Help KDE España while subscribing to Linux-Magazine.es

If you were thinking to subscribe to Linux-Magazine.es you might want to have a look at this offer, which lets you to pay the amount you want for 6 issues (well, actually it has to be >= 2€ but 2€ for 6 magazines borders stealing in my opinion :D) and you even get to choose to donate 10% to KDE España or other Free Software organizations.

KDE España is looking for Akademy-es 2012 locations

In KDE España we are looking for a group or organization in condition of co-organizer for Akademy-es 2012. If you are interested have a look at the call for locations page. If you are interested do not forget to send your submission in before February 25th.

Sad story of the day: Qt and XF86XK_TouchpadToggle

Today I realized Gnome has support for XF86XK_TouchpadToggle, i.e. if you press the key in your keyboard that has the touchpad with an X symbol over it, it toggles the enabled state of the touchpad.

This is very useful if you are like me and attach/detach a mouse various times during the day.

Since as far as I know this is not supported in KDE, this afternoon I decided to write a quick kded module that would listen to XF86XK_TouchpadToggle and call the corresponding XInput2 functions to toggle the state of the touchpad.

Investigating XInput2 was supposed to be the difficult part since it is out of my area of comfort, but at the end it resulted it was not that difficult and the desired effect can be achieved with no more than 10 lines of code.

After getting the correct XInput2 calls I started to build the skeleton of my kded module and when I was going to register the global KAction to listen for XF86XK_TouchpadToggle I realized Qt does not have support for this key, which means I can not use a KAction for that. Sad :-/

This has resulted in my getting diverted from my original goal and writing a patch for Qt5 to support the XF86XK_TouchpadToggle key and two other ones. Sadly this does not solve my immediate itch so I will either live with that itch or try to detect the keypress at the X level, but i'm not sure that's something I want to do :D

Update: I went the X11 way and it was not that painful. I now have some code that works, putting it in a git repo as soon as I get one :-)

Join KDE! Translate KDE!

It's that time of year again, KDE is nearing a new release day and it's time for translators to work on the making sure that new software/features are properly translated so that the thousands of KDE users can enjoy it in their native language.

Unfortunately translators come and go and KDE software continues to grow and grow, meaning that sometimes some languages fall below the line of what we consider an acceptable amount of translations for them to be shipped with the KDE releases.

For this 4.8 cycle this is the list of languages that was in 4.7 and if the release was today would not be released: Arabic, Bulgarian, Galician, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Latvian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Uyghur and Walloon

Obviously this does not mean that they will not released with KDE since each translation team has a different work schedule and some of them only work when really close to a release, but if you are a user enjoying KDE on one of the above languages you should think on volunteering to do some work so it stays that way. This is your opportunity to make a difference, write me to aacid@kde.org and join KDE by working on translations!

New job

Today has been my first day in my new job. I've started working as Software Engineer for

Since late August I had been doing interviews here in Barcelona but most of them were not really interesting only fullfilling the last of my four wanted points:
* Interesting job
* Linux related
* Free Software related
* Barcelona based

Working for Canonical gives me those four points and as an extra the salary is better than the average Barcelona job, so I can't complain :-)

As note i am almost sure my regular work will *not* be working in creating Kubuntu so don't ask me for feature improvements/bugfixes for it.

KDE/Harmattan brings me back to Berlin!

Until this summer I had never been in Berlin. And now after going there this August for the Desktop Summit, I am going back this weekend for the KDE/Harmattan sprint. My plan for this sprint involves trying to port KTuberling to Harmattan, should not be too difficult after my Blinken port, investigate how to use a proper kdelibs instead of libkok and try to learn as much of possible from all the attendants :-)

Okular and Send by Mail

There are regular requests about Okular having a "Send by Mail" menu item in the File menu.

In terms of implementation, it is a five minutes hack, since all you have to do is create a new KAction that calls KToolInvocation::invokeMailer with a few params and you are done.

Yet, i have been refusing to implement it since i do not think it is Okular responsibility to offer this feature.

I can understand that users are used to Adobe Reader having it, and in the unintegrated world of Windows it makes sense that every app includes as many features as possible since it is you versus the world.

On the other hand, in KDE land we pride ourselves of having things properly integrated and each feature in the software where it logically belongs, and in my book, the action of initiating the sending of an email, does not belong to a document viewer.

It is true though, that even if I've been involved in UI designing/programming for a while I can't still say I know what belongs to a given program or not.

Because once we add it to Okular? Why not to gwenview? And why not to Calligra? And And And?

What do you think?

Blinken: First KDE App on the Nokia Store?

Today Nokia approved Blinken for the N9/N950 and it appeared in the Nokia store.

I started coding Blinken (back then known by the ksimon name) in February 2005 and a few months later it joined the KDE Education project.

The last few months I've been playing with the N950 that the nice people at Nokia lent me and soon I realized that thanks to the Document Viewer (based in Calligra) it has some sort of kdelibs on the device (by the name of libkok) so porting KDE applications to it became a bit easier.

With the aim of having Blinken on my phone I started to work and after a few ifdefs for the mouse hover handling and a bit of QML for bits of the UI I ended up with this commit that makes Blinken available for another platform and to my knowledge makes it the first KDE application in the Nokia Store.

PelleTut, we love you too!

A nice user by the nickname of PelleTut just dropped by the #okular IRC channel and after me telling him "use evince instead of okular if you like it more/does what you want", he answered with a nice "lol, retard" and then quit.

Great way to convince us to implement those missing features!

Some Okular testing, please?

There are three newsworthy things today in Okular world:
* Michel Ludwig merged into master the branch he had been developing to help him use Okular better from Kile. This should had no impact in regular Okular users but as this is a biggish change it would be great if you all master branch okular users update, recompile and complain if you see any regression
* I committed a patch that will make the UI more responsive on opening for documents whose pages are slow to render. There is no real speedup, but the fact that you have the UI up and running sooner is nice. Again this should be pretty innocuous but if you run master and see any new weird thing on opening files let us know.
* I created a new branch named kill_poppler_thread whose only commit removes a lot of code from the PDF/poppler backend that is not needed anymore since there is now generic code that provides the threading functionality that code had. This should also be innocuous but i am a bit hesitant of merging it into master so it would be cool if some that use okular with PDF files intensively switched to the kill_poppler_thread and verified everything works as it should. If you do, please tell me and it will make my decision of whether merging into master or not easier.

KDE 15 years message from KDE España

KDE España decided to force me to record a video saying Happy Birthday to KDE. You can see it (in Spanish) at http://es.kde.org/notasprensa/15aniversario.php. And do not forget we have talks in four different cities going on this afternoon!

Updating the N950 firmware

I just got a N950 like probably some other KDE contributors will be getting this week. Thanks Nokia!

I am writing this blog to bring two things into your attention:
* The firmware shipped is not the last one, you might want to download the new one.
* Updating the firmware failed for me with a "USB interface: Device or resource busy" error

To fix this problem I needed to run
while true; do modprobe -r cdc_phonet; done
in a separate terminal and then it all worked (note it takes around 20 minutes to update, be patient) (kudos to google for showing me the answer in an obscure irc log)

Moved from Berlios

This weekend we learnt that Berlios would be shutting down at the end of the year. I went over there and realized i had three things in Berlios:
* The webpage of your favorite geography learning tool KGeography
* The webpage of the ioslave that lets you access the pre-http "web" kio_gopher
* The code of the ROAM 3D viewer I coded for my Master Thesis r3v

For the KGeography and kio_gopher webpages I've chosed userbase, in case of KGeography reusing the existing one that was quite good and for kio_gopher creating a small one from scratch.

For r3v I've went with gitorious, not sure it is the best code hosting around but i just wanted a quick place to dump this coded i created in 2005 and i already had an account in gitorious :D

Poppler 0.18.0 released

Poppler 0.18.0 is here! It took 9 months and was delayed around 3 months because of my infamous laptop dead but I was finally able to release 0.18.0 today.

The changes are too big to explain in detail (12000 lines changed in 236 files) but I'll give a few highlights:
* General speed improvements
* Quaility and speed improvements in the Splash renderer (used by Okular)
* Quaility improvements in the Cairo renderer (used by Evince)
* Better Annotation support
* Better Form support
* Introduction of pdftocairo, a command line utility that uses the Cairo renderer to render pdf pages to png, etc.
* Introduction of pdfseparate, a command line utility that extracts pages of PDF files
* Introduction of pdfunite, a command line utility that can merges multiple PDF files into a single one
* Removal of pdftoabw as it was unmaintained
* Removal of the Qt3 frontend as it was unmaintained

You can have a look at the full changelog going to the Poppler releases page and having a look at the changes of 0.18.0, 0.17.4, 0.17.3, 0.17.2, 0.17.1 and 0.17.0

KDE git 4.7 branches renamed to KDE/4.7

Since 5 days ago, the git repositories that used 4.7 as branch name (kdepimlibs, kdepim, kdepim-runtime, kdeplasma-addons, okular, mobipocket and the repos of what used to be kdeedu and kdeutils) now use KDE/4.7 to be consistent with the rest of git repositories that are released together in the KDE SC.

Be sure you work on the correct branch and do not push the wrong branch names again. Also it might make sense to run "git remote prune origin" on your clones so that the now unexisting branches are removed from your local copy.

Note: I did not do this work, but I haven't seen anything on the planet so I thought it made sense blogging about it

KDE l10n essential requirements changed

In the past we asked KDE translation teams to translate kdebase at least a 75% if they wanted to be part of a KDE release. With the evolution of KDE towards something less monolithic it made less and less sense to have that requirement, so today, going along with the split of the old kdebase directory of translations to kde-runtime, kde-workspace and kde-baseapps we have changed the requirement to be a 90% of kde-runtime.

It is a increase in percentage, but it is really a decrease of total messages required since previously 75% of kdebase was around 13000 messages and 90% of kde-runtime is around 3000.

You can check the essential requirements for what will be KDE 4.8 at http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/essential/

KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule was made official last Saturday. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.8 goodness by late January 2012. Remeber you can keep up to date with releases using the http://www.kde.org/releaseschedule.ics calendar file.

How a patch for poppler made me fix a bug in Konsole

In March, Tim Brody sent a patch to the poppler mailing list to make poppler extract accentuated characters of old pdf generated by latex (where the character and the accent where represented as two different glyphs) as a character plus a combining character. After testing the patch i saw it did not work at all, as it was changing the output of pdftotext from
R. L¨wen and B. Polster
o
to
R. Lowen and B. Polster
instead of
R. Löwen and B. Polster

Tim answered with a "WorksForMe" that left us quite puzzled for a while. It took me some time to realize it was actually Konsole's fault as it did not understand combining characters. A bug about that had already been reported by Thiago back in 2005. As i had been bit by that bug I decided to have a go at fixing it and after some days of coding I landed a patch to support Unicode composing characters in Konsole. Unfortunately it was already too late for KDE 4.7 so you'll have to wait until 4.8 to enjoy of this goodness (or use master ;))

P.S: Tim if you are reading this you never answered about the regressions caused by your patch so it was never committed to poppler

Okular Selection GSoC: In depth analysis

As I explained a few days ago Mahfuzur has been working on improving the text selection for Okular in a GSoc. Now he has made a very detailed blog post explaining all his work. Please go there and give it a read as it is quite interesting (and do not forget to try the code and give feedback!)

Try the new Okular selection branch

Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun has been working on a GSOC to bring multi column support to Okular text selection, it has reached the state where it would be nice to have other people testing it and giving some feedback about what you think about it. So please all you heavy okular users go, checkout the selection_and_highlighting branch and either write here or write to the okular-devel mailing list.

Berlin

I'm also doing a Lightning Talk about Poppler :-)

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

Talk at X JPL

This thursday and friday the X Jornades de Programari Lliure take place at Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. As you can see in the program I will be talking about translation communities dynamics (mainly on KDE) on Friday from 16:30 to 17:00.

Other KDE people like Aaron Seigo, Aleix Pol and Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas also also talking at the X JPL.

N9 disappointment

It seems the default applications will be closed source, so yeah, looks cool, uses Qt and bla bla bla, but still not a real Free Software phone as they sold it to us.

Of course I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.

Beware of KDE 4.6.4

Some tarballs appear to be broken.

Catalan Police hitting pacific protesters

Catalan Police doing what they know better, being brainless idiots.

KGeography questions: Top Left or Centered?

We the KGeography developers are in a disagreement of what looks better, centered questions or top left aligned ones, so we are opening this poll for you the users to decide. Please hop onto this post on the KDE Forums and vote!

Akademy-es 2011 starting today

Akademy-es 2011 is starting today :-)

Today talks include a talk about translations by part of Catalan KDE translation crew, how about how to contribute by Aleix, one about telepathy by Alex and me speaking about potatos.

Thanks to our kind sponsors Google and Qt/Nokia :-)

Qt Designer texts: disambiguation vs comment

Qt Designer has two fields regarding translations for text properties (e.g. the text of a Label, or the tool tip of a Widget) disambiguation and comment (that unfortunately map to the comment (for disambiguation) and extracomment (for comment) XML attributes in the .ui file), let me give a bit of explanation of what they mean since I've found some errors on it's usage while fixing a bug we had in our translation scripts (aka scripty). First some background on how translation works, when you ask for a string to be translated (e.g. "Run") you can give some context that acts as an extra key (e.g. "Verb" or "Noun") so translators can do different translations (Run, Verb) -> Ejecutar (Run, Noun) -> Ejecución This extra key is what you write in the disambiguation field On the other hand when you write something in the comment field, it only appears as a comment to the translator, so if you have two texts with the same text (e.g. "Run") and different comments (e.g. "Verb" or "Noun") it will not work, so only use the comment field to give extra information for fields whose text is unique but the meaning might not be easy to understand to the translator. So there is no reason at all to do things like <string extracomment="General information">General information of the identity.</string> since you are giving less information in the comment field than in the text itself Also just remember it makes no sense to add disambiguation or comment to a text property that is empty since at the moment we can not translate empty strings, so things like this are also not useful at all <string extracomment="Open file dialog"/> Finally if you use KUIT markers they need to be in the disambiguation field

Akademy-es 2011 schedule ready

We just published the schedule for Akademy-es 2011 that will happen in Barcelona from 20 to 22 of May. Make sure to register if you plan to attend!

Akademy-es 2011

KDE Spain is organizing in Barcelona the Akademy-es 2011, the annual meeting of KDE users and contributors in Spain from May 20th through May 22nd.

During the last events attendance and the technical quality of the papers have increased significantly making the Akademy-es, is one of the most important KDE events worldwide.

New this year, the event will take place in two different locations, thereby adjusting each activity to its ideal location. Friday's activities will be held at the Campus Nord of the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya and weekend ones will be at school Sant Marc de Sarrià.

You can find more infomation at the event website.

Hero of the day: Thomas Freitag

I've just commited a patch to Poppler made by Thomas Freitag that implements Pattern tilings in the Splash rendering backend (the one used by Okular) instead of falling back to the default Poppler::Gfx implementation. This means that for example for a pdf page that previously took 34 minutes to render, now renders in 250 msec. Not bad eh?

Fixed one of biggest Okular crashers

I just fixed one of the biggest Okular crashers https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243434 (around 20 to 30 duplicate reports). This one was not really difficult to fix (actually it is just a one liner), but it was difficult to fix for me since I could not reproduce it

It took a while to find someone that had the crash and was willing to help me debug it (thanks Adrià). So please, all users reading this blog, be more proactive when we ask questions in bugs, because, you know, it is in your best interest answering our questions and helping us pinpoint where the problem is.

KDE Main Modules Minor Point Relase Policy

The release-team has written a minor point release policy for KDE main modules.

You can find it at http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Minor_Point_Release_Policy

As far as we know it covers what we already do, just makes it a bit more official and standardized.

KDE 4.6 dinner in Barcelona^WBadalona

This Saturday 19 the Barcelona & surroundings KDE crew will be celebrating the release of 4.6 with a dinner in Badalona. Read the Community Wiki page for more details and join us! It'll be fun :-)

Dublin Airport Terminal 2 fail

Today is the first day my Aer Lingus flight to Barcelona leaves from new shiny Dublin Airport Terminal 2 instead of Terminal 1 and it really shows it is new and has some rough edges.
* Aer Lingus self checking machines are not able to read most passports, thus almost everyone has to queue on the check-in desks
* Security clearance trays get stuck in the ramp that is supposed to get them back to the beginning of the queue (can't believe no one tested this)
* VIP lounge WiFi has only http access

All those three things worked perfectly on Terminal 1 :-/

Dear Lazyweb: Know anyone at multimania?

Since the end of december, the webpage of my father at http://usuarios.multimania.es/sacorbera has been lost in hyperspace redirecting to a 404 error at multimania.de.

The interesting part is that if I log in via multimania.es all the data is there, it is just that the domain seems to be lost (¿misconfiguration?).

I have been trying to contact multimania admins via mail and all the forms i've found in their web without any kind of success. So please if you happen to work at multimania or know someone that works there or know someone that knows someone... Tell them to fix this problem.

Second Linux Kernel patch accepted

After my first ever Linux Kernel patch 8 years ago (yes I'm getting old) i successfully got a new one accepted a few weeks ago that fixes the temperature problem i was having with my laptop. Yay for scratching your own itch :-)

KDE Spain looking for a place to host Akademy-es 2011

We are looking for a place to host the annual Spanish KDE event, if you feel like helping us co-organize the event please visit http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2011/ubicacion.php

KWalletEditor no longer depends on Qt3Support

I've just commited to trunk (KDE 4.7) the last of the changes I started doing a few days ago to make KWalletEditor not depend on Qt3Support/KDE3Support. Basically that meant rewriting all the Q3IconView and K3ListView as KListWidget and QTreeWidget with the associated Drag&Drop changes. I've been testing the code for the usual problems of this type of porting while doing the code changes but something might have escaped me so I'll be more than happy if you give it some usage and report to me any problem you might find.