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.