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The first day of Camp KDE is behind us, with the first of the many presentations being well attended. A full summary of the talks lives behind the break, and videos will be online shortly. If you are in the San Diego region, feel free to join us for Camp KDE for talks and training. Saturday, the first day of Camp KDE 2010 in San Diego, started with a short introduction by Jeff Mitchell. Jeff, who was the principal organizer of the conference, introduced us to a bit of history about Camp KDE and then went into some statistics about the KDE community. The conclusion was that if we maintain our current rate of growth we'll have about 6 billion developers by 2050. Continuing with this theme, he spoke about current topics in KDE such as the migration to Git and the upcoming release of KDE SC 4.4. Jeff then introduced the talks to follow, including the work on KDE-on-Windows, KOffice and KDE technology on mobile devices.

Earlier today Lyz Krumbach sent an email to the Ubuntu Women Project mailing list announcing that the Ubuntu Community Council had appointed me as the interim leader of the Project. I was speechless! I appreciate those of you who gave testimonials for not only me but for Melissa Draper and Penelope Stowe as well. Melissa and Penelope both have some amazing goals and vision for the team and I can't wait to see the team adopt and incorporate all these as we update and follow the roadmap to a successful growing Ubuntu Women Project.

One of the best ways to protect sensitive computer data like credit card numbers and social security information is to use encryption software. Encryption software executes an algorithm that is designed to encrypt data in such a way that it cannot be recovered (decrypted) without access to the key. It is a main component of all aspects of file protection and computer communication. Files on hard drives and other removable media, email messages, and packets sent over computer networks can be made secure by encryption software.

The IBM Seer application for Android mobile phones provides an augmented reality view of Melbourne Park and the Australian Open tennis tournament.

Embedded software applications are like the mammals of the software industry – while the monolithic dinosaur applications slug it out up in broad daylight, the embedded apps scurry about in the undergrowth doing what they do best, hidden from all but the most observant. While this isn’t an analogy you’d want to push too far, it’s certainly the case that embedded software can be found in the strangest places. Some of the more esoteric examples you gave us in a recent poll were buoys and Bluetooth energy meters, CAT scanners, endoscopes and pulse oximeters, hyperbaric welding systems, web based laundry control systems and our personal favourite – car catapults for crash testing.

Your editor, not generally known for his good sense, has long made a tradition of putting together a set of Linux-related predictions at the beginning of each year and posting them for the world to see. There is no particular source of inside knowledge behind these predictions, and no real reason to give them more credence than is merited by much of the material found in one's spam folder. Still, it's a fun exercise in pondering how things could go and trying to guess what the important themes will be.

For those that prefer wicd to NetworkManager or other programs for managing network connections under Linux, a new release of the Wireless Interface Connection Daemon is now available. Wicd 1.7.0 is arriving just about six months after the release of wicd 1.6.0, but this 2010 release does bring some new features.

The Perl CPAN Testers have been suffering issues accessing their sites, databases and mirrors. According to a posting on the CPAN Testers' blog, the CPAN Testers' server has been being aggressively scanned by "20-30 bots every few seconds" in what they call "a dedicated denial of service attack"; these bots "completely ignore the rules specified in robots.txt".

Tomorrow morning, the third major North American KDE event will start with an introduction by Jeff Mitchell and Aaron Johnson. At 11:00 a keynote by University of California San Diego professor Philip Bourne will introduce us to the university's Open Data initiative and after a lunch we'll get going with the various presentations.

Want to get Unix/Linux techies arguing? Besides classic flame wars such as whether vi or EMACS is the better text editor, another surefire way to start a fight is to talk about which file systems are the best. Google, which knows a thing or two about fast systems has decided, for their purposes anyway, that Ext4 is the best and close to the fastest file system of all.

The eighth annual KDE PIM developer meeting in Osnabrück, Germany started out with an extended snowball fight among the Scottish, German and Dutch contingencies. That actual work was being done was evidenced by enhancements to Akonadi, KDE 4.4 and 4.5, and planned further development of the Kontact groupware client.

The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of a new jobs portal on its community driven Linux.com site. According to the JobThread Network, an online recruitment platform established in 2006, demand for Linux-related jobs has increased 80% since 2005. The Linux Foundation hopes that the new Linux Jobs Board will act as an online forum to help employers find the "best and brightest Linux talent". Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation said, “Linux.com reaches millions of Linux professionals from all over the world. By providing a Jobs Board feature on the popular community site, we can bring together employers, recruiters and job seekers to lay the intellectual foundation for tomorrow’s IT industry.”

Every once in a while we here at MakeTechEasier like to take a look at where things stand with the notoriously still-in-development Enlightenment window manager. I say “notorious” because version 0.17 (hereafter called E17) has been in development almost 10 years, long enough to invite a fair share of Duke Nukem Forever analogies. While some have got tired of waiting and just think of E17 as vaporware, the fact is that it has been making progress the entire time. Slow progress, sure, but progress nonetheless. These days E17, while not complete, is still a very slick and powerful desktop with some beautiful graphics and effects. Today we’ll cover how to install E17 onto a standard Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) system.

I admit, I'm one of those people who dual-boots so I can play video games. I've tried running programs like CrossOver Games in order to feed my need for fragging, but in the end, it seems I always have to install Windows to enjoy some real gaming fun.

The Linux Foundation (LF) has launched a Linux Jobs Board on Linux.com, with special services available from the JobThread Network. Meanwhile, the LF is accepting requests for invitations for its exclusive, invitation-only Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on Apr. 14-16 in San Francisco at the Hotel Kabuki. The LF's online jobs site aims to provide employers, recruiters, and job-seekers with a forum to find each other in one of the few IT job categories that is still something of a buyer's market: Linux. Employers can post their openings on Linux.com for $100 for 15 days and $200 for 30 days, or pay additional fees to post jobs on the JobThread Network on Linux.com to reach 50 niche publishing sites with a combined 9.8 million visitors every month, says the LF.

The top 10 most popular stories on Linux Planet covered a range of topics, and even included some very old stories that were published long before 2009. Is there value in that old mold? You bet there is!

Virginia Tech licenses GenoCAD source code to International Society for Computational Biology

The Linux Foundation says that the market for Linux-related jobs has grown 80 percent over the past five years. In response to this trend, the foundation is launching a Linux job board to help connect employers with potential candidates for Linux-related jobs. The Linux Foundation, an advocacy and standardization group, obtained the Linux.com domain name from GeekNet last year. The website hosts a variety of content and services for Linux users and programmers, including blogs and community-driven technical support. The job board, which will be powered by th JobThread Network, is the latest addition to the website.

Theodore "Ted" T'so has moved to Google, leaving his position as Linux Foundation's Chief Technology Officer. The news came in a blog posting from T'so entitled "Proud to be a Googler" where T'so said "Although I obviously had nothing to do with Google’s decision vis-a-vis China, having only started working there for a week, I was definitely glad to see it and it made me proud to be able to say that I work there." He is well known within the Linux community as one of the core Linux developers and maintainer of the Ext3 and Ext4 file systems.