Font artist wanted

In blinKen we are using a font that simulates hand drawing to show status messages, the problem is that this font does not have some characters used by some languages so if you always wanted to learn how to use FontForge, now is your oportunity to learn it and do something nice with your artistic skills! Add that missing glyphs to steve font!

If you want to do it contact me for details.

Ubuntu woes

Have a look at this bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/callgrind/+bug/2700.

callgrind is not installable in lastest [K]Ubuntu stable version, and the bug is marked as rejected, how nice :-/

Catalan l10n team and Catalan government work together

Today it was announced that the KDE Catalan l10n team known as ( cat >> KDE ) will work together with TERMCAT, the organization that standarizes new words, usually technology related, in the Catalan language.

The exact collaboration terms are still not completed, but we will surely provide them access to the NX account we have on the OpenUsability server, so they can test the translations while we work on them.

So thanks also to Kurt and the OpenUsability team for providing us with access to that NX machine where the translators can have a look at how their translation will look in a given program, as that is often a program as they translate "unreleased" versions of the programs.

More info on http://www.lafarga.org/node/1052 (Catalan language)

Karma++

I just became a member of MSF so i got some karma boost :-) To all people out there that always thought "it would be nice beign member of a NGO", don't think it anymore, just do it!

What my work colleagues liked about KDE

Some weeks ago i installed KUbuntu at work to help improving the multi-OS behaviour of our Qt based product.

What is interesting is to know which things they have liked more about KDE, first are konqueror shortchuts gg: imdb: en2es: es2en:, second there is RSIBreak, they like that cute program that helps you avoid RSI, and third and finally they woed about ... kruler!!!

So for all those that say that those little "toys" are not good for KDE shut up, i got office people interested in KDE with all those small progams ;-)

KDE meetings, Languages and Trolls

Well, if you have a look at Akademy-es 2006 meeting news item on the dot you will see it turned into completely off-topic discussion. Probably my fault, i'm sorry.

This does not means i regret of the comment i did as it is completely right IMHO, let's have a cold look at it.

A) Someone asks language of the meeting
B) Jason Harris says he guess it'll be Spanish as it is the language the wiki is in and also is a event specifically for Spanish people
C) Antonio Larrosa reanswers and says that yeah Spanish will be the main language of the event and that we hope to get people from catalan, basque and galicean translation teams, so that languages will probably be present in the event too. Nothing strange, i remember i spoke Spanish in some moments in the "real" Málaga Akademy with Spanish people and i'm sure some germans spoke german between them also.
D) Someone called Javier Marcet, comes and starts with "Oh my ****!!" + strange sentence about political nonsense that IMHO doesn't fit + "Absurd!", and then asks us to forbid the usage of any language not Spanish.

Sorry, but that is trolling, see it as you want, but people will talk in the language they fell more happy with, forcing people to use a specific language is BAD.

Does this mean i will speak in Catalan to another Catalan if i know there are 10 people around that do not understands us?

Obviously not, noone, nowhere, at any time of the history, as done that, because i will be more "happy" sacrifizing some part of my "speaking mother tongue happyness" to win some "happynes" by the fact that there is more people that understands me.

Obviously you have the right to flame me and disagree, this is all about speech freedom.

Which 64-bit distro?

Probably this week i'm buying a new PC with the dual core 64-bit AMD Processor. Any suggestion of which 64-bit distro is better?

KPDF problem with Save As...

KPDF as a problem in which if you save a document over itself while it is open using the Save As... hability the document gets destroyed. So don't do it ;-) You've been warned. More at http://kpdf.kde.org/news.php

Google Summer of Code T-Shirt

I just got my Google SoC T-Shirt, it's a nice black t-shirt with a small but good enough SoC logo on the front and Google's brand on one of the arms. Thanks Google for that gift :-)

Kombination web page is on

Ok, after Berlios refused us, gna, as some people suggested, has accepted us. So we already have a project page, a home page (although a bit ugly ATM) and a mailing list. So come and join the fun!

Poppler 0.4.3 release is out

Well it's not a big release, but it fixes some security problems and some crashes so it is worth updating if you are using poppler. Grab it at http://poppler.freedesktop.org/.

On the current *news* going all over the net, i think it's a good thing Linus uses KDE and promotes its use, on the other hand there is no need to insult the Gnomes as we are all friends, you know?

Amazon--++

First of all -- for not beign able of shipping a calendar from germany to spain without it getting lost/stealt/wathever

Then ++ for returning the money they charged me with such diligence.

Berlios--

********
Due to resource limitations we cannot support more games or game frameworks.

The BerliOS Crew
********

So they refused to host kombination web page, nice for them, thanks and bye, i'm not suggestion berlios as a sourceforge alternative to anyone anymore.

Poppler, Qt4, Windows and my desktop

Seems making poppler compile under Windows is not that difficult, mingw, some handfile editing of Makefiles and some luck gave me that


That is, an almost working poppler-qt4 test, if it not was because no fonts are rendered :-D So yes, all people that keep asking if poppler is portable to windows, it is, we just need you to do the fine tuning ;-)

Many will consider me a heretic for that kind of Windows work, but linux on my laptop suffered some problems lately due to having Mandriva Cooker installed and my main desktop machine seems to have died completely (had a kernel panic when i came back from seeing TV and it won't boot :-S)

Hello Planet Freedesktop!

To Planet KDE, i'm now member of Planet Freedesktop also ;-)

This is my presentation post for FreeDesktop planet readers. I work mainly on KDE, as maintainer of kpdf and some other apps, but i'm also an active developer on freedesktop cvs due to beign one of the main commiters to poppler cvs tree.

In Poppler related news i can tell that we have already merged the xpdf 3.01 changes in the tree, that mainly give us support for images with alpha channel and we are trying to get a new release, that will probably be qualified as "unstable", as there are quite heavy changes, to get some testing out there :-)

Mozilla and their i18n problems

First of all note this is AFAIK and that i'm not a mozilla developer nor specialist nor user (only when i'm on windows that is not much).
You probably noted that yesterday Mozilla tried to eclipse our 3.5 release with Firefox 1.5 release, i thought, ok, i'll download it so my father can use it on its Windows machine, so there i go to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all.html to get the catalan version of Firefox 1.5 for Windows and wooops, it's not there :-/ So my father is forced to use the old 1.0.7 version.
Obviously i'm not requesting to have a fully 100% translated catalan version of Firefox when we don't have one in KDE (http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/ca/index.php) but at least a 1.5 release reusing the strings from 1.0.7 would be enough as i'm almost sure most strings are the same, but Mozilla foundation has historically been a bit bad on the i18n side making translation teams provide the i18n'ed binaries instead of doing the build along the English binary and that cause that kind of problems.
I hope they can solve this issue with i18n as it's one of the strong points Free Software has.

KDE 3.5 released!

Announcement

My contributions to this release are some minor features in kpdf like support for images with alpha channels and two new programs inside kdeedu.

Also don't forget to visit the visual guide for other highlights.

Congrats to everyone involved in this release!!!

The second

Some days ago my expedient on my university's online campus got updated to reflect i have the second best average mark of the 213 people that ended the CS degree this year, now my only duty left is to discover who was number one and kill congrat him.

On side news: Spanish media reports that the newborn princess will get university level studies, damn! THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Kombination

You may remember a past blog (http://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2005/09/some-gaming.html) about two games i was writing for KDE4. Kiriki has not changed anything since it can be said to be finished, but crossedWords changed its name to Kombination (damn K-names! ;-)) and has progressed a lot as you can see here thanks to Pino Toscano helping with it. You can actually play with the exception that scoring does not work, blank tile can not be changed to a letter and that word checking does not work.

And word checking is our largest problem by now. With word checking i mean "how to decide if a word is valid or not".
The first obvious thing one thinks is "ask the other users", but you have to think as a game designer that other players can be "bad people" and always refuse your words so that solution has this problem.
Second obvious thing is "use kspell", but this has problems as for example in spanish you play with unaccentuaded tiles, so you do not create "balcón" but "balcon" so kspell will tell you that word is invalid.
Third obvious thing is "use a preprocessed list only with acceptable words even if they are written wrong", that solution also has problems, italian word list extracted from aspell is 25Mb, spanish one is 6.5Mb and catalan 149Mb!!! that means that loading that into memory to check needs a lot of mem and that kombination would be HUGE to distribute.

Anyone has a fourth idea?

BTW you can get kombination from /branches/work/kde4/playground/games/kombination/

I hate monarchy

This is just a rant and not KDE related, if you are reading this from the planet you can just skip it.

Well, the title says it all, i can not stand monarchy, those people that break the rules, "law is the same for everybody" they say, yeah, that's why there's someone out there that will be the ruler of my country just by having been born, i think i was not given that right when i was born.

My hate has always been big, but today there was the drop that made the glass full; the princess entered the hospital to give born to a new bloodsucker from Spanish monarchy and TV is making connections to the hospital each fives minutes just to report there are no news!!! Come on! I don't give a damn if he is born or not, but i could *try to understand* a connection if the new prince has been born, but just stopping a movie each 5 minutes to tell there's no news is just insane!

Viva la República!