Wednesday, October 28, 2009
KPovModeler looking for a new maintainer
Andreas Zehender is stepping down as KPovModeler maintainer so if you want to introduce yourself in the world of 3D, Qt, KDE, et al, working on KPovModeler will surely be a good experience! Don't miss it!
Monday, October 26, 2009
Jargon is bad
Aaron was talking the other day on how using jargon is bad. The real problem is how to know if a word is jargon or not.
Example follows:
Yesterday my grandmother was bit by something she qualifies as jargon. She bought a new printer, one that can hold xD cards inside and print directly from there, when plugging the xD card she was told by the printer LCD "Do you want to format the card? Formatting the card in printer format will make it faster bla bla" and, she answered "Yes", and all the photos went to the heaven of photos.
The problem here is that we all know formatting means erasing, killing, vanishing the contents, but my grandmother did not. So should "format" considered jargon? Or maybe we should keep using format but on the confirmation question mention "erasing" too?
Example follows:
Yesterday my grandmother was bit by something she qualifies as jargon. She bought a new printer, one that can hold xD cards inside and print directly from there, when plugging the xD card she was told by the printer LCD "Do you want to format the card? Formatting the card in printer format will make it faster bla bla" and, she answered "Yes", and all the photos went to the heaven of photos.
The problem here is that we all know formatting means erasing, killing, vanishing the contents, but my grandmother did not. So should "format" considered jargon? Or maybe we should keep using format but on the confirmation question mention "erasing" too?
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Okular Junior Job: Kill qApp->processEvents() from fontPool::locateFonts
The title says it all, fontPool::locateFonts, part of the DVI backend (generator in Okular jargon) is using qApp->processEvents() and that is baaaaaad. The code is located at kdegraphics/okular/generators/dvi/fontpool.cpp and it should be straigh forward to port away from using processEvents to a signal/slot mechanism.
Interested people please drop by the #okular channel on freenode or to the okular mailing list.
Interested people please drop by the #okular channel on freenode or to the okular mailing list.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Another free software kernel
Symbian just made their kernel Free Software so if anyone is interested in real time, multitasking, SMP-ready kernel that is in use in lots of phones, you have something to hack on now :-)
Friday, October 16, 2009
Gluon sprint + QtDevDays
So last few days i've been in munich for the Gluon sprint and the Qt Developer Days.
Before starting my summary i want to thank the KDE e.V. and Qt/Nokia for paying the trip to Munich, the accommodation, letting us use the Qt/Nokia offices in Munich, giving us free entrance to the DevDays and also free opportunity to do the Qt Certified Developer Exam (easy if you are a seasoned KDE dev i'd say (hope i pass it :D)).
That said, lets start :D
Gluon sprint started friday at 10pm for me when i got to our hostel, there i met with Sacha and Sandro, had some drinks and went to sleep waiting for the next day.
On Saturday, HarriF from Qt/Nokia picked us up in our hostel and guided us to the nice offices Qt/Nokia has in Munich, there we started some presentations about gaming creation IDEs so all the participants of the sprint could see the idea of what Leinir wants for Gluon Creator. Mid-afternoon, Knuth joined us and cared for us for the rest of the day, even getting us some food for dinner when the waitress was hesitant because it was already late.
On Sunday we started to do some work involving designing, refining of classes, creating d-pointers for classes, improvements on some classes to make it more easy to be cross paltform, etc. HarryF joined us for a while and he got himself parts of the sample gluon game (Blok) working on the Mac, cool stuff.
Monday continued with work on Gluon stuff with fregl, karli and SaroEngels joined us due to the proximity of the DevDays. The very monday afternoon we headed to the Hilton where the welcome reception sponsored by Tieto. A company that was the Platinum sponsor of the event, that said to have lots of Qt experience but whom i had never heard of. They were actively showing plasma on the S60 emulator, no idea if they have anything to do with the plasma port to that platform, if they have not it's a weird thing to show.
Tuesday was DevDays talks start, it all began with Nokia VP for Qt speaking of the Qt Everywhere idea (we had a Qt-based coffee machine :D) which includes everything you can think of except the iPhone and Android (some conflict with Nokia interests?). The starting video showed Marble and KDE screenshots, nice touch :-) Lars spoke about the next generation of Qt followed by Walter Bender talking about Sugar, that uses pygtk and when he asked if Python Qt would be supported he got a no, there's some company called riverbank that does it but Qt/Nokia does not do it. I wonder what happened to PySide that not even Nokia employees talk about it... Then ¿our own? Matthias Ettrich came out to the stage with a laptop with a huge KDE sticker running Ubuntu and spoke about the Declarative interfaces thing, cool stuff, but mostly for the smartphones i'd say, also it is bad that it won't respect native style of "widgets".
After lunch talks continued without anything worth mentioning except the shameless plugs for QtCreator in each of the talks (guys we know it's not a bad tool, no need to say "look what it does, it's cool") and the unprofessional way of referring to the iPhone as "the phone from the fruit company" and Android as "the robot from the ad company". Grow up.
Then we headed for the 15th floor for some drinks while the rooms where prepared for dinner where the Fact or Crap Quizz Contest was held, my table (the gluon team table) was just 1 correct answer away to qualify to the final, so close to those shiny phones....
Next day i attended some more talks about features that seem specifically developed for smartphones (gestures/animations/stateMachine) and also two KDAB given talks, one about Multithreading by Mirko (with some Steven Seagal resemblance) and Qt Kwan-Do by Mirko and Till.
All in all a very nice experience, more suit-y than Akademis but still nice to see that much people attending a Qt meeting, being the largest Nokia developer oriented event this year.
And last but not least, Sandro is luckiest man in earth, he won two consecutive raffles, take that statistics :D
Before starting my summary i want to thank the KDE e.V. and Qt/Nokia for paying the trip to Munich, the accommodation, letting us use the Qt/Nokia offices in Munich, giving us free entrance to the DevDays and also free opportunity to do the Qt Certified Developer Exam (easy if you are a seasoned KDE dev i'd say (hope i pass it :D)).
That said, lets start :D
Gluon sprint started friday at 10pm for me when i got to our hostel, there i met with Sacha and Sandro, had some drinks and went to sleep waiting for the next day.
On Saturday, HarriF from Qt/Nokia picked us up in our hostel and guided us to the nice offices Qt/Nokia has in Munich, there we started some presentations about gaming creation IDEs so all the participants of the sprint could see the idea of what Leinir wants for Gluon Creator. Mid-afternoon, Knuth joined us and cared for us for the rest of the day, even getting us some food for dinner when the waitress was hesitant because it was already late.
On Sunday we started to do some work involving designing, refining of classes, creating d-pointers for classes, improvements on some classes to make it more easy to be cross paltform, etc. HarryF joined us for a while and he got himself parts of the sample gluon game (Blok) working on the Mac, cool stuff.
Monday continued with work on Gluon stuff with fregl, karli and SaroEngels joined us due to the proximity of the DevDays. The very monday afternoon we headed to the Hilton where the welcome reception sponsored by Tieto. A company that was the Platinum sponsor of the event, that said to have lots of Qt experience but whom i had never heard of. They were actively showing plasma on the S60 emulator, no idea if they have anything to do with the plasma port to that platform, if they have not it's a weird thing to show.
Tuesday was DevDays talks start, it all began with Nokia VP for Qt speaking of the Qt Everywhere idea (we had a Qt-based coffee machine :D) which includes everything you can think of except the iPhone and Android (some conflict with Nokia interests?). The starting video showed Marble and KDE screenshots, nice touch :-) Lars spoke about the next generation of Qt followed by Walter Bender talking about Sugar, that uses pygtk and when he asked if Python Qt would be supported he got a no, there's some company called riverbank that does it but Qt/Nokia does not do it. I wonder what happened to PySide that not even Nokia employees talk about it... Then ¿our own? Matthias Ettrich came out to the stage with a laptop with a huge KDE sticker running Ubuntu and spoke about the Declarative interfaces thing, cool stuff, but mostly for the smartphones i'd say, also it is bad that it won't respect native style of "widgets".
After lunch talks continued without anything worth mentioning except the shameless plugs for QtCreator in each of the talks (guys we know it's not a bad tool, no need to say "look what it does, it's cool") and the unprofessional way of referring to the iPhone as "the phone from the fruit company" and Android as "the robot from the ad company". Grow up.
Then we headed for the 15th floor for some drinks while the rooms where prepared for dinner where the Fact or Crap Quizz Contest was held, my table (the gluon team table) was just 1 correct answer away to qualify to the final, so close to those shiny phones....
Next day i attended some more talks about features that seem specifically developed for smartphones (gestures/animations/stateMachine) and also two KDAB given talks, one about Multithreading by Mirko (with some Steven Seagal resemblance) and Qt Kwan-Do by Mirko and Till.
All in all a very nice experience, more suit-y than Akademis but still nice to see that much people attending a Qt meeting, being the largest Nokia developer oriented event this year.
And last but not least, Sandro is luckiest man in earth, he won two consecutive raffles, take that statistics :D
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Thanks to git people
Monday, October 12, 2009
Dear lazyweb: intel graphics problems
Here i am trying to open a svg file with inkscape and i get this.
Any idea what can be the problem? Fedora 11 uptodate with Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device.
Any idea what can be the problem? Fedora 11 uptodate with Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device.
What a sprint can do for you
Today is the last day of kdegames/gluon sprint, and it's being quite productive as you can see on http://gitorious.org/ gluon is now in the Most Active projects list gluon-team is in the Most active teams list.
Of course this is powered by my powerful sitting on chair skills :-P
Of course this is powered by my powerful sitting on chair skills :-P
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