Greetings and salutations. And thanks to Chris for adding me to the planet. =:)

As an aside, there must be a cooler way of introducing oneself to an aggregator, but having wasted 10 minutes of my life trying to think of one (and not having actually come up with anything clevererer), I’ll relegate myself to looking like a doofus and stick a big “Hi, my name is” adhesive tag on my forehead….

Hi. My name is Jason ‘vanRijn’ Kasper. The Kasper part comes from a rich Austrian heritage that I have documented somewhere in a closet. The Jason part my parents decided to slap on me for no good reason, other than that they must have foreseen the Friday the 13th movies coming out in my early childhood years. The vanRijn part I slapped on myself after a bitter “hey, that nick is mine… no, it’s mine… no it’s mine… *smurf*” war over my previous nick of Rembrandt on undernet many years ago. As it turns out, “vanRijn” is near-impossible for Americans to pronounce. I get periodic e-mails from random Dutch peoples that I’ve confused; and I’ve had it for so many years as my nick that I figure I might as well keep it for the duration. (I’ll never admit to it, but at one point I tried changing my nick to ZeroCool but was so quickly mocked that I quickly went back to using vanRijn in defeat.)

I am one of the KPilot hackers as of the last couple of years, and while I have been successful in wandering up into the parental KDE PIM code a few times, time and opportunity have not proven to be on my side for that to happen with any regular frequency, unfortunately. I first got involved in KDE PIM as I was looking to scratch my itch of not having a good syncing solution for my Palm device and the memos on it. I asked Adriaan about contributing code for a new memo conduit that is filesystem-based as opposed to knotes-based and he did such a great job of encouraging and mentoring me that I’m still hacking away with him on the ugly duckling of the KDE PIM suite to this day.

I’m currently mentoring the talented Mister Broeksema and am co-laboring with him on this year’s KPilot Google Summer of Code project which involves a serious refactoring/rethinking of how KPilot’s record-based conduits operate. The intention is that this is phase #1 in our 7-step plan to take over the world, wherein we:

• establish a solid foundation with the common functionality and syncing algorithms pulled up into base, reusable conduit code
• write a concrete implementation of that common functionality (by way of a Keyring conduit, yay!!)
• convert our current conduits over to the new base conduit classes
• …
• and then look at where we can gain synergy with the OpenSync project.

Bertjan is doing an outstanding job of it all, and it’s exciting to see the progress that we’re making. In addition to the SOC work, I’m putting all my available time into getting KPilot ported and functional in the KDE4 environment, which is proving much more difficult than I had thought it would be. The good side of it is that I’m getting to see much more of the KPilot code than I’d previously looked at closely, so I’m able to do spots of cleaning and improving as I go along.

Before joining the KDE PIM team, I was heavily involved in the Blackbox window manager project and wrote and maintained the bbkeys utility (blackbox’s keybindings handler) as well as the bbconf program (the blackbox GUI configurator) and its predecessors, bbkeysConfigGtk (*twitch*) and bbkeysConfigC–and yes, all the cool kids named their blackbox-related programs starting with “bb”.

I am an Open Source developer and hacker by nature, heart, and core. It is what I am most passionate about in this world, outside of my family, and it’s been that way since I first broke into the elementary-school classrooms to hack on Apple ][‘s after hours in my grade-school years. While Open Source development is not yet what I am able to do for a paid profession (but I am earnestly seeking ways to remedy that), I am a very active Open Source evangelist in the corporate/enterprise environments that I work in as an IS Developer/Architect. I insist on being living proof that the FOSS desktop is ready for the enterprise by running and using only it on my work laptop and being quite vocal about it to anyone who’ll listen.

So… anyway… hello, planet. It’s very nice to meet you. =:) And if you don’t mind, I’ll take this sticker off my forehead now….