So the oh so famous Gartner Analysts have announced that Microsoft Windows is collapsing under its own weight and that a radical change is needed.

The conclusion of the blog is correct: ‘How fast will Windows collapse under its weight? It’ll take longer than folks think.’. They are not going to collapse. They have a good user base and in my daily work I get customers insisting on Microsoft products, just because they know these products and their features. Or people knowing people telling them how excellent the choise for Microsoft is.

So, what is the deal here? It is simple. Microsoft is starting to prepare people that Windows 7 will not be compatible with older version. As this might be a shock to a lot of people, Microsoft needs to educate people why it is needed. It will be hard to sell that /all/ existing windows software will simply not run anymore on Windows 7. We could already have read that it won’t be compatible.

And that’s where Gartner kicks in. Nothing better then some ‘independent’ analysts telling that Microsoft is doomed and that there need to be radical changes. In a later stage Microsoft can announce the incompatibility and refer to this Gartner statement. And Gartner can again publish in a few years how Microsoft succesfully avoided the crisis.

So please read all those stories in the right context and learn from their tactics. Sit back and enjoy the show. It is good to learn how to prepare users for radical changes. We never know if we can use some of those tactics for KDE 5 or 6.

Microsoft did it again, they keep amazing me. The way they handle publicity is just awesome. Every single fart hits the jackpot on the publicity scale. This time I was surprised by the fact that Microsoft is going to make a Frysk (West Frisian) translation of Office.

Fries is spoken in the nothern part of The Netherlands, especially in the province Friesland, it’s a beautiful language and the dutch people can’t really understand it.

It seems Microsoft has worked together with the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden to work on a ‘Community Glossary’ to get a unified vocabulary for ICT terms. Which is great, because that’s often a difficulty in a small language: you don’t have a translation for all the specialised terms used in the software.

Microsoft being involved in such a commercially less attractive initiative looks to me as if they are trying to improve their image. I’m not against the initiative at all, because I wish the Frysk people all the best, especially software in Frysk – I hope it includes a spell checker, etc.

I’m just wondering why this is mentioned in the news. KDE provides Frysk for a while already and I seriously doubt it would be on any news site at all if we have made a press release. Seriously, we have to do really weird things to get it on WebWereld for example. Something like releasing KDE4 for example. I think those sites need to wake up and not copy over every single press release Microsofts Martketing Dep. comes up with.

I’ld even like it when a journalist actually did some research before publishing it. Like phone Microsoft and ask why they are the last big Office application being delivered in Frysk (assuming OOo has Frysk too). Or asking them what there involvement is exactly – for me it looks like Microsoft is only repackaging the software, but the story is very superficial. So reporters: wake up, do your job, please!

I really want to give a huge compliment to the KDE Frysk team: Rinse (also the one responsible for the dutch translation for years, and years), Berend and Douwe. I hope I did not forget anyone ;-). Nice Job!

Today I went to Utrecht where the Dutch Joomla!-days took place. I was quite surprized by the size of the event, it was three times as big as I expected, with 5 parallel sessions and a lot of international core-developers.

It was interesting in more than one way. During some of the presentation some bits of the release process were presented, basically they want to do a 4-6 month cycle, 2,5 months of development and 1,5 month of testing, documenting and releasing. Of course I could not resist in constantly comparing the stuff they do with how we do it within KDE. I’m interested in one particular part of their process. At the start of a new development cycle they request white papers. These describe the new features in detail for the next release. I know Ubuntu does something similar. I’m wondering if that could be something we could use within KDE as well.

It would be kind of cool to know in detail what the goals will be for the next release we make. Those white papers can also hold information about the way a feature will be implemented and can be the base for discussion with the relevant group of developers. Think about it, it would make sense I think.

One of the presentations was done by one of the american developers. The first ten seconds were kind of normal, after that he made us stand up and rearrange the room, so we would sit in big circles. He stood in the middle and we were allowed to shoot random questions to him on any subject we wanted. I think we could also do something like that within KDE. Sometimes I feel that we don’t always listen that good to hear the biggest problems our users have. Normally you could get that info due to bug reports, but since we get so many it is kind of hard to pick out the big line out of it. It would be a nice idea to have an IRC session for example, where we invite a couple of core KDE developers and where everyone can ask any random question they want about KDE. That way we also be more accessible to our users…

One of the new feature in Joomla! 1.6 will be ACL’s. Currently I find that one of the biggest shortcomings of Joomla!. There need to be more finegrained rights management. You want people belonging to groups, groups belonging to other groups. Then you want to allow or deny them to do certain actions. But you also want to restrict them to certain categories of content. So it’s kind of three dimensions you need to cope with. The implementation framework is not the biggest problem. phpGACL provides it. The problem they face is how to implement it in a clean way in the user interface and keeping the performance.

I’ve seen a couple of presentations, which I found interesting and learned a lot more about making templates in Joomla!, how their community work and how open they are to their users. Anyhow, I had an interesting day there.

During the Akonadi meeting in Berlin we decided that Akonadi needs a separate crash handler to handle Akonadi crashes. The reason is that nobody ‘owns’ the Akonadi instance. It could be accessed by Mailody, KMail, KNode or the plasma applet. Besides, Akonadi isn’t a real KDE application as it is cross-desktop and cross-platform, but that means the Akonadi crash it self can not be handled by the default KDE crash handler.

So, let me hereby present to you our new crash handler:

Some of the things in there, I want to discuss a bit more in detail. The first thing you notice is that we will be using clear error codes and error numbers. This is done because up front we don’t know which errors will occur. Before the release we will create a spot on our Akonadi website which lists those errors and the solutions so the user will know exactly what is going on. In a later version we will probably add a simple ‘feedback’ button so the user does not have to write it down and go to the website manually.

We had a rather large discussion about allowing the user to see the the backtrace. In a close vote we decided against it. People thought that the vast amount of output generated by a backtrace would just confuse the users and that the error number has proved to be enough.

As our approach has many similarities to the Microsofts way of reporting errors, we decided to give it the same look as well. As KDE starts to be true platform independend, it is no longer a problem to grab to good parts of Windows and introduce that to the KDE desktop. It has been acknowledged by our usability experts that this form of error report is the most approriate one since it has decades of wide scale testing across all ranges of target audiences.

Maybe other applications want to use this framework as well? Comments are welcome as usual in #akonadi