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.