Beware of Ahtec laptops

A year and a half ago I bought an Ahtec laptop from one of its Spanish distributors (Ampliware), the price was competitive enough and was one of the few places I knew that sold laptops without Windows installed so back then it seemed a good idea.

The computer worked fine for a year and a few months, but unfortunately after coming back from my trip to the States the laptop would not boot (yeah, two weeks away with no one using it and then it doesn't work :-S).

As the warranty in Spain is 2 years I decided to get it to the same shop that had sold it to me to ask for a free repair, but unfortunately Ampliware seems to be out of business (no shops and all the phones i find in the internet seem to be dead) so I went to a different distributor that agreed to send the laptop back to Ahtec (which seems to be based in Netherlands).

It took a while for them to answer and the answer was not satisfactory. They said that the GPU had died because of the heat because of the fan exhaust was full of dust and that the warranty did not cover that since it was not a manufacturing issue.

That's quite shocking to me, a laptop is basically a black box so I could never ever had opened it to clean it up (the screws had a "warranty void if removed" sticker) thus the only way I can think of that the GPU would not die would be:
a) Not use the laptop much so the fan would not carry that much dust to the fan exhaust and it would not get blocked
b) The laptop being manufactured better so that the fan exhaust doesn't get blocked by dust

As asking for a) is kind of a no go for a laptop ("Sir here you have the laptop, but do not use it much or it will break) so I'd go for b) the laptop was either manufactured or engineered incorrectly and in my opinion that means it should be covered by the warranty.

The problem is that the shop that sold it to me is gone so i can not ask/complain/sue them and that the manufacturer is not from Spain so fighting for my warranty to be honored will be too expensive.

So anyone wants to buy some laptop parts? 2GB PC3-8500 RAM stick? P8700 CPU? 320GB HD?

Akademy-es 2011 videos and slides

You can find the Akademy-es 2011 videos and slides at
http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2011/material.php. Thanks to Victor for the work encoding them and putting them on the Internet and thanks to Kiko for making sure that the only videos that were not properly recorded are my talks :D

Reboot!

After approximately a year and a half living in Dublin i just moved back to L'Hospitalet: It's been an interesting time but at the end I missed Barcelona too much. So here I am, back in the city I like and unemployed :D So if anyone from Barcelona is looking for a talented C++/Qt/KDE developer have a look at my LinkedIn profile and if interested drop me a note at aacid@kde.org. I might also be interested in consulting from Barcelona to non Barcelona companies but at the moment I'm not considering moving again.

RFC: i18n extraction of desktop-like files

This is a RFC for an idea I want to implement in l10n trunk. I think it will make it easier for us i18n dudes and should not affect (or maybe even should help) the developers.

At the moment if you want to have translations in a file that is ".desktop like" but does not have one of the extensions we extract by default (that is *.directory *.desktop *.desktop.cmake *.kimap *.themerc *.kcsrc *.setdlg index.theme *.notifyrc *.protocol *.profile *.actions) you need to go to l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles and add a line like
find $BASEDIR/`get_path kdebase_kde-workspace`/khotkeys -name \*.khotkeys -print >> $filelist

My suggestion is move the responsibility of listing those files from l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles to a file in the program itself (that is, a file in similar fashion to Messages.sh). This serves various purposes:
* Make the developer know there is something he needs to keep updated (it's not the first time people move or delete files and the l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles get outdated)
* Make it easier for l10n maintainers to move things between l10n trunk and l10n stable, since the things are more autocontained and we do not need to worry about what in findfiles will get outdated or not, or might be reintroduced later if someone decides they need a stable branch

So all in all seems a win/win situation for me. What do you guys think?

Dear Lazyweb: 2nd bag at Ryanair

I'm taking a flight with Ryanair on Thursday and i happen to need to carry more than 15Kg the first bag allows you to carry. I know for sure that other companies (e.g. Aer Lingus) do not increase your weight allowance when you book another bag, that is, with one bag you can carry 20Kg and if you pay to ship 2 bags you can still carry only 20Kg. I've been reading the Ryanair Terms and Conditions and they are totally unclear so I'd like to know if any of you has taken a flight with Ryanair lately (say less than 6 months) with two bags and it meant that you could carry 15Kg per bag (30Kg total) or just 15Kg total.

The new board of KDE España

The members of the KDE España association have chosen a new board for next year. The new board consists of Albert Astals Cid (Chairman), Alejandro Fiestas Olivares (VP), José Millán Soto (Treasurer) and Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez (Secretary). The new board appreciates the work of Rafael Fernandez Lopez as VP in the past years and the confidence of the members in us all.

KDE 4.7 needs you: Bulgarian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Maithili, Wallon Translators

KDE 4.7 is going to be tagged in about two weeks and those 8 languages (Bulgarian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Maithili, Wallon) that were part of KDE 4.6 currently do not meet the essential requirements to be released and thus will not be released with KDE 4.7 unless someone starts working on it now.

It seems the old translators do not have much time at their hands at the moment, so if you are a speaker of any of those languages and want to keep using KDE in your language, now is the moment to act, contact me at aacid@kde.org to see how you can help yourself and other speakers of your language!

Update: Icelandic is actually fine and meets the essential requirements, it was a mistake on my side that add them to the list.

Cross thread signal delivery fixed!

At work we've been chasing for a long time a problem in which thread T1 emitted signal S1 and then signal S2 connected to an object in thread T2 but they were received in that object in the reverse order, that is, S2 first and S1 later.

First we though it was our fault since the code in those classes is not as clean as it should be, but after days we could not find anything specially wrong in our code so started looking down to Qt.

Just after one day I was able to locate a problem in QObject::moveToThread that did not keep the entries in QPostEventList properly sorted and was able to produce a quick patch to fix our issue. Unfortunately it has taken around one month for that patch to hit upstream (no idea if it stalled in my company, digia or nokia) and the bug being fixed by Olivier (with a patch better than mine).

Bottom line: If you can not find the bug in your code it's maybe because it's not there :D