Wednesday, May 30, 2007

poppler 0.6 Release Candidate 1 released

Today i released poppler 0.5.9 aka 0.6 Release Candidate 1, this is the first time i do a release on the poppler project, so hope i did it right :-D

Changes include:
- Merge xpdf 3.02 changes
- Qt4 frontend is not marked anymore as unstable
- Support for Sound objects
- Support for Opening/Closing page actions
- Support for page duration
- Improve PS Tokenizer performance thanks to Scott Turner
- Various speed ups by Krzysztof Kowalczyk
- Beginning of Interactive Form support by Julien Rebetez
- xpdfrc is no longer used for anything
- Add AbiWord output device and pdftoabw program by Jauco Noordzij
- Fix security issue MOAB-06-01-2007
- Lots of bugs fixed

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

We are targetting 27th June for 0.6 release, but that may slip depending on feedback from this release.

sjfonts 2.0.2 released

Today i released sjfonts 2.0.2, only change is the addition of ĞğŞşİı characters to SteveHand font. Thanks goes to Serdar Soytetir!

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Where's my ballot paper?

I'm upset, VERY upset. I just came back from the electoral college for Spanish 2007 municipal elections and i had to spend at least 5 minutes in front of all the stacks of ballot papers looking for the one i wanted.

And the problem was not that there were much possibilities to vote (that would have been a GOOD THING™). The problem is that someone had put other party ballot papers on the top of the stack of the party i wanted to vote, so i had to actually realize there was two stacks with the same ballot papers and then start removing ballot papers from the top of both until i actually found the one i wanted to get.

I feel shame of living in the same neighborhood than someone so dull and simple that wants to fuck that small party i vote and doesn't have a better idea than putting an even small party ballots on top of it.

And then i went to complain to municipal representative and he said something that can be summarized as "Shit happens", Very helpful, eh? :-/ He could have said "I'll double check next time", even if it had been false it would have made me feel better.

Monday, May 21, 2007

aKademy 2007 GPG Signing Party

Anne Wilson has kindly offered to coordinate the key signing party for aKademy 2007. If you are going to be on Glasgow go to http://akademy2007.kde.org/conference/keysigning.php, follow the instructions and you will get your key signed by fellow KDE people :-)

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Car's working again

Yesterday the car was not working, but it was due to the battery was empty, a dude from the RACC came and started the car with his battery. So my father and I went around to do some kilometers and now everything is working again :-)

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Bring on good old mechanical things!

That may seem a strange sentence coming from a computer science person like me, but at this moment i'm hating electronics.

Today i lost a lunch with some friends from one of the local LUGs because the Renault Megane we bought second hand two weeks ago decided to act weird. This car is equipped with a proximity sensor (maybe RFID?) that comes in a card, so to open it you just have to go near the car and open it. And to start it you just have to press the brake pedal and push the "Start" button.

My father did this at 6 am and came back home at 6:30 am to get the keys of the old car because he could not get it started.

This morning one our before the lunch time i did the same, went into the car, pressed the brake pedal and pushed the Start button, and a "Electronics Problem" message came up on the status panel. I still had time so i could have went lunching with the metro, so i got off the car and pressed the close button on the card to close the car.

No reaction.

So i pull off a key that is inserted on the card and use it to close driver's door, but doing that still leaves co-pilot door and back door open.

ARG!

So i call try to call previous owner of the car, my uncle, and he says he never had this problem.

Then i go home, pick up the car's manual and see it says there's a mechanical lock on doors you can use to lock them, good! Back onto the car i discover there's no suck lock on my car :-@

I go home again, look into the internet a Renault number, phone them and i explain them the problem. The dude says that i should get onto the car, press the "lock doors button" and then go off it and close driver's door with the key. Back onto the car i try that, doesn't work either, opening driver's door unlocks all other doors.

At this point my mother and I were already pretty desperate. At that moment i remembered a friend whose sister had a Megane too. I phoned her and luckily she was with her sister. And bam! she had the solution, it seems the car thought it was powered on, so all i had to do was put the card onto the slot that there's on the car, push the "Start" button twice and then a "Please remove the card" message appeared, so the car thought it was off, we got off the car and could even close all the doors using the card buttons.

We still did not try to get the engine started again, that will have to wait for tomorrow, but at least we could close the doors! Unfortunately more than hour had passed with all that and i could not make to the lunch :-(

So next time you design something cool with electronics, please think of the failure scenario and that a mechanical way to fix it is always welcome!

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

KTuberling SVG

You may have read the list of games not making the cut for KDE 4.0 at Johann's blog. KTuberling was in the position of "We all love (or have relatives that love it) it but nobody is working on it".

So i got up my mind and started coding the SVG port, in two days i already had it working, with exception of text, everyone that has tried to draw text in Qt, knows is not so easy as it might seem, but i hope to get it working in less than a week.

Mandatory screenshot:


I have not made any optimization attempt and it works quite snappy on my machine, but it is a fast machine so if anyone with a slower machine could test it and give me his opinion i'd be happy.

Of course any comment is welcome (except "You should be working on something more important")

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Started aKademy Arrival and Departure pages at wiki

So i started Arrival at aKademy 2007 and Departure from aKademy 2007 when you can voluntarily write yourself to try to find partners to make the trip from and to the hostel more KDE oriented :-)

See you in Glasgow :-)

Update: Seems that was already started on techbase, wonder why someone decided TECH base is a good place for that, but oh well, please go to http://techbase.kde.org/Events/Akademy2007/Attendees if you want to share your information.