seriously fantastic experience. Outside of Akademy I’m involved in the organization of a other project and have been involved in some projects in the past. Since the roots of the initial organizers, Bart & Wendy, is very (with that I mean, VERY ) Belgium they’ve chosen there very romantic, sweet and beautiful hometown of Mechelen as the location of the event.

From a very early start on, Bart and Wendy tried to contact lots of people and sponsors to get a plan for  ‘Akademy 2008′ out in the wild. From that point on they have been poking the e.V., sponsors, The Nayer Institute, the municipality of Mechelen, formed a local team responsible for all facilities and the rest of the community to get everything realized the way they did.

As I said, I do know a few things about organizing and even more, I know how much a hell of a job it can be to get such a thing running. In organizing events you have to deal with people promising things they eventually don’t have the time for, unresponsive organizations, governemental institutes and volunteers in general, money and budget calculation and last but not least, getting press coverage done.

For that I decided to put out a public hit-list containing all the people involved in the organization of Akademy 2008 that really, really deserve a good bunch of kisses and flowers, simply because they are great. I am aware of the fact that people are missing below, so please mail me ASAP to get them on the hit-list as well (niels A.T. shodan D-o-T nL).

Go and find the bastards!

• Bart Cerneels
• Wendy van Craen
• Claudia Rauch
• Lydia Pintscher
• Kenny Duffus
• Pieter van de Wyngaerde
• Bart Coppens
• Andy Goossens
• Wesley Stessens
• Pieter Verledens
• Marijn Kruisselbrink

I’ve had a short chat with one of the guys involved in the joint conference next year, which is about to take place in Gran Canaria. Though that is all in a very early stage I’ve already heard some good things about it. Besides, I would love to get the Gnome and XFCE guys over there to go into a full week of hacking all together to go out for world domination. Because, no matter the project, toolkit or package manager, we still are a relatively small part of the market but we are delivering very high quality products that most of the times beat out products resulting from that other business model. My point, we simply all rock!

And well, I got myself into a really cultural SHOCK. In the Netherlands, when you are ordering a small fries you do get as less fries as possible covered in this fat fluid called Mayonaise. But the defenition of the word ’small’ has still to be invented here in Belgium (just like proper roads and clear roadsigns).

To make it easier for everybody I’ve made this French Fries size comparison. If you wan’t to go for ’small’ fries here, be sure to ask for ‘zeer kleine frieten’ (very small frites), perhaps that saves you a calorybomb.

Dutch Standards

Small Size

Medium Size

large Size

Oversized Belgium Standards

Small Size

Medium Size

large Size

Sitting in the room 1 at the Akademy St. De Nayer institute. Actually Torsten was supposed to have a talk about Marble, though unfortunately the beamer broke so his talk has been delayed till further notice.

To keep it short, the atmosphere, the people and of course the beer and early-morning coffee beverages are simply great.

I’m not having any numbers on the commits being made at the moment, though the network is actually quite active. This graph should resemble that at least!

Almost three years ago I started following our Planet and got bit by bit more interested in the KDE4 terminology and all the other vaporware that surrounded it. At some point Jess Hall wrote a blog with the title ‘KDE4 - understanding the buzz’ in which she tried to describe what KDE4 was at that point and what it would probably be.

When I saw the screenshots in that article, that looked like KDE3 on Mexican drugs (though the gigantic first stage of porting was already done), I started running the codebase by compiling it daily on my own old Acer Aspire laptop. Every single day the changes to many files were stunning and the fast improving socially motivated attitude within the core group was absolutely fantastic.

About 1,5 years ago I removed my kde4-devel user and started building the codebase within my own user account and switched over to the devel code right away. At that time I didn’t needed my laptop at the office so usage demands were low and the stability of the trunk code at that time was far from usable, it crashed daily - if not - hourly. But I was absolutely fine with that as the improvements were far too exciting.

In January last year KDE 4.0 got released to the public, a release that created large amounts of excitement, press coverage, but also a lot of controversy. Since a project like KDE is so huge both on technical as management level I think we can safely say that all the people - from the different working groups, communicaters to the daily webloggers - have been building a miracle that can’t be awarded enough times. I’m not sure if this one is going to be fully true but I just have to state that no traditional commercial company in the industry can achieve what all these people did in a short period.

So, back to the title of my blog. I’m fully aware that the title has been used in the development process more then once, especially when developers had to announce a certain milestone. So I’m going to bluntly announce here that from the next weekend on I’m going to stop compiling trunk code and switch over to stable 4.1 packages, as it is a solid and good working system now. Of course to the public 4.0 had to be what 4.1 is right now, but the reasons of the developers that decided to release code as 4.0 are in my eyes still very valid, communicated over and over and imho the media and users should stop ‘looking back’.

Since yesterday I’ve been following press coverage on the release and most of the posts I have seen are ranging from average to very positive, which I think the whole KDE community can be very proud of! To use my favorite phrase from the HGTTG one last time:

So long KDE, and thanks for all the fish!

Since I’m even seeing yellow buttons in my sleep I just have to do my yes-im-in announcement with a touch of blue:

The patent describes as:

“…A system, method, and computer readable medium for the proactive detection of malware in operating systems that receive application programming interface (API) calls is provided. A virtual operating environment for simulating the execution of programs and determining if the programs are malware is created. The virtual operating environment confines potential malware so that the systems of the host operating environment will not be adversely effected. During simulation, a behavior signature is generated based on the API calls issued by potential malware. The behavior signature is suitable for analysis to determine whether the simulated executable is malware….”

So what do I actually read here? Yes, they sum up all the methods a certain DLL library calls and walks patterns over it to detect “suspicous” API-calls! Well, that certainly doesn’t sound very innovative nor such a good solution. Why couldn’t they come up with a good security model that would deny the API calls in the place? That company keeps amazing me….

Thumbs up to KDE, and the Plasma team in particular! I’m really sure now that 4.1 is going to be a very solid release…

Ps. Oh, and that Krunner revamp rocks as well!

To keep up with the history meme hype that started last week on planet.gnome.org:

:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head -n 12
83 ls
73 cd
56 svn
35 sudo
19 screen
18 rm
18 cat
14 make
12 exit
9 kcmshell4
8 wget
8 dd

I’m affraid i’m using subversion more for deleting/moving than rm and mv…

A few weeks ago I was in a what-to-code-right-now-mood and inspired by The Gold Bug I decided to write a little easy cypher in PHP (could have been any language^TM of course) without any secret key. You know, just for fun.

So what did I write exactly? Well, I wrote two API functions, one for encrypting and the other for decrypting a string, and used all kinds of string manipulations to get it the way it is. A little example for encrypting the first paragraph of The Gold Bug:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?PHP
include('rotsteroids_contest.inc.php');            

$msg = "This Island is a very singular one. (....) The vegetation,
as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish.";           

echo rot_encrypt($msg);

Which will print something along the lines of this:

11:m0xbfvtumj=yA5EyOpOWO=RKJUJPzlKKtVnLMoMo
LqYmmtuthcxgmby5jIRScIOOAT2PzTT3JFFKnoMpVooM
MMnHwhvztilbvzSOSO94OOEOWTP2lTJPvUPKBq(.......)
chttOOS5DAqk4jwPvTTKUU2JPMMMVVFVVpMMvhim0tu
mtbyySOyS4OED1AwTlTTFFKzP3ZopVVMrnono

As you can see the cypher hasn’t been optimized for speed at all and can contain all sorts of salts and/or junk, or am I giving away too much fish now? For encrypting we have the function rotsteroids_encrypt( str ) and rotsteroids_decrypt( str ) for the other way round.

So now the fun part, which is up to those nifty smart minds out here to crack my implementation. I’ve written the cypher in pure PHP which might use some other string manipulating functions, or not, but still, it is pure PHP. To make it even more fun I’m just going to make it a contest, and for the first reader who is able to send me a reference implementation that works, I’m going to send a bottle of beer trough mail =).

So how to get started? Well, as I said, it is easy to deal with the code, API-wise there are only to functions one for encrypting and the other for decrypting. To not give away the source-code, and thus the answer to my contest, I’ve created a online form in which you can use the encrypting and decrypting of strings. Earlier today I got a few mails from people that actually decoded the phps file I had uploaded and delivered me the source that way, which is, in fact, cheating.

I’m curious for any responds, let me know!

mail: niels-[AT]-shodan-[DOT]-nl

So that was just it, the lack of a good wireless chipset, no fancy 3D stuff (sis chipset, even no simple shadows compositing worked), a very slow harddrive and simply horrible unpredictable and bad service from Acer. So in a very impulsive mood I decided yesterday to purchase myself a new laptop, after dreaming month’s of it I finally settled my hunt on a Lenovo Thinkpad.

So after I started my google queries and review reading yesterday I decided that a Thinkpad T61 (NI265NI) would be the best choice and within budget, altough quality devices like these never have been cheap. After fiddling trough the ordering process (which resulted in a double order) I got the delivery confirmation in my mailbox at 5PM yesterday, it’s going to be delivered within two or three days.

Feeling like a happy little child getting his duplo-toys, simply can’t wait!

Though I have to resume the php code I was hacking on… Cya!

It has been almost one year ago the last time I wrote a entry in this dusty blog. And since then, a lot of things changed in my life and on the web. And one of those is that I got a new, and my first serious job back in June last year.

So, back in June ‘07 I started working at the funny called company Madcap (still in Dutch) which at that time consisted of 7 employee’s and existed for only 1 years or so. My employee is using Drupal in it’s projects and is preparing mayor contributions to the projects it uses. Since then the company grew rapidly to over 25 employees, which meant I didn’t had much spare time left as I had to rest a lot and had lots of other things to do besides KDE and such.

But happily I’ve been following the kool people on this planet every day and saw the KDE repository growing from alpha code to a stable ‘four dot oh’ release, congratulations to everyone involved! So, last week, FOSDEM took place at the free university of Brussels, Belgium. After some bad experiences with hostels the previous years I subscribed to the organised KDE accomodation by Lydia Pintscher (Amarok’s community manager) and shared the room togheter with Jonathan Riddell and Manuel Nickschas (who wrote Quassel).

Before the event started the FOSDEM people organised the ‘Friday Night Beer Event’, which we (a lot of cool Amarok people, who all joined the grouped KDE accomodation) used to promote Amarok to a group of XMMS people inside the delerium cafe to promote Amarok by howling! On Saturday (damn, I felt broken, really had a hang-over) I’ve been playing booth-bunny togheter with loads of Amarok and other KDE people and wrote reviews of the talks in the devrooms together with superstoned Jos Poortvliet.

Saturday night all the KDE people got organised and Knuth Yrvyn (Trolltech’s community manager) decided to give a nice restaurant a go in the south of Brussels. While waiting Marijn Kruisselbrink showed off running plasma on a openmoko telephone, what really surprised me! Though it took a long before the food was on our tables, it tasted very good. Fosdem is quite a nice event, thanks for all the energetic people cheering up my weekend!

See you next time… Gotta wrap up right now