LUUSA

Es noch Hoffnung in Deutschland: Das Bundesverfassungsgericht. Hier macht man sich offensichtlich wirklich differenzierte Gedanken und schmettert die sogenannte Online-Durchsuchung ab. Zum Beispiel im Falle des entsprechenden Gesetzes in NRW, das heute vom BVG kassiert wurde:

Die NRW-Vorschrift, die dem Landes-Verfassungsschutz allgemein den "heimlichen Zugriff auf informationstechnische Systeme" erlaubte, verstoße auch gegen das Gebot der Verhältnismäßigkeit. (tagesschau.de)

Deswegen stellten die Richter jetzt ein Grundrecht auf Gewährleistung der Vertraulichkeit und Integrität informationstechnischer Systeme fest. Online-Durchsuchen sind zwar nicht unmöglich, aber die Hürden werden sehr, sehr hoch angelegt. Nun hoffen wir, dass diese eindeutige Entscheidung nicht wieder durch die Üblichen Verdächtigen systematisch untergraben wird.

(via lawblog)

To sum it up: it was an awesome party. We had a decently filled location, which surprised me because this particular party was announced less than one week in advance.

Starting at about 19:00 o'clock local time we saw a great show: Aaron giving an awesome keynote, Benjamin presenting KDE 4.0 apps on the Mac and Holger showing off KDE 4.0 on Windows in the typical understatement way of people from northern Germany . Thanks to Google for recording, Franz for organizing the streaming, and Dirk for getting a server capable of actually delivering the stream.



To me that keynote (which we will hopefully soon be seeing on Youtube), was en par with the ones the Steve's of this IT world deliver, just a lot warmer and more honest. Yet Aaron managed to present the incredible achievement that is KDE 4.0 in an amazing way.

After the keynote finished, the attendees had time to test KDE 4.0 and discuss various issues. As a special plus for those attending our party, we offered a special "KDE 4.0 Blue Lagoon Cocktail", which was very well received. (recipe on the right, sorry for the crappy pic). Thanks go to Peter for organizing beer, Natascha for doing an excellent job as a bar tender, the Netzladen for hosting and to AurISP and PBR Systems for providing a projector for everyone to follow the keynote.

Oh, and Qt is (also) GPLv3 now. Yay!

After Harri started the series of announcements for locations of the KDE 4.0 release party, it's now up to me:
We'll have a party on Friday, January 18st, 19 hours. We are partying at the premises of the Bonner Netzladen e.V., a very renown hacker space. We plan to have a live stream from Mountain View and will provide guests with Club Mate, Kölsch and a special surprise drink! Of course, we'll bring a KDE 4.0 test setup for everyone to play around with.

So if you are from the Cologne/Bonn area (or just closer to Bonn than to any other location, or just like us best...), come and join us. To allow for better planning, please add yourself to the respective Wiki page.

Due to some rather strange pains in my back (probably muscle-related, I hope the doc will find out tomorrow), I am somewhat chained to my bed. With my action radius being limited significantly, I am doing what seems popular: I decided to give an update about my personal situation. To sum up 2007, it was a fairly nice but also stressful year, with a lot of changes in my private life, both positive and rather sad (which don't belong here, drop me a mail if you care).

It also saw the release of the english, slightly updated version of my book on Qt 4 and held an awesome study-related internship at the coolest toolkit-vendor ever. I hope this explains why I remained so silent on the blog and (even worse) on the KDE commit list. I kept active in the background however, keeping TechBase running along with Dominik and setting up other MediaWiki-based websites for KDE.

As for 2008, there is a lot of things I want to do. I won't bother you with all of them, just the very basic ones:

• Finish studies (finally )


• Get more involved in KDE development again


• Enjoy real-life even more than last year*

So, to all my friends, readers and KDE-enthusiasts i wish

A happy new 2008!

*(well actually, that looks like bad resolution at first sight, since 1 and 2 conflict with 3, but after all it's all about the right balance, right?)

When the news about Qtopia on the OpenMoko made its round in the news, I was eager to find out how it would be, especially because the only platform I had seen it on was the Greenphone. Thankfully my friend Lars lent me his Neo 1973 to help me getting an impression. It still had one of the first OpenMoko Firmware images installed and couldn't even do GSM. So I took it home and flashed it with the binary release from Qtopia.net. I booted it up and... wow, it asked for my PIN, logged into the network and I had GSM working. So after two days of using it, here is a list of cool stuff:

• It's astonishingly usable without a stylus already (scrolling, dialing, etc), with exception of the querty keyboard (must-have #1)


• The adoption to keyboardless handling is very good, e.g. games that need one have been removed, applications got adjusted (must-have #2)


• Telephony just worked (not that obvious these days)


• The graphics look really polished


• and of course: the lock/unlock mechanism is really cool and a funny idea

So what did I notice? (Please bear in mind that this is the first public release of the OpenMoko-based firmware, so this is something that can be fixed)

• Suspend doesn't seem to work properly yet (issues with the OpenMoko kernel?)


• Without suspend, battery life is only about 6 hours


• Some redraw errors in the unlock application


• Speaker volume too silent, even when pushing everything to max

Now this is stuff that certainly can be fixed, and if there would be Marble available on Qtopia, too, that would even make for an awesome geo-location-based-services tool (Nokia seems to belive it's the future, and so do I). Awesome work, Brisbane trolls, and of course all the other devel trolls in Berlin, Munich and Oslo! I hope now that Qtopia is GPLed, Qtopia might become an interesting alternative to OpenMoko.

By the way: I was approached a few times by friends who asked me of the whole Qtopia on OpenMoko thing spoiled the OpenMoko development. Here is my view. The OpenMoko firmware is for those who like to have their X11 and all the crap running, Qtopia is for those who just want to have stuff working, without caring that its even Linux underneath. They don't need X11, the framebuffer is good enough and less complex to draw on (also, nobody keeps you from adding an X-Server to Qtopia or port Qtopia to Qt/X11. It's GPL, after all).