okular lightning talk

Today Pino and me did a lighting talk in aKademy 2006 about okular. It was quite good accepted. Assistants liked all the cool new features okular has like REAL text selection, page rotation, overview mode, LOTS of document format support and annotation support. In short, okular rocks :-) As everything it could rock even more so do not hesitate to join us on #kpdf freenode channel and help us building the coolest document viewer out there.

aKademy 2006 kdeedu BOF notes

kdeedu has its bof today, if you are interested in what we talked there read our notes!

aKademy 2006 kdeedu BOF notes

aKademy 2006 kdegames BOF notes

You can find them at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDEgames+Akademy+2006+BOF+Notes

Summary:
* Identify if any game can be dropped
* Invite other programs to join the extragear
* #kdegames channel exists!
* We want to attract all that games programmers that use scripting

aKademy - Day 1

Opening
The typical opening by politicians and university people but this time people had a Unix background so they knew what they were talking about, not like last year in Málaga when some of the people were just there "because i put money and i want to speak"


Keynote - Looking ourselves in the eye
Aaron spoke about ourselves, what KDE is, what are our challenges and what we can do to succeed even more. Basically we are a reef and we need to get KDE4 out :-D Also a nice presentation with photos of some KDE people in the most embarassment moments he could find.


QtDBus
Thiago explained us why we are going to use Dbus for KDE4, it is basically a DCOP solution but with the benefit that there are much more language bindings so we have more possibilities to have our application used, that is cool :-)


Portland
Waldo was here to explain us the necessity ISV and ISD have for xdg-utils, because they don't want to choose a specific desktop for their independent application so they need to have programs that let them install an icon, launch a browser or controll the screensaver without having to code specifically for KDE/Gnome/etc.


Phonons in Solids
And interesting talk about two of the new technologies we are going to have in KDE4. Solid is going to give as independent access to the hardware system which is a good thing like you as a KDE developer do not want to care if you are interacting with a Linux kernel, a FreeBSD kernel or a Windows kernel. Solid in the other hand is providing the application developers a quite powerful set of classes to do audio and video output and input. Instead of beign a full system like we had with arts it's based on existing code that is good because we code less and have the same functionality :-)


Keynote - The State of the Linux Desktop
John Cherry gave and overview of what the OSDL is, and specifically which are the goals of the Desktop part of the OSDL. Of course it includes the Portland initiative Waldo spoke about, but they also do market studies about Linux adoption and usage around the world. Of course you always need to take these figures with one or two grains of salt, but it seems we have a small but steadly growing percentage of users around the world, so "The Year Of The Linux Desktop" is near ;-)


Competition and Cooperation
A talk by John Palmieri (J5), a Gnome hacker, and no, we did not kill him ;-) At least not publically... He did a quite intelligent talk speaking why we are not really "the enemy" as fighting for a 1-5% market share is ridiculous when the major player has 95% of the market. He also spoke about the dynamics that keep KDE and Gnome improving, like the fact that when you see something in Gnome that is nice, you implement it in KDE and [try to] make it a bit better, then Gnomies see our implemtenation and improve theirs and so on.


Ricoh
That was a talk that really did not fit much in the KDE conference, as it was not Desktop oriented, but was quite interesting because i learnt how Ricoh have opensourced the stack that powers their [high-end?] printers, based on BSD kernel and a Java Framework, and that has made people some crazy things like implement Sudoku/Tetris/etc for the printers, wait, did i say it was not Desktop oriented? Some of their printers have a resolution of up to 800x600 so i think we could make a KDE version for Ricoh printers :-D Anyone up to the job?


Multi-Head RandR
Keith Packard from Intel and one of the X gods spoke about auto detection, auto configuration and autoAnything of X screens and how that can make us save battery power for our little and battery hungry laptops. Really my description is not good enough for the coolness he showed us in the demonstration.


Organization of KDE Events
Martijn and Claire illustrated us about how and what we should to to organize a [KDE] event, ranging from BIG things like aKademy or the KDE 4 Series meetings to some smaller things like regional meetings. Interesting to attend but difficult to explain, sorry for you guys that were not there!


KDE Support
Kevin Krammer explained us the huge amount of work that has to be done in order to help our ever growing user base. He knows that developers are getting out of user support because there are too many users to read their mails and help, so we need a new kind of people to do the interfacing between the developers and the users. That is a rewarding and also sometimes difficult work, but he insisted you can get into it without having much or any technical knowledge of KDE. So if you ever wondered what you could do for KDE if you do not have developing/translating/artwork/documentation skills, you just found your area! Join the support guys!


How To Make Your Program Popular
Inge spoke about his experience about beign the KOffice Marketing person. He clarified us that he really is not doing marketing, but just promotion that is a smaller subset of Marketing. Also it is "easy" to improve the promotion of your application, blog about it, send news to The Dot, speak of how cool it is to your friends and colleagues and soon you will create a nice promotion snowball :-) In the specific case of KOffice he told us that they have maybe even doubled the developer community by getting more awareness and also they have the "Next cool thing in Office Suites" tag so everyone mentions KOffice when speaking about ODF and such. Good work Inge!

KMahjongg 10th best Linux Game :-)

Techgage has voted the best 10 Linux games and KMahjongg is the 10th one :-) Congratulations to everyone involved! And be sure it will continue rocking thanks to Mauricio it will surely rock even more :-)

aKademy-es 2006 apology

At Akademy-es 2006 we did two contests that had rather nice prizes, unfortunately, the organizer (no, that's not me) has virtually disappeared from the face of earth, does not answer e-mails and does not go to LUG meetings, so i have no way to contact and put pressure on him.

So, sorry, you will probably end up without prizes and there's nothing i can do about it :-/

okular talk tomorrow

I know it's a bit late, but anyway i'll say it :D Tomorrow in my LUG we do a small series of talks where i'll do a small talk presenting okular and showing that thing that seems to be KDE 4. So if you are from barcelona get up yourself and join us. In the morning i'll also probably be on the local event of the Software Freedom Day.

At last :-)

It has been a bit more difficult than what i expected, but finally got my driving license this morning. It was the fifth attempt but better fifth than sixth :D

kdegames revival

kdegames is getting hot :-) Just look at the mailing list number of messages or at the big number of replies my kmahjongg blog created. So now that kdegames has again a reasonable number of people we have created the #kdegames IRC channel so if you are interesed in game development or want to suggest some features for existing games do not hesitate to drop by and have a nice talk!

Poppler for windows

The most people that reach my blog from google are looking for the poppler-windows blog, so i thought i would do another one mentioning the cool Sumatra PDF Viewer by Krzysztof Kowalczyk. So if you want a poppler-based PDF viewer for windows, have a look at Sumatra PDF.

Konversation 1.0 out

Well, i'm not a konversation developer, only an user and translator, so i should not be really be doing this but as it seems the konversation team ran out of steam with the packagement and last minute fixes i'm going to spread it.

Konversation 1.0 is out :-)

Check out the HUGE changelog at the Konversation homepage.

P.S: Konversation is a nice IRC client for KDE ;-)

Weird reality

You go with a friend and buy a laptop. Boot it up, find Windows preintalled, start up the demo that is on the desktop that says "Know your new XXX computer" and it crashes. You do all the upgrades, start up the demo again and it crashes.

I'm still wondering if XXX company does quality control or they just pack up things and send them to the shops.

I'm not happy.

Update: I did not want to gave the names but as people keep asking shop is MediaMarket and laptop is an Asus Z93

Update 2: He went to the shop and got another one of the same model and seems to be working fine now :-)

No internet

Unless a miracle has ocurred today and someone materialized from nowhere to fix my phone i'm without internet all the weekend and already for 3 days so if you need me for something or are wondering why i seem to suddenly have gone dead is because someone unplugged my phone cable from the cable box that is outside my building and now i'm waiting a worker from phone company to come and fix it.

Update: Seems phone company workers also work on saturday and i just got my connection fixed :-)