On football, national feelings et al

Be warned, this is not a KDE nor Free Software post, if you don't want to read it, don't do it.

Be warned 2, this post is going to be controversial, please don't write saying "You idiot" or similar/worst things, i'm trying to be as respectful as i can when dumping my brain into this post.

So it seems Spain just won Eurocup 2008, lots of people in the streets making noise and using firecrackers/fireworks leftovers from Sant Joan that was just a few days ago.

The ones that know me well know that i don't have a big Spanish feeling, i feel more Catalan and European, but to tell the truth i have mixed feelings about this Spain win.

On the good side, the spanish team is formed by young talented players, that don't act like if they were gods and that do a rather good football. And most of that players feel sympatic and someone you might empathize with, so they winning feels good.

On the other side, looking at the flags spanish followers waved at the stadium you can find three types at very similar rates of use:
* Normal Spanish flag: Nothing to say
* Spanish flag with a bull: Mixed feelings again, the bull is a animal that i probably would say i like if you ask me, but that bull flag is most of the times used either to support bullfighting or to support a rancid view about Spain. And i disagree with both
* Franquist flag: Yes, you might wonder why around one third of people supporting Spain soccer team wave a flag that means you don't like democracy nor any kind of personal rights. I do wonder too.

And then you have people like someone in my neighborhood that play cara al sol, a semi-official franquist song, each time Spain wins.

And that makes me wish Germany did win.

Sadly, i have to agree with what a coworker says: "España es un pais de pandereta" (not sure if makes sense translated but that'd be "Spain is a country of tambourine")

Installed OpenSuse 11.0

Just installed OpenSuse 11.0 in the laptop. They've done an good job in overall putting KDE 4 in a distro but i had two important problems, so i'm going to blog about them so that if someone has the same problem can find it.

First, the installer misdetected my monitor resolution, then i told him the good one, but that ended up in a messed xorg.conf that applied zoom onto the desktop, i had the remove the Option "PreferredMode" line from the file.

Second, knetworkmanager won't connect to my wifi network, i had to update (using a wired connection) and then it worked like a charm.

KDE, plugins, GPL and closed source applications

Here i was today, thinking about this stuff (yeah you can say i'm weird).

In KDE all of our core libs are LGPL so if someone owns a Qt commercial license he can write closed source applications using kdelibs.

In KDE we also have this nice technology called KParts that let's you load plugins for lots of things on runtime. One of the KParts possibilities is to load a KPart for a specific mimetype.

Let's say the above closed source application uses KParts to preview things, and the user of that closed source application decides to preview a PDF.

In that moment, the KPart system will lookup and load the OkularPart that is able of viewing PDFs.

And there is where my mind broke, OkularPart is GPL and is being used by a closed source application.

"NO! VIOLATION!" Does my mind shout, but how can the closed source developer prevent it? All he did is use a LGPL library, so, maybe this is not a violation? And if it is, what are we doing in the KDE project to help the closed source developer be a good citizen? Maybe we should tell the kpart system what kind of Parts are acceptable?

Can someone highlight me?

Dead monitor (again)

On wednesday, my Benq FP937s+ died again, it does not want to power on, the same thing that happened 15 months ago. Not good to have the most expensive Benq monitor at the time it was bought to die twice in less than 3 years :-(

Luckily i've still 3 months of guarantee so i'll be getting a new^Wrepaired one for free.

Looking for PDF with JPX streams

I'm currently working on a patch for poppler that makes use of OpenJPEG to decode JPX streams instead of the xpdf inherited code because the inherited code does not work for some PDF and i think that there's no reason not to use an already existing solution if it works. And that's the question, i need more PDF with JPX streams to be sure my 170 lines of code + OpenJPEG can replace the 3200 of xpdf code without any regression.

So if you could

cd /
find -name "*pdf" -exec grep -H JPXDecode {} \;

or as said in the comments

locate -0 .pdf | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H JPXDecode

and send me (aacid@kde.org) a link to the pdf or the file pdf itself of all the files that match.

Poppler 0.8.3 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.3.tar.gz

Changes since 0.8.2:
Core:
* Fix crash when reading some PDF with annotations
* Fix crash on PDF that reference Optional Content elements that don't exist
* Fix leaks on error conditions
* Do not limit CharCodeToUnicodeString to 8 characters
* Support for surrogates outside the BMP plane

Qt 3 frontend:
* Fix crash when reading PDF with password
* Fix leak when calling scanForFonts()

Qt 4 frontend:
* Fix the text() method

Splash renderer:
* Fix compilation with --enable-fixedpoint

Version 0.8.4 is scheduled for July 3rd

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.