Translate!

Hello, this is Albert speaking from my new KDE 4 i18n/l10n coordinator position.

If you have always wanted to help KDE and you have knowledge of a language different than english you can do it! Join today your local Translation team and you will improve your english but also your native language skills :-)

Translations for KDE4.0 are closing in about 12 days but there will be a 4.0.1 so don't worry of being late!

And congrats to Portuguese team that has a 100% translation!

libspectre 0.1.0 now available

First libspectre release is now available from:
http://libspectre.freedesktop.org/releases/libspectre-0.1.0.tar.gz

What is libspectre
==================
libspectre is a small library for rendering Postscript documents. It provides a convenient easy to use API for handling and rendering Postscript documents.

Dependencies
============
libspectre depends on libgs which is available at http://www.ghostscript.com

More information about libspectre
=================================
Web site: http://libspectre.freedesktop.org

The programming manual: http://libspectre.freedesktop.org/manual

Bug reports and feedback: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ Product: libspectre

And yes, in the TRUE cross-desktop spirit this library is programmed by gnome and KDE people :-)

Valgrind 3.3.0

The cool valgrind crew has released a new version, from the NEWS file:

*********
3.3.0 is a feature release with many significant improvements and the
usual collection of bug fixes. This release supports X86/Linux,
AMD64/Linux, PPC32/Linux and PPC64/Linux. Support for recent distros
(using gcc 4.3, glibc 2.6 and 2.7) has been added.

The main excitement in 3.3.0 is new and improved tools. Helgrind
works again, Massif has been completely overhauled and much improved,
Cachegrind now does branch-misprediction profiling, and a new category
of experimental tools has been created, containing two new tools:
Omega and DRD.
*********

Omega is cool it actually tells you when a leak just happened instead of having to wait to the end of program execution to know you have a leak :D

And i already blogged on how useful helgrind can be to detect problems in thread programs, but i'll say it again, helgrind rocks too!

Terry Pratchett has rare Alzheimer

Today is a bad day :-(

Eek!

Poppler 0.6.3 and Poppler-data 0.2.0 released

Poppler 0.6.3 is available from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.3.tar.gz

Changes since 0.6.2:
 poppler core:
  * Fix crash in extra debug code

 glib frontend:
  * Make sure passwords are passed correctly to poppler core

 Qt frontend:
  * Fix crash on documents that specify an empty date

 build system:
  * Disable gtk tests if the user disabled glib frontend

Poppler-data 0.2.0 is available from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-data-0.2.0.tar.gz and contains lots of new cmaps and nameToUnicode and unicodeMap files so if you are a non strictly latin1 user be sure to grab it.

KDE-EDU Paris meeting summary

So here's my KDE-EDU Paris meeting summary:
* 14 nice people, some people already knew like annma and carsten and new faces like jpwhiting and SaroEngels
* Fixed issues everywhere ktuberling, kalzium, kgeography, blinken, kate, catalan translation, ... Ok, not all are KDE-EDU related but we are KDE developers after all too, right? ;-)
* Fixed an ugly bug together with Jure 'JLP' Repinc about kickoff search not finding items when their GenericName was not defined, it results in ktrader syntax you have to check that properties exist before using them or you get a tree evaluation error, so it is not (GenericName contains Foo) or (Name contains Foo) but ((GenericName exists) and (GenericName contains Foo)) or (Name contains Foo)
* Together with apol we helped a bit Vladimir making Step compilable standalone and as part of playground-edu and BTW if you have not tried Step, do it NOW! It totally ROCKS.
* Helped SaroEngels with an okular problem on CanNotSayTheNamePlatform, it seems KMimeType::findByPath always returns text/plain on the CanNotSayTheNamePlatform so it's actually not a problem in okular.

Preliminary KDE-EDU screenshots^WPhotos

KDE-EDU meeting has started on Mandriva offices at Paris, some quick photos for the impatient.

okular, libgs and crashes on Debian and derivatives

If you are trying postscript rendering on okular, be advised you need to have a recent version, the more recent the best. (around 8.60 or so should good enough)

Unless you use Debian or any of its derivatives that reuse their patches (like Ubuntu) because they are using a patch (06_libpaper_support.dpatch) that makes libgs crash when you reuse the gs instance.

Fortunately for the patch creator there is not any program i know that reused the gs instance, until now. Okular is reusing it and now we crash because of someone patching library code and not being prudent.

So next time you touch library code be prudent! And if you are not the main developer of it be more than prudent!

Translations, Merchandising and a plug

This saturday we hold the KDE 4 Catalan translation marathon, if you want to join KDE Catalan translation team it's the moment! Come and help us making the translation ready!

I have some merchandising left from Akademy-es, 5 baseball caps, 3 t-shirts (1 S, 2 XXL) and "lots" of stickers, if you are from Spain contact me. Of course all money goes to the e.V.

And now the shameless plug!

A friend has started a new Software Company in Barcelona, called AteneaTech, they specialize on Web Accessibility and Usability and with SaaS and any kind of custom development you need. So if you need such a service from anyone, think on them and i'll win a dinner for each new customer that mentions me ;-)

helgrind is back!

Today i was having a hard time debugging some code of mine that used threads and i thought of helgrind, as of valgrind 3.2.3 trying to use it gives you

Helgrind is currently not working, because:
(a) it is not yet ready to handle the Vex IR and the use with 64-bit
platforms introduced in Valgrind 3.0.0
(b) we need to get thread operation tracking working again after
the changes added in Valgrind 2.4.0
If you want to use Helgrind, you'll have to use Valgrind 2.2.0, which is
the most recent Valgrind release that contains a working Helgrind.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Let us know if this is a problem for you.

So i downloaded valgrind 2.2.0, but it complained about me having a too new glibc, so i downloaded valgrind from svn and YES! it's there :-) It made me realize i needed to add QDeepCopy to some QStrings and it is working now :-) Yet again valgrind to the rescue!

Poppler 0.6.2 released

Available from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.2.tar.gz

Changes since 0.6.1:
poppler core:
* Fix CVE-2007-4352, CVE-2007-5392 and CVE-2007-5393
* Fix a crash on documents with wrong CCITTFaxStream
* Fix a crash in the Cairo renderer with invalid embedded fonts
* Fix a crash with invalid TrueType fonts
* Check if font is inside the clip area before rendering
it to a temporary bitmap in the Splash renderer. Fixes crashes on
incorrect documents
* Do not use exit(1) on DCTStream errors
* Detect form fields at any depth level
* Do not generate appearance stream for radio buttons that are not active
* mingw fixes

build system:
* Require fontconfig >= 2.0
* builddir != srcdir fixes

Qt4 frontend:
* Improved documentation

misc:
* Fix FSF address

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Spanish computer shops to sell Free Software

I read from a Mercè Molist article (spanish) that the "Spanish Association of Small and Medium Sized Computer and New Technologies Companys" will inform their clients about free software, computers more compatible with it and how to claim back Windows fee if you bought a Windows preloaded computer. A really nice move, let's see what's its future.

Paris here we go

Just bought my tickets for KDE-edu meeting in Paris. In 40 days i'll join the edu KDE crew to ensure KDE keeps being the best educational desktop out there :-)
BTW, from yesterday to today the plane ticket price was like 15€ more expensive, so if you are planning to come, reserve FAST!

Iberia is weird

So i go to Iberia.es to book some flights. I try to get Barcelona->Paris (just one way) for 30th November. Price is 632 €. OUCH. Then i try Barcelona<->Paris (roundtrip) coming back home the 2th of December and it costs 136€. Errr, what?

Anyone with insight in how flight companies work can explain that nonsense? Or is it just that French hate us and they let us go to do some tourism and come back but not just go? :-D

Update: The french hating us is a JOKE. I've been twice to Paris and it has been great.

Zaragoza here we go

Just bought my tickets for aKademy-es 2007. In 30 days i'll join all the Spain KDE crew and do some talks, party and coding, all in the correct proportion. Now i just need to think what to talk about... And BTW you are ALL invited to join us and enjoy the event, it's free!

Poppler 0.6.1 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.1.tar.gz

Changes since 0.6.0:
 poppler core:
  * Fix printing with different x and y scale
  * Fix crash when Form Fields array contains references to non existent objects
  * Fix crash in CairoOutputDev::drawMaskedImage()
  * Fix embedded file description not working on some cases

 Qt4 frontend:
  * Fix printing issue
  * Avoid double free
  * Fix memory leak when dealing with embedded files

 glib frontend:
  * Fix build with --disable-cairo-output
  * Do not return unknown field type for signature form fields

 build system:
  * Support automake-1.10
  * More compatible sh code in qt.m4

 utils:
  * Fix build on Sun Studio compiler

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

CMake HEAD got faster reinstalls

On Friday Brad King announced on kde-buildsystem@kde.org "Repeat installations are now lightning fast", today i tried the CVS version of CMake (cmake version 2.5-20071007)

Well, it's not lightning fast, but it's a considerable win, here kdebase went from about 240 seconds to 75 seconds, so congrats to the CMake team and thanks for improving CMake in a continous way!

QImage::Format_ARGB32_Premultiplied is your friend

If you have looked at QImage in Qt4 you'll have noticed that there is the typical QImage::Format_RGB32 and QImage::Format_ARGB32 plus QImage::Format_ARGB32_Premultiplied.

Maybe you have wondered why is there, well, i'll tell you, it's FAST.

I have done a simple test rendering 100 times gear-flowers.svg wallpaper in a qimage of 1024x768. The results follow

RGB32: 20351 msec
ARGB32: 39273 msec
ARGB32_Premultiplied: 20248 msec

So if you look at the numbers, you'll see ARGB32_Premultiplied is actually faster than RGB32 that is not even producing correct results.

So QImage::Format_ARGB32_Premultiplied should be probably renamed to QImage::Format_ARGB32_UseMeBecauseImFast :D

Performance of radeon free drivers

The other day, i updated to KUbuntu gutsy and saw it ships a free graphics driver for my Ati X300 card (r300 based). I switched to it from the non-free driver but i have went back.

Why? Well, actually it does work, but it is slow, for example, hiding and showing again a normally sized ktuberling, takes around 180ms on the fglrx driver while it takes 550ms on the radeon driver.

But well, after all, as far as i remember they reverse engineered the driver, so i should congratulate the people doing it, it's a bit slow but works, so people that NEED a free driver or where the non-free one does not work can actually use the card now, thanks :-)

This is with driver 6.7.194 which i would say is latest released version.

UPDATE: Setting the driver to use EXA makes it go as fast or faster than fglrx driver in this scenario of swapping ktuberling windows, now i ask me why this is not the default :-S

UPDATE 2: Now blogger.com newsticker makes CPU go to 100% on both konqueror and firefox. I think i'll wait for the next iteration of the driver.

Why small KDE projects are useful for the big KDE picture?

On Wednesday, Burkhard Lück began sending mails to the kdegames mailing list about the shortcomings we had regarding translations not being loaded, not being possible, etc.

One of the most reported issues was that translations of theme names were not used even though they had been translated. That shocked us as we use the typical KDE way of using .desktop files, so we investigated a bit, and came up with with a very small test case that showed that the kdelibs class for accessing .desktop files was not working correctly.

In less than two hours we had the bug fixed. So that's why small KDE projects like kdegames are useful for KDE, they are as good testers as anyone else.

KUbuntu Gutsy issues

Yesterday i updated to what will be KUbuntu 7.10 to 7.04. Here are the results:

* They still poppler patch kpdf even if the 3.5.7 packages for KUbuntu 7.04 did not, so expect that i still treat KUbuntu users as second class users when reporting kpdf bugs.

* There's a ¿kernel? bug that hogs the CPU https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/119315/

* My network configuration was lost, resulting in not being able to access the internet anymore, that is because now my second network interface is supported (that's good) and so what before was my eth0 is now eth1 and nothing worked (that's bad)

* They fixed a bug i reported about exit dialog accelerators not working correctly

* kdesu hangs randomly https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144397

* XF86Mail key is hardcoded to a new mail message and you can't reassign it to something else like for example opening KMail https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144398

* They added a ugly user list to kdm that when disabling it results in an even uglier kdm https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/129309

All in all, my opinion is quite negative at the moment.

New KTuberling playground and looking for a description

Thanks to Jocelyn Etienne KTuberling in KDE 4.0 will feature another nice playground



Besides, the other day, Robert Knight, our konsole overlord warned me that normal menu users, current name of the game is "Potato Guy" and the description is "Game for Children". First is actually wrong because of this new playground and second is really really precise, eh ;-)

So i'm open to any suggestion for both name and description.

Kate welcomes Find Selected

Thanks to quick work by Sebastian Pipping (sping) and some small contribution from my side, kate will have in KDE 4 the "Find Selected" feature.

Basically it's the find feature, but starts find automatically on the selected text and does not show the find dialog. At start it may seem not useful enough, but those used to Eclipse (ctrl+k) and nedit (ctrl+h) will surely welcome this new addition to kate

Poppler 0.6 released

Poppler 0.6 is available from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.tar.gz

Changes since RC2:
- CairoOutputDev fixes
- Allow pdftoppm to read/write from stdin/stdout
- API work on Qt4 frontend
- Fix pdfimages produces inverted image for black & white image
- Fix error on the NFKC text matching routine
- Add support for word and line selections
- Do not enforce %%EOF at the end of file
- Pad zeroes instead of aborting when rendering 1-bit images
and the stream is too short
- Update glib bindings documentation

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Junior Jobs for KBackgammon

KBackgammon is KDE backgammon client. SHOCK!!!

It did not get as much love as other kde games for the KDE 4.0 release but we decided to keep for reasons that are not important now.

What is important is that i created 3 Junior Jobs for people that want to start with KDE 4 development and don't know where to.

If you want to have a look at them see:
Bug 149275: Enable antialias in KBackgammon
Bug 149276: Convert config dialogs to .ui files
Bug 149277: Remove engineSet usage

All three should be "fairly" straightforward even for a newcomer.

So get your brain ready and start coding.

Modern art is ...

... curious. Have a look at this photo from me at the Pompidou Center of Paris.



You have to have guts to tell people that's art.

poppler 0.6 Release Candidate 2 released

Today i released poppler 0.5.91 aka 0.6 Release Candidate 2

Changes include:
- Various memory leaks fixed
- Compile with --enable-fixedpoint. Bug #11110
- Header cleanup
- Remove dependency on debugxml. Bug #11187
- Allow access to more document metadata in glib and qt4 frontends
- Several glib API frontend improvements
- Fix crash on accessing embedded files
- Build on Sun Force compiler
- Render '*' instead of the actual content in password form fields
- Fix pdftohtml complex output. Bug #9746 and #11610
- Windows build fixes
- Improve Japanese font support. Bug #11413
- Do not exit the program on files that confuse libjpeg
- Update required cairo version to 1.4
- Fix CVE-2007-3387

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Weird PS files needed

As you may know, i'm currently working on adding PS support to okular. It's currently more or less working, the problem is most files i have around here are result of a few programs "printing" to PS, so most of them are basically "the same in their internals" and thus are quite unuseful for testing. What i need are PS files with different page sizes, different page rotations, etc. the weirder the better. If you have or know where to get some of this kind of files, please mail me at aacid@kde.org with the details.

Avoid Ya.com

<BEGIN RANT>
Let me begin with something everyone agrees with "All spanish ISP suck".
That said i have to suggest any spanish reader out there to avoid ya.com.
I've been a Ya.com ADSL user for two years now, and besides minor hiccups and their broken DNS servers i was fairly satisfied, but not anymore.
On July 16th, my internet connection stopped working, it is still not working, and their technical service as marked my incidence as WONTFIX. They have told me all is fine in their side and what i have to do is call the company that is providing them the service (they are mere resellers) and tell them to fix my problem.
WTF?¿? Why do i have to call that company i'm not paying anything for my connection. I'm paying ya.com for my connection and any normal people would think it's them who have to fix my problems. But well, i did call the other company, four times, and obviously they told me "hi Mr Astals you are not our client and we can't help you, sorry"
So i'm giving up from Ya.com and just going to some other company to see if i have more luck.

On the Free Software side this means you won't have non-gui-blocking text search in Okular in less than two weeks (while i have done it for weeks) and that someone else will have to release poppler 0.5.9 RC2 (or wait until i get internet again)
</END RANT>

No internet

Since Sunday night i'm without internet at home, so all you that are expecting replies and internet actions from me (Chusslove, Yukiko, Miquel...) please have some more patience, the ADSL company told me "We are working on it".

Canon Ixus 850 (2)

So finally i got the Canon Ixus 850, it costed a bit less than 350€ and came with lots of extras (1GB memory, case, tripod and second battery). As far as i've been testing it i'm quite happy with it, quite fast when taking photos, quite good image quality and no problems using it with digikam. So that's it, i do not regret the buy, maybe it helps for others in the same situation.

Eclipse Europa can't use lineedits history

Yesterday i just installed the new Eclipse version at work and suddenly i realized i could not use up/down arrows to use lineedit's history. I filed a bug against their bugzilla that got closed as duplicate of a WONTFIX/NOTOURBUG bug :-(

Actually it seems the bug is on gtk but it quite astonishes me the fact that i'm using the same gtk i was and it worked on previous version of Eclipse.

So that forces us to ask the question: As a software developer, it's better to release a product that does not work and wait for the library we use to fix itself or should we workaround the bug as much as we can?

I'm not sure which one i'd pick with my developer hat, but as a user i tell you i want things to work :D

aKademy 2007 photos

aKademy 2007 was great! I did not blog as much as i wanted (actually i blogged 0 because blogger.com was unaccessible from the aKademy network) so here come the photos i made as small substitution. They suck a bit, but i've never been a good photographer so please bare with me! http://kde.cat/aacid/fotos/akademy2007/

Canon Ixus 850

I'm planning buying a Canon Ixus 850 if i can get one for a reasonable price (between 300 for a barebone one and 350€ with extras) before going to akademy 2007. Anyone has first experience with it and want to give some comment? Please abstain people that have a Olympus/Sony/wathever :-)

See you on Saturday on Glasgow :-)

SpreadKDE rebirth

Thanks to Pier-Olivier Thibault & Luke Parry we got a new and shiny SpreadKDE webpage. Paraphrasing Pier-Olivier

*****
We'd like to invite you to our new website http://spread.kde.org where you'll find all the information you need. As of today, the main feature we implemented is a managing system for people who are willing to organize events on the behalf of KDE. If you have any question about spread.kde.org, feel free to ask them here on kde-promo@kde.org or on #spreadkde on Freenode.

We strongly suggest you that if you're willing to organize an event, to make it so through the spread.kde.org website as it will help us make the website more usable for you all.
*****

As always help is welcome so if you want to help KDE building spread.kde.org have a look at Building SpreadKDE

KTuberling themers wanted

If you can draw and always wanted to help KDE but did not know how, this is your opportunity!

As you may know KTuberling got a nice SVG engine a month ago. The problem is that i am not able to draw, and even if the KDE world has some nice artists, they are overloaded with work, so more people on board never hurt.

Contributing themes for KTuberling is VERY easy. All you have to do is draw a nice SVG image.
As example, here are the two themes that we have currently
potato-game.svg and default_theme.svg, the themes.HOWTO file and the two .theme files for the SVG files potato-game.theme and default_theme.theme

If you have any code question do not hesitate to contact me at <aacid _AT_ kde _DOT_ org>
For graphical guidance contact kde games graphics dude at <johann _DOT_ ollivierlapeyre _AT_ gmail _DOT_ com>

KDE fame is waiting for you!

New Strigi blog

Due to problems with kdedevelopers, Jos has opened a new blog at http://strigi.sourceforge.net/?q=blog/2. While clee adds him to the planet, see his latest post about strigi, Xesam and akademy 2007 at http://strigi.sourceforge.net/?q=node/32.

More news tomorrow at the same time!

TaxiPilot looking for developers

Thomas Friedrichsmeier, TaxiPilot's author is looking for development helpers to port his small but nice game to KDE 4. So if you are looking for a nice introduction to KDE 4 development do not hesitate to contact him!

okular and PS files

I'm having some problems deciding what to do with PS files on okular, seems strange, eh, since PS is so old and unchanging one would think it's a solved problem. At the moment we are using libgs instead of calling the gs binary to render the files but there are some things i am not sure, here is the list of pros and cons of using libgs.

Pro:
* Using a library seems the right thing to my programmer mind
* We don't have to interact with gs using non-portable X properties like kghostview does
* We don't have to write the images to disk and then load them like ligature does

Con:
* Everyone (kghostview/evince/ligature) uses the gs binary
* libgs is not much widespread among distro packages, although that is improving and okular using it would probably "fix it"
* if libgs crashes it takes down the whole process
* libgs API is not what one would like it to be

So anyone out there that has the magic solution?

Of course, testers and constructive comments are more than welcome for the ghostscript okular backend, actually for all okular parts :-)

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!

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.

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 :-)

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 :-)

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!

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")

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.

kde-i18n-ca: Extend and embrace

So for KDE 4 we switched from using KDE's own mimetype database to shared-mime-info from freedesktop (thanks David!) this has lots of advantages i don't need to explain, the only obvious problem i could find was the lack of translation to Catalan, but that can easily fixed when you are a translator yourself and you know how to trick others to finish your work, so thanks to Josep Ma. Ferrer and me, shared-mime-info has now a translation to Catalan :-) And the good thing of sharing things is that gnomies, xfceis, roxies and all others using shared-mime-info will benefit from our translation :-)

Cannot find konq-kubuntu.rc problem and fix

On one of the five machines i've upgraded from Edgy to Feisty, i got a weird error with Konqueror. When starting it, i got a very weird Konqueror without Address line for example and two symptomatic errors
konqueror: WARNING: KXMLGUIClient::setXMLFile: cannot find .rc file
konq-kubuntu.rc
konqueror: WARNING: KXMLGUIClient::setXMLFile: cannot find .rc file
konq-kubuntu.rc

For us that know some KDE programming that means Konqueror was trying to find the konq-kubuntu.rc
file to create it's gui but failed to find it.

Quick solution was looking for some file that referenced konq-kubuntu.rc I found it at .kde/share/apps/konqueror/profiles/webbrowsing

As i had another working machines it was easy to see that XMLUIFile=konq-kubuntu.rc should be XMLUIFile=konqueror.rc and now it is working like a charm :-)

aKademy registration deadline #1

Remember, if you want the aKademy organization team to handle accommodation booking for you, you should register and PAY before April 30th.

Of course if you can handle booking accommodation for yourself you are allowed to register later :D

Back from Albacete

I'm back from the nice conference organized by LinuxAlbacete people. I reused the talk Aaron gave at Guademy about KDE 4, and people seemed to like it quite a bit, i'm not as good as Aaron giving speeches but i know how to do jokes in spanish and Aaron not ;-)
It has been a pleasure beign there and eating some mancheguitos with you :-) Good luck for next year and keep up the good work!

kdemail.net is alive again

I noticed it because i started getting spam on the address again *sight*

Short note to those who were subscribed to mailing lists using kdemail service: Check you are still subscribed, but as administrator of the kde-edu mailing list i remember seeing some messages saying "foobar@kdemail.net has been automatically unsubscribed due too high number of bounces"

Update: Seems only smtp and mail aliases work for now. As imap and pop3 connections are refused. :-/

KDE SoC Projects

Bigger annoucement later at The Dot, but for the anxious http://code.google.com/soc/kde/about.html

Printing hack in KPDF 0.5.7

KPDF is usually good enough at printing documents, but sometimes it fails completely.

And there's nothing worse that having a document you need to print and not beign able to do it. To fix that situation i just added a small hack to KPDF version that will be released with KDE 3.5.7.

In that version there will be a PDF Options tab with a Force rasterization checkmark that will let you force KPDF to render each PDF page to an image and print the image instead convert PDF commands into PS commands. This is bad as you lose the vector side of having a PS, but in cases KPDF did show the document correctly, but printing failed, i think it will be a welcome addition.

HPLIP team rocks

So i had a problem printing a PS file. First i did was contact our resident KDE printing guru, Kurt Pfeifle.

He ensured me the file seemed correct as three different PostScript printers printed the file correctly so it might be a problem in the HPLIP driver of my HP PSC 1610

Today i contacted the hplip-help mailing list:
16:37:23 - my mail reaches the list
17:39:34 - an HP engineer contacts me so so i send him the file in private (as it contains semi-sensitive data)
18:17:04 - i send the file
19:12:43 - confirmation that they can reproduce the problem (yay! for bug reproductivity)
23:30:38 - i get a patch for latest HPLIP release making my PS file print correctly

Now try to do this on windows...

Kiriki moved to kdereview

On last kdegames irc meeting, it was decided that Kiriki, the Yahtzee! clone for KDE 4 i've began writing on Málaga's aKademy, was worth enough to be on KDEgames 4.0 release. Today i moved it to the kdereview module for the mandatory two weeks review period. If nothing goes wrong it'll hit kdegames around April 18th or so. Do not hesitate to try it and comment, just don't mention networking :D It's planned but i'll wait for KDE 4.1, try to hook it up on GGZ and convince gtali developers (if any) to do the same :-)

On other news, yesterday i went to RENFE station to pick up the tickets i had bought via internet and they have NO special queue for that kind of people, so i still had to wait the 120! turns of people that was before me to pick the tickets, wonder what advantage gives me buying the ticket over internet if i still have to do the same queue that if i bought the ticket on the station.

At least a survey that offers results back

Today i received a mail from the FLOSSImpact survey i took months ago, it has surprised me since its the first time i participate in a FLOSS survey and they come back with the resuts. Way to go! But next time please make it shorter than 287 pages :-D

The hard balance between security and usefulness

So i tried to book some tickets for coming back home from "III Jornadas de Software Libre de Albacete" organized by Linux Albacete. First i had the obvious look at coming back by plane, but there's no flight on Sundays from Albacete to Barcelona, so i went to seek other methods. One person of the organization made me think of RENFE, spanish's railroad company. So here i go, i check and see there is a train from Albacete to Valencia and another one one hour later from Valencia to Barcelona, seems good enough, let's buy the tickets.

First i notice is that i have to register, i never had to register to buy tickets for a plane flight, but well, no problem, let's register. Then i see you can not buy more than one ticket and once, so i have to buy the two tickets separately, causing the possible problem that i end up buying one and when i go to buy the other, there are already no more places available. Not a problem this time as seem to be enough seats.

After buying the ticket from Albacete to Valencia, i got a message saying that "As is the first time you buy a ticket from us you will need to go to a RENFE station and validate you are really who you say to be", hpmf, say bye to the comfort of buying things online if you have to end up going to the station, but as it's only the first time i can see they want to be on the secure side and be sure that the credit card number i put it's mine, i "could try" to understand this.

The biggest problem, is that i can't buy the second ticket, because i have still not validated i am really myself, so the system refuses to sell me a second ticket. That means at the moment i am with a ticket from Albacete to Valencia and that's all. This seriously sucks. So remember next time you design a system, security is important, but so is letting the system do what it is supposed to do, and that's selling me train tickets.

Fix for gphoto2 breakage in Kubuntu

It seems gphoto2 got broken on latest Kubuntu 6.10 (not sure if it's a backport or what) so one can no longer use digikam.

I got it working following the suggestion on Ubuntu bug 91250 that is basically changing BUS!="usb*", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_end" to SUBSYSTEM!="usb*", GOTO="libgphoto2_rules_end" in /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libgphoto2.rules

Good riddance xpdfrc

Today has been a good day for poppler, there was a VERY interesting change related to a nice feature, but i'll leave Pino blog about it, so check out his blog!

My change was a minor one but well worth, i finally made poppler not to depend on a installed xpdfrc file, that dependance was there because our roots on xpdf, but it was silly to have it, as why should okular pdf rendering be affected by a file called xpdfrc?

Also Rajeev J Sebastian (insanekane) started pypoppler-qt4 hosted at the svn of our Pardus friends.

Finally let me thank Google for his SoC program as the interesting thing Pino will be blogging about was partially done under their program by Julien Rebetez.

You've got to love Free Software developers

So one fellow poppler developer tells me he his having problems with a new code he is developing and a PDF created by scribus and asks for help to see if it's a problem on scribus or on poppler code. I have a look at the spec and the pdf and reach the conclusion that it's their fault, so i go into the #scribus IRC channel speak there with their nice developers, i convince them that it's a bug, and 10 hours later the bug is fixed. This rocks :-)

Dead monitor

My Benq FP937s+ just died today while my mother was using the computer. The screen has gone black and won't come back, not even the OSD :-( The monitor is less than two years old, so hopefully it's still in guarantee, wish me luck...

pdftk frontend for KDE

Well, a week yes and the next one too, there is some request to add pdf modification options either to kpdf or to okular. This requests are always dismissed with "kpdf/okular is 'just' a viewer, not a swiss-tool".

That said i started to look for pdftk frontends i could suggest to the people and i could not find any good one so i thought i can try to create 'PDF Transformer' (work in progress name) as a "good" frontend for pdftk. The problem is defining "good", so fellow readers i'm asking for some help here, i'd describe what i have in mind and hope to get some comments if it seems good or not. Also if you know of a "good" frontend for pdftk just tellme and i'll be happy to scrap one thing from my todo list.

pdftk can do lots of things that are easy to do in dialogs and a relatively user friendly way, it's just merging of documents, modifying page ordering and removing of pages that i'm not sure how to implement in a way that can be more easy than just typing the whole command at the cli. My current idea is in this this mockup. You open the document[s] you want to use as input and get the list on pages on the left and a preview of the current selected page, you can rotate the currently selected pages, move them up or down or remove them. After you are finished you "create" the output file.

Ideas? Suggestions?

Guademy 2007

GPUL people from A Coruña are organizing a KDE+Gnome meeting on March 23-25 2007. I'll probably (not sure) be there speaking about cool things of KDE 4 like okular, trying to recruit some developers and meeting our gnome enemiesfriends.

Who said kde and gnome people can't work together?

2007-01-28 Albert Astals Cid <aacid@kde.org>
* glib/poppler-document.cc: Plug memory leak in poppler-document.
           Patch by Carlos Garcia Campos <carlosgc@gnome.org>

Link for non believers ;-)

Does this train stop at Plaça Catalunya?

That's the worst thing you can ask someone when you already are at Plaça Catalunya station :-D
I really need to concentrate a bit more in the real world...

Pino is new okular mantainer!

I just changed okular code to reflect the reality.

That means i changed main.cpp to say Pino is okular mantainer, i was listed as mantainer, but Pino has been doing much more work than me and everyone was asking him, not me, about new features and things, so i thought it was about time to give him the credit he deserved if he agreed to take the position, and he did.

Obviously this does not mean i'll stop contributing to okular, i'll be as active as i've been in the past few months, that is not much, but is as much as i can.

Now we only need Pino to get a blog so he explains us how happy he is :-)

keyboard crazyness

Be warned, this is a rant.

Today is Biblical Magi day in Spain, so i got some nice presents. Amongst them i got a new keyboard to replace the current one, that has half broken keys and sometimes i end up pressing C instead of Ctrl+C with the bad consequences this has (good we have Ctrl+Z, but as Ctrl is the broken key, sometimes this fails too :-D). The keyboard in question is a Microsoft Wired Keyboard 500 [image], and i will have to return it, not because it is from Microsoft, but because it follows the trend to not have keys where they should be.

Why is there a key that is not Return below backspace?
Why right Ctrl is not in line with the vertical of Shift?
Why the Insert, End, etc keys are in a 3x2 block instead of the typical 2x3?
Why the 4 arrow keys are not on the same baseline than right control and 0 from the numeric keyboard?
Why F12 is not on the vertical of backspace?

This surely seem small things to the dude that designed it, but me, that know the keyboard by memory NEED that the keys are where they should be, and unfortunately it's becoming quite hard to find a decent keyboard with the keys in the correct positions :-(