In the last week several KDE developers delivered short reports about the status of their projects. The first was Wynn Wilkes, who gave a report on the status of Java support in Konqueror. The short version: all applets which can be run the jdk appletviewer should now work, the security manager (sandbox) is in place, and applet loading via proxy and over SSL is now working (for SSL you need the JSSE (Java Secure Sockets Extension)).

Amir Michail, creator of the CodeWeb data mining tool, is back with CVSSearch, a tool that searches for code fragments using CVS comments. It will eventually index over 350 KDE applications and promises to be very useful. Send your kudos and comments here.

Sometimes wise men say that the quest for speed and comfort drives the humankind away from its cultural vocation. The time might have come, thanks to the free software credo, to reconcile our quest for technology and our thurst of culture. Wolfram Diestel is one of the people that work towards this goal. Wolfram is Tink's guest this week, and he presents his work on esperanto translations of KDE.

Good news from theKompany.com keeps pouring in. As several of you have pointed out, the first beta of Aethera has been announced. In case you haven't been following, Aethera is theKompany's fork of the greatly hyped/anticipated Magellan project.

TheKompany has just released kivio-0.9.2.

KDE.com has announced it will provide a convenient
service to all KDE developers who, for whatever reason, have not been able
to compile KDE documentation properly or who do not want to go through the
hassle of installing all of the necessary packages to compile KDE .dockbook
files. Simply visit the KDE.com
DocBook Documentation

Many agree that one of the greatest strengths of KDE is the professional quality of the user interface translations and localization. In this week's People Behind KDE, Tink presents to us Gregory Mokhin, member of the Russian KDE translation team. With charm and a subtle sense of humor, Grisha speaks about his work and life.

We are proud to announce the first Open Source and Free Developers' European Meeting featuring Fyodor, Jeremy Allison, Richard Stallman, Kevin Lawton, Phil Thomson, Rasmus Lerdorf and more. David Faure will be offering a KDE presentation.

The meeting will take place in Brussels Saturday the 3rd and Sunday the 4th February 2001, and is organised in collaboration with VA Linux which is actively sponsoring the event.

A KDE accessibility mailing list has been created. We hope the mailing list will be the starting point for a subproject of KDE, possibly named Access KDE, that will be dedicated to making the entire desktop environment accessible. The mailing list will serve as a forum for those who want to further KDE's accessibility to disabled users (e.g., visually impaired or low-vision individuals). Those interested are strongly encouraged to subscribe.

David Faure, the KDE release coordinator, has posted the KDE 2.1 release schedule. The summary: KDE 2.1beta2 is scheduled for release on January 29, and KDE 2.1 is scheduled for release on February 12, 2001. Read the post below.