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.