New blood

New blood in the KDE world should be a good thing, but sometimes it is not.

Why? oh! Why?

you may ask.
It depends on how you use that new blood.

A very good way to use the new blood is Season of KDE. You get new developers, features that interest them and some mentor to help them if they find themselves lost. Almost sure a win situation. This way we are getting a person (Rafael Rodríguez) to try to fix the VERY SLOW rendering of patterns in okular.

Then there is the bad way, and sorry Jonathan, i know i kinda promised you not to bitch more about Rosetta, but i have to. That nice Translate This Application button is the worst executed idea ever. It redirects you to a page where people will translate applications for KUbuntu (potentially overriding real KDE translation) and people will not know they are not contributing to KDE, moreover this people probably won't know the style used for translations, so their translation will be totally out of the rest of translations.

The good implementation of that idea should have been putting that person in contact with the KDE translators team, but that would remove the KUbuntu coolness from the equation ...

Things to see in Morocco

This is completely FLOSS unrelated, you can skip it now if you are 100% geek ;-)

Ok, now that i've eliminated 100% geek people, let me ask one thing.

Which are the must see places in Morocco?

I'm going there a whole week in December with some friends but we do not know much about the country so i thought asking here, probably some of you have been in Morocco and have good suggestions on what we should visit.

Thanks!

Update: I'm back from Morocco, if you want to read about it go to this blog post

Akademy hosting ends early!

Hi, this is just a reminder to all those people out there that want to come to aKademy but still have not registered. Last day to pay for aKademy hosting is JULY 23rd so you better get yourself to register and pay the hosting quickly or you will have to find accomodation by yourself if you register later.

Thanks TSS!

What's TSS would 99.99% of you ask? It's short for Transport Simulation Systems, the company where i work, and why do i thank them?

Because they sending me to aKademy 2006 and paying trip and hosting. This is quite a nice thing for them to do as the only KDE related thing we do is developing with Qt :-) It's so strange Tink suggested they are tired of me and they are sending me a few days off, hope not!

So, remember, if you ever are in need of a Micro or Macro traffic simulator using Qt that is multiplatform and somewhat remotely helps KDE, have a look at www.aimsun.com.

I suck

This is a follow up to the I rock blog from a few days ago, maybe with it, some people tought i am that kind of person that can only see his good points and thinks himself is perfect, just to make sure, i'm not that kind of person :-D

And why i suck? Well, today was my fourh fail trying to pass the driving test and i did get into contrary direction no less!!!

Well, at least i lasted a bit more than that poor girl that could not even start because she did not remember of disengaging the hand brake :-/

Well, five is a good number right?

Registered!

I'm #20. That is a quite high number given aKademy 2006 registrations started this morning :-)

See you in Dublin!

Racist me? No!

Well, i'm getting the habit of blogging about non FLOSS things, this is about this morning discussion with a woman on the underground.

So that's the situation:
* I get though the entrance, a woman does too, two north-african get throught the entrance without paying
* Woman says "Here in Spain we do pay for the service!" in very loud voice
* The north africans think its better saying nothing and just continue their way
* i have a "Let's improve the world" feeling and try to argue with the woman
* "That was a bit of racist comment, don't you think?"
* "Racist? Me? No! What bothers me is that they are no paying!"
* "Yeah, that's what you said in Spain right?"
* "I did not even look at their faces!"
* "Come on, if it had been me you would have also said in Spain..."
* "Well, really i wanted to inform them, maybe they don't know..."
* "You really think they are utterly stupid and don't know they have to pay?"

And some more strange things she said i don't completely remember.

Maybe the woman does not want to be racist, but her subconscious is, maybe only a bit, but...

Spying a bit on GUADEC

Today i went to Vilanova to assist to a few talks of GUADEC to see how our gnome friends where doing.

Today and tomorrow are the "warmup weekend" and most/all the talks where in spanish or catalan and directed towards the local people. I went to a dbus talk, 5 mins of GTK programming (where i thanked $DEITY that we do not use C for doing OOP), a talk about l10n of gnome to catalan (they seem to be doing a bit better in terms of number of translators than ca l10n team of kde) and a talk about the new distribution that will go into all catalan schools next year, based on Suse, using gnome desktop as default but also shipping KDE.

Some things worth mentioning:

• They had rather big posters hanging on the outside of the buildings where GUADEC takes place, that is a GOOD THING and we should do something similar, AFAIK it was not done in málaga last year.


• They seem a bit more concerned about us that we about them, at least all talks i went mentioned KDE in some way or other, i don't remember that happening in Málaga (although maybe it happened)


• It is much nicer having the conference center in the center of the village, like GUADEC in Vilanova or this year's aKademy in Dublin, than in the outside like happened in Málafa


• Gnomies are normal people! WTF i thought gnomes where small people with a large beard!


• They had a nice o'Reilly stand in the main hall selling books, although some of there were not really ON TOPIC there (think JavaBeans)


• There was WIFI hotspots for all around, first time i listed available networks i thought "i'll go home with some hundreds of neurons less"


• There were very few power plugs


• Warmup weekend is free, but the core sessions are 30€, i think making contributors pay is not a good thing


• freenode IRC network was not working (probably due to too many people trying to connect from the same IP)

All i all, is nice meeting/hearing people that have different preferences so you don't end up in self indulgence

Shame!

Warning: This is not KDE nor FLOSS related, you can freely skip it if you don't want to read a real life rant.

Yesterday, in Catalonia there was a referendum to vote about a new statute of autonomy.

And more than 50% of voters did not vote, i feel shame for that. Not voting means you are out of game, you can vote yes, vote no, do a blank vote, put KDE logo on the voting envelope, or even put a photo of yourslef on it, but VOTE!

If you don't vote, you just demonstrate that you are nothing more than a drone, going to work, having some vacation, seeing world cup on TV and repeat, you can not express a "i'm dissapointed with politics" with abstention, you just demonstrate dullness of mind.

I rock :-)

Just saw on Adriaan's graph that i'm the oldest commiter with a 100% activity percentage :-).

Obviously i'm not the best commiter, coolo, dfaure, and mlaurent have to fight for it, but ei, i'm the first on something :-D. Cheers to markey for beign the runnerup on the oldest commiter with 100% activity!

More seriously, we might consider removing commit rights from all that oldies that only have a "square" for their first week and never ever commited anything more.

Popularity contest

Don't know if the [k]ubuntu running people already know of it or not, but i just found http://popcon.ubuntu.com/ a page that list the most "popular" ubuntu packages. You just have to install popularity-contest and dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest

Once the numbers get high enough it'll be interesting for developers to see how much their program is used.

Wish me luck

Tomorrow i'm taking my drivers license practic test, i'm going to need some luck to make it perfect so i get the license so i need your wishful thinking ;-)

On a side note i svn rm kpdf from svn! You have to use oKular on branches/work/kde4/playground/graphics from now on if you want to use kpdf on KDE4. I need helpers there as Piotr (that did oKular as part of a Google's Summer of Code) is not helping as much i would want, so if you want to take part come and join the fun!

You know you're a freak...

... when you go to the annual party of your computer science university (FIB/UPC) and there's a giant poster that says

FestaFib 2006
lol omg wtf rtfm

and you are the only person among your friends that know what the second line means.


On the kpdf/oKular/poppler side i've been porting code from kpdf/oKular to the poppler-qt4 frontend lately and almost have a full port of oKular to use the poppler-qt4 frontend. After that i'll svn rm kdegraphics/kpdf and focus on trying to improve oKular to live to everyone's expectations.

Most used Free Software Browser

If you ask anyone that knows what a browser is and what Free Software is, what is the most used Free Software Browser, [almost] everyone will answer "Firefox!".

But it is not, sorry to be a bubble buster to all that people that thought Free Software was having a nice champion on Firefox.

What why is Firefox not Free Software may you ask? Simple, because of this

This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports (including Denied Parties, entities on the Bureau of Export Administration Entity List, and Specially Designated Nationals).

And everyone knows Free Software and Open Source definitions are completely AGAINST limiting who can use the software.

So probably most used Free Software Browser is Konqueror.

Update: Ok, i'm completely stupid and idiot, and wrong, because seems everyone accepts removing freedoms because someGoverment says it, does not make your program unfree, i completely disagree, but obviosuly i'm not a lawyer and as said i'm stupid and idiot so my opinion is worth zero.

BTW this never wanted to be an attack to Firefox or to anyoneelse, just a curious thing i discovered.

Anyways i thought one could post random thoughts on his blog, but now it seems planet.kde.org is an official kde channel instead of what it says it is "Planet KDE is an aggregation of public weblogs written by contributors to the K Desktop Environment. The opinions expressed in these weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors.
Planet KDE is not a product or publication of KDE e.V.; as such, it does not necessarily represent the views of the KDE project as a whole or the views of KDE e.V." So do not associate this idiot blog with KDE or KPDF or Poppler or other projects i contribute to, the only idiot here it's me, Albert Astals Cid.

Update 2: So it seems that restriction is not transitive, that is, one can download firefox from US to Spain and then one can download it from Spain to Cuba, isn't law something strange? /me is glad he has not anything to do with law in his life.

That strange feeling...

Sometimes i have that strange feeling that people are trying to make fun of me.

Just know i've had this feeling again, i've tried to go to a webpage of local radio that also uses internet for the broadcast so i could hear FC Barcelona vs AC Milan soccer match.

The interesting thing is that you can not make it work under linux because they're using a Flash 8 animation to load the audio player!

That itself is awful enough but what is even *nicer* is that once i've went into windows, loaded that flash 8 movie there's a "if you have linux click on this link". WTF! How can i be seeing that in linux if flash8 does not work on it? And even better the link does not work! :-D

Come on, can't you just give me a damn url...

Help with KDE releases translation

Translating the release announcements to different languages is important because that makes it easier for non-english speaking people and media to spread the good news that a new KDE version is out.

If you feel you can help, have a look at http://www.spreadkde.org/handbook/release_promotion/translations

New live in kde-edu and oKular

This week oKular port to KDE4 got some help from one of our of the kde-edu guys, Pino Toscano, that has been removing Qt3Support calls, improving the cmake support and such much needed things, thanks Pino!

On the edu side, David Saxton has been improving kmplot in the same way, making it more Qt4-ish at a rate of 1 commit each 4 hours :-D

I for one welcome our new overlords!

First step to World domination

Well, we all know in the deep of our heart that KDE mission is World domination.

We are on the first step to it, as for now once you have installed KDE from source you can not uninstall it anymore.

~/build-cmake/kdelibs4_snapshot$ make uninstall
make: *** No rule to make target `uninstall'. Stop.


PS: That is a joke, not in the way that it is not real, but in the way that i know that it is beign worked out, but i'm so frustated with cmake at the moment that i had to make a joke about it or die.

Let's do the poppler dance

KPDF from trunk (that is what will become KDE 4.0) just got switched to use poppler >= 0.5.1
STOP
oKular (that if everything goes well will be KPDF successor for KDE 4.0) will be switched during the week
STOP
We still do not use poppler-qt4 bindings because i have still to get them complete
STOP
Hope to get them complete for poppler 0.5.2
STOP
That does not mean i approve some distros silently patching KPDF from KDE 3.5.x to use poppler
STOP
LET'S GO TO THE STREET AND DO THE POPPLER DANCE
NOW!
STOP

We are doing right

You know you are on the right way when you are attacked by spanish trolls that accuse you of beign a damn catalan nationalist and also are attacked by catalan trolls that accuse you of beign a damn spanish nationalist :-D

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." - Master Yoda