2. Contributing Authors

David Faure is a French KDE Developer (now living in the U.K.) working for MandrakeSoft. He maintains the file manager (Konqueror) and works on the KDE libraries (component technology and network transparency) and the KOffice framework. David wrote a series of articles on KDE programming for Linux Magazine France.

Kurt Granroth is a KDE Core member, developer, and evangelist and has been addicted to KDE since being introduced to it two years ago. He started out with the "gateway" apps, such as KBiff and KAppTemplate, but soon moved into the "hard" stuff—the base KDE libraries and applications. He dives daily into a veritable soup of acronyms such as "XML-UI GUI infrastructure" and "XML-RPC to DCOP gateway." Now, the SuSE Labs pay Kurt to feed his habit of working on KDE nearly every waking hour by employing him as a full-time Open Source developer. Those hours that aren't spent on KDE are covered by his wife and daughter in their Phoenix, Arizona home. He can always be reached at <granroth@kde.org> and http://www.granroth.org.

Daniel Marjamäki mainly contributes to the KDE project by writing documents for KDE programmers, and his current project is a dynamic KDE programming tutorial. Daniel lives in Sweden, in a small town called Skävde. Daniel loves programming with all his heart and is a student at the University of Skävde, where he studies computers and electronics.

Ralf Nolden was born on January 30, 1973 in Mayen, Germany. In 1996 he began his studies to become an electrotechnical engineer at the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, and there began work with UNIX Systems as well as KDE. Ralf has been involved with the KDevelop project since its inception in 1998. Since then, he's coded on the KDevelop IDE itself, written the handbooks, and helped in customer support online. He also gives presentations of KDevelop at IT conventions. He's involved in porting KDE to SCO's UnixWare7 Operating System and wants to move to the United States after he has finished his diploma at the university.

Charles Samuels has been known to code too much and has accepted that it is difficult to get him to stop. His actual existence has been questioned, but he claims to be a student living in San Jose, CA. Charles is an active KDE user and developer—working on KNotify and konv and intends to turn his hobby into a career.

Espen Sand received a MSc. degree in electrical engineering (micro electronics design) at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in 1995 and is employed as a research scientist at Norsk Elektro Optikk A/S, a Norwegian R/D firm. Espen's involvement with the KDE project began in late 1998. He has designed and developed the next generation KDE hex editor and participated in improving user-interface library (kdeui) elements such as the KDialogBase and KJanusWidget classes. He made the standard "About KDE" dialog and enjoys improving software whenever needed.

Cristian Tibirna's main contributions to KDE include developing a smart window placement algorithm and magnetic borders algorithm in a window manager, collaborating on the graphical effects engines, maintaining the international keyboard applet, and making tiny code adjustments in many parts of the KDE source code base. He's a contributor to news and how-to-help pages on the KDE main Web site, a member of the Core Team, and an official representative for Canada. Cristian is a chemical engineering Ph.D. student in his last months of studies. He's specializing in high-level numerical simulation techniques. Cristian has a strong interest in object-oriented programming and finds that his hobby, KDE, is a particularly interesting field of application for it. Cristian has also a great "real-world" passion: his son and his wife. They are both happy KDE testers and they finally learned to accept Cristian's endless hours on his computers.

Stefan Westerfeld is the main developer of the KDE 2.0 multimedia technology. He started loving UNIX-like operating systems at the age of 16, when he used one to write his own BBS system in C++; he then ran a BBS for a few years on it. After that, he worked on a commercial medical imaging application with some real-time requirements. But the preferred program he wrote is aRts, a free modular real-time synthesizer, which is also the base for the KDE multimedia work he is doing. Besides programming, he is studying computer science and philosophy.