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 :-)

Gluon sprint + QtDevDays

So last few days i've been in munich for the Gluon sprint and the Qt Developer Days.

Before starting my summary i want to thank the KDE e.V. and Qt/Nokia for paying the trip to Munich, the accommodation, letting us use the Qt/Nokia offices in Munich, giving us free entrance to the DevDays and also free opportunity to do the Qt Certified Developer Exam (easy if you are a seasoned KDE dev i'd say (hope i pass it :D)).

That said, lets start :D

Gluon sprint started friday at 10pm for me when i got to our hostel, there i met with Sacha and Sandro, had some drinks and went to sleep waiting for the next day.

On Saturday, HarriF from Qt/Nokia picked us up in our hostel and guided us to the nice offices Qt/Nokia has in Munich, there we started some presentations about gaming creation IDEs so all the participants of the sprint could see the idea of what Leinir wants for Gluon Creator. Mid-afternoon, Knuth joined us and cared for us for the rest of the day, even getting us some food for dinner when the waitress was hesitant because it was already late.

On Sunday we started to do some work involving designing, refining of classes, creating d-pointers for classes, improvements on some classes to make it more easy to be cross paltform, etc. HarryF joined us for a while and he got himself parts of the sample gluon game (Blok) working on the Mac, cool stuff.

Monday continued with work on Gluon stuff with fregl, karli and SaroEngels joined us due to the proximity of the DevDays. The very monday afternoon we headed to the Hilton where the welcome reception sponsored by Tieto. A company that was the Platinum sponsor of the event, that said to have lots of Qt experience but whom i had never heard of. They were actively showing plasma on the S60 emulator, no idea if they have anything to do with the plasma port to that platform, if they have not it's a weird thing to show.

Tuesday was DevDays talks start, it all began with Nokia VP for Qt speaking of the Qt Everywhere idea (we had a Qt-based coffee machine :D) which includes everything you can think of except the iPhone and Android (some conflict with Nokia interests?). The starting video showed Marble and KDE screenshots, nice touch :-) Lars spoke about the next generation of Qt followed by Walter Bender talking about Sugar, that uses pygtk and when he asked if Python Qt would be supported he got a no, there's some company called riverbank that does it but Qt/Nokia does not do it. I wonder what happened to PySide that not even Nokia employees talk about it... Then ¿our own? Matthias Ettrich came out to the stage with a laptop with a huge KDE sticker running Ubuntu and spoke about the Declarative interfaces thing, cool stuff, but mostly for the smartphones i'd say, also it is bad that it won't respect native style of "widgets".

After lunch talks continued without anything worth mentioning except the shameless plugs for QtCreator in each of the talks (guys we know it's not a bad tool, no need to say "look what it does, it's cool") and the unprofessional way of referring to the iPhone as "the phone from the fruit company" and Android as "the robot from the ad company". Grow up.

Then we headed for the 15th floor for some drinks while the rooms where prepared for dinner where the Fact or Crap Quizz Contest was held, my table (the gluon team table) was just 1 correct answer away to qualify to the final, so close to those shiny phones....

Next day i attended some more talks about features that seem specifically developed for smartphones (gestures/animations/stateMachine) and also two KDAB given talks, one about Multithreading by Mirko (with some Steven Seagal resemblance) and Qt Kwan-Do by Mirko and Till.

All in all a very nice experience, more suit-y than Akademis but still nice to see that much people attending a Qt meeting, being the largest Nokia developer oriented event this year.

And last but not least, Sandro is luckiest man in earth, he won two consecutive raffles, take that statistics :D

Thanks to git people

git 1.6.5 was released a few days ago including the quiet flag for pushing. Now our l10n logs will look less messy without all those "Writing objects %" lines. No idea if it was because i'm from KDE or not, but git people were very helpful and implemented my request quite fast. Thanks!

Dear lazyweb: intel graphics problems

Here i am trying to open a svg file with inkscape and i get this.



Any idea what can be the problem? Fedora 11 uptodate with Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device.

What a sprint can do for you

Today is the last day of kdegames/gluon sprint, and it's being quite productive as you can see on http://gitorious.org/ gluon is now in the Most Active projects list gluon-team is in the Most active teams list.

Of course this is powered by my powerful sitting on chair skills :-P

poppler-data 0.3.0 released

I've just released a new poppler-data package based on the new free cMap files by Adobe. This now makes poppler-data a free package so you should go and bug your distro to install it by default.

Projects: be open or die

So i search for poppler on google and find http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/poppler.html a page from the Linux From Scratch project that mentions how to build poppler. I spot a couple of factual errors there and after some searching i see i have to mail lfs-dev@linuxfromscratch.org which i do.

After an hour or so i get a mail saying my mail has been rejected to enter the mailing list.

After querying the admin of the list i get "IIRC, you are not registered with the list." That's it, not a "please for bugs use thisOtherService this list is for core contributors", not even something like "Please register, we prefer people to do so it makes sure follow ups are not lost", nothing.

So good luck with the project, if you don't want to include fixes it's up to you, but you should make contributing easy otherwise you'll end up with no incoming people and you'll project will die sooner or later.

I'm glad KDE community is generally more welcoming than that.

Qt for S60 not as cool as real Qt

Ok, Qt for S60 *is* real Qt since it was merged in mainline Qt not too much ago, but it still has lots of things that make it not the very good toolkit we are used too. For example Qt 4.6 in S60 will have a QFile that won't support unicode names in files. :-(

KDE in Barcelona Software Freedom Day

This 19th of September is the Software Freedom Day. As every year Caliu is organizing the event in Barcelona, this time at the Centre Cívic de Les Corts, from 10 to 20h. Aleix Pol and me will be there with a KDE talk at 15:00.

1984

So yesterday i finished reading 1984, a book written in 1949 about a future 1984 where the world is divided in three mega countries in permanent war. The book talks about Winston Smith a mid-level member of The Party, the dictatorial organization leading one of those 3 mega countries, and how he hates the establishment and how he tries to subvert the system. It also features "telescreens" a fictional two-way camera/television that sees everything and controls everyone.

The book is the first Orwell novel i read (though i read an adaptation for kids of Animal Farm when i was younger) and i found it rather interesting and as a classic in science fiction i think you should read it. The topics it covers are still up to debate: Are "low level classes" with less problems happier than people that know more? Do revolutions just mean changing who is in charge but "exploited people" remain in the same situation? Is government surveillance a good thing? Is torture a valid method to achieve government objectives? Is true love a thing that can not be destroyed?

How not to do a poll

Today i was traveling on the TramBaix back home and noticed a leaflet that said "Imagine the new Diagonal", that said the city council wants to reorganize the Diagonal (one of Barcelona's most important avenues) and wants the citizen feedback. I'm a good citizen so i read the first question, it says:
The Diagonal should be:
a) A space where neighbours and citizens can meet and walk
b) A space to travel using public transport
c) A space to have shops
d) A space with green areas
e) A space for traffic, but with less private cars than right now

And then i saw it made no sense keeping reading, all of the answers are targeted to what the city council wants, so whatever you answer, they will be happy, there's no answers like (not that i agree with them)
x) A space for traffic, but with more space for private cars than right now
y) Remove the TramBaix, it's useless

So basically this is a sham, a fake poll and whoever did it should be ashamed, but it seems we are in a time were politics are not ashamed anymore of any kind of wrongdoing and citizens don't seem to care much :-/

Trobadour knowledge about QGraphicsScene

If you do not want your QGraphicsView to repaint itself totally do not delete QGraphicsItems without removing them from the QGraphicsScene first.

Is the X11 engine slower than raster just because of the drivers?

Here was i profiling KSquares and discovered that when painting an antialiased dashed line using the Qt X11 engine you hit a code path in which Qt tries to detect for each dash of the line which other dashes intersect with it, that's right a O(n^2) calculation that makes no sense, that since you are drawing a line the intersections it will find it's that a dash only intersects with itself. So seeing things like that i wonder if the Raster engine is faster because X11 drivers suck we have been told or it's that the X11 engine code is not as good as it could be. I've checked and the raster engine has no such "bad" loop

Even more symbian woes

Symbian has pthreads support, but it sucks, yesterday i discovered it has a maximum number of threads you can create, that is

void *dumb_thread(void *)
{
pthread_exit(NULL)
}

function_somewhere_in_my_code()
{
pthread_t t;
int error = pthread_create(&t, NULL, dumb_thread, NULL);
check_error();
pthread_join(t, NULL);
call_function_somewhere_in_my_code_though_a_timer();
}

will end up returning error 35 (EAGAIN) in pthread_create after some calls, depending on the phone it can be 20000 or 60000, and yes, that's a lot of threads, but if you are using threads for fire and forget jobs it's relatively easy to hit that number, so i've been forced to implement a thread pool just to workaround yetAnotherSymbianBug.

And yes, this has nothing to do with KDE, except that the more i code in Symbian the more i appreciate the rock solid API provided by KDE and Qt

Symbian stringstream woes

Here i am, wondering why the hell Symbian code is so bad after all the years that have passed since it was created. I was bitten by the "select() memory leak" bug some months ago and now i've been bitten by the "stringstream is not thread-safe" bug. One wonders if such simple things fail[1] what more can be hidden in the deeps of the Symbian code, i think it's time for the Symbian Foundation to open up the code already.

[1] Ok, actually the "select() memory leak" got fixed (or so i was told) after i reported the bug in the Symbian Foundation bugzilla and the "stringstream is not thread-safe" seems to be fixed either in the OpenC/C++ 1.5.5 beta that can be dowloaded from the trolls site or in the new firmware for the N78 (can't tell which one fixes things as i updated both)

Help translating KDE

KDE has a strong translators community being one of the most translated software all around but as all areas of [Free] Software development the more people helping the better, so you should consider going to http://l10n.kde.org/teams-list.php and contact the team of your language. In case the point your team is marked as inactive or the contact for your team does not answer, you should contact the general list for KDE i18n where we'll give you further guidance.

"Why should i translate if i already understand english?" will you ask yourself. There is no definitive answer to that but i can give you two reasons:

• As any contribution to Free Software will make your karma go up and you'll be part of something BIG


• It will help you improve your english and your native language knowledge. That's because most of the times you understand english enough to understand the sentence, but transforming it to correct native language in a semantic and sintatic way is not always simple so you end up improving a lot both your English and your native language skills

As i said all languages need help, but the ones of this list are more in need as their former translators don't seem active anymore: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Breton, Chinese Hong Kong, Croatian, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Faroese, Igbo, Indonesian, Kabyle, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Kiswahili, Lao, Latin, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Nepali, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Swati, Tamashek, Tatarish, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Urdu, Uzbek Venda, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu

Twice a FIBer

So after studying at Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona (FIB for short) last week i attended Festival Internacional de Benicàssim (FIB for short) so i can say i'm a double FIBer now. Bad jokes aside, i want to recommend anyone that has never attended a music festival yet to do so (if you remotely like the music played on it) being on one is an experience you have to live (singing a song together with 100K people is HUGE), maybe at the end you decide you don't want to repeat it, but i'm sure you won't regret being in at least one.

wcgrep

wcgrep is a script from the subversion dudes dfaure copied to kdesdk/scripts that greps ignoring .svn directories, you should be using it for your greps!

KDE 4.3 Release Dinner at Barcelona

Following the tradition of doing release meetings the Barcelona KDE crew is meeting for dinner this friday (yeah damn the release team for postponing the release), if you want to join us head to http://cat.kde.org/index.php/Sopar_KDE43 FAST!

GCDS

So i had planned to do blogging each day but at the end there's too many interesting things going on at the same time to get time to write something down.

GCDS has already ended and i'm waiting at the Fataga hotel hacking area with other barcelona fellows until late as our plane leaves at 00:05 of tomorrow.

Let's try to summarize a whole week of GCDS :-D

I have some new gear now: Kubuntu, GCDS and KDAB tshirts and a Qt towel

Keynotes where rather interesting, RMS speech had as expected some Mono bashing, Sugar shown us a different way of having a Desktop Environment, Quim Gil told us that Maemo was switching to Qt as GUI toolkit and Robert Lefkowitz told us we use Free Software not because it's better, but because we are gentleman and he convinced me :D

Then we had the cross-desktop lighting talks that started with Frank Karlistech announcing Open-Pc project and followed with lots of other fast talks not really cross-desktop but one of each

Next day i attended some more so-called cross-desktop talks and sadly most of the focused only on one of the two projects, i think i managed to be quite equidistant in my poppler talk but maybe i wasn't :D

After day Akademy started with a nice keynote telling us that Free Software will save the world, we rock! Then we had the IDE battle with KDevelop and Qt Creator, Qt Creator requiring you to grant Nokia a commercial license so that they accept your code makes it the loser in my book. Then GAmaral talked us about KDE in Mexico and Knut introduced some students that had been working on Qt.

Nokia payed us a nice party that night in the harbour

Next day we had Akademy too, i attended talks about Qt graphic things, improving productivity, improving design and improving git for Qt and KDE.

After lunch, Sebastian did a keynote on our own future followed by dfaure telling us how to fix bugs faster and Olivier doing the same talk i had prepared for Akademy-es :D After that i switched to the Business track with Till, Nikolaj, Bart and Frank telling us how to win money with KDE.

And finally Akademy almost ended with the Akademy Award ceremony, with three of the key people in our community awarded.

The real Akademy ending was at the basysKom party

From there all turned even more crazy, with KDE eV assembly, ereslibre and antlarr saving Behdad from dead (well just leading him to the hospital), KDE España assembly, bofhs, Akademy-es (more on that on the dot shortly) a trip to the beach with a bug in the transportation system, having Behdad explaining me how font rendering works, discussing about poppler with lost of people and yet another party this time sponsored by Collabora.

All in all i think the GCDS was ok, though as always with this kind of events there were several things i did not like much like people being spread on lots of hotels, having one auditorium room outside the main building with too much time travel to the other, having the travel agency (Viajes El Corte Inglés sucks!) kind of scamming me, the University being too far away from the hotel and Akademy-es being eaten by a too much bigger event, on the other hand having the possibility to meet some gnome people i needed to talk to was a pleasant experience even if it made it a bit more difficult to start talking with people at parties because maybe you spoke with someone that did not have much in common with you.

Okular, PDF and file permissions

There seems to be some controversy about how Okular handles file permissions (sometimes called DRM) in PDF files. I will put here my personal opinions (weird i have to say this since this is *my* blog so when i write here it's always *my* personal opinion).

As a note for those that don't know me much, i was KPDF maintainer from 2004 or so till it's death, mentored the SoC project that created Okular, a regular Okular developer and i'm also the maintainer of poppler since a few time ago, so well, i think we'll agree i know what i'm talking about ;-)

Let's analize the bug-reporter sentence:

"So what I want to know is: why are people putting code into Debian
that limits our freedom? Why are people putting such code into KDE?"

So he wants to KNOW why *we* did this, yet he mails Debian bug tracker. First weird thing man, we have the okular irc channel, the okular mailing list and the kde bug tracker, all this are MUCH BETTER places for knowing.

First question:
"why are people putting code into Debian that limits our freedom?"
is very similar to
"why is people coding in GPL that that limits our freedom?" from the BSD fanboys. It all boils down to your freedom ends where other people freedom starts. And someone freely decided he doesn't want you to copy his PDF, you may hate him for that, but it is his freedom, *his* license, and we all like people respecting our license (GPL) so we should respect others, or are we just going to respect licenses we like?

Second question:
"Why are people putting such code into KDE?"
because it's what the PDF specification says and we want to have a PDF reader, don't we?

Now, there's even a LWN article talking about it (sorry folks, you have to pay them to read that unresearched article), but i'll quote here a small part (under the fair quotation law i hope)

Applications which do implement this "feature" tend to disable it by default.

he means evince has it disabled by default and okular enabled by default? I don't see a "tend to" here

Perhaps this behavior is result of the relative newness of this application; as it accumulates more users, the pressure for more user-friendly behavior is likely to grow.

KPDF had the exact very same behaviour since 2005. And well, if Okular is not called KPDF in KDE 4 it's just because we decided to support more formats but for the rest it's the same program.

Linux, at all levels, has felt free to ignore standards when following them makes no sense.

Repeat with me Okular is not Linux, Okular is KDE, Okular runs in Linux, Okular runs in Solaris, Okular runs in FreeBSD, Okular runs in Windows, Okular runs in Mac OS X.

And now my final words. I hate DRM, i don't buy DRM enabled things (or try as hard as i can not to) BUT KDE is not the place to protest about that. The place to protest against that is with your wallet (don't buy DRM'ed things), with your vote (don't vote politicians that pass pro-DRM laws) or even in the streets in demonstrations.

A day in scam land

So i'm looking for two tickets for FIB now that tickets are sold out.

One goes to google and finds three announcements on craigslist, price is okaish so you contact the posters ... and all you get are scammers.

The first one says "please provide me this details asap so i can start this transaction asap through craigslist they will contact you", a mention to craigslist itself, this must be safe for sure, but then you go to craigslist and see a page that explicitly says that they don't handle transactions at all. The announcer does not answer back once i point her to this page.

The second and third announcements end up being from the same mail address, interesting as one announcement is from Barcelona and the other from London, one asks 400€ and other 380£. The poster says he is not able to meet me and Barcelona and neither an hypothetic friend of mine in London because "he works all day" (though answers my mails in 5 minutes). I ask him to post pictures of the tickets with a newspaper of today or the very same mail i just send and he just sends pictures of the tickets themselves. More over he says we'll do the transaction via "Ebay and Square Trade". If you look at Square Trade, they are not a transaction company at all either, seems someone is using their name to scam gullible people.

So basically it seems that yeah, the prices they were selling the tickets were "too low" and are just a honey pot to scam people.

I hate how the world is full of people that don't any respect for others at all. Meh :-/

Your talk in Akademy-es 2009

You may that we are celebrating Akademy-es 2009 inside GCDS. If you did not know you do now ;-)

So if you think you have something to say to the Spanish community that will gather there do not hesitate to read the call for activities and submit one before the 8 of June!

We are waiting for them ;-)

Buenos Presagios (Good Omens)

So yesterday i finished reading Buenos Presagios the translation of Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, a book written in 1990 and that has the Spanish first edition on ... April 2009 ... it's intriguing how some editorials decide to translate not so great books asap and better ones are left on the dust for almost 20 years.

And now onto the book, it's my first Gaiman book, but my n-th Pratchett one and i have to say it lives to the expectation.

It's a novel about the end of the world because of the Armageddon, the coming of the Antichrist, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a witch that did 300 years of exact predictions and an earth-living Angel and Demon that prefer to work together instead of for their far away bosses. All that mixed with the great humour that Pratchett gives to all his books, will have to read some Gaiman to see if it's good too (Just saw he's the writter of Stardust, i haven't read the book but the movie was entertaining). The only thing i did not like much is that book ending is a bit weak in my opinion, but otherwise a very recommended book.

Poppler 0.11.0 (0.12 Alpha 1) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.11.0.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.12 Alpha 1 release, it should work like any release from the 0.10 branch, but do not blame us if it turns the sea into Coke.

Changes against the 0.10 branch:
core:
* Add initial support for color management
* Remove case-insensitive matching of filenames in PDFDoc constructor
* Fix extraction of some ActualText content
* More work on Annotations support
* Improve font rendering in Cairo output device
* Fix bug in cairo backend with nested masks
* Fix cairo luminosity smask rendering
* Add optionally text support to Cairo output device
* Add the possibility of setting the datadir on runtime
* Return an error code instead of a boolean when saving
* Make the font scanner more versatile
* Small opimization in documents that use PostScriptFunction
* Minor optimization to Stream handling
* Fix some compile warnings

glib:
* Optional content support
* More work on Annotations support
* Improvements to the demo
* Documentation improvements
* Fix build when compiling with GTK_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES

Qt4:
* Support URI actions for Table Of Contents items
* Documentation improvements
* Improvements to the demo
* Add a FontIterator for iterating through the fonts of the document

utils:
* Allow the use of cropbox in pdftoppm
* Make pdftohtml output png images when the image is not a jpeg
* Make pdftotext accept cropping options like pdftoppm
* Support rendering non-square pixels in pdftoppm

build system:
* Require Cairo 1.8.4 for the Cairo output device
* Require CMake 2.6 when using the CMake build system
* Optionally require libpng for pdftohtml
* Optionally require libcms for color management


Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

i18n as second citizen in KDE

Sadly it seems that i18n (short for internationalization), that is, making your program available for non english speakers is a second citizen between KDE developers.

Programmers are treating bugs reported against i18n as non critical when effectively they are making their program unavailable for lots of users.

You may think this is a personal perception, but let's mention some examples:
* Plasma: Category names ("Application Launchers", "Astronomy") in the drop down box of the "Add Widget" dialog are untranslatable. Plasma developers excuse themselves saying i18n is not their best aptitude
* Places names are set after first use and don't follow the user locale https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=177536
* KMail view names have a similar problem, can't find the bug number right now
* Places names for devices are not translatable http://lists.kde.org/?t=123937583500004&r=1&w=2
* Amarok: Items in the playlist layout editor are not translated https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189750
* Amarok: Default layout names are not translatable https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189751

These are just some examples, don't feel finger pointed if your app is here.

You'll notice that some of this bugs/reports have patches or suggestions on how to fix it, yet nothing has been done to fix them.

So please, don't treat i18n as second citizen, you *really* don't want to alienate so much users from your program.

Fix for broken hplip in Jaunty upgraded from Intrepid

If hp-toolbox fails to start for you with

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/hp-toolbox", line 246, in
from ui4.devmgr5 import DevMgr5
File "/usr/share/hplip/ui4/devmgr5.py", line 45, in
from dbus.mainloop.qt import DBusQtMainLoop
ImportError: No module named qt

The solution is purging and reinstalling the python-qt4-dbus package

Book reviews

This week is Saint George's Day and in Catalonia it's typical to buy/gift books so i'm commenting over the fours last books i've read.

El Códice de la Atántida (Decipher) by Stel Pavlov: A Science Fiction book that carries the tag "Best Seller in USA and Italy". Well, i'm not going to comment on these countries taste for books, but this is a book you should avoid, it's a mix of Atlants, nanobots, armies, earth to be destroyed, misc adventures and all, but at the end i just had no interest for keep reading another page, and i just finished the book because it's what i do will all books.

Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) by Stieg Larsson: A noir novel, you should read it if you are not scared of a book were some pages talk about crimes on women being killed by cutting their head and putting it on the fire. It's a book i got addicted fast and could not stop reading it until the end. It features kidnaped girls, assassins, investigators and more important Lisbeth Salander, best good-evil character since Wolverine.

La chica que soñaba con una cerilla y un bidón de gasolina (The Girl Who Played with Fire) by Stieg Larsson: Second part of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You'll have to read it after reading the first one, the story is less macabre than in the first book but as vibrating as the first one and involves some "I'm your father" Star Wars-like scenes that even feature everywhere still impacts the reader.

La verdad (The Truth) by Terry Pratchett: It's for sure not the best Discworld novel, but still worth a read, Pratchett can create jokes from almost everything, and newspapers are not going to be an excempion. In this novel a new character is introducted William de Worde that will try to do real journalism and investigate the charges of embezzlement and attempted murder against Lord Vetinari.

So all in all, don't buy Decipher, read Stieg Larsson books if you like noir novels and The Truth is just another Discworld novel, so it's of course worth a read.

P.S: Stieg Larsson books since to have a much more catchier name in Spanish than in English, wonder which is more closed to the original swedish though.

How to make foreach loops that don't suck

Calling values in Hashes/Maps/Sets

QHash<QString,Plasma::Meter*> meters;
foreach (Plasma::Meter *w, meters.values()) {
  w->setLabelColor(0, theme->color(Plasma::Theme::TextColor));
}


This code is iterating over the values of a hash and doing something over them. Everything seems ok, but it's not, it's calling values() on the hash and that's causing the creation of a temporary list with all the values of the list, effectively causing a bigger memory usage and iterating over the list twice (one to get the values and other to do something over them).

You can write something that does the same without these two problems doing

QHash<QString,Plasma::Meter*> meters;
foreach (Plasma::Meter *w, meters) {
  w->setLabelColor(0, theme->color(Plasma::Theme::TextColor));
}


So if you are using values() in a foreach, just remove it and your code will be instantaneously faster.

Calling keys in Hashes/Maps


QHash<QString,Plasma::SignalPlotter*> plotters;
foreach (const QString& key, plotters.keys()) {
  plotters.value(key)->setShowLabels(detail == SM::Applet::High);
  plotters.value(key)->setShowHorizontalLines(detail == SM::Applet::High);
}


This is calling keys() over the hash, this, as values(), means going across the container and creating a temporary list containing all the keys of the hash, that's a waste of memory when you could simply use a proper
QHash<QString,Plasma::SignalPlotter*>::const_iterator
and just iterate keys one by one.

Then it does plotters.value(key) twice, ok, accessing a value in a hash is amortized O(1) but still you are going to calculate the qHash of the string twice for no reason.

But more important, what the code is doing is actually iterate over the values, so the proper way is doing

QHash<QString,Plasma::SignalPlotter*> plotters;
foreach (Plasma::SignalPlotter *plotter, plotters) {
  plotter->setShowLabels(detail == SM::Applet::High);
  plotter->setShowHorizontalLines(detail == SM::Applet::High);
}


Probably in this case the net benefit is not much because probably the number of element of plotters is small, but there's no need to write inefficient code when the efficient one is as easy to write.

And of course it could be worse. If plotters was a map instead of a hash, lookup would be O(log(n)).

So if you are using keys() in a foreach, please think twice what you are doing and if you only need the value, iterate of the container and if you really need the key use a proper iterator to avoid constructing the temporary list.

3 years and 8 months later...

...i got my University Engineering diploma. I wonder what's the reason for taking so much for printing a paper :D

The nice swindler inside Apple

Apple has just gone a step higher in my list of companies i hate. Let me explain my last experience with them.

So i am browsing the net and see there's an iPhoneOS 3.0 pre-release, you have to register, pay something like 80€ and then you are part of the developer program and can download the SDK. So as my daywork involves working with phones i decide to register and pay with my boss credit card, something i've done lots of times already and never had any problem with.

But seems Apple is special and needs the names to match. No problem, i can accept that.

What i can not accept is they charging my boss the 80€ and then denying me the access to the developer zone because names do not match. That's what i call a swindle.

And the even more wonderful thing is the people that answers my mails don't see Apple did anything wrong and is asking me to send a fax (to US that i don't want to know how much it cost) of my and my boss ID cards with a notary sign saying it's ok (i don't know elsewhere, but in Spain a notary is NOT CHEAP). And won't return the 80€ either. Wonder if the only chance is asking the bank not to pay that 80€ :-(

That's what i get for dealing with Apple :-/

Transactions and rollback and their lack of in viajar.com

This post should be called "I'm going to Akademy! (i hope)", but instead of rejoicing of going for 4th consecutive year to KDE meeting, i'm going to do a rant about transactions and how rollback should work.

So here was I, sitting in my computer trying to find a good flight to go to Gran Canaria and ended up in viajar.com. They had a mixed offer (flight from Barcelona to Gran Canaria with one company and back with a different one) that was the best considering time and money so i went on and bought from them.

So i clicked the "buy" button after filling all the data and scared saw that the server was taking too much time to show me the "done" page. After 5 minutes or so, it told me "error", and i went like "oh, i'll have to find some other place to buy". But first i had a look at my credit card account and saw in horror that a the company of the second flight (clickair) had charged me about the half of the amount of money of what i had bought.

Calm down! I thought, and waited for a mail explaing something, but there was none for 12 hours so i had to call them. A nice person answered and explained me that they had absolutely no record of my purchase so they could not give me any info, i then explained the situation and she realized that clickair bookings are somewhat done differently from the rest because it's a Low Cost Company so she asked me which dates i had booked and promised to give an answer back.

Two hours later she phoned me with the needed data to take both flights as it seems she could book me also the first flight, good, all resolved!

But i was still wondering, how can the system book one ticked without checking the other one is available? how can i get a ticket booked and get no information back? Probably i went to the last if/else/if/else/if/else of conditions, but that's no excuse.

So if you are doing internet "shops" think twice your transactions and rollbacking mechanism, and then, think it a third time!

NetworkManager settings not shared/specified?

Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.

I've been having a quick look at how NetworkManager is implemented and from what i see the public DBUS API is only for querying, not editing there. The edition of new networks et al is to be provided by a separate NetworkManager service that has no common API. This has two consequences to me:
* Users that edit/create connections under KDE don't see them under Gnome/Xfce/wathever and viceversa
* You can not write a desktop agnostic program that needs to modify/create networks as you don't know who you have to talk to <-- This is specially ugly

ddrescue to the rescue

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!

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?

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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 :(

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.

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 Olímpica.

You can see a few photos i made at http://kde.cat/aacid/fotos/mozcampeu2008/

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?

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!

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 ;-)

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 :-)

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

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.

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.

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.

Poppler 0.8.7

Just two fixes, but you really want it as fixes a regression in Form handling introduced in Poppler 0.8.6.

Got it while it's hot http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.7.tar.gz

Looking for people

Dear Lazyweb,
At the poppler project we are trying to relicense all our patches as GPLv2 or later so that in case that xpdf is ever relicensed to something newer than gpl2 only we are not stuck because of patches.
The problem is that we have problems getting answers from everyone, so i'm posting this so that in case you know some of the missing people in person or have IM adreses of them, you can bug them for me.
And now onto the names:
- Marco Pesenti Gritti
- Kjartan Maaras
- Timothy Lee
- Carl Worth
- Ed Catmur - specially problematic has his mail server bounces mails

KHTML rocks

'nuff said. Keep it rocking guys!

Maemo scratchbox on amd64

So it seems the maemo scratchbox refuses to install on amd64, has anyone succeded in doinng so? Can i fool the script, or do i need to run a virtual machine with linux i386 inside and then run the scratchbox inside that?

KDE 4.1 adoption seems high

KDE 4.1.0 was released this very same week and already 17% of Konqueror users of the last month to my blog are using Konqueror 4.1, seems quite high to me

Catalan Summer of Code

So Catalan government decided to run a project similar to Google's Summer of code program. That's cool, the bad news is that the law that grants the money was approved as of May 30th and i just discovered the site because i was doing some random browsing.

So if you can read catalan go to http://www.lafarga.cat/beques/bases-de-la-convocatoria and start thinking what to do for Free Software.

Actually it seems like it's non-published on purpose so either:
a) It fails and politics can say "See Catalonia has no interest for Free Software" and they can go on paying Microsoft for doing sucky and patchy translations of their products to Catalan (yes they pay twice, license and translation)
b) Someone's son needs to make sure he is the chosen one, so the less publicity the better.

Bug your distro to package OpenJPEG

The new poppler major version that will come out in a month or so, sports a new JPEG2000 decoder based in OpenJPEG that is better than the current one, for example, it renders Google scanned docs, that is good. Yay! The problem is that actually not much distros package OpenJPEG (i could only find Debian), so go to your distro bug tracker and bug them to include OpenJPEG.

And BTW:

Poppler 0.8.5 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.5.tar.gz

Changes since 0.8.4:
Core:
* Fix crash on PDF that define a page thumbnail but it's not a Stream
* Fix crash when Annots object is not of the desired type
* Fix crash when obtaining fonts in PDF where XObjects link themselves in loops
* Fix crash on documents with an IRT object
* Saving should work much better now
* Plug some memory leaks in Annotation handling

Utils:
* pdftohtml: Don't crash on documents that specify an invalid named dest for a link
* pdftohtml: Make html output to keep all the spaces with
* pdftohtml: Improve a bit text layout
* pdftohtml: Make xml output valid xml

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

As a side note, one of the four crashes was a CVE while the other three where not, of course the four are as critic as the other.

kpovmodeler looking for help

Andreas Zehender wrote

I'm looking for a skilled KDE developer with some knowledge in povray and 3D stuff, who will follow future KDE technology changes and keep kpovmodeler compilable and stable.!

So if you are interested mail him!

Away from the internet

I'll be without internet connection until the 19th/20th of July so if you mail me, no i'm not ignoring you, i'm just cycling around sardinia :-)

If you need a quick answer for anything i might now, just write the appropiate mailing list for that question, i'm not that special i'm the only one that can asnwer your questions.

On football, national feelings et al

Be warned, this is not a KDE nor Free Software post, if you don't want to read it, don't do it.

Be warned 2, this post is going to be controversial, please don't write saying "You idiot" or similar/worst things, i'm trying to be as respectful as i can when dumping my brain into this post.

So it seems Spain just won Eurocup 2008, lots of people in the streets making noise and using firecrackers/fireworks leftovers from Sant Joan that was just a few days ago.

The ones that know me well know that i don't have a big Spanish feeling, i feel more Catalan and European, but to tell the truth i have mixed feelings about this Spain win.

On the good side, the spanish team is formed by young talented players, that don't act like if they were gods and that do a rather good football. And most of that players feel sympatic and someone you might empathize with, so they winning feels good.

On the other side, looking at the flags spanish followers waved at the stadium you can find three types at very similar rates of use:
* Normal Spanish flag: Nothing to say
* Spanish flag with a bull: Mixed feelings again, the bull is a animal that i probably would say i like if you ask me, but that bull flag is most of the times used either to support bullfighting or to support a rancid view about Spain. And i disagree with both
* Franquist flag: Yes, you might wonder why around one third of people supporting Spain soccer team wave a flag that means you don't like democracy nor any kind of personal rights. I do wonder too.

And then you have people like someone in my neighborhood that play cara al sol, a semi-official franquist song, each time Spain wins.

And that makes me wish Germany did win.

Sadly, i have to agree with what a coworker says: "España es un pais de pandereta" (not sure if makes sense translated but that'd be "Spain is a country of tambourine")

Installed OpenSuse 11.0

Just installed OpenSuse 11.0 in the laptop. They've done an good job in overall putting KDE 4 in a distro but i had two important problems, so i'm going to blog about them so that if someone has the same problem can find it.

First, the installer misdetected my monitor resolution, then i told him the good one, but that ended up in a messed xorg.conf that applied zoom onto the desktop, i had the remove the Option "PreferredMode" line from the file.

Second, knetworkmanager won't connect to my wifi network, i had to update (using a wired connection) and then it worked like a charm.

KDE, plugins, GPL and closed source applications

Here i was today, thinking about this stuff (yeah you can say i'm weird).

In KDE all of our core libs are LGPL so if someone owns a Qt commercial license he can write closed source applications using kdelibs.

In KDE we also have this nice technology called KParts that let's you load plugins for lots of things on runtime. One of the KParts possibilities is to load a KPart for a specific mimetype.

Let's say the above closed source application uses KParts to preview things, and the user of that closed source application decides to preview a PDF.

In that moment, the KPart system will lookup and load the OkularPart that is able of viewing PDFs.

And there is where my mind broke, OkularPart is GPL and is being used by a closed source application.

"NO! VIOLATION!" Does my mind shout, but how can the closed source developer prevent it? All he did is use a LGPL library, so, maybe this is not a violation? And if it is, what are we doing in the KDE project to help the closed source developer be a good citizen? Maybe we should tell the kpart system what kind of Parts are acceptable?

Can someone highlight me?

Dead monitor (again)

On wednesday, my Benq FP937s+ died again, it does not want to power on, the same thing that happened 15 months ago. Not good to have the most expensive Benq monitor at the time it was bought to die twice in less than 3 years :-(

Luckily i've still 3 months of guarantee so i'll be getting a new^Wrepaired one for free.

Looking for PDF with JPX streams

I'm currently working on a patch for poppler that makes use of OpenJPEG to decode JPX streams instead of the xpdf inherited code because the inherited code does not work for some PDF and i think that there's no reason not to use an already existing solution if it works. And that's the question, i need more PDF with JPX streams to be sure my 170 lines of code + OpenJPEG can replace the 3200 of xpdf code without any regression.

So if you could

cd /
find -name "*pdf" -exec grep -H JPXDecode {} \;

or as said in the comments

locate -0 .pdf | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H JPXDecode

and send me (aacid@kde.org) a link to the pdf or the file pdf itself of all the files that match.

Poppler 0.8.3 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.3.tar.gz

Changes since 0.8.2:
Core:
* Fix crash when reading some PDF with annotations
* Fix crash on PDF that reference Optional Content elements that don't exist
* Fix leaks on error conditions
* Do not limit CharCodeToUnicodeString to 8 characters
* Support for surrogates outside the BMP plane

Qt 3 frontend:
* Fix crash when reading PDF with password
* Fix leak when calling scanForFonts()

Qt 4 frontend:
* Fix the text() method

Splash renderer:
* Fix compilation with --enable-fixedpoint

Version 0.8.4 is scheduled for July 3rd

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

GDB hidden gem

Well at least it was hidden to me :D

Sometimes it's difficult to keep in view the surrounding lines of code when you are using GDB. list command helps but it's not that user friendly. So the other day a coworker told me about GDB TUI. You can enable it with Ctrl+X A and voilà you get the full listing of the code in a nice browseable view on the top :-)

And a screenie for your viewing pleasure:

KDE and strigi analyzers

If you are compiling kde strigi analyzers and installing them into a different path where strigi is installed on, you should be aware that strigi won't find your kde analyzers unless you instruct it to.

Let's say your strigi is in /usr, so it is looking for plugins in /usr/lib/strigi and your kde is in /home/kdesvn/installed/ so the KDE strigi analyzers are on /home/kdesvn/installed/lib/strigi.

You should define the environment variable STRIGI_PLUGIN_PATH to /home/kdesvn/installed/lib/strigi:/usr/lib/strigi

That in case you use strigi 0.5.9 that supports more than one path to be defined in STRIGI_PLUGIN_PATH, in case you are using 0.5.7 like Ubuntu users, you are out of luck as STRIGI_PLUGIN_PATH can only be one path, so you might want to define STRIGI_PLUGIN_PATH to /home/kdesvn/installed/lib/strigi and then go there and create symbolic links from all the ones in /usr/lib/strigi.

Anyway if you are using Ubuntu strigi your analyzers won't work because what seems to be a packaging bug.

KUbuntu KDE 3.5.9 kded lock fixed

So this is the great thing of Free Software, people care about their programs/distributions/wathever and we got a relatively quick fix for the ugly problem about kde locking on Kubuntu. Cheers to Jonathan for fixing it.

Poppler 0.8.1 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.1.tar.gz

Changes since 0.8.0:
core:
 * Do not call FT_Done_Face on a live cairo_font_face_t as it might cause crashes
 * Do not take into account Colorspace resource subdictionary for image XObjects
 * Downsample 16 bit per component images to 8 bit per component so they render

build system:
 * Link to pthread when the system needs it

windows:
 * Fix comparing against NULL instead against INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE when calling FindFirstFile

0.8.2 version is scheduled for May 26th

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Q_FOREACH is your friend

It's real, foreach makes writing loops much more convenient, but you have to know how to use it, see the following code:

#include <QList>
#include <QtDebug>

class Foo
{
 public:
  Foo()
  {
   qDebug("Empty constructor");
  }

  Foo(int aa, int bb, int cc) : a(aa), b(bb), c(cc)
  {
   qDebug("Constructor");
  }

  Foo(const Foo &f)
  {
   a = f.a;
   b = f.b;
   c = f.c;
   qDebug("Copy constructor");
  }

  int a, b, c;
};

int main(int /*argc*/, char ** /*argv*/)
{
 QList<Foo> list;
 list << Foo(1, 2, 3);
 list << Foo(4, 5, 6);
 list << Foo(7, 8, 9);
 list << Foo(10, 11, 12);
 list << Foo(13, 14, 15);

 foreach(Foo f, list)
  f.a = f.b = f.c = 0;

 foreach(Foo f, list)
  qDebug() << f.a << f.b << f.c;
}

There are two problems in the usage of foreach in this code.

The first problem is serious, it is trying to use foreach to modify the values of vector. The code compiles, but if you run it, you'll notice nothing was changed, why oh why?! may you ask. Because Foo f is a local variable to the foreach, so what you are doing is modifying a variable that exists in this very same line and nothing more.

The second problem is that you are constructing far much more Foo objects than needed, if you look at the output the copy constructor is called each time in the foreach, so the correct way for the debug line would be

 foreach(const Foo &f, list)
  qDebug() << f.a << f.b << f.c;
}

So remember, always that your foreach iterator is not a basic value like an int, double or pointer, use const &, it will be faster and will protect you against the try to use foreach to modify values problem, because

 foreach(const Foo &f, list)
  f.a = f.b = f.c = 0;

will not compile.

KUbuntu 8.04 released with rock solid 3.5.9 goodness...

...unless you try to automount USB devices, because that'll give you a deadlocked kded! HORRAY! It's quite interesting to see how a bug caused for a patch to use LUKS is not fixed or the patch reverted when such an used feature has such a big bug like deadlocking kded...

Spanish keyboard, dead ~ or not?

If you are using a Spanish keyboard layout, you may have noticed that in some Xorg update, AltGr+4 stopped typing a ~ and then you had to do AltGr+4+space or AltGr+4+AltGr+4 to get a ~.

This is because a non spanish user requested that change and Xorg people changed it.

I asked it to be reverted as there's no use for a dead ~ in Spanish as we don't have ã nor õ (we have ñ but we have a whole key for that) and the xkb maintainer asked me to run some kind of votation so that people decides what they like more.

So please, if you have an opinion on that issue go to http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477197 and http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9763 to get all the facts and write your opinion to 477197@bugs.debian.org

Dissappointed with SoC results

So, selected KDE SoC projects are out, and i have to say that personally i'm somewhat disappointed.

Personally i think we've done bad decisions in leaving proven KDE people with sensible projects out, while betting for too many non-proven newbies.

Besides that, the IRC meeting had, in my opinion, too much power over the final outcome, and people like me or David that could not attend it, saw how their mentored projects got dismissed when probably if we had been there that would not have happened so easily.

But well, that huge power of the IRC meeting is also probably due to Google's webpage sucking when you have to rate over 250 applications.

So life's hard, nothing to see here, keep moving.

fglrx blocking Xorg on logout

If you are running Kubuntu Hardy with the flgrx drivers and logging out does not work due to the Xorg process locking up at 100% of CPU usage, you should thank Stefan Carslöv for tracking down the issue to /etc/ati/authatieventsd.sh being unproperly configured, you need to change

XDM_AUTH_MASK=/var/lib/xdm/authdir/authfiles/A$1*

to:

XDM_AUTH_MASK=/var/run/xauth/A$1*

Throwing Away Promo CDs is Illegal

Or so says Universal. The world has gone mad.

iParty X was awesone

This weekend i was with some other spanish KDE dudes (ereslibre, apol, ana`, nefertum and pgquiles) at the Aditel iParty X where we did some talks about KDE. It was a very nice experience being at a Free Software only party.

We celebrated ereslibre's anniversary with a KDE cake and a huge greeting :-)

You can see the photos at http://www.kde.cat/aacid/fotos/ipartyx/ and the Qt4 Dance at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxmKzbbmEU

Poppler 0.8 Released

So we made it and released poppler 0.8. Congrats to everyone involved.

Changes since 0.7.3 include:
* Fix caching of members in the glib frontend causing issues with rendering
* Change glib public api to have a correct naming
* Some better error handling on corner cases
* Check the document stream is seekable when opening it
* Build fixes with autotools and with cmake
* Fix infinite recursion on some malformed documents when consulting the fonts
* Fix possible crash when asking for Movie contents

I've created a branch for 0.8 releases for bugfixes, i'll try to keep a monthly release schedule like we had with 0.6

If you want to create a directory holding branch 0.8 you can do:

git clone ssh://yourUser@git.freedesktop.org/git/poppler/poppler poppler-0.8
cd poppler-0.8/
git checkout --track -b poppler-0.8 origin/poppler-0.8

if you don't have an account first line should be
git clone git://git.freedesktop.org/git/poppler/poppler poppler-0.8

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Poppler 0.7.3 (0.8 RC2) released

This is the second and last release candidate of what will be Poppler 0.8

Changes include:
* Fix regression in Splash renderer
* Fix off-by-one write in Splash
* Plug some minor leaks in Optional Content code
* Improve error handling when creating a document in the glib frontend

So only one regression and some minor fine tuning. Seems we are on track for
releasing 0.8.0 next week

glib tests are known not to build using cmake, so if you are using cmake
disable glib tests for now.

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Poppler 0.7.2 (0.8 RC1) released

So one week after the scheduled date, we have released Poppler 0.7.2.

This is the first release candidate of what will be Poppler 0.8

From now on no API nor ABI changes are allowed unless TOTALLY necessary. Only bugfixes until we release and branch 0.8

We will try to follow the planned schedule with a 1 week delay applied, that is:
* March 19 -> Poppler 0.7.3 (0.8 RC 2)
* March 26 -> Poppler 0.8.0

And now onto the changes

Major Changes:
* Improve font matching not forcing default values onto Fontconfig
* Add preliminary annotations support in the glib frontend
* Initial Movie support in the core
* Make GDK dependency optional in glib bindings

Minor Changes:
* Make the core able to read mime types of embedded files
* Qt4 API for accessing mime types of embedded files
* Handle correctly check state of optional content groups
regarding parents state
* Avoid setting singular CTM matrices on the Cairo backend
* Improved Qt4 API to get character position
* Qt4 api documentation improvements
* Qt4 minor stability fixes
* Proper lib64 Qt detection
* Fix build when compiling without cairo support

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Konqueror 4.0.2 is more translated than firefox :-)

With the imminent release of KDE 4.0.2, Konqueror will not only have a bigger Acid3 score than Firefox, it will also include 50 languages (49 translations + original English) which equals 50 Firefox 2.0.0.12 translations (44 official + 1 beta + 5 language packs) so if you belong to a language that still is not well translated into KDE join the amazing l10n team of KDE and help us surpass Firefox there too ;-)

Spending my time writing useless software

So here i am, having a TODO list of over 70 items and having to finish my slides for a class i'll do on Saturday about KDE and what do i do? Port and improve my gopher ioslave to KDE4. *sigh*