Going absentee for a while; some Mountain View release party details
I know that it's always a busy time in the KDE world, and it's never a good time to go away for a period (as aaron could attest to), but I guess it's my turn. (In future years, we could do something bizarre and shut down the SVN repo for a week every year to force people to take a break.)

I will be around to cover beta 2, but will commit to nothing else until the second week of september. I'll be absent from IRC, email and blogs in order to help refocus myself on the other tasks I have in my life, such as a new school year starting, and trying to successfully complete my summer research projects.

Beat.

It's time to make this event more publicly known.

The release party planning is going fairly normally, except that we don't have any sort of official announcement yet (which would allow people to start booking flights), but for those KDE hackers that are in North or South America, or are elsewhere and just really want to go, please contact Wade Olson to see if we have a spot for you. We don't have unlimited sponsorship for the travel costs, but we do have the food and hotel rooms covered at the event. Which by the way is being hosted by Google at their headquarters in Mountain View, January 17-19 (two nights in the hotel are covered).

This is our KDE 4.0 release party and press announcement event, as well as an event intended to strengthen our presence within the Americas by getting as many of us as we can in one place. I personally also intend it to use it to launch an annual KDE gathering on this side of the pond that would exist 6 months opposite to the Akademy cycle (that is assuming Akademy's location for next year is once again chosen to be in Europe).

The Jan 17th date is tentatively planned to be the "keynote" and announcement of KDE 4.0 to all the press that will attend. We'd like all of our corporate sponsors and distro partners to be present here as well, as it will be a good opportunity for them to look good for the press, be interviewed, and so forth. I won't be the only Ars Technica reporter there, which is good, since I'll be relatively busy with event coordination and won't have time to cover everything :)

The Jan 17th date was chosen since it is nearly three months after our published released date, according to the latest release schedules. We are announcing 4.0 (not 4.0.1) even though 4.0 in some form will already have been out for quite a while. The three month buffer really allows us to book flights and stuff without worrying about the release date slipping due to a showstopper bug or somesuch, as well as giving us some extra time to plan the event itself and get it to be 6 months opposite of Akademy.

So anyway, if you are involved with KDE in anyway, and live in the Americas, again, please bug Wade to make sure that you can get a room reserved. If you are a reporter that does open source coverage, we have a room for you too :) If you work for any KDE distribution, make sure you're on the list so you get a room.

Beat.

Cheers folks, and thanks for tolerating my occasionally controversial blogs :)