Distributor patches

Don't you like when distributions decide they are going to patch your program so it works worse? And not only it makes your program work worse, you loose your precious time debugging problems that don't really exist.

Ok, i know i blogged about that before, but the problem is still not fixed so i keep whining about it.

KPDF printing and margins

Up to now, KPDF did not let you specify the margins for printing, it always printed with 0 margins, today, seeing that from time to time there's a bug report with people asking about printing PDF with margins i started implementing it, i'm almost done, but have some problems understanding what a user wants when specifying margins.

Let's put a simple example. You have a single page A4 document that has a black rectangle drawn at 2cm of distance from each side. Now you choose to print it with 5cm margin on top. Which result should you get?

a) The printed sheet has the rectangle with these distances: bottom 1.66 cm, top 6.66 cm, left 2cm, right 2cm. That means the available height got reduced from 29,7cm to 24,7cm so distance of 2cm is now 1.66 in the vertical direction, but as available width did not change, you get aspect ratio lost.

b) The printed sheet has the rectangle with these distances: bottom 1.66 cm, top 6.66 cm, left 3.43cm, right 3.43cm. That means the available height got reduced from 29,7cm to 24,7cm so distance of 2cm is now 1.66 in the vertical direction, and to preserve aspect ratio, the available width got reduced from 21 to 17.465 cm, resulting in 1.66 + (21 - 17.465)/2 margin in left and right.

c) Something else

I don't really know what a user would expect when printing, as losing aspect ratio is always a bad idea, but case b) is quite confusing too as you get margins on the horizontal side when you only put it on the vertical side, ideas?

GPG trust paths

Today i found a interesting web that helps you finding GPG trust paths from one key to another, here are the truth paths from me to Amaya Rodrigo, a debian developer i never met, but given that web of trust (6 people with only one hop) i would rather be sure that the key really belongs to her and not to somebody that tries to supplant her.

67% vs 66.7%

In KPDF in the zoom combo we had
50%
66.70%
75%
in okular in the zoom combo we fixed it to
50%
66.7%
75%
but our usability dude still thinks
50%
67%
75%
would be better as it "aligns" things visually. What do you say?

Thanks Zaragoza :-)

Just came back from the KDE meeting at Zaragoza, glad to meet again Antonio, Isaac, Ana and meet for the first time lots of nice people. Thank you guys, the weekend rocked! Thanks also to Warp Networks, DBS and the Zaragoza city council for sponsoring Antonio's and my travels and hotel rooms.

Effects of KDE-PIM bug triage weekend

We all did a very good work on that, just see the effects on unconfirmed bugs.

KMail Bug Chart
KOrganizer Bug Chart
KNode Bug Chart
Kontact Bug Chart

Hope to see more efforts in that direction!

Edit the changelog!

Looking at the changelog file it seems that only Pino and me have fixed bugs for the KDE 3.5.6 release, hope that is not true!

So remember, each time you fix a bug, put it on the changelog, that will help us having a good changelog and also will help you, because if you wait before the release it will be a harder work and you may not remember them all!

okular mailing list

Today we inaugurated the okular-devel mailing list. YIPI! :-) Feel free to subscribe, but keep in mind it's a developer mailing list so most topics will be about development. If you have suggestions we are happy to hear them too, but please use http://bugs.kde.org to report wishes against the okular product. And again, we have a mailing-list, YIPI! :-)

kdegames survey

During the last aKademy we identified the need to conduct a survey about the current state of applications in the kdegames module, and also to collect suggestions for games in KDE4.

Mauricio did the hard work and thought the questions and created the poll itself. So please, take the poll to demonstrate his work was not in vain and to help kdegames developers decide what to do for KDE 4.

Barcelona 10th KDE Annivesari dinner

So not as big as the official event but at Barcelona some KDE developers, translators and users decided to gather and had a dinner and pub session. Go to http://cat.kde.org/index.php/Sopar_10è_Aniversari to see how the catalan KDE crew looks like.

Solution for KUbuntu 3.5.5 and USB not automounting

Well, some friends of mine had this problem, after updating to Kubuntu 3.5.5 packages their USB/iPod did not automount like before. At the end we discovered i had a newer libhal (0.5.7-1ubuntu18.1 vs 0.5.7-1ubuntu18) because they did a 3.5.3 -> 3.5.5 update while i did 3.5.3 -> 3.5.4 -> 3.5.5 and the 3.5.4 update adds the newer libhal, so if you are having problems with Kubuntu 3.5.5 and did not do the 3.5.4 update, add
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-354 dapper main
to your sources and update and you'll see libhal update appear and hopefully fix your problem. Riddell toldme he is going to add libhal update also to the 3.5.5 packages, but meanwhile, try it.
Update 1:Seems that does not work for everybody, sorry for you, it worked for some.
Update 2:Seems that Riddell already added new hal packages to 3.5.5 repository so this is not needed anymore, just update and [dist-]upgrade.

Summer of Code 2006 t-shirt is here

Admitidely i like 2005 one better but a free geeky t-shirt is always cool!

KDE 10th birthday Dinner at Barcelona

Well, it's not going to be as big nor interesting as the Official 10 Years KDE event but at barcelona we are also organizing our small event, so if you want to know some KDE people drop by in our dinner.

P.S: Yes, i know yesterday i missed okular features #4 blog, but it'll have to wait a bit more, good things are worth to wait for! Stay tuned!

okular features #3

Overview mode



Okular provides a new displaying mode in adition to the single page and facing pages already provided by kpdf. In this mode you set the number of columns you want to see in the page view and the pages are layouted following this setting.

okular features #2

Word processor-like text selection



Okular provides real text selection, that is you can select from half one line to the half of a line below it and get the lines in between completely selected. This fixes the problem kpdf had with the old rectangle based selection.

okular features #1

Sebastian Klüger (Candy man from now on ;-)) suggested me to blog about the cool things okular developers are doing, so here i am, starting a bi-daily "okular features" series so you all can know them.

Extraction of embedded files in PDF documents



We are now able to extract embedded files in PDF documents, you can see here a screenshot showing a document with two embedded files. You can access the embedded files via the menu and also via the yellow bar that appears on the top of the screen when the document you have just opened has an embedded file.

okular lightning talk

Today Pino and me did a lighting talk in aKademy 2006 about okular. It was quite good accepted. Assistants liked all the cool new features okular has like REAL text selection, page rotation, overview mode, LOTS of document format support and annotation support. In short, okular rocks :-) As everything it could rock even more so do not hesitate to join us on #kpdf freenode channel and help us building the coolest document viewer out there.

aKademy 2006 kdeedu BOF notes

kdeedu has its bof today, if you are interested in what we talked there read our notes!

aKademy 2006 kdeedu BOF notes

aKademy 2006 kdegames BOF notes

You can find them at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDEgames+Akademy+2006+BOF+Notes

Summary:
* Identify if any game can be dropped
* Invite other programs to join the extragear
* #kdegames channel exists!
* We want to attract all that games programmers that use scripting

aKademy - Day 1

Opening
The typical opening by politicians and university people but this time people had a Unix background so they knew what they were talking about, not like last year in Málaga when some of the people were just there "because i put money and i want to speak"


Keynote - Looking ourselves in the eye
Aaron spoke about ourselves, what KDE is, what are our challenges and what we can do to succeed even more. Basically we are a reef and we need to get KDE4 out :-D Also a nice presentation with photos of some KDE people in the most embarassment moments he could find.


QtDBus
Thiago explained us why we are going to use Dbus for KDE4, it is basically a DCOP solution but with the benefit that there are much more language bindings so we have more possibilities to have our application used, that is cool :-)


Portland
Waldo was here to explain us the necessity ISV and ISD have for xdg-utils, because they don't want to choose a specific desktop for their independent application so they need to have programs that let them install an icon, launch a browser or controll the screensaver without having to code specifically for KDE/Gnome/etc.


Phonons in Solids
And interesting talk about two of the new technologies we are going to have in KDE4. Solid is going to give as independent access to the hardware system which is a good thing like you as a KDE developer do not want to care if you are interacting with a Linux kernel, a FreeBSD kernel or a Windows kernel. Solid in the other hand is providing the application developers a quite powerful set of classes to do audio and video output and input. Instead of beign a full system like we had with arts it's based on existing code that is good because we code less and have the same functionality :-)


Keynote - The State of the Linux Desktop
John Cherry gave and overview of what the OSDL is, and specifically which are the goals of the Desktop part of the OSDL. Of course it includes the Portland initiative Waldo spoke about, but they also do market studies about Linux adoption and usage around the world. Of course you always need to take these figures with one or two grains of salt, but it seems we have a small but steadly growing percentage of users around the world, so "The Year Of The Linux Desktop" is near ;-)


Competition and Cooperation
A talk by John Palmieri (J5), a Gnome hacker, and no, we did not kill him ;-) At least not publically... He did a quite intelligent talk speaking why we are not really "the enemy" as fighting for a 1-5% market share is ridiculous when the major player has 95% of the market. He also spoke about the dynamics that keep KDE and Gnome improving, like the fact that when you see something in Gnome that is nice, you implement it in KDE and [try to] make it a bit better, then Gnomies see our implemtenation and improve theirs and so on.


Ricoh
That was a talk that really did not fit much in the KDE conference, as it was not Desktop oriented, but was quite interesting because i learnt how Ricoh have opensourced the stack that powers their [high-end?] printers, based on BSD kernel and a Java Framework, and that has made people some crazy things like implement Sudoku/Tetris/etc for the printers, wait, did i say it was not Desktop oriented? Some of their printers have a resolution of up to 800x600 so i think we could make a KDE version for Ricoh printers :-D Anyone up to the job?


Multi-Head RandR
Keith Packard from Intel and one of the X gods spoke about auto detection, auto configuration and autoAnything of X screens and how that can make us save battery power for our little and battery hungry laptops. Really my description is not good enough for the coolness he showed us in the demonstration.


Organization of KDE Events
Martijn and Claire illustrated us about how and what we should to to organize a [KDE] event, ranging from BIG things like aKademy or the KDE 4 Series meetings to some smaller things like regional meetings. Interesting to attend but difficult to explain, sorry for you guys that were not there!


KDE Support
Kevin Krammer explained us the huge amount of work that has to be done in order to help our ever growing user base. He knows that developers are getting out of user support because there are too many users to read their mails and help, so we need a new kind of people to do the interfacing between the developers and the users. That is a rewarding and also sometimes difficult work, but he insisted you can get into it without having much or any technical knowledge of KDE. So if you ever wondered what you could do for KDE if you do not have developing/translating/artwork/documentation skills, you just found your area! Join the support guys!


How To Make Your Program Popular
Inge spoke about his experience about beign the KOffice Marketing person. He clarified us that he really is not doing marketing, but just promotion that is a smaller subset of Marketing. Also it is "easy" to improve the promotion of your application, blog about it, send news to The Dot, speak of how cool it is to your friends and colleagues and soon you will create a nice promotion snowball :-) In the specific case of KOffice he told us that they have maybe even doubled the developer community by getting more awareness and also they have the "Next cool thing in Office Suites" tag so everyone mentions KOffice when speaking about ODF and such. Good work Inge!