Google Summer of Code T-Shirt

I just got my Google SoC T-Shirt, it's a nice black t-shirt with a small but good enough SoC logo on the front and Google's brand on one of the arms. Thanks Google for that gift :-)

Kombination web page is on

Ok, after Berlios refused us, gna, as some people suggested, has accepted us. So we already have a project page, a home page (although a bit ugly ATM) and a mailing list. So come and join the fun!

Poppler 0.4.3 release is out

Well it's not a big release, but it fixes some security problems and some crashes so it is worth updating if you are using poppler. Grab it at http://poppler.freedesktop.org/.

On the current *news* going all over the net, i think it's a good thing Linus uses KDE and promotes its use, on the other hand there is no need to insult the Gnomes as we are all friends, you know?

Amazon--++

First of all -- for not beign able of shipping a calendar from germany to spain without it getting lost/stealt/wathever

Then ++ for returning the money they charged me with such diligence.

Berlios--

********
Due to resource limitations we cannot support more games or game frameworks.

The BerliOS Crew
********

So they refused to host kombination web page, nice for them, thanks and bye, i'm not suggestion berlios as a sourceforge alternative to anyone anymore.

Poppler, Qt4, Windows and my desktop

Seems making poppler compile under Windows is not that difficult, mingw, some handfile editing of Makefiles and some luck gave me that


That is, an almost working poppler-qt4 test, if it not was because no fonts are rendered :-D So yes, all people that keep asking if poppler is portable to windows, it is, we just need you to do the fine tuning ;-)

Many will consider me a heretic for that kind of Windows work, but linux on my laptop suffered some problems lately due to having Mandriva Cooker installed and my main desktop machine seems to have died completely (had a kernel panic when i came back from seeing TV and it won't boot :-S)

Hello Planet Freedesktop!

To Planet KDE, i'm now member of Planet Freedesktop also ;-)

This is my presentation post for FreeDesktop planet readers. I work mainly on KDE, as maintainer of kpdf and some other apps, but i'm also an active developer on freedesktop cvs due to beign one of the main commiters to poppler cvs tree.

In Poppler related news i can tell that we have already merged the xpdf 3.01 changes in the tree, that mainly give us support for images with alpha channel and we are trying to get a new release, that will probably be qualified as "unstable", as there are quite heavy changes, to get some testing out there :-)

Mozilla and their i18n problems

First of all note this is AFAIK and that i'm not a mozilla developer nor specialist nor user (only when i'm on windows that is not much).
You probably noted that yesterday Mozilla tried to eclipse our 3.5 release with Firefox 1.5 release, i thought, ok, i'll download it so my father can use it on its Windows machine, so there i go to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all.html to get the catalan version of Firefox 1.5 for Windows and wooops, it's not there :-/ So my father is forced to use the old 1.0.7 version.
Obviously i'm not requesting to have a fully 100% translated catalan version of Firefox when we don't have one in KDE (http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/ca/index.php) but at least a 1.5 release reusing the strings from 1.0.7 would be enough as i'm almost sure most strings are the same, but Mozilla foundation has historically been a bit bad on the i18n side making translation teams provide the i18n'ed binaries instead of doing the build along the English binary and that cause that kind of problems.
I hope they can solve this issue with i18n as it's one of the strong points Free Software has.

KDE 3.5 released!

Announcement

My contributions to this release are some minor features in kpdf like support for images with alpha channels and two new programs inside kdeedu.

Also don't forget to visit the visual guide for other highlights.

Congrats to everyone involved in this release!!!

The second

Some days ago my expedient on my university's online campus got updated to reflect i have the second best average mark of the 213 people that ended the CS degree this year, now my only duty left is to discover who was number one and kill congrat him.

On side news: Spanish media reports that the newborn princess will get university level studies, damn! THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Kombination

You may remember a past blog (http://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2005/09/some-gaming.html) about two games i was writing for KDE4. Kiriki has not changed anything since it can be said to be finished, but crossedWords changed its name to Kombination (damn K-names! ;-)) and has progressed a lot as you can see here thanks to Pino Toscano helping with it. You can actually play with the exception that scoring does not work, blank tile can not be changed to a letter and that word checking does not work.

And word checking is our largest problem by now. With word checking i mean "how to decide if a word is valid or not".
The first obvious thing one thinks is "ask the other users", but you have to think as a game designer that other players can be "bad people" and always refuse your words so that solution has this problem.
Second obvious thing is "use kspell", but this has problems as for example in spanish you play with unaccentuaded tiles, so you do not create "balcón" but "balcon" so kspell will tell you that word is invalid.
Third obvious thing is "use a preprocessed list only with acceptable words even if they are written wrong", that solution also has problems, italian word list extracted from aspell is 25Mb, spanish one is 6.5Mb and catalan 149Mb!!! that means that loading that into memory to check needs a lot of mem and that kombination would be HUGE to distribute.

Anyone has a fourth idea?

BTW you can get kombination from /branches/work/kde4/playground/games/kombination/

I hate monarchy

This is just a rant and not KDE related, if you are reading this from the planet you can just skip it.

Well, the title says it all, i can not stand monarchy, those people that break the rules, "law is the same for everybody" they say, yeah, that's why there's someone out there that will be the ruler of my country just by having been born, i think i was not given that right when i was born.

My hate has always been big, but today there was the drop that made the glass full; the princess entered the hospital to give born to a new bloodsucker from Spanish monarchy and TV is making connections to the hospital each fives minutes just to report there are no news!!! Come on! I don't give a damn if he is born or not, but i could *try to understand* a connection if the new prince has been born, but just stopping a movie each 5 minutes to tell there's no news is just insane!

Viva la República!

It's official, i've been unfair

When i said "Mandriva 2006.0 does not like KDE" i should have said "Mandriva 2006.0 does not like KDE enough to have a IMHO serious bug fixed before their official release".

People seem to have interpreted that Mandriva is anti-KDE and that is of course wrong.

It's official, Mandriva 2006.0 does not like KDE

Why do you ask? Well the reason is http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16432, they have a bug in all their Qt/KDE programs that is not present if you use the original Qt library, so they are patching the library to work worse than the original one, great...

KGeography and Tajik

Just got a nice mail from Roger Kovacs about the Tajik translation of KGeography Albert, Just wanted to share some positive events surrounding KGeography. Tajikistan is a small poor nation, somewhat isolated, and quite behind in technology. A small NGO in Dushanbe called Youth Opportunities, has formed a student Linux User Group called SDTLUG for School Days Tajik Linux User Group. These middle and high school students chose to translate KGeography as their primary project. So you will see the translations for "tg" growing in the next months. I don't want to flood your e-mail, but if you would like some photos of the students, I can send them along. For more information about Linux in Tajikistan you can look at www.tajikngo.org (although Victor, the director of Youth Opportunities has just started to redo the web site - you can still take a look around.) I know the students will probably learn more about Geography from doing the translation work, than they would in class! In addition, some of the students in the LUG know Russian as their primary language, and they have contacted the Russian team and will be submitting translations to them to include in svn. Thanks for the great tool - it provides in so many ways! Roger Kovacs Thanks for that! I'm glad my program helps people :-)

Some gaming

Lately i've been coding some Qt4/KDE4 small things, the first one is a clone of gtali (that is a yahtzee clone) called kiriki, it can be found at branches/work/kde4/playground/games/kiriki and it's [almost] done. Comments accepted :-)



The second one is a scrabble clone, that is going to be MUCH more difficult and i've been coding for it only 2 or 3 hours in total but i already have a nice board, thanks to Danny Allen of course, my colors where much uglier :-D

BTW i need a GOOD name for that, current working name is crossedwords but it's ugly IMHO

Awarded at Akademy!

Wooooooooooooooo, both Enrico and me have been awarded in aKademy 2005 in the "Best new application or improvement to an existing application in the last year" category thanks to our KPDF work. Thanks to all of you that sent patches or reported wishes or bugs, and of course thanks the jury for choosing us.

update: forgot to mention the other winners with all the excitation :-D
In the "Best non-application contribution (eg for documentation, artwork, web work, translation, library development or similar) in the last year" Lauri got awarded by is work in the documentation team
In the "Jury's choice for contribution to KDE, especially (but not exclusively) in the last year" both coolo and ossi got awarded for the SVN transition

Akademy day 3 talks

Today has been a quite interesting day

Keynote from Trolltech
Very interesting figures about the [quite widespread IMHO] adoption of Qt, most impresive is that there were 94 people working for them at the beginning of the year and they are now up to 140!!!

Multimedia API for KDE4
Quite interesting too, there will be some nice features in KDE4 related to multimedia, KDEMM will have the possibility of having different backends for the same frontend, that will also allow backend API changes (gstreamer we know you) without that meaning KDEMM API changes

2005 KDE-Edu BOF
Quite nice brainstorming about what to do with edu apps for KDE4, summary at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=28%20August%20meeting

The Poppler Library
Hey dudes! That was my presentation, i was afraid no-one would come beign that late in the afternoon and having to battle with Mathieu Chouinard and Simon Hausmann, but at last there were about 7 person there (but some heavy dudes likes Cornelius and Riddell there), not that much, but that was good because i was a little worried as that was my first conference in english ever, it seems my pronuntiation was good enough as Riddell's transcript seems to have all it right :-D
BTW you can get the slides at http://conference2005.kde.org/slides/poppler.kpr or http://conference2005.kde.org/slides/poppler/index.html if you don't have KPresenter installed. You can also read the transcript (interesting because it features the small questions and answers session) at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Poppler+Library+Talk
Finally the videos are available at http://ktown.kde.org/akademy2005/

Akademy day 2 talks

Krita
Wow, Krita has needed a long time to get got shape (almost 6 years since KImageShop) but the shape IS really good. Congrats to all the Krita team as they have some features that are very rare among free-software image editors for linux

KCall
Don't know if it was that the talk was boring or if it was that i was tired but i was in a almost-slept state for all the talk, so i can not report much apart from KCall beign a VoIP program and it beign rewritten as part of a Google Summer of Code

Firefox and KDE
Not much new as someone already said, but good news that Dirk is getting payed to do the port and that things may be finally get rolling.

Quanta and docboocks
Another WOW goes for Quanta, not only a very powerful HTML application but a killer editor for our documentation team as it gives many nice features to be able of editing docbooks

That's all for today, more tomorrow :-D
And BTW don't forget to go to http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Talks+%40+aKademy+2005 to read some nice transcripts

Akademy day 1 talks

Novell Desktop
Not too good IMHO, it was a user oriented talk given to a hacker audience, moreover the slides told that evolution was *better* than kontact :-S At least they use kopete :-)

mEduxa
Another not so good talk for a KDE conference IMHO, it was mostly oriented to problems related with netsharing, etc. Very few KDE things related, just how they got to choose over gnome and not much more.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu
That was a really misleading title, as there was nothing Ubunti and Kubuntu related. What Mark did was talk about kollaboration successes in things like Wikipedia and things he is trying to do to create that kind of kollaboration on Distro and upstream related things (bugs, translations, etc)

NX
Never seen NX in action before, but in a word, it's WONDERFUL! I see why Kurt is pushing to have a free-as-in-speech NX client

And more... We have all been invited to a party on the behalf of Novell, THANKS!!

I'm in malaga!

I just arrived to Málaga, i'm sharing the residence apartment with aseigo and someone else that is still sleeping :D
I've already met chouimat and saw a lot of people sitting in some tables at the bar discussing but last night i slept only 2 hours so i'm going to try to sleep a bit now.

PS in kpdf

You may have noticed that in kpdf we now open PS files too if ps2pdf is present on the system. There has been quite a heated discussion about if using such a trick is good or not.

I'll tell why we have added it, the results are quite acceptable, in any case, if you get bad results, well, it's kpdf, you explicitely opened a PS file with it and got the "Converting from ps to pdf..." message, so if it is not completely fine you should guess why. AND you get all that "nice" features kpdf has like text search that kghostview does not has.

Coin3D conference

Today's conference i've attended in the Free Software convention i mentioned yesterday has been about Coin3D. It has been given by Karin Kosina, SiM developer and FSFE member, and she's a woman, glad to have woman at that high level.

As a summary i'll tell you that the conference has been a introduction to Coin3D that is a nice set of libraries to work with 3D graphics at a higher level than using OpenGL. The results are quite fascinating as you can get quite impressive results with only a few lines of code. Furthermore the lib is completely compatible with OpenInventor 2.1 API.

As a Qt/KDE related note i'll say that they use Qt has the default gui binding library for their library, she said they also had bindings for GTK, MFC and Motif available but they were all quite dead and lower quality than the Qt one. Way to go :-)

SkoleLinux conference

Today i have assisted to a SkoleLinux conference given as a talk of IV Jornades de Programari Lliure.

The talk has been given by Markus Gamenius, it has been quite informative about how SkoleLinux is being quite successful as there are already 200 schools from all around the world that use it. He has also commented that there is commercial support given for the distribution by four companies and that is hurting them because they are small and compete with theyselves and with the others (IBM, MS, etc) so they want to merge in a SkoleLinux Inc., a good move. He also has spoken of the pressions schools have by MS and from some people from the government not to ditch MS, nothing new, but it always surprises me when i see the corruption even advanced countries have.

In the KDE related side, he has explained that they choose KDE instead of gnome because the thin clients they use (LTSP) need 2MB when running KDE but 3 when running gnome, quite a win on our side :-). I also felt sad when he said that they were using KDE 2.2, as a side effect on being based on Debian stable, i feel the pain for they users :-/

Call me Mr. Engineer from now on :-)

Well, last Thursday i presented the final project you have to do here in my university before ending the studies (someone told me it's called Master's thesis, others degree dissertation, don't really care), so I'm done with my CS degree and I'm now an "Ingeniero en Informatica" "Computer Science Engineer" or something like that. I got 9.5 out of 10 for my project so i can not be sad about it :-)

Now I'll have to find something to do before i start looking for a job in September so expect my kde contributions to grow a bit, or not ;-) As i may even try to get the Driver's License, as beign 23 and not having it it's beginning to make me feel ashamed ;-)

I am rude and paranoid

Well at least that is what krh says, but i don't think he is right. Moreover i think he does not even know how to read English or maybe my English is bad enough to be unreadable.

I'll explain the situation.

He has asked that all my patches go though the mailing list so we can discuss them, a fair thing. The problem is that all/most of my patches are being put back by small even sometimes bad suggestions (see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/2005-June/000517.html where he suggests changing an enum to an int). BUT i COULD live with that.

The big problem is when he goes on and commits http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/2005-June/000541.html a HUGE patch that allows real selection (a nice thing) but without sending it to the mailing list. Where is the discussion? That is what really makes me sad, my patches have to be discussed but his not, maybe being a Red Hat employee gives you superpowers and your patches are never bad? Not sure about that...

This makes me wonder if what everyone says about fd.org is right and that all they want is to drag kde people to make them loose their time trying to get their patches accepted. I'm almost sure this is not true ;-) but it is what it really seems to be happening.

So i send him a mail explaining that and all i got is an answer saying I'm rude and paranoid, that he has made all he can to make his selection patch available for all backends and that it's kpdf devels choice to work or not on poppler.

So here is my answer Kristian, i do not care if the selection patch is available or not for all the backends or not (well i do, but the mail was not about this), what i do care is about the DOUBLE moral there is in patches, mine got discussed and yours not. Also you should not say that i can choose not to work with poppler, as if kpdf does not get to use poppler, poppler will be just an evince extension, and you don't want that, right?

Update: Per Kristian's request i've made the mails public at aacidtokrh and krhtoaacid.

Testers wanted

The last few days i have been trying to decompose pdftk into a library plus a binary that uses it instead of a monolithic binary so that we can use that lib to implement wish #86787. I have almost finished but i would like that some testers tried the package to see if the autotools thing I've created works (pdftk was using hardcoded makefiles) and if pdftk binary i produce has the same behavior old one had (you have to be a previous pdftk user to know that ;))

The package can be downloaded from http://kgeography.berlios.de/pdftklib.tar.bz2 and to test it you need to do the usual

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix /usr
make
make install

Keep in mind that --prefix /usr may not be the "right" place in your system and that make install will overwrite your old pdftk so backup it elsewhere

So please if you try it leave a comment saying the system you use and if it worked or not.

KDE hidden powers

Today i discovered one of the lots of the powerful things you can do thanks to kde. Imagine you are writing a script to decompress a tar.bz2 and install it somewhere, imagine the target user may not even have bzip2 installed but you know for sure he has kde installed, what do you do?

kfmclient copy tar:/path/to/the/file.tar.bz2 /path/to/the/new/destination

And voilà, the tar.bz2 is descompressed inside /path/to/the/new/destination :-)

Mad at bash

Something strange is happening with my shell, and it is bad because it makes kde configure fail, let's see if someone can help me and tell me why

x=`gcc -print-prog-name=ld`
y=ld
echo $x
echo $y
if test $x = $y; then
        echo equal
else
        echo not equal
fi

gives me this result

$ ./test.sh
ld
ld
not equal

I'm deseperate :-(

Update: I've fixed it now, it was a hack i did to colorgcc to make it work with unsermake that was making gcc return "strange" things. Thanks to all that ofered help both here and in #kde-devel

More on CIA

You may have noticed that the #kde-commits channel is working again as http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/kde is listing the commits in the recent messages part. You may have noticed too that for example http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/kde/kdebase is not getting the kdebase messages, that is due to the script Dirk installed on the KDE subversion server is not the best cia people provide. The problem is that the best one needs regexps to know where each commit really went, so if you want this to work, please have a look at http://cia.navi.cx/clients/svn/ciabot_svn.py and get the correct regexps for each project and subproject. If you make it work do not hesitate to contact me or Dirk so we can try to make it work.

KDE and CIA

No, the intelligence agency is not messing with KDE, this blog is about CIA Open Source Notification System. It provides a web page and some bots like the one present at #kde-commits where you can dig info about commits of KDE and a zillion other different projects.

With the change to SVN the #kde-commits bot stopped working, i contacted the #cia guys and they said we were in our own, either we helped debuging the mail parser or installed one of the cia clients on our SVN server.

He wanted us to debug the mail parser because "I only added KDE mail parser to help CIA bootstrap (read get more exposure)", so i had a look at the mail parser and everything seemed fine, after all the SVN commit mails are 99.99% similar to the CVS ones. So as the CIA server itself was not working because they were rebuilding the DB i thought i'd wait and see if it worked.

Today it was clear the mail parser was not working (#kde-commits bot was still silent) so i entered #cia again and after some messages i saw

<CIA-9> micah * r8234 cia/mail/ (dot_procmailrc filter_kde.py): KDE's filter script no longer works properly. Remove it, since it's easier to just give up the special treatment and have them install a real client script.

So all the CIA and #kde-commits fans you better convince our admins to install the svn client if you still want to see that services work.

For me it has been clearly demostrated that we got used by CIA when they needed some exposure and now that they don't need us anymore nothing stops them to throwing us away, IMHO not a nice move.

UPDATE: Dirk fixed it, so thanks a lot, next time coolo says "no" i'll speak to you before making it a state afair :-D

Poppler

You may have noticed that recently xpdf source code has had some code auditing and some problems where found in it. And you may have noticed that meant lots of new releases, xpdf, gpdf, kpdf, koffice, cups, evince, latex(IIRC) and some more, why? you may ask. Because xpdf has not a shared lib so all the projects that want to use xpdf code have to include it in their sources. That obviously sucks for many reasons, a shared lib will be obviously better. That is where poppler comes in. Poppler is a fork of xpdf sources that installs itself as a lib other programs can use. Currently only evince is using it, but Brad Hards has some patches to make the pdf kfile_plugin use it and i've sent the poppler mailing list some patches we had in our (kpdf) sources and i hope they will be accepted, so the next time a vulnerability is found in xpdf code you'll have to update less things, a good thing (TM)

For those who fear a fork

I just wanted to inform you that a few moments after the DRM code was added to KPDF we added a configure switch so if you do

./configure --enable-kpdf-drm=no

you still get the old behaviour. IMHO that rules out any possibility of a fork.

Mantainership is a heavy rock

Since i took kpdf mantainership I've been quite proud of the changes Enrico, Tobias and me have made to it. But all things have its bad faces, and kpdf development have had 2 of them.

First of them happened when i introduced the possibility of running external programs on a user click on a link if the pdf specified this, that was put down by kde-cvs list readers as they said it was a security problem even if we added a dialog asking the user if he wanted to execute the command or not. IMHO that can be an interesting feature in some cases like when doing a presentation, but i can understand the security implications

The second has happened today when Enrico and me have added the DRM handling to PDF, that means, if the pdf says you can not print it, we don't let you do it, and some similar things. That has caused some controversy on #kde-devel as people said that this removes freedom from the user side and that there is no need for us to implement it. IMHO there is a need for this, i mean we don't go on opening password protected files without asking for a password, if the author put a password on it it was because he had good reasons, so if the author decided he did not like his pdf to be printed we do the same as with the password protected the file. Maybe you want to print the file, but should not blame kpdf for not being able to print it, blame the author for being an asshole.

Well i suppose being the mantainer of a program means you have to be prepared for such discussions.