So two weeks ago my HD did a huge CRACK and it stopped working. The system did not boot up and it just did CRACK CRACK CRACK all the time. So i browsed a bit and saw that ddrescue was a dd variant able to skip failing sectors. So i picked up a new HD the double size of the old one and a RIP CD and started the process of dumping the old filesystem into a file. Two weeks after ddrescue told me i had lost 77MB and thankfully after dumping the file into a newly created filesystem and some fsck later i did not lost anything important.
So thanks a lot ddrescue devels!
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Monday, February 02, 2009
How to get Konsole 4.2 to behave?
Dear lazyweb: My Konsole in KDE 4.2 does not like me. Let me explain myself, i like to use vim for quick text editing and i like using the numeric keypad to type numbers, if i use the "Default (XFree 4)" input method, that doesn't work, and pressing any keypad number makes vim go nuts, so i'm using the "Linux Console" input method.
"Linux Console" works correctly when on a local session but if i log into a remote machine using ssh, then suddenly the Home and End keys start outputing ~ characters. And this all does not happen in xterm so it must be a konsole feature, any idea how can i get rid of it?
"Linux Console" works correctly when on a local session but if i log into a remote machine using ssh, then suddenly the Home and End keys start outputing ~ characters. And this all does not happen in xterm so it must be a konsole feature, any idea how can i get rid of it?
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Announcing KDE 4.2 Barcelona Release Party
Along with other KDE 4.2 Release Parties all over the globe, the KDE barcelona crew is also hosting one. The date is the 30th of January. Place is still to be determined, so if you have suggestions contact me asap! Also contact me if you want to be in the list of people.
Some KDE Merchandising available at Barcelona
Since last Akademy-es i've some KDE Merchandising left at home (apol has some more), so if you live Barcelona or nearby and want stickers (15cmx15cm, 5cmx5xm, round 8cm), baseball caps, akademy 2008 t-shirts, akademy-es 2008 t-shirts, fridge stickers(round 3.5cm), badges(round 3.5cm) or mouse pads(19x19cm) contact me for availability and prices. Of course if you don't live Barcelona or nearby you are also allowed to contact me but then probably shipping is going to be more expensive that the item itself.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Every bug report is important
Yesterday a user reported KTuberling being unable to save. Imposible! - i said, as i had tested that feature, but further investigation revealed that KTuberling was indeed unable to save files with non ascii characters, that made me create a simple regular expression i executed all over KDE code and found similar bugs in kmahjongg, parley, kross, kgpg, digikam and krita. So never underestimate the power of a bug report!
Sunday, January 04, 2009
My top 10 blog posts of 2008
Here the top 10 of blog entries visited in 2008 in my blog:
10 - pdftk frontend for KDE
9 - Poppler for windows
8 - KDE 4.1 adoption seems high
7 - KHTML rocks
6 - Performance of radeon free drivers
5 - KDE, plugins, GPL and closed source applications
4 - keyboard crazyness
3 - Morocco trip
2 - fglrx blocking Xorg on logout
1 - KUbuntu 8.04 released with rock solid 3.5.9 goodness...
One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 5 out of 10 are from either 2006 or 2007
- People really want a pdftk frontend for KDE since my 2007 post of my no longer existant project is visited frecuently
- People want to use poppler in windows, strange that all those users almost never sent patches to the project, seems like windows culture is not so much about collaborating but about just using.
- My Morocco trip summary is liked by google, it's linked in the first page of results usually
- The two most read blog entries are about bugs in kubuntu ... maybe that's why Canonical never replied to me applying for jobs there :D
10 - pdftk frontend for KDE
9 - Poppler for windows
8 - KDE 4.1 adoption seems high
7 - KHTML rocks
6 - Performance of radeon free drivers
5 - KDE, plugins, GPL and closed source applications
4 - keyboard crazyness
3 - Morocco trip
2 - fglrx blocking Xorg on logout
1 - KUbuntu 8.04 released with rock solid 3.5.9 goodness...
One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 5 out of 10 are from either 2006 or 2007
- People really want a pdftk frontend for KDE since my 2007 post of my no longer existant project is visited frecuently
- People want to use poppler in windows, strange that all those users almost never sent patches to the project, seems like windows culture is not so much about collaborating but about just using.
- My Morocco trip summary is liked by google, it's linked in the first page of results usually
- The two most read blog entries are about bugs in kubuntu ... maybe that's why Canonical never replied to me applying for jobs there :D
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Symbian C++ sucks
Let's say you are developing on a Symbian phone. You are creating something more complex than a "Hello World" app so you need threads.
You create a RThread, and inside that thread you append things to a RArray (dynamic array) and then from the main thread you want to retrieve them.
NO! You can't! Accessing elements of a RArray from two different RThreads is not allow and it'll crash on you.
Ok you think, they just ported STL to Symbian, let's use a std::list, and NO! It'll crash even earlier.
So you are about to throw the phone across the window, but then you think, wait the also ported some POSIX things to Symbian, and try pthread and it suddenly works and you realize how simple things can be a nightmare when using weird tools/SDK, that's why Qt rocks it gives you almost all you want in a practical API, and when something is missing KDE adds the missing bit.
You create a RThread, and inside that thread you append things to a RArray (dynamic array) and then from the main thread you want to retrieve them.
NO! You can't! Accessing elements of a RArray from two different RThreads is not allow and it'll crash on you.
Ok you think, they just ported STL to Symbian, let's use a std::list, and NO! It'll crash even earlier.
So you are about to throw the phone across the window, but then you think, wait the also ported some POSIX things to Symbian, and try pthread and it suddenly works and you realize how simple things can be a nightmare when using weird tools/SDK, that's why Qt rocks it gives you almost all you want in a practical API, and when something is missing KDE adds the missing bit.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Akademy-es 2008 videos
Akademy-es 2008 videos are starting to appear under the Akademy-es 2008 schedule page. GPUL people recorded all talks so with some time all the talks should have the video available.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Talks at Termens
This sunday Aleix and me are doing a talk about KDE in general and another about KDE-EDU at Termens. The talks start 11 and will be held at the Termens Lan Party, i'm not sure if people not registered at the party can listen to the talks, but if you want to come don't hesitate to contact the organizers and tell them you want to drop by and i don't think there will be any problem.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Akademy-es 2008 recap
So it's already a week since Akademy-es 2008 ended. And i have to say it was a quite a success. We had around 60 attendants, 20 of them being from outside the region where the event was organized, maybe not highest total of attendants but for sure the highest number of "foreigner" attendants, attending from far shows commitment.
Some of the slides can be downloaded at the talks page and the videos will probably be available next week.
I want again to thank the local organizing team and our sponsors for making the event possible!
And now the photo, with few people because it was made late in the last day :(
Some of the slides can be downloaded at the talks page and the videos will probably be available next week.
I want again to thank the local organizing team and our sponsors for making the event possible!
And now the photo, with few people because it was made late in the last day :(
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Don't buy a Labtec Standard Keyboard Plus
So my keyboard broke, the current one lasted for about two years, not bad.
As i'm quite special about the layout of keyboards i ended up buying a Labtec Standard Keyboard Plus, that is basically a cheap keyboard with the standard layout, but after having used it for less than 24 hours i've to say, DO NOT BUY it.
The keyboard has probably been tested by the slowest typer on earth, if i try to write KDE i always end up with KE or KD, the keyboard is unable to detect fast keypresses of SHIFT + D + E and that happens with a lot of combinations. What a shame, so let's see how i can explain that to the clerk of the shop to get my money back.
As i'm quite special about the layout of keyboards i ended up buying a Labtec Standard Keyboard Plus, that is basically a cheap keyboard with the standard layout, but after having used it for less than 24 hours i've to say, DO NOT BUY it.
The keyboard has probably been tested by the slowest typer on earth, if i try to write KDE i always end up with KE or KD, the keyboard is unable to detect fast keypresses of SHIFT + D + E and that happens with a lot of combinations. What a shame, so let's see how i can explain that to the clerk of the shop to get my money back.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Mozilla Camp Europe 2008
This past saturday i was at the Mozilla Camp Europe 2008 that was held in Citilab at Cornellà . I was invited by one of the local organizers and being so close (5 metro stations) i had no excuse not to drop by.
The event was about 200 people, not bad, but once you know the Mozilla Foundation paid for almost every trip it's not that impressive, if you get the trip paid, going to such an event is much easier ;-)
And that makes you think Mozilla has LOTS of money, they paid the trip to Barcelona for about 150 people and have about 150 employees around the world, and that with just a free browser as a product. That sounds like success to me.
And now to an overview of the talks:
Aza Raskin spoke about things they are doing in the labs like Weave, that duplicates sessions from your computer to your mobile so you can have a continous browsing experience and about Ubiquity that is krunner for Firefox.
David Ascher spoke about Thunderbird and how it's gaining calendaring support (can you say Kontact?) and how there are *only* 20 or 30 people working on it. I wonder what the kdepim module could do with so much man power :-D
Next Christian Sejersen spoke about Phenec, Mozilla's attempt at the mobile browser. I have to say i liked the description he did of the interface so installed it on the N810. Took like a minute to start up, so removed at the very moment.
Then it came the translators meeting, with around 40 people around, i wonder if we could do such a big translators meeting for KDE, it would be interesting.
Later a talk about leaks and testing. I came a bit late at the leak part but basically ended up with the impression that they know they have lots of leaks to the situation they've done a tool that tells them how much nodes of the DOM tree were leaked when loading some pages. The testing bit was totally out of place as it was "this is what we do at our company", little to do with Mozilla at all.
The Embedding Gecko talk, the speaker acknowledged embedding Gecko into an app is total mess since they don't have stable nor simple APIs so they are trying to create one given that KHTML/WebKit is hurting them.
Then another talk about Weave and we went to a nice dinner in a restaurant in the beach in Barcelona's Vila OlÃmpica.
You can see a few photos i made at http://kde.cat/aacid/fotos/mozcampeu2008/
The event was about 200 people, not bad, but once you know the Mozilla Foundation paid for almost every trip it's not that impressive, if you get the trip paid, going to such an event is much easier ;-)
And that makes you think Mozilla has LOTS of money, they paid the trip to Barcelona for about 150 people and have about 150 employees around the world, and that with just a free browser as a product. That sounds like success to me.
And now to an overview of the talks:
Aza Raskin spoke about things they are doing in the labs like Weave, that duplicates sessions from your computer to your mobile so you can have a continous browsing experience and about Ubiquity that is krunner for Firefox.
David Ascher spoke about Thunderbird and how it's gaining calendaring support (can you say Kontact?) and how there are *only* 20 or 30 people working on it. I wonder what the kdepim module could do with so much man power :-D
Next Christian Sejersen spoke about Phenec, Mozilla's attempt at the mobile browser. I have to say i liked the description he did of the interface so installed it on the N810. Took like a minute to start up, so removed at the very moment.
Then it came the translators meeting, with around 40 people around, i wonder if we could do such a big translators meeting for KDE, it would be interesting.
Later a talk about leaks and testing. I came a bit late at the leak part but basically ended up with the impression that they know they have lots of leaks to the situation they've done a tool that tells them how much nodes of the DOM tree were leaked when loading some pages. The testing bit was totally out of place as it was "this is what we do at our company", little to do with Mozilla at all.
The Embedding Gecko talk, the speaker acknowledged embedding Gecko into an app is total mess since they don't have stable nor simple APIs so they are trying to create one given that KHTML/WebKit is hurting them.
Then another talk about Weave and we went to a nice dinner in a restaurant in the beach in Barcelona's Vila OlÃmpica.
You can see a few photos i made at http://kde.cat/aacid/fotos/mozcampeu2008/
Friday, October 17, 2008
Aligned data when doing a new
Dear LazyWeb...
I know i can use the gcc aligned attribute to align a variable, but is it possible to do that with memory i get doing a new or a malloc?
That is, i have a class that needs to have one of it's members aligned, so i need to declare the member to be aligned but that is not enough, i need to align the object itself, how?
I know i can use the gcc aligned attribute to align a variable, but is it possible to do that with memory i get doing a new or a malloc?
That is, i have a class that needs to have one of it's members aligned, so i need to declare the member to be aligned but that is not enough, i need to align the object itself, how?
Akademy-es 2008
So as every year since 2006 the KDE Spanish community is gathering to discuss and enjoy in our own micro Akademy. This year we are doing it in A Coruña together with the GPUL dudes of Guademy fame. The dates are from November 21st to 23rd.
The registration site just opened so click here to register!
See you in A Coruña!
The registration site just opened so click here to register!
See you in A Coruña!
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Poppler 0.10.0 release
Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.10.0.tar.gz
Differences with latest stable series (0.8.7) are quite interesting, you can see them all at the Poppler 0.9 Releases list of http://poppler.freedesktop.org/releases.html.
As a summary it includes:
* Initial JavaScript support
* JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
* Some crash fixes
* Better support of malformed files
* Some rendering improvements
So you should be all using Poppler 0.10 now to get a better PDF experience ;-)
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.10.0.tar.gz
Differences with latest stable series (0.8.7) are quite interesting, you can see them all at the Poppler 0.9 Releases list of http://poppler.freedesktop.org/releases.html.
As a summary it includes:
* Initial JavaScript support
* JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
* Some crash fixes
* Better support of malformed files
* Some rendering improvements
So you should be all using Poppler 0.10 now to get a better PDF experience ;-)
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Looking for PDF with Japan2 fonts
The other day we realized poppler did not correctly supported Adobe-Japan2 fonts, so i went on and did some work that should make it work, but then i have no file to test, so if you could do
cd /
find -name "*pdf" -exec grep -H Japan2 {} \;
or
locate -0 .pdf | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H Japan2
and send me (aacid@kde.org) a link to the pdf or the file pdf itself of all the files that match i could try to see if i did really fix it or not :-)
cd /
find -name "*pdf" -exec grep -H Japan2 {} \;
or
locate -0 .pdf | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H Japan2
and send me (aacid@kde.org) a link to the pdf or the file pdf itself of all the files that match i could try to see if i did really fix it or not :-)
Thursday, September 18, 2008
PC, MAC, GUADALINEX and LINEX compatible
You can read on fellow Catalan KDE translator blog that his son got an English learning CD that states to be compatible with two of the spanish regional goverment distributions, interesting to see that on an "Oxford University Press" material.
It does not state "GNU/Linux" compatibility, but it seems a sign that we are getting there.
Photo of the CD
It does not state "GNU/Linux" compatibility, but it seems a sign that we are getting there.
Photo of the CD
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Poppler 0.9.1 (0.10 Beta 2) released
Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.1.tar.gz
WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 2 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes your chair break.
Differences with 0.9.0:
Core:
* Fix crash on some AESv2 encrypted files (bugs #13972, #16092, #17523)
* Improve parsing of broken files (bug #17568)
glib frontend:
* Minor improvements to the demo application
utils:
* pdftohtml: Generate the outline file in the same place of the other generated files (bug #17504)
Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.1.tar.gz
WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 2 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes your chair break.
Differences with 0.9.0:
Core:
* Fix crash on some AESv2 encrypted files (bugs #13972, #16092, #17523)
* Improve parsing of broken files (bug #17568)
glib frontend:
* Minor improvements to the demo application
utils:
* pdftohtml: Generate the outline file in the same place of the other generated files (bug #17504)
Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Poppler 0.9.0 (0.10 Beta 1) released
Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.0.tar.gz
WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 1 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes LHC destroy the world.
Differences with 0.8 branch:
Core:
* Initial JavaScript support
* Annotation improvements
* Improvements in the Arthur based renderer
* Improvements in the Cairo based renderer
* Added a JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
* Small fixes in ActualText implementation
* Fix jpeg rendering when not using the libjpeg based decoder
* Movie fixes
* Do not get out of memory on documents that specify huge fonts
* Emulate Adobe Reader on documents with duplicate keys in Dictionaries
* Forms improvements
Qt4 frontend:
* Annotation improvements
* Forms improvements
* Add the possibility of extracting embedded fonts
* Initial Movie support
* Documentation improvements
* Small improvements in the PS exporter
glib frontend:
* Annotation improvements
* Attachment fixes
utils:
* updated man pages
* Added -listenc to pdfinfo and pdftotext
Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.0.tar.gz
WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 1 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes LHC destroy the world.
Differences with 0.8 branch:
Core:
* Initial JavaScript support
* Annotation improvements
* Improvements in the Arthur based renderer
* Improvements in the Cairo based renderer
* Added a JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
* Small fixes in ActualText implementation
* Fix jpeg rendering when not using the libjpeg based decoder
* Movie fixes
* Do not get out of memory on documents that specify huge fonts
* Emulate Adobe Reader on documents with duplicate keys in Dictionaries
* Forms improvements
Qt4 frontend:
* Annotation improvements
* Forms improvements
* Add the possibility of extracting embedded fonts
* Initial Movie support
* Documentation improvements
* Small improvements in the PS exporter
glib frontend:
* Annotation improvements
* Attachment fixes
utils:
* updated man pages
* Added -listenc to pdfinfo and pdftotext
Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.
Friday, September 05, 2008
Looking for aKademy-es organizers
Somehow i managed to forget to announce here we are looking for organizers for this year KDE Spain users and developers meeting. If you are interested have a look at http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2008/ubicacion.php. We are accepting proposals up to september 15th.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)