Junior Job: Port poxml away from Qt3Support

This is a junior job for all of you that want to get started in KDE development and don't know what to do, kdesdk/poxml is a set of tools used to convert KDE xml-based documentation to po (translator friendly format) and back. They are still using Qt3Support, that is not bad per se, but is not good either.

Doing the port should be straightforward if you have some Qt experience and read the docs on porting form Qt3 to Qt4.

Of course i'll be there to help and review the final diff, so what are you waiting for?

Akademy-es 2010

The KDE España association is organizing Akademy-es 2010 in collaboration with Itsas (the Free Software group of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU) and the Department of Culture of the Basque Goverment. This event gathers contributors to and users of KDE software and will be held in the Engineering Technical School of Bilbao from the 7th to the 9th of May.

If you are interested in giving a talk have a look at the Call For Papers and send us your proposal!

To attend the event do not forget to register before 16th of April.

See you in Bilbao!

Updating KDE/Konqueror web shortcuts

Speaking with maelcum on #kde-devel we found out that KDE web shortcuts are a bit out of date since for example they don't have yahoo nor bing so we thought updating the list of KDE web shortcuts would be a good entry project for someone that wanted to start contributing to KDE.

You can find the current list of KDE web shortcuts at http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdebase/runtime/kurifilter-plugins/ikws/searchproviders/

Once you have a proposal come to #kde-devel in irc.freenode.net and hunt for maelcum or me (tsdgeos).

Dear lazyweb: Which PS2 game to buy?

I just got hold of a PS2 and all the games i've ever played on a PS2 is "Guitar Hero 3". So i'm looking for suggestions of the "best game ever for the PS2".

Poppler 0.13.0 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.13.0.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.14 Alpha release, it should work like any release from the 0.12 branch, but do not blame us if it turns your printer into a broom.

Changes against the 0.12 branch:
core:
* Improvements to Annotation rendering. Bug #23108
* Do not give an error when opening files without pages. Bug #24720
* Try to read streams without Length
* Do not crop the transformation matrix at an arbitrary value. Bug #25763
* Make poppler (optionally) relocatable on Windows
* Use a small object cache in GfxResources to cache GState objects
* Reduce the number of redundant pattern creations in the Cairo outputdev
* Use colToDbl() to avoid rounding error in the Cairo output device
* Fix problems with mask handling in the Cairo output device. Bug #8474
* Use a better scale down implementation in the Cairo output device
* Various optimizations to the Splash output device
* Add the possibility to use floats instead of doubles in Splash outputdev
* Write out fixed-content portion of Type 1 fonts in the PS output device

build system:
* Improvements to the CMake build system
* Enable AM_SILENT_RULES by default in autotools
* Require glib 2.18
* Require GTK+ 2.14
* Make fontconfig optional with mingw compiler
* Remove makefile.vc

glib:
* Add support for file attachment annotations
* Improvements to the demo
* Use TextOutputDev to get TextPage when we haven't rendered the page
* Remove support for the Splash output device

utils:
* pdftoppm can now write to jpeg
* pdftoppm embeds the correct resolution in png and jpeg files

qt4:
* Minor improvements to the tests

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

KDE 4.4 Release Party in Barcelona

As usual the Barcelona KDE crew is organizing a KDE release party, coincidentaly that weekend i will be in Barcelona since it's my mother's birthday (hi mum!) so i'll also be attending. See you there!

My top 10 blog posts of 2009

Here the top 10 of blog entries visited in 2009 in my blog:
10 - Morocoo Trip
9 - NetworkManager settings not shared/specified?
8 - pdftk frontend for KDE
7 - How to get Konsole 4.2 to behave?
6 - Consistency
5 - Performance of radeon free drivers
4 - Okular, PDF and file permissions
3 - Is the X11 engine slower than raster just because of the drivers?
2 - Poppler for windows
1 - keyboard crazyness

One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 5 out of 10 (including 1 and 2) are from either 2006 or 2007 (but not from 2008 :D)
- People really want a pdftk frontend for KDE since my 2007 post of my no longer existant project is visited frequently
- 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
- There are 5 blog entries that already where in the top 10 of last year

Users and lusers

I'm starting to get fed up of lusers that think they have the right to insult developers, use bad wording and in general being totally non respecting for the work other human being is going for them for free.

This kind of weird individual also thinks that by using bad manners its problems will be fixed more promptly, sorry but no, this is not a bar fight and being the rudest won't get you anything else than ignorance even if your bug is genuine.

I will not point to any of their posts, there have been too many lately, it's easy to recognize them and they know who they are.

At the contrary I will link to a mail by Jochen Trumpf so you can all learn how people is supposed to comment and contribute, in a clear, precise and constructive way, and as Thiago always says "If you got a patch it's much better", but if you have not it's ok too. To all lusers out there, please learn from Jochen.

Consistency

Today i realized how much Windows sucks at consistency, here a screenshot with 3 screen decorations of three programs made by Microsoft itself (Visual Studio, Outlook and the command shell), notice how the decorations are different in the three and also notice the colours are different in the three even if all of them are inactive windows.

Making okular the default program for tiff files?

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219326 is a request to make Okular the default viewer for TIFF files based in that it seems that now the default TIFF viewer in KDE is kolourpaint and it doesn't support multipage tiff files.

Comments? Should we change it?

Calling Frisian KDE users

If you are using KDE in Frisian (fy) take a note that the team is currently having problems to fulfill the essentials to be released with KDE SC 4.4 and you should join them to be able of using KDE in your language. If you want to help mail me at aacid kde org and i'll tell you more details.

Of course this offer is extensive to most if not all KDE translation teams as more helping hands are always welcome. If you are a user that doesn't know how to code help translating and you'll be able to say

Compiling virtuoso-opensource-20091109 in Fedora 12

If you are trying to compile virtuoso-opensource-20091109 in Fedora 12 and are getting error messages you might try adding
#define STACK _STACK
at the beginning of libsrc/Dk/Dkernel.c and libsrc/Wi/http.c

Ugly but worked for me :D

KDE Spain looking for a place to host Akademy-es 2010

We are looking for a place to host the annual Spanish KDE event, if you feel like helping us please visit http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2010/ubicacion.php

Nokia Certified Qt Developer

So i just got a mail saying i'm now a Nokia Certified Qt Developer. Great!

Beware of QDomElement::setAttribute with floats and doubles

QDomElement::setAttribute with floats and doubles formats the numbers according to the current locale as specified by the documentation and this is for sure going to bite you. It did for us in Okular where people lost annotations when moving from one computer to another since the user was using a , locale in one of them and a . locale in other.

So if you use QDomElement::setAttribute with floats and doubles just add QString::number to the second parameter or as Thiago suggested switch to QXmlStreamWriter

Moving to Dublin

Some of you may already know, but probably most don't.

I will be leaving my home city of L'Hospitalet and moving to Dublin the second week of December.

This is a huge change for me since I'll stop living with my parents and live on my own for the first time of my life, also in a place where they don't speak my mother tongue, so it's both scary and motivating.

This also means I'll probably have less time for KDE since I'll have to do the boring real life cleaning/cooking stuff i don't do at the moment so you all will have to live with less bugging about "const &" by me.

It's been a very interesting year working with the cool dudes at Miraveo and i really wish them luck for the future but the company i'll be working for had a monetary offer i could not really refuse without trying to see what they do have to offer.

BTW I'm not saying who I'll be working for because the papers i signed said so many things i don't really know if i can say who I'll be working for, so don't ask.

Interesting times ahead.

KPovModeler looking for a new maintainer

Andreas Zehender is stepping down as KPovModeler maintainer so if you want to introduce yourself in the world of 3D, Qt, KDE, et al, working on KPovModeler will surely be a good experience! Don't miss it!

Jargon is bad

Aaron was talking the other day on how using jargon is bad. The real problem is how to know if a word is jargon or not.

Example follows:

Yesterday my grandmother was bit by something she qualifies as jargon. She bought a new printer, one that can hold xD cards inside and print directly from there, when plugging the xD card she was told by the printer LCD "Do you want to format the card? Formatting the card in printer format will make it faster bla bla" and, she answered "Yes", and all the photos went to the heaven of photos.

The problem here is that we all know formatting means erasing, killing, vanishing the contents, but my grandmother did not. So should "format" considered jargon? Or maybe we should keep using format but on the confirmation question mention "erasing" too?

Okular Junior Job: Kill qApp->processEvents() from fontPool::locateFonts

The title says it all, fontPool::locateFonts, part of the DVI backend (generator in Okular jargon) is using qApp->processEvents() and that is baaaaaad. The code is located at kdegraphics/okular/generators/dvi/fontpool.cpp and it should be straigh forward to port away from using processEvents to a signal/slot mechanism.

Interested people please drop by the #okular channel on freenode or to the okular mailing list.

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 :-)