A day in scam land

So i'm looking for two tickets for FIB now that tickets are sold out.

One goes to google and finds three announcements on craigslist, price is okaish so you contact the posters ... and all you get are scammers.

The first one says "please provide me this details asap so i can start this transaction asap through craigslist they will contact you", a mention to craigslist itself, this must be safe for sure, but then you go to craigslist and see a page that explicitly says that they don't handle transactions at all. The announcer does not answer back once i point her to this page.

The second and third announcements end up being from the same mail address, interesting as one announcement is from Barcelona and the other from London, one asks 400€ and other 380£. The poster says he is not able to meet me and Barcelona and neither an hypothetic friend of mine in London because "he works all day" (though answers my mails in 5 minutes). I ask him to post pictures of the tickets with a newspaper of today or the very same mail i just send and he just sends pictures of the tickets themselves. More over he says we'll do the transaction via "Ebay and Square Trade". If you look at Square Trade, they are not a transaction company at all either, seems someone is using their name to scam gullible people.

So basically it seems that yeah, the prices they were selling the tickets were "too low" and are just a honey pot to scam people.

I hate how the world is full of people that don't any respect for others at all. Meh :-/

Your talk in Akademy-es 2009

You may that we are celebrating Akademy-es 2009 inside GCDS. If you did not know you do now ;-)

So if you think you have something to say to the Spanish community that will gather there do not hesitate to read the call for activities and submit one before the 8 of June!

We are waiting for them ;-)

Buenos Presagios (Good Omens)

So yesterday i finished reading Buenos Presagios the translation of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, a book written in 1990 and that has the Spanish first edition on ... April 2009 ... it's intriguing how some editorials decide to translate not so great books asap and better ones are left on the dust for almost 20 years.

And now onto the book, it's my first Gaiman book, but my n-th Pratchett one and i have to say it lives to the expectation.

It's a novel about the end of the world because of the Armageddon, the coming of the Antichrist, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a witch that did 300 years of exact predictions and an earth-living Angel and Demon that prefer to work together instead of for their far away bosses. All that mixed with the great humour that Pratchett gives to all his books, will have to read some Gaiman to see if it's good too (Just saw he's the writter of Stardust, i haven't read the book but the movie was entertaining). The only thing i did not like much is that book ending is a bit weak in my opinion, but otherwise a very recommended book.

Poppler 0.11.0 (0.12 Alpha 1) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.11.0.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.12 Alpha 1 release, it should work like any release from the 0.10 branch, but do not blame us if it turns the sea into Coke.

Changes against the 0.10 branch:
core:
* Add initial support for color management
* Remove case-insensitive matching of filenames in PDFDoc constructor
* Fix extraction of some ActualText content
* More work on Annotations support
* Improve font rendering in Cairo output device
* Fix bug in cairo backend with nested masks
* Fix cairo luminosity smask rendering
* Add optionally text support to Cairo output device
* Add the possibility of setting the datadir on runtime
* Return an error code instead of a boolean when saving
* Make the font scanner more versatile
* Small opimization in documents that use PostScriptFunction
* Minor optimization to Stream handling
* Fix some compile warnings

glib:
* Optional content support
* More work on Annotations support
* Improvements to the demo
* Documentation improvements
* Fix build when compiling with GTK_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES

Qt4:
* Support URI actions for Table Of Contents items
* Documentation improvements
* Improvements to the demo
* Add a FontIterator for iterating through the fonts of the document

utils:
* Allow the use of cropbox in pdftoppm
* Make pdftohtml output png images when the image is not a jpeg
* Make pdftotext accept cropping options like pdftoppm
* Support rendering non-square pixels in pdftoppm

build system:
* Require Cairo 1.8.4 for the Cairo output device
* Require CMake 2.6 when using the CMake build system
* Optionally require libpng for pdftohtml
* Optionally require libcms for color management


Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.