Akademy-es 2010 slides available

You can find the Akademy-es 2010 slides at http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2010/doku.php?id=materiales.

The videos will be available soon, hopefully.

Here some photos:


Unfortunately we have people like apol that was neither of the two big photos since they were made at the very beginning and at the very end of the event.

Complex systems are complex

Under such a obvious title i want to state how much things mostly work by luck in modern software systems, let's pick bug 232918: Translations do not work on KDE 4.5 snapshots.

I was never able to reproduce this error until Johannes Obermayr let my play with his machine today. Why? Because my kdebase installation was old, but i really never bothered updating kdebase to try to reproduce this problem since kdebase has nothing to do with translations, right? Right, it doesn't.

So what was happening? Well, a not obvious use case of KComponentData in KStyle together with the new feature that integrates Qt and the KDE Development platform more closely was triggering a bug in KComponentData, and the thing is that the bug had been there since r718911 (that is almost 3 years ago), but it wasn't until a while ago that it was triggered by the combination of that KStyle and Qt/KDE plugin.

So yes, writing software is complex, and what causes something to break (the Qt/KDE Plugin) is not always the one to blame (in this case KComponentData)

BTW for those curious, the bug fix together with the explanation of what it is a bug can be found at http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdecore/kernel/kcomponentdata_p.h?r1=1112279&r2=1132109

Also while on it, I found a bug in an openSuse patch where they where adding three default catalogs but adding 4 to numberOfSysCatalogs variable, cheers to tittiatcoke for quickly fixing it.

Akademy-es 2010 talks streaming

Hi, just a heads up that Akademy-es 2010 talks will be streamed, you can get the info at http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2010/doku.php?id=streaming. Yes, we know not a very Free Software friendly format, but that's what you get when you reuse the University hardware. The talks will also be recorded and published somewhere somewhen.

Interviewed about Okular

Akademy-es 2010 coordinator interviews me about Okular. Read it in spanish at his blog.

3g USB dongle stopped working in Ubuntu 10.04

If your 3g USB dongle stopped working in Ubuntu 10.04, install the usb-modeswitch package. It fixed the problem for me.