The drupal based Ideatorrent (developed by Nicolas Deschildre) which will be used by the next version of Ubuntu Brainstorm, has been adopted by BBC at it’s idea store:
http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com
Nicolas (nand) is now an admin on the above mentioned BBC Idea Store.
Congratulations Nicolas!!
Not long from now, KDE Forum will start it’s Klassroom sessions.
What is it about?
Each Klassroom session will be held with a pre-defined aim. It would help all participating users to make use of existing documentation and guidance from “Mentors” to work on small projects related to:
Who are the mentors?
Following are the mentors who will be starting the Klassroom sessions:
How do I participate?
So if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but didn’t know how to, here’s the best chance for you! And if you’re feeling confident enough already, don’t forget to subscribe to the Klassroom as soon as the first one is out. 
You can find the official announcement here.
Not as much as the last time, but this time, we have the following set up.
1. An official forum for project Eigen has been set up. The developer himself would be moderating the forum. The forum can be found under: Developers -> Libraries & APIs -> Eigen.
Link to developer/moderator’s profile: http://forum.kde.org/bjacob-u-2883.html
Link to forum: http://forum.kde.org/eigen-f-74.html
I also posted an announcement on the forum itself. Find it here.
2. We now have a new bar plugin at the forums. So anything dropped in by out bot “aggregator” at the releases area and/or all forum announcements will be displayed at the forum homepage.
3. Oxygenation: Oxgenation of the forums is almost complete. If you are a member of the forum and you feel that we missed out something, please open a thread at the Feedback section or PM me or neverendingo.
KDE 4.2 beta 2 is out! The official announcement can be found here.
Got this upgrade to KDE 4.2 beta 2 (KDE 4.1.85) on 18th midnight. After a ~108 MB upgrade and a reboot, there have been many positive changes. Of the numerous upgrades, I noticed these:
1. The systray notification daemon fix. Earlier, the daemon showed a green up/down arrow in the systray for showing/hiding the daemon. Clicking on the notification window/pausing the transfer would crash the whole plasma workspace. Now, there is a modification to the appearance of the daemon. The notification is *much* stable. It does not crash anymore. I can successfull stop, pause and resume my transfers from the daemon itself.
2. Thumbnail previews for folder-view have been fixed. Earlier, it would not successfully show thumbnails for some png’s and jpeg’s. Now everything looks perfect. I can choose which thumbnails to display and which not (choose, as in select the file formats to display the thumbnail for).
3. Keyboard shortcuts have been fixed. Now all my global shortcuts work. That means I can take screenshots by pressing “Prt Scr” … yay!!
4. The calendar plasma widget has been modified to look better. Earlier, it was a cluttered look, but now, it looks better. What I see is the spacing has been increased and made uniform:
5. Gwenview crop tool has also been fixed. Now when I crop a portion of an image, the selector does not go out of the image scope (boundary). Earlier, I had to be careful in cropping a portion of an image close to it’s boundary.
6. KWin effects: Significant changes have been made to the kwin effects. They now work smoother with EXA rendering method. I have now removed the forcing of XAA. Even gtk apps like firefox also do well with EXA.
I also see a bunch of new plugins working, like the desktop sphere, cylinder, the magic lamp (though this was working in beta 1 also).
7. Grouping has been polished. Manual grouping still is broken, but forcing of rows and auto grouping works perfectly.
8. The plasma menu (the cashew at the top right side) has also been fixed. Now it does not become bigger each time it is opened!
9. KRunner has added functionality viz spell checking, web-history, a smart unit converter, calculator and many more:
10. Pinheiro‘s AIR wallpaper looks great. With the latest trunk, you would see this wallpaper as a new addition.
^^ This was a screeny from my friend neverendingo‘s desktop posted here at the KDE forums.
So that would be what all I could notice in a day. With added stability, beta 2 is a must try. It has so much more than the 4.1.x releases that you will definitely be surprised and more importantly, pleased! It works like a charm on this old laptop of mine with a GMA900 onboard 
Now I’m eagerly waiting for the final release 
VLC now has a festive get-up! I just noticed this systray icon and the mugshot change after the update on 19th:
Merry Christmas to the VideoLan Team
Finally, I migrated to wordpress — installed it on my domain this time. I must say that wordpress is extremely customizable and has a huge variety of themes and plugins. Migration was just a 1 click affair, and viola, I had all posts and comments imported \o/
So now, looking forward towards shaping up the whole website.
Cheers to the planet!
We have constant changes going on at the KDE Forums – http://forum.kde.org
The fresh new forum already has 2840 members and a team of 2 admins, 7 global moderators, 5 moderators and 3 mentors.
Here is a small summary of the prominent happenings:
Behind the scenes:
In near future:
After reading this announcement, I decided to upgrade to 4.2 beta 1. Though I had been using nightly, but somebody advised me to go for the beta. Naturally, beta has all goodies of nightly (neon), but polished.
After the 135MB upgrade, here are a few basic observations.
Integration of Battery monitor with powerdevil
Lancelot comes by default
This is a great addition to the default widgets.
Systray icons look clean
System tray icons look good with no overlapping.
The zoom slider and better thumbnails
Dolphin shows good looking thumbnails with drop shadows, which can be viewed at a range of zoom levels using the zoom slider.
Previews in the folder view widget
Folder view now also allows selecting individual files with Ctrl + click. Very useful update.
“Examining” and “Transferring” notifications
I fail to understand the purpose of this notification daemon. I open an album in gwenview and keep pressing “Next” and it manages to drive me crazy
Tooltips for plasma
KDE 4.2 has tooltips for plasma. What more, it that when you hover upon another plasma while a tooltip is displayed, the tooltip will gradually move towards the new plasma you are pointing to.
Additionally, you can rotate a plasma widget..
Overall, it’s a great package. Cheers to KDE developers!
Just renovated my webpage: http://sayakbanerjee.co.nr
100% Gimp this time!
A son, brother and friend. An Infoscion. Enjoys programming and making small bits of apps here and there. Wants to conquer the world (well, who doesn't ;D). A geek who has an obsession for ponies. Loves acoustic and wants to play guitar sitting on the Hollywood hill one day!
KDE is a versatile software compilation for all platforms. It is an intuitive and powerful desktop environment that focuses on finding innovative solutions to old and new problems, and creating a vibrant, open atmosphere for experimentation.
» http://www.kde.org