Lately I’ve been very interested in the Plasma Project.

“Development of KDE4 has just begun, and it is during these major release cycles that we have the opportunity to retool and rethink our applications and environment at the fundamental level. The fact that the current desktop concepts have lasted this long is a testament to their effectivity, and we should not simply abandon all sense of the familiar and the useful. Yet we can not stay where we are either.

This, then, is the goal and mandate of Plasma: to take the desktop as we know it and make it relevant again. Breathtaking beauty, workflow driven design and fresh ideas are key ingredients.”
quoted from the Plasma vision page

here are some links to get you started:
Plasma Kollaboration forum
Discussion on KDE Dot News
Marc Cramdal’s idea of a new application launcher
German: KDE will den Desktop neu erfinden

I translated my tutorial Debugging PHP scripts with Quanta Plus and Gubed PHP Debugger to German. Thanks to kde.nl there is a Dutch version too.

Just to remind everyone from Vienna / Austria: From 24. to 27. Mai 2005 the Linuxwochen (”Linuxweeks”) take place in the Museumsquartier. Among the speakers are: Karin Kosina and Georg Greve (Free Software Foundation Europe), Markus Beckedahl (Bundestux), Christian Mock (Coretec) and Joe Pichlmayr (Ikarus). I hope to see you there!

If you are a Quanta Plus user please take some time to read this post by Eric Laffoon, the project manager. Quanta Plus has thousands of users and many of them use this great tool to earn money. These people should not hesitate to give some money back to this project. Every donation is an investment in the future of this fantastic tool. If you don’t have a credit card and you live in the European Union you can donate by money transfer too (contact Andras Mantia: amantia at kde.org for details).

update: here is a follow up on the original post

quote:
For the long term though my objective with kdewebdev is to get the funds in order to set up a tax exempt charitable foundation for software development. Unfortunately this costs thousands of dollars and takes some time and headaches, but the positive is that it makes it pretty easy to secure large donations from companies. For companies contributing becomes effectively a tax shelter to support software they benefit from. The potential here is huge! I could never have to ask for money on the list again (Yay!) and instead I could be taking surveys for what additional plugin tools our users would like to see developed.

Are you a web developer? Chances are you use PHP as your scripting language and Quanta Plus as your IDE. As soon as your scripts get more complex, debugging them with echo or print_r statements is a major pain. It is best to use a real debugger instead. Quanta Plus features a general debug plugin system but currently only one plugin is available which adds support to use the Gubed PHP Debugger. Some time ago I wrote a tutorial Debugging PHP scripts with Quanta Plus and Gubed PHP Debugger. It was posted on dot.kde.org and I guess that is how Fabrice Mous from KDE Nederland found out about it. He contacted me and asked me if it was ok if he translated it to dutch. Sure. So here it is: PHP-scripts debuggen met Quanta Plus. Thank you Fabrice