let's do coffee ;)

Things have been crazy busy lately on every single front in my life. This has come at the expense of not blogging much at all, which has sucked. So much has been going on, a lot of it very interesting and fun and which I would have liked to share with you as it was happening. Such is life, but we need to catch up. So grab a coffee (or whatever you prefer, tea maybe? :) and let's catch up!

I ended up at a fencing competition as a spectator this weekend cheering on S. (and editing text from the sidelines for the Akademy sponsorship brochure that Claudia, Kenny and Nuno are working on; it's looking great!) and then out for dinner with old friends here in Vancouver the day after that. I also completed one of the last I-just-moved-to-a-new-province tasks as well: I got my car registered and insured with the locals here in B.C. Turns out that my B.C. drivers license expired the same year I got my now previous car insurance in Alberta, which led them to give me 14 years of safe driving and pushing me into the highest discount bracket (and one year away from the highest rating bracket over all). Still, it was one more thing that filled in my schedule.

The KDE promo team is in high gear as well, and that's keeping me a bit more busy. The promo sprint they just had was a great way to punctuate the increase in activity we've been seeing. A Dot story will apparently appear sometime soon detailing what went on at the sprint, but there have already been a number of blog entries on planet.kde.org about it. One outcome of the sprint is that we're starting to organize our communication strategies a bit more. This was not, by far, the most important result of the sprint, but it's the one that's kept me busiest. I was really impressed, and surprised even, to see how many people were at the promo sprint and, as a result, how much they accomplished. But when you have a larger group of people, you need to step up the coordination as well.

I remember the first KDE release announcement I ever wrote. It was just me and a text editor and Coolo reminding me it needed to be ready in a day or two, latest. My how things have changed (and for the better).

I've also been hacking my brains out in a few different areas for 4.4, though I'll blog about some of that later. With the feature freeze behind us, it's become apparent just which items are going to drop off my "can do for 4.4" list, however. Most notably, I'm not going to get to notification queueing or a replacement for the desktop zoom in/out feature. These will have to wait for 4.5 as I work on other items that I hope will have bigger pay offs for 4.4. The items that are being left on the cutting room floor for 4.4 will fit in well with 4.5, though, I think.

I've already come to a determination as to what the focus for the Plasma family will be in 4.5. We've already discussed it a bit on the mailing list, but I won't be announcing it publicly until Tokamak IV which will be in February in Nuremberg. We'll be toasting with the OpenSuse people (congrats on 11.2, btw!) and hopefully enjoying the company of a few friends from elsewhere in industry as well. Most importantly, we'll be setting the Plasma agenda for 4.5. Much love will be had. (Or something, it just sounded like a good ending.)

I'm also in another "prep for shows" cycle. I'm going to hopefully be making it to Fedora's FUDCon in December (congrats on F12 and the KDE spin, btw! Seems to be the most popular spin by a kilometer! :) and am gearing up for one or two others.

One show that caught my eye is the Linux Audio Conference. The people involved in getting it going are quality folk (a big shout out to Armijn!) and if there's an area that F/OSS needs attention it's audio. Our stack is a mess at the moment, and not because of API issues but because we're doing a poor job of system integration, shoving features out to our users way before the software is ready for that and the like. I'm hoping that LAC will be well attended and some positive, useful results that will lead to improvements in how we handle our audio stack with care and respect will emerge as a result. I think it's really interesting that LAC will also focus on using media and will be striving to get media content creators there as well. This should help widen the scope beyond infrastructure navel gazers when it comes to audio and get a lot of great feedback as well as grow our shared community around F/OSS audio.

Now, I couldn't mention shows without talking about the most important gathering in the next six months as far as KDE is concerned. Yes, I'm talking about Camp KDE. I'll be there and I plan to bring a truck load of hugs and inspiration with me. I hope to see you there!