Looks like some Mozilla developers, like Gervase Markham, have noticed that Slovenia may soon become the first country in the world where Firefox will pass the 50% point when it comes to internet browser market share. When this happens Firefox will definitely be the most used web browser in our beautiful country.

The latest report from Xiti Monitor (in French) cites Firefox share in Slovenia to be at 47,9%. Gervase even thinks that Firefox is already the most widely used browser in Slovenia. Well in my opinion this hasn’t happened quite yet. If you check out my previous blog article Slovenia loves Mozilla Firefox web browser, you can see that a Slovenian internet advertisement company Iprom measured lower share of Firefox. By about 11% lower than Xiti. As long as the difference is still the same today, then Iprom would spit out a 37% share.

In any case the share of Firefox is very high in Slovenia and we are on a very good way to truly be the first country in the world to pass the magical 50% share. And I think there is still a couple months of time left to organise the World Slovenia Day that Gervase proposes.

To all Slovenians: Let’s not let Finland beat us to it. They are only 2,5% behind us. Ditch your old, closed source and insecure browser and switch to Firefox! Let’s make the whole world proud of Slovenia!

Tags: slovenia, mozilla, firefox, browsers, web, internet, ie, internet explorer

I’m now safe at home for about a day and here is my look back at aKadmy 2007.

I’m glad that flights and other travelling went so smoothly. Yeah, it was a bit long and there was a lot of waiting, especially the first day, but that’s about it. Found the bus between Prestwick airport and Glasgow just fine. And the walk in the middle of the night from the bus to Euro Hostel was also fine. We felt lost just for a short moment, but then found the hostel immediately.

The room in the hostel was OK, nice to have your own shower and you got fresh towels every day. There could be more variety when it comes to breakfast and it would be nice if each room had a free wireless internet. Well at least they had internet at the lobby of the hostel.

The aKademy conference itself was great. I expected that there would be around 200 people, but I’ve heard that there were actually about 300 people. The talks and BoFs were interesting. I especially liked the ones about KDE and FLOSS in education. What I did miss is a talk about translation and localisation, which is a very important part of KDE and free software. It was also unfortunate that the wireless internet connection only started to work at the end of the second day. I also expected that they would be selling more KDE merchandise. like plush Konqi, more t-shirts, pins and stuff like that. Other than that it was really nice to meet all the people and I sure hope I will be able to go to aKademy 2008 next year.

About Glasgow. The English accent they use there makes people hard to understand sometimes. The traffic lights work in a strange way, feels almost randomly. With sister we also tried Kebab there and it was put together in a different way than here in Slovenia, didn’t taste very good and it was very expensive (like everything in Glasgow). The weather was depressing a bit. Almost always cloudy and it was raining very often. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to go sightseeing. The aKademy programme filled almost entire day and at the end of the day I was just so tired that I went back to the hostel and fell asleep.

All in all it was a great week and I recommend to every KDE user to definitely try to visit aKademy at least once. In the end I must thank Linux User Group of Slovenia, who paid for my trip and made this great experience possible. Thank you LUGOS!

Read more:
Ready for aKademy 2007
All packed and ready for aKademy 2007
aKademy 2007, day 0
aKademy 2007, day 0, part 2
aKademy 2007, day 1
aKademy 2007, day 2
aKademy 2007, School and Education day
aKademy 2007, BoFs Day

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

My plan today was to go to Kopete plugin development BoF first. But I couldn’t find the room and the Geo Services BoF I stumbled upon looked very interesting, so I just stayed. There were a lot of interesting ideas where geo-location information could be used. For example tagging photos in DigiKam and other documents with location. This could then be integrated with Strigi desktop search so you could quickly search for photos taken at or around some place. There were also some concerns raised about publishing your location, so a user should be aware of privacy when it comes to it.

The second BoF today was about KDE Games. Developers talked about the best way to handle resizing game windows. You see, it takes a certain amount of time to re-render the SVG image after you resize. There were also discussions about the welcome screen, which enables players to quickly start games, and how to make game instructions easier to get to.

I’ve also stayed at the SQO/Research BoF where people where gathering ideas for tests that could be used to measure quality of open source software. Something similar to English Breakfast Network and Ohloh. I didn’t have any ideas at the time, but later at home I got an idea that one of the tests could check out how well code is prepared for internationalisation and translation.

The next BoF was about Plasma, the new desktop that is coming in KDE 4 and is heavily based on desktop widgets/desklets/gadgets which are called Plasmoids. I didn’t hear or see much new about Plasma, but during the talk Zack Rusin managed to get an OpenGL plasmoid working. Way cool! Oh yeah I almost forgot. Aaron Seigo told us that there are some companies interested into Plasma, which would like to use plasmoids and all to build a multimedia centre interface.

The last BoF I went to was about KDE Education project. One thing we all agreed on was that Edutainment should be renamed to Education. There was also a debate whether some applications (like KhangMan) should be in KDE Games package or remain in KDE Education. Other topics included the need for more artwork, the need for KEduca replacement and educational plasmoids. You can read more in KDE Edu BoF Report.

This was it for the day and the last thing for this year’s aKademy. I returned back to hostel earlier to pack the baggage and get some sleep before waking up at 3:40 in the morning getting on a long trip back home. Too bad time flies so quickly during aKademy.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland, bof

Skipped the breakfast today, since I forgot to set up the alarm clock and was already running late. Went directly to the university, because I wanted to be there about half an hour earlier to connect to the internet. The connection was not working and it was strange that there were no people. Luckily Mario Fux came by (he forgot his power adapter) and told me that the talks are in the Livingston Tower across the street.

We had three talks in which we were told about three actual deployments of Linux in schools over Europe (Norway, Switzerland, Spain). It was shown how much money a school can save by using free and open source software, in what way the money is saved and how the deployments are made. It is sad that at first school administration is often very afraid of Linux in their school, because they don’t know anything about it. After they actually see how well it works and how many benefits it brings they eventually want more Linux. It was also very interesting to see what and how many customizations are made during deployments. Either to make a better fit for school’s special needs or to work around deficiencies in existing Windows servers, which often don’t work nicely with the rest of the world.

There was a chance to see One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate PC side by side and we also got them into our hands. I was quite surprised that Classmate PC actually feels lighter. What I also like about Classmate PC is that it appears to be a more capable machine for which it is easier to develop applications. The model at the presentation actually had a slimmed down version of Mandriva Linux installed, with KDE desktop and OpenOffice.org. And everyone knows how heavy OpenOffice.org is when it comes to system resources.

The guy with OLPC also showed us around GCompris, a suit of educational applications. I’ve heard about it before, but never checked it out. It has over 100 educational activities and is definitely something to check out in more detail and see how well it is translated into Slovenian language. Later Marble was presented. It is a widget for showing geographical data that is ready to be used in Qt or KDE applications (for example in KStars to set location you are observing from). In addition, it is a full application, which is similar to Google Earth. During the presentation Summer of Code student managed to get GPS support working. Another application presented was KAlgebra, which can be used as a bit more advanced calculator and is also capable of drawing 2D and simple 3D graphs. It is also very nice to see that KAlgebra is based on MathML standard.

At the end we had a discussion where we collected a few topics, on which it would be nice to work in the future. For example more task oriented and simplified desktop and applications. Another idea was to set up a web portal and mailing list where people interested in free and open source software in education could work together. Maybe SchoolForge could be revived and used for this.

Another very interesting day indeed. And if you would like to know all details about what was happening be sure to check out KDE Edutainment pages some time later. You will be able to find all the presentations and some notes there.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland, education, olpc, one laptop per child, classmate pc

During the breakfast I’ve heard the news that there could have been a terrorist attack at the Glasgow airport. Someone crashed into terminals or something like that. As far as I know nobody got hurt and there were only flights canceled for the day.

Today the most interesting talks started with Tudor Groza, who presented concept of semantic desktop and how it is coming into KDE. We found out that the next version of Mandriva Linux should already integrate some parts of it. Later on Olaf and Gunnar Schmidt had a very interesting talk about accessibility, something that is too often overlooked when developing software. Accessibility is also one of the hot topics in governments, so it is very important that KDE provides the best experience for people with disabilities. The next talk on the programme was from Jim Zemlin of Linux Foundation, who told us what the organisation does and into which direction Linux is going. During his talk we got the good news that the internet id finally working. In the following talk Sander Koning provided us with some tips on writing documentation so that it is useful to the users. It’s harder than it looks at first. Towards the end of the day Claire Lotion revealed to us that there is a lot of money available from European Union which can be used for research in informatics and computer related fields. KDE already has some projects which would be good candidates to apply for this money, but currently there is no framework in place at KDE to better utilise the available resources. Claire has started the work to improve the situation.

At the end of the contributors conference there was the 3rd aKademy Award Ceremony. Award for the best application went into the hands of Sebastian Trueg for K3b. Danny Allen received award for his great work on weekly KDE Commit Digest. Congrats to both!

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland