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.
A blog about random things and sometimes about my work translating and developing KDE and anything
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Friday, July 08, 2005
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 :-)
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 :-)
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
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 :-/
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 :-/
Saturday, July 02, 2005
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 ;-)
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.
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.