I thought that was obvious, but today someone thought that i was "working" as "paid working" on it.
No, I don't get paid for the work i do on Poppler.
It's my computing hobby, and on top of that it's not even my "primary" computing hobby, lots of KDE stuff take precedence over it, and i guess Gnome stuff may also take precedence for Carlos (second top commiter according to the git shortlog)
Aside a few paid contributions and some patches that may have come from people that use the software on their business (and we could file them under "paid" since they did the fix as part of their job) no one has a paid job that is mainly "work on poppler".
I guess we've done a good enough job as hobbyist :)
Obviously we could do better, so if you have lots of money and are interested in making free software PDF rendering beter please hire someone to help us (no, this is not me asking for money, I've a good enough job already).
And if you don't have money but you have some free time and like to help, join us :)
And if you really really have some free time or lots of money you could port Okular, Evince et al to pdfium and see if it's actually better/worse than poppler.
Showing posts with label free software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free software. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 07, 2016
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Logging in into Picasa 3.9 under Linux
A few years ago I showed my father Picasa under Linux, he liked it and started to use it to upload his photos, and has been using it for almost 6 years, even Google discontinued Picasa for Linux at version 3.0 (Picasa is at 3.9 now).
Unfortunately a few weeks ago seems Google decided to kill support for old APIs in the server side and Picasa 3.0 for Linux was giving back an error when trying to upload an image ("Could not find POST url" or similar). I suggested to wait to see if they would come back, but it seems they haven't and so i've had to fix it for him.
Since he's heavily invested in Picasa I've had to install Picasa for windows under wine to make it work. It has not been trivial to get to work so I'll share it here for others that committed the error of trusting privative software and services.
The story is this: Installing picasa 3.9 for windows under wine is pretty easy (next, next, next). The problem is once you are running it, being able to log in. First problem is that the webview using for login doesn't even show. Most of the interwebs suggest installing ie8 using winetricks to solve that and it indeed solves the problem of the webview not showing, but still i can't log in (interestingly the webview will tell you if you wrote the password wrong).
At this point i was stuck for a few hours, even found some dude that claimed he had installed Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer and that had fixed for him. But not for me.
After a few hours, I stopped trusting the internet and started to think. I have a windows installation laying around, and i can log in from there, and once logged in Picasa does not ask for the password again, so it must be storing something no?
So I made a copy of the Program Files folder and compared it after loggin in, folders where exactly the same. So it was not stored there, which makes sense since log in is per user not per machine. Next i tried in that weird Personal Folder (Windows $HOME) but could not find any change either. Last chance was the registry, i used http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/reg_file_from_application.html and saw that when logging in, Picasa writes a few entries in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Picasa\Picasa2\Preferences namely GoogleOAuth, GoogleOAuthEmail, GoogleOAuthServices and GoogleOAuthVersion, so I copied these over to the wine installation (with "wine regedit") and now my father can run Picasa just fine again.
Lessons learned:
* Non Free Software will eventually come back and hit you, if possible don't use it for stuff that is critical to you
* Think about your problem, sometimes is easier than just googling random instructions from the internet.
Unfortunately a few weeks ago seems Google decided to kill support for old APIs in the server side and Picasa 3.0 for Linux was giving back an error when trying to upload an image ("Could not find POST url" or similar). I suggested to wait to see if they would come back, but it seems they haven't and so i've had to fix it for him.
Since he's heavily invested in Picasa I've had to install Picasa for windows under wine to make it work. It has not been trivial to get to work so I'll share it here for others that committed the error of trusting privative software and services.
The story is this: Installing picasa 3.9 for windows under wine is pretty easy (next, next, next). The problem is once you are running it, being able to log in. First problem is that the webview using for login doesn't even show. Most of the interwebs suggest installing ie8 using winetricks to solve that and it indeed solves the problem of the webview not showing, but still i can't log in (interestingly the webview will tell you if you wrote the password wrong).
At this point i was stuck for a few hours, even found some dude that claimed he had installed Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer and that had fixed for him. But not for me.
After a few hours, I stopped trusting the internet and started to think. I have a windows installation laying around, and i can log in from there, and once logged in Picasa does not ask for the password again, so it must be storing something no?
So I made a copy of the Program Files folder and compared it after loggin in, folders where exactly the same. So it was not stored there, which makes sense since log in is per user not per machine. Next i tried in that weird Personal Folder (Windows $HOME) but could not find any change either. Last chance was the registry, i used http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/reg_file_from_application.html and saw that when logging in, Picasa writes a few entries in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Picasa\Picasa2\Preferences namely GoogleOAuth, GoogleOAuthEmail, GoogleOAuthServices and GoogleOAuthVersion, so I copied these over to the wine installation (with "wine regedit") and now my father can run Picasa just fine again.
Lessons learned:
* Non Free Software will eventually come back and hit you, if possible don't use it for stuff that is critical to you
* Think about your problem, sometimes is easier than just googling random instructions from the internet.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
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.
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.
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 :-)
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Spanish computer shops to sell Free Software
I read from a Mercè Molist article (spanish) that the "Spanish Association of Small and Medium Sized Computer and New Technologies Companys" will inform their clients about free software, computers more compatible with it and how to claim back Windows fee if you bought a Windows preloaded computer. A really nice move, let's see what's its future.
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