My top 10 blog posts of 2010

Here the top 10 of blog entries visited in 2010 in my blog:
10 - Poppler, Qt4, Windows and my desktop
9 - Performance of radeon free drivers
8 - Is the X11 engine slower than raster just because of the drivers?
7 - Morocco trip
6 - 3g USB dongle stopped working in Ubuntu 10.04
5 - Poppler-Symbian pdf viewer
4 - Poppler for windows
3 - keyboard crazyness
2 - Konqueror 4.4.4 vs Firefox 3.6.6
1 - Qt, gitorious, merge requests and Open Source

One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 6 out of 10 are from either 2006 or 2007 or 2009 (but not from 2008 :D)
- People seem interested in my poppler-symbian project. It did not get very far but there's a proof-of-concept at http://projects.ufocoders.com/projects/pdfviewer/repository in case you are interested in doing the work
- People want to use poppler in windows (it gets two entries in the top 10), strange that all those users almost never sent patches to the project, seems like windows culture is not so much about collaborating but about just using (and complaining in the list it's too difficult to build)
- People reading my 2007 entry about radeon drivers performance should really be looking somewhere else
- There are 5 blog entries that already where in the top 10 of last year
- There's nothing like a good rant to get the top spot of visits ;-)

Okular website translatable

In the past few days I've been working on using the existing i18n functionality in the KDE website framework (AKA capacity) in the Okular website.

The functionality was added ages ago but it needed some tweaking to support all the Okular website needs.

I've also worked in making scripty extract the messages automatically to .po files so each day the contents of the website are extracted to the trunk/l10n-kde4/templates/messages/www folder.

Of course this can be added to any of the KDE websites. I've added some documentation to the Capacity techbase page, if you find you need more help do not hesitate to ping me on IRC.

My valgrind talk at OSSBarcamp 2010

The 26th of September I gave a talk about valgrind at OSSBarcamp 2010 in Dublin. In case you want to listen/see it feel free to hit http://vimeo.com/15483105. Warning not good English is included for free in the package

Join the KDE translation team

This is a reminder that the various KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but did not know how to do it, this is your chance, join the KDE Translation team!

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE software sources that will end up in 4.6 release are frozen for new messages so no new messages are going to be introduced before the release. A second reason is that the release date is close enough (2 month approx until tagging) so you will see your effort released really soon.

You can have a look at the statistics in the l10n web page, but remember that even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will for sure still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so I can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

How to change the current song from the headset in the N900

Like some people i got a N900 during the Meego Conference, so far I’m liking it and already have a few ideas of development things for it. On the other side I’m trying to force me to use it as my regular phone so i can show others the greatness of a real Linux stack based phone, the main problem I’ve found is that my Nokia-Symbian phone headset has very useful next/previous/pause/play song buttons that do not seem to work on the N900. Does anyone know how to get this to work?

Meego Conference goers advice

I won't be attending the Meego Conference but i've been living in Dublin for 11 months so there is one advice i can give you.

Make sure you come with the correct clothes.
The weather forecast for the coming days is:
* Temperatures between 0 and 10ºC
* Heavy wind
* Rain
So bring a good coat (if possible water proof-ish and with hood), a scarf or similar and a hat/cap/something for your head.

I hope the Aviva Stadium was really cheap otherwise i don't understand why someone would like to have a conference here at this time of the year :D

Update: Remember that Ireland uses a different power socket than mainland Europe

My CPU fan does not speedup

Dead Lazyweb: I'm having problems because the fan of my laptop seems to always be on "slow mode" and my CPU is getting to 80/90 ºC and sometimes the laptop just shut downs itself. I know the fan can spin faster because in those cases the laptop shut downs, upon reboot the fan makes more noise while booting, but once it gets to Linux it turns to that slow mode again. Any idea how do i make it smart so that it actually goes faster when the CPU temperature raises?

Qt, gitorious, merge requests and Open Source

Begin of rant

Some time ago Qt/Nokia decided to open their repos (great! even if they are not the real repos) and also decided to start accepting contributions from non Qt/Nokia employees in a way that they will make you the favour of accepting your code for free without making you fax things and talk with lawyers (you still have to grant them a perpetual license to do whatever they want with your code).

The fact that you have to grant them a perpetual license to do whatever they want with your code was the reason i decided myself not to contribute to Qt.

But the flesh is weak and i actually found something that i though would be nice to have and was actually easy to implement. So i went ahead and did it (http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/merge_requests/814) seven weeks ago.

Since then my merge request has received exactly two comments. One from a non Qt/Nokia employee saying "Looks good to me (and useful!)" and one from a Qt/Nokia employee saying "Your indentation is wrong" (which i think is not but that's unrelated).

And that's it.

I know phones don't have a need for QHeaderViews, but Qt/Nokia could pretend they still are supporting the desktop (which is what brought them to the position they are) and if they get a patch from a reasonably known community member that gets acked by a well known community member have the decency of following up the patch.

End of rant.

KDE España at the LSWC

Antonio Larrosa, founding member of KDE Spain and KDE contributor almost from its inception, will give a talk on KDE in the Libre Software World Conference 2010 held in Málaga this October 27. The scheduled time of the talk is from 17:00 to 17:30.

The Libre Software World Conference is a conference that emerged from the community to replace the Open Source World Conference, cancelled by its organizers (La Junta de Andalucía) just a month before its start.

Interviewed in KDEBlog

KDE Blog has published a long interview in three pages about my involvement in KDE, KDE España et al. The interview is in Spanish, so bad luck if you don't understand it (though you might want to try some translation service :D)

Back from Madrid

So I'm just on the bus on my way home back from Madrid. There I attended the Solid sprint in the UFO CODERS (aka afiestas+ereslibre) office. Unfortunately I didn't get much solid hacking done besides helping afiestas and ereslibre here and there with minor C++KDE things and the typical "const & in foreach" fixing (I knew that beforehand and that is why I didn't ask the KDE eV for sponsoring my trip) but I really had a productive weekend in other KDE and KDE España related things and it was really nice meeting Sebas, Will, Kevin, Alex, Rafa and Agustín again and meeting Will+2, Dario, Lamarque and Javier (Spanish OpenSuse community member) for the first time so "Solid Sprint 2010 FTW!". The only problem is the 6 hours of sleep in 48 hours are starting to kill me :D

Picture stolen from Sebas twitter:

XPS viewer for Linux

From time to time people ask me what i use to view XPS in Linux (unfortunately my company uses them for the salary sheets and stuff like that) and my answer is Okular. So that means there is a lack of awareness of all the document formats Okular supports, so remember, if you are forced into an XPS file Okular will help you :-) And yes, it does not implement all the features of the format but all files i have seem to open fine so you know the deal, if you have one that doesn't work, report a bug and maybe then it will work in the next version

Update: BTW Okular is supposed to work (i never tried myself) on other OSes including, Windows, MacOsX, *BSD, etc but seems those people has less problems finding a suitable viewer there

Speaking at OSS Barcamp this weekend

This weekend i will be giving two talks at OSS Barcamp in Dublin. The first talk (Saturday 12:00 Room 2) is "An introduction to Qt Quick" (really an introduction as i am just a beginner in Qt Quick) and the second talk (Sunday 11:10 Room 1) is an introduction to Valgrind (I'm not an expert but i think i qualify as seasoned user here). Of course I'll be around a while wearing my KDE gear so if you have questions or wanna have a chat just say "Hi!"

Give libdvdcss some cpu

Yesterday i bought the 4 Season DVD set of Prison Break, and today when trying to play the 3rd DVD on my PS2 it was failing, i touched the disk and it is actually thicker than the 2 first DVD and it probably doesn't fit in the PS2 drive (it actually made weird noises) so i tried playing it with VLC and totally failed. After some playing around it seems libdvdcss has a low timeout to try to decode the DVD keys and as i was running some very intensive tasks it failed. So if you have to play a DVD disk make sure libdvdcss has some CPU power available.

ebook-tools 0.2 released

ebook-tools 0.2 was released a few days ago. It contains lots of crash fixes that will make the Okular epub backend more stable so go and bug your distro packagers to include it in the next versions of your distro.

KGeography video

It seems someone has done a video on KGeography and it seems he even does enjoys using my little program. Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWClw5baTCY

Akademy-es 2010 videos available

Akademy-es 2010 talks are now available at http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2010/doku.php?id=materiales

Talks are in Spanish (except one that is on Basque) so if you don't understand it, you are out of luck.

I hope that those of you that could not come enjoy the videos and maybe they convince you so you come next year ;-)

How to run a Messages.sh file to create your .pot file

Some people regularly ask me how to create the .pot file of their program. They know the Messages.sh file is the key for it but they also realize that doing

cd /path/to/my/project
bash Messages.sh

Does not really work and then they are a bit stalled.

The answer is quite simple, but you need to know it ;-) You have to run the extract-messages.sh script that lives in the l10n-kde4/scripts

That still will fail as the script tries to save the .pot files in a folder called "po", so all in all these are the commands to get the .pot file of your project

cd /path/to/my/project
mkdir po
bash /path/to/l10n-kde4/scripts/extract-messages.sh

And that's it :-)

KDE 4.5 lunch in Madrid

After countless KDE release parties in Barcelona the KDE people in Madrid seem to have gotten their act together and are organizing a KDE 4.5 lunch release event in Madrid the 21st of August. Drop by and make sure you organize enough to make sure there's another one in 6 months ;-)

l10n.kde.org: an apology

Yesterday i had a look at the l10n.kde.org database and noticed there were about 300 people that had registered there in the past 4 years to help translating KDE and most probably had not been contacted.

Even if i didn't put the system into place, you guys need an apology, so here it comes: "We are sorry".

Besides saying "oh fuck!" i started mailing them all (some registered like 4 years ago) and this morning i've already got some answers.

Some had managed to overcome the blackhole of not getting any answer and actually contacted the translation team and were already alive and kicking. Good :-)

Some had moved to gnome and obviously are not interested in translating KDE anymore. Bad for us, there's no better way to keep an user that getting him involved

Some others had become KDE developers meanwhile :D

Some people still want to translate. Great!

Most of the address just bounced off though :-/ Lost contributors :-(

So remember if you add a way for people to contact a team, make sure it does not get lost and there is anyone looking at that mailing address, database, forum, mailing list or whatever.

And BTW i'm in the process of killing/reworking the l10n.kde.org database so this does not happen again.

Akademy 2011 Berlin

See you all there next year

Bug your distro to package lcms2

Yesterday i tried poppler with lcms2 instead of the regular lcms1 and some pdf give a speed improvement of 10%, the problem is that it seems that almost no distro packages it so we can't really depend on it. So please if you want a "free" speed improvement in poppler bug the packagers of your distro to package lcms2

KDE Translations in danger of being removed for 4.5

If you are a user of KDE in ones of these languages you might want to contact me at aacid@kde.org since the old translators seem to have gone AWOL and if no urgent work is done in the less than three weeks that are left to 4.5 on them they will not be released with KDE 4.5

The endangered languages are:
* ar - Arabic
* csb - Kashubian
* eo - Esperanto (they are not AWOL but still endangered so help is always welcome)
* fy - Frisian
* hi - Hindi
* mai - Maithili
* mk - Macedonian
* si - Sinhala
* tg - Tajik

Konqueror 4.4.4 vs Firefox 3.6.6

People say Facebook doesn't work in KHTML? Where is the send button in firefox?

And yes, i know that's something probably that is "my fault" since the button seems to show up for other people that is sitting in the table around me.

Planet KDE Español

Hi, this is a announcement for the newly created Planet KDE Español. This planet aims to be a collection of blogs around the KDE world written in Spanish, so if you blog about KDE and think you should be included in the planet drop me an e-mail at aacid@kde.org

I like shiny images too

Though unfortunately not all week :-/

Join the translation crew

Hi, this is a reminder that the KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so even if you do not know how code you can help translating the KDE Software to your mother tongue or some other language you are fluent in and make a difference.

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE Software Compilation 4.5 sources are frozen for new messages so new messages are going to be introduced before the release and also the release date is close enough (1 month approx until tagging) that you will see your effort be released really soon.

One of the teams specially looking for contributors is the Gujarati team, that met the essential requirements to be shipped with KDE SC for 4.4 but does not to 4.5

And remember, even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so i can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

European politicians gone mad

So, i've been trying to ignore the issue, but it is really difficult, so here is my rant, European politicians are about to approve a law that will force search engines to store searches for some time (from 6 month to 2 years). The official reason for that is creating a "early warning system against paedophiles and sex offenders".

There are lots of fishy things in that law:
* Do you really need from 6 months to 2 years of searches for a "early warning system"? I find that a bit contradicting at least
* When someone uses the "think of the children" reason, they are usually going for the lowest instincts of human, because obviously anyone opposing to protect the children is immediately evil. Well, that is going to end up forcing children to stay at home, or even forbidding them at all that way, with no children they won't be molested, right?
* The other thing that you get when you say that you oppose to such intrusive measures is "you should not be afraid unless you have something to hide", and they are right, i have lots of things to hide, it is called PRIVACY
* And finally the most important part, the law is going to be useless, if i am an *evil* dude i probably know how to use Tor or some other anonymous internet access so storing all that searches will not help at all.

So for me the bottom line is that:
a) Politicians are useless and fail to contact proper experts that confirm the measure is not going to help at all
or
b) Politicians are evil and even though they know the measure is not going to help at all, they are just going to approve it to fuck up with us citizens

And well, i don't know if a) or b) is worse :-/

Offer for Linux Magazine.es wanabbe subscriptors

If you were thinking to subscribe to Linux Magazine.es you might want to have a look at this offer, which imho is quite good (>= 2€ for 6 numbers) and you even get to choose to donate 10% to KDE or other Free Software organizations.

KDE Blog reaches 1500 blog posts

This is just a congratulations blog post to our (in KDE España sense) own Baltasar Ortega for reaching the remarkable number of 1500 blog posts (well 1502 at the moment :D) in his KDE Blog (only in Spanish).

Keep up the good work!

BTW, KDE España has a planet for those interested in the mumblings of its members

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.

Poppler-Symbian pdf viewer

So yesterday, i grabbed poppler, freetype and Qt sources and in 45 minutes hacked together a proof of concept PDF viewer for symbian. Pretty cool if you ask me, the ugly side is that if i ever get some more work on it and want to get it into OVI store I need to pay 50€ to register into it and around 200€ more to get the app to go through Symbian signed, of course what i'm not going to do is spend 250€ to get a free app into OVI store, on the other hand i could of ask for some € for the application (3€?), but i'm not sure it's a good idea either.

Akademy-es 2010 schedule published

Akademy-es 2010 schedule has just been published, you can see it at the event web page. It includes talks of all kinds, ranging from purely development ones to how to deploy KDE using thin clients passing through KDE programs on Windows.

On a related note we are very happy that we almost have 80 registered attendants at the moment, if you want to register, remember tomorrow is the last day!

And finally i'd like to thank our sponsors: Cenatic, Bilbao city, University of Basque Country, Euskaltel, Basque Country Government, Qt/Nokia, cast-info, irontec and ESLE, not forgetting our media associates Linux Magazine and Todo Linux, the host ETSI Bilbao and of course the local organizers itsas.

Bought plane tickets for Akademy

I just bought the plane tickets to go to Akademy, Dublin->Heathrow->Helsiki, 2.5 hours to change planes in heathrow, should be enough i hope, all in all 300€ could be better but could be worse too i guess. So see you in tampere :-)

KDE Workshop in OpenSegovia 2010

Eduardo Robles Elvira (aka Edulix) will run a workshop on introduction to programming using the KDE platform in OpenSegovia 2010 that is held in Segovia from 15 to 17 of Abril. The workshop is scheduled on Thursday 15 at 16:00. For more information you can have a look at the event webpage.

How to kill tourism

So today i was coming back to Dublin from my weekend trip to my home Barcelona and in my trip i saw a man from the check-in desk be rude to a group of women, he probably had his reasons but if your work is facing the public you should never be rude to anyone; a woman telling the customs officer "My passport was stolen"; a boarding message in a spoken english that was so bad that people did not understand that boarding would be done for rows 10 to 27 first; the men seating besides me speaking on how specially Barcelona felt to them and how they would recommend the visit but put a remark that you should be careful with petty crime.

Probably today was a bad luck day for me but if 4 of 4 things i realized were bad, something wrong we are doing, the problem is that fixing this is not easy so you can put this blog in the random rant/head dump section.

Lightning talks at OSS BarCamp

I'll be giving two lightning talks at OSS BarCamp this saturday, one about poppler and other about the KDE localization project. More info at http://www.ossbarcamp.com

KDE in Interlingua

If you are interested in Interlingua, Giovanni Sora just started the translation of KDE to Interlingua, i'm sure he'll welcome any help. Just comment here or drop me a mail at aacid@kde.org if you want to contact him.

KDE SC 4.4 talk at iParty 11

Baltasar Ortega of kdeblog fame will talk about KDE SC 4.4 at iParty 11, that will be held in Castellón from 8 to 11 of April. The talk will be Saturday 10 at 17:00. For more information you can go to the event page.

Junior Job: Port poxml away from Qt3Support

This is a junior job for all of you that want to get started in KDE development and don't know what to do, kdesdk/poxml is a set of tools used to convert KDE xml-based documentation to po (translator friendly format) and back. They are still using Qt3Support, that is not bad per se, but is not good either.

Doing the port should be straightforward if you have some Qt experience and read the docs on porting form Qt3 to Qt4.

Of course i'll be there to help and review the final diff, so what are you waiting for?

Akademy-es 2010

The KDE España association is organizing Akademy-es 2010 in collaboration with Itsas (the Free Software group of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU) and the Department of Culture of the Basque Goverment. This event gathers contributors to and users of KDE software and will be held in the Engineering Technical School of Bilbao from the 7th to the 9th of May.

If you are interested in giving a talk have a look at the Call For Papers and send us your proposal!

To attend the event do not forget to register before 16th of April.

See you in Bilbao!

Updating KDE/Konqueror web shortcuts

Speaking with maelcum on #kde-devel we found out that KDE web shortcuts are a bit out of date since for example they don't have yahoo nor bing so we thought updating the list of KDE web shortcuts would be a good entry project for someone that wanted to start contributing to KDE.

You can find the current list of KDE web shortcuts at http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/kurifilter-plugins/ikws/searchproviders/

Once you have a proposal come to #kde-devel in irc.freenode.net and hunt for maelcum or me (tsdgeos).

Dear lazyweb: Which PS2 game to buy?

I just got hold of a PS2 and all the games i've ever played on a PS2 is "Guitar Hero 3". So i'm looking for suggestions of the "best game ever for the PS2".

Poppler 0.13.0 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.13.0.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.14 Alpha release, it should work like any release from the 0.12 branch, but do not blame us if it turns your printer into a broom.

Changes against the 0.12 branch:
core:
* Improvements to Annotation rendering. Bug #23108
* Do not give an error when opening files without pages. Bug #24720
* Try to read streams without Length
* Do not crop the transformation matrix at an arbitrary value. Bug #25763
* Make poppler (optionally) relocatable on Windows
* Use a small object cache in GfxResources to cache GState objects
* Reduce the number of redundant pattern creations in the Cairo outputdev
* Use colToDbl() to avoid rounding error in the Cairo output device
* Fix problems with mask handling in the Cairo output device. Bug #8474
* Use a better scale down implementation in the Cairo output device
* Various optimizations to the Splash output device
* Add the possibility to use floats instead of doubles in Splash outputdev
* Write out fixed-content portion of Type 1 fonts in the PS output device

build system:
* Improvements to the CMake build system
* Enable AM_SILENT_RULES by default in autotools
* Require glib 2.18
* Require GTK+ 2.14
* Make fontconfig optional with mingw compiler
* Remove makefile.vc

glib:
* Add support for file attachment annotations
* Improvements to the demo
* Use TextOutputDev to get TextPage when we haven't rendered the page
* Remove support for the Splash output device

utils:
* pdftoppm can now write to jpeg
* pdftoppm embeds the correct resolution in png and jpeg files

qt4:
* Minor improvements to the tests

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

KDE 4.4 Release Party in Barcelona

As usual the Barcelona KDE crew is organizing a KDE release party, coincidentaly that weekend i will be in Barcelona since it's my mother's birthday (hi mum!) so i'll also be attending. See you there!

My top 10 blog posts of 2009

Here the top 10 of blog entries visited in 2009 in my blog:
10 - Morocoo Trip
9 - NetworkManager settings not shared/specified?
8 - pdftk frontend for KDE
7 - How to get Konsole 4.2 to behave?
6 - Consistency
5 - Performance of radeon free drivers
4 - Okular, PDF and file permissions
3 - Is the X11 engine slower than raster just because of the drivers?
2 - Poppler for windows
1 - keyboard crazyness

One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 5 out of 10 (including 1 and 2) are from either 2006 or 2007 (but not from 2008 :D)
- People really want a pdftk frontend for KDE since my 2007 post of my no longer existant project is visited frequently
- People want to use poppler in windows, strange that all those users almost never sent patches to the project, seems like windows culture is not so much about collaborating but about just using.
- My Morocco trip summary is liked by google, it's linked in the first page of results usually
- There are 5 blog entries that already where in the top 10 of last year