Dear Lazyweb: 2nd bag at Ryanair

I'm taking a flight with Ryanair on Thursday and i happen to need to carry more than 15Kg the first bag allows you to carry. I know for sure that other companies (e.g. Aer Lingus) do not increase your weight allowance when you book another bag, that is, with one bag you can carry 20Kg and if you pay to ship 2 bags you can still carry only 20Kg. I've been reading the Ryanair Terms and Conditions and they are totally unclear so I'd like to know if any of you has taken a flight with Ryanair lately (say less than 6 months) with two bags and it meant that you could carry 15Kg per bag (30Kg total) or just 15Kg total.

The new board of KDE España

The members of the KDE España association have chosen a new board for next year. The new board consists of Albert Astals Cid (Chairman), Alejandro Fiestas Olivares (VP), José Millán Soto (Treasurer) and Aleix Pol i Gonzàlez (Secretary). The new board appreciates the work of Rafael Fernandez Lopez as VP in the past years and the confidence of the members in us all.

KDE 4.7 needs you: Bulgarian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Maithili, Wallon Translators

KDE 4.7 is going to be tagged in about two weeks and those 8 languages (Bulgarian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Maithili, Wallon) that were part of KDE 4.6 currently do not meet the essential requirements to be released and thus will not be released with KDE 4.7 unless someone starts working on it now.

It seems the old translators do not have much time at their hands at the moment, so if you are a speaker of any of those languages and want to keep using KDE in your language, now is the moment to act, contact me at aacid@kde.org to see how you can help yourself and other speakers of your language!

Update: Icelandic is actually fine and meets the essential requirements, it was a mistake on my side that add them to the list.

Cross thread signal delivery fixed!

At work we've been chasing for a long time a problem in which thread T1 emitted signal S1 and then signal S2 connected to an object in thread T2 but they were received in that object in the reverse order, that is, S2 first and S1 later.

First we though it was our fault since the code in those classes is not as clean as it should be, but after days we could not find anything specially wrong in our code so started looking down to Qt.

Just after one day I was able to locate a problem in QObject::moveToThread that did not keep the entries in QPostEventList properly sorted and was able to produce a quick patch to fix our issue. Unfortunately it has taken around one month for that patch to hit upstream (no idea if it stalled in my company, digia or nokia) and the bug being fixed by Olivier (with a patch better than mine).

Bottom line: If you can not find the bug in your code it's maybe because it's not there :D

Talk at X JPL

This thursday and friday the X Jornades de Programari Lliure take place at Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. As you can see in the program I will be talking about translation communities dynamics (mainly on KDE) on Friday from 16:30 to 17:00.

Other KDE people like Aaron Seigo, Aleix Pol and Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas also also talking at the X JPL.

N9 disappointment

It seems the default applications will be closed source, so yeah, looks cool, uses Qt and bla bla bla, but still not a real Free Software phone as they sold it to us.

Of course I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.

Beware of KDE 4.6.4

Some tarballs appear to be broken.

Catalan Police hitting pacific protesters

Catalan Police doing what they know better, being brainless idiots.

KGeography questions: Top Left or Centered?

We the KGeography developers are in a disagreement of what looks better, centered questions or top left aligned ones, so we are opening this poll for you the users to decide. Please hop onto this post on the KDE Forums and vote!

Akademy-es 2011 starting today

Akademy-es 2011 is starting today :-)

Today talks include a talk about translations by part of Catalan KDE translation crew, how about how to contribute by Aleix, one about telepathy by Alex and me speaking about potatos.

Thanks to our kind sponsors Google and Qt/Nokia :-)

Qt Designer texts: disambiguation vs comment

Qt Designer has two fields regarding translations for text properties (e.g. the text of a Label, or the tool tip of a Widget) disambiguation and comment (that unfortunately map to the comment (for disambiguation) and extracomment (for comment) XML attributes in the .ui file), let me give a bit of explanation of what they mean since I've found some errors on it's usage while fixing a bug we had in our translation scripts (aka scripty). First some background on how translation works, when you ask for a string to be translated (e.g. "Run") you can give some context that acts as an extra key (e.g. "Verb" or "Noun") so translators can do different translations (Run, Verb) -> Ejecutar (Run, Noun) -> Ejecución This extra key is what you write in the disambiguation field On the other hand when you write something in the comment field, it only appears as a comment to the translator, so if you have two texts with the same text (e.g. "Run") and different comments (e.g. "Verb" or "Noun") it will not work, so only use the comment field to give extra information for fields whose text is unique but the meaning might not be easy to understand to the translator. So there is no reason at all to do things like <string extracomment="General information">General information of the identity.</string> since you are giving less information in the comment field than in the text itself Also just remember it makes no sense to add disambiguation or comment to a text property that is empty since at the moment we can not translate empty strings, so things like this are also not useful at all <string extracomment="Open file dialog"/> Finally if you use KUIT markers they need to be in the disambiguation field

Akademy-es 2011 schedule ready

We just published the schedule for Akademy-es 2011 that will happen in Barcelona from 20 to 22 of May. Make sure to register if you plan to attend!

Akademy-es 2011

KDE Spain is organizing in Barcelona the Akademy-es 2011, the annual meeting of KDE users and contributors in Spain from May 20th through May 22nd.

During the last events attendance and the technical quality of the papers have increased significantly making the Akademy-es, is one of the most important KDE events worldwide.

New this year, the event will take place in two different locations, thereby adjusting each activity to its ideal location. Friday's activities will be held at the Campus Nord of the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya and weekend ones will be at school Sant Marc de Sarrià.

You can find more infomation at the event website.

Hero of the day: Thomas Freitag

I've just commited a patch to Poppler made by Thomas Freitag that implements Pattern tilings in the Splash rendering backend (the one used by Okular) instead of falling back to the default Poppler::Gfx implementation. This means that for example for a pdf page that previously took 34 minutes to render, now renders in 250 msec. Not bad eh?

Fixed one of biggest Okular crashers

I just fixed one of the biggest Okular crashers https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243434 (around 20 to 30 duplicate reports). This one was not really difficult to fix (actually it is just a one liner), but it was difficult to fix for me since I could not reproduce it

It took a while to find someone that had the crash and was willing to help me debug it (thanks Adrià). So please, all users reading this blog, be more proactive when we ask questions in bugs, because, you know, it is in your best interest answering our questions and helping us pinpoint where the problem is.

KDE Main Modules Minor Point Relase Policy

The release-team has written a minor point release policy for KDE main modules.

You can find it at http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Minor_Point_Release_Policy

As far as we know it covers what we already do, just makes it a bit more official and standardized.

KDE 4.6 dinner in Barcelona^WBadalona

This Saturday 19 the Barcelona & surroundings KDE crew will be celebrating the release of 4.6 with a dinner in Badalona. Read the Community Wiki page for more details and join us! It'll be fun :-)

Dublin Airport Terminal 2 fail

Today is the first day my Aer Lingus flight to Barcelona leaves from new shiny Dublin Airport Terminal 2 instead of Terminal 1 and it really shows it is new and has some rough edges.
* Aer Lingus self checking machines are not able to read most passports, thus almost everyone has to queue on the check-in desks
* Security clearance trays get stuck in the ramp that is supposed to get them back to the beginning of the queue (can't believe no one tested this)
* VIP lounge WiFi has only http access

All those three things worked perfectly on Terminal 1 :-/

Dear Lazyweb: Know anyone at multimania?

Since the end of december, the webpage of my father at http://usuarios.multimania.es/sacorbera has been lost in hyperspace redirecting to a 404 error at multimania.de.

The interesting part is that if I log in via multimania.es all the data is there, it is just that the domain seems to be lost (¿misconfiguration?).

I have been trying to contact multimania admins via mail and all the forms i've found in their web without any kind of success. So please if you happen to work at multimania or know someone that works there or know someone that knows someone... Tell them to fix this problem.

Second Linux Kernel patch accepted

After my first ever Linux Kernel patch 8 years ago (yes I'm getting old) i successfully got a new one accepted a few weeks ago that fixes the temperature problem i was having with my laptop. Yay for scratching your own itch :-)

KDE Spain looking for a place to host Akademy-es 2011

We are looking for a place to host the annual Spanish KDE event, if you feel like helping us co-organize the event please visit http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2011/ubicacion.php

KWalletEditor no longer depends on Qt3Support

I've just commited to trunk (KDE 4.7) the last of the changes I started doing a few days ago to make KWalletEditor not depend on Qt3Support/KDE3Support. Basically that meant rewriting all the Q3IconView and K3ListView as KListWidget and QTreeWidget with the associated Drag&Drop changes. I've been testing the code for the usual problems of this type of porting while doing the code changes but something might have escaped me so I'll be more than happy if you give it some usage and report to me any problem you might find.

My top 10 blog posts of 2010

Here the top 10 of blog entries visited in 2010 in my blog:
10 - Poppler, Qt4, Windows and my desktop
9 - Performance of radeon free drivers
8 - Is the X11 engine slower than raster just because of the drivers?
7 - Morocco trip
6 - 3g USB dongle stopped working in Ubuntu 10.04
5 - Poppler-Symbian pdf viewer
4 - Poppler for windows
3 - keyboard crazyness
2 - Konqueror 4.4.4 vs Firefox 3.6.6
1 - Qt, gitorious, merge requests and Open Source

One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 6 out of 10 are from either 2006 or 2007 or 2009 (but not from 2008 :D)
- People seem interested in my poppler-symbian project. It did not get very far but there's a proof-of-concept at http://projects.ufocoders.com/projects/pdfviewer/repository in case you are interested in doing the work
- People want to use poppler in windows (it gets two entries in the top 10), 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 (and complaining in the list it's too difficult to build)
- People reading my 2007 entry about radeon drivers performance should really be looking somewhere else
- There are 5 blog entries that already where in the top 10 of last year
- There's nothing like a good rant to get the top spot of visits ;-)

Okular website translatable

In the past few days I've been working on using the existing i18n functionality in the KDE website framework (AKA capacity) in the Okular website.

The functionality was added ages ago but it needed some tweaking to support all the Okular website needs.

I've also worked in making scripty extract the messages automatically to .po files so each day the contents of the website are extracted to the trunk/l10n-kde4/templates/messages/www folder.

Of course this can be added to any of the KDE websites. I've added some documentation to the Capacity techbase page, if you find you need more help do not hesitate to ping me on IRC.

My valgrind talk at OSSBarcamp 2010

The 26th of September I gave a talk about valgrind at OSSBarcamp 2010 in Dublin. In case you want to listen/see it feel free to hit http://vimeo.com/15483105. Warning not good English is included for free in the package

Join the KDE translation team

This is a reminder that the various KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but did not know how to do it, this is your chance, join the KDE Translation team!

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE software sources that will end up in 4.6 release are frozen for new messages so no new messages are going to be introduced before the release. A second reason is that the release date is close enough (2 month approx until tagging) so you will see your effort released really soon.

You can have a look at the statistics in the l10n web page, but remember that even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will for sure still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so I can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

How to change the current song from the headset in the N900

Like some people i got a N900 during the Meego Conference, so far I’m liking it and already have a few ideas of development things for it. On the other side I’m trying to force me to use it as my regular phone so i can show others the greatness of a real Linux stack based phone, the main problem I’ve found is that my Nokia-Symbian phone headset has very useful next/previous/pause/play song buttons that do not seem to work on the N900. Does anyone know how to get this to work?

Meego Conference goers advice

I won't be attending the Meego Conference but i've been living in Dublin for 11 months so there is one advice i can give you.

Make sure you come with the correct clothes.
The weather forecast for the coming days is:
* Temperatures between 0 and 10ºC
* Heavy wind
* Rain
So bring a good coat (if possible water proof-ish and with hood), a scarf or similar and a hat/cap/something for your head.

I hope the Aviva Stadium was really cheap otherwise i don't understand why someone would like to have a conference here at this time of the year :D

Update: Remember that Ireland uses a different power socket than mainland Europe

My CPU fan does not speedup

Dead Lazyweb: I'm having problems because the fan of my laptop seems to always be on "slow mode" and my CPU is getting to 80/90 ºC and sometimes the laptop just shut downs itself. I know the fan can spin faster because in those cases the laptop shut downs, upon reboot the fan makes more noise while booting, but once it gets to Linux it turns to that slow mode again. Any idea how do i make it smart so that it actually goes faster when the CPU temperature raises?

Qt, gitorious, merge requests and Open Source

Begin of rant

Some time ago Qt/Nokia decided to open their repos (great! even if they are not the real repos) and also decided to start accepting contributions from non Qt/Nokia employees in a way that they will make you the favour of accepting your code for free without making you fax things and talk with lawyers (you still have to grant them a perpetual license to do whatever they want with your code).

The fact that you have to grant them a perpetual license to do whatever they want with your code was the reason i decided myself not to contribute to Qt.

But the flesh is weak and i actually found something that i though would be nice to have and was actually easy to implement. So i went ahead and did it (http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/merge_requests/814) seven weeks ago.

Since then my merge request has received exactly two comments. One from a non Qt/Nokia employee saying "Looks good to me (and useful!)" and one from a Qt/Nokia employee saying "Your indentation is wrong" (which i think is not but that's unrelated).

And that's it.

I know phones don't have a need for QHeaderViews, but Qt/Nokia could pretend they still are supporting the desktop (which is what brought them to the position they are) and if they get a patch from a reasonably known community member that gets acked by a well known community member have the decency of following up the patch.

End of rant.

KDE España at the LSWC

Antonio Larrosa, founding member of KDE Spain and KDE contributor almost from its inception, will give a talk on KDE in the Libre Software World Conference 2010 held in Málaga this October 27. The scheduled time of the talk is from 17:00 to 17:30.

The Libre Software World Conference is a conference that emerged from the community to replace the Open Source World Conference, cancelled by its organizers (La Junta de Andalucía) just a month before its start.

Interviewed in KDEBlog

KDE Blog has published a long interview in three pages about my involvement in KDE, KDE España et al. The interview is in Spanish, so bad luck if you don't understand it (though you might want to try some translation service :D)

Back from Madrid

So I'm just on the bus on my way home back from Madrid. There I attended the Solid sprint in the UFO CODERS (aka afiestas+ereslibre) office. Unfortunately I didn't get much solid hacking done besides helping afiestas and ereslibre here and there with minor C++KDE things and the typical "const & in foreach" fixing (I knew that beforehand and that is why I didn't ask the KDE eV for sponsoring my trip) but I really had a productive weekend in other KDE and KDE España related things and it was really nice meeting Sebas, Will, Kevin, Alex, Rafa and Agustín again and meeting Will+2, Dario, Lamarque and Javier (Spanish OpenSuse community member) for the first time so "Solid Sprint 2010 FTW!". The only problem is the 6 hours of sleep in 48 hours are starting to kill me :D

Picture stolen from Sebas twitter:

XPS viewer for Linux

From time to time people ask me what i use to view XPS in Linux (unfortunately my company uses them for the salary sheets and stuff like that) and my answer is Okular. So that means there is a lack of awareness of all the document formats Okular supports, so remember, if you are forced into an XPS file Okular will help you :-) And yes, it does not implement all the features of the format but all files i have seem to open fine so you know the deal, if you have one that doesn't work, report a bug and maybe then it will work in the next version

Update: BTW Okular is supposed to work (i never tried myself) on other OSes including, Windows, MacOsX, *BSD, etc but seems those people has less problems finding a suitable viewer there

Speaking at OSS Barcamp this weekend

This weekend i will be giving two talks at OSS Barcamp in Dublin. The first talk (Saturday 12:00 Room 2) is "An introduction to Qt Quick" (really an introduction as i am just a beginner in Qt Quick) and the second talk (Sunday 11:10 Room 1) is an introduction to Valgrind (I'm not an expert but i think i qualify as seasoned user here). Of course I'll be around a while wearing my KDE gear so if you have questions or wanna have a chat just say "Hi!"

Give libdvdcss some cpu

Yesterday i bought the 4 Season DVD set of Prison Break, and today when trying to play the 3rd DVD on my PS2 it was failing, i touched the disk and it is actually thicker than the 2 first DVD and it probably doesn't fit in the PS2 drive (it actually made weird noises) so i tried playing it with VLC and totally failed. After some playing around it seems libdvdcss has a low timeout to try to decode the DVD keys and as i was running some very intensive tasks it failed. So if you have to play a DVD disk make sure libdvdcss has some CPU power available.

ebook-tools 0.2 released

ebook-tools 0.2 was released a few days ago. It contains lots of crash fixes that will make the Okular epub backend more stable so go and bug your distro packagers to include it in the next versions of your distro.

KGeography video

It seems someone has done a video on KGeography and it seems he even does enjoys using my little program. Check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWClw5baTCY

Akademy-es 2010 videos available

Akademy-es 2010 talks are now available at http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2010/doku.php?id=materiales

Talks are in Spanish (except one that is on Basque) so if you don't understand it, you are out of luck.

I hope that those of you that could not come enjoy the videos and maybe they convince you so you come next year ;-)

How to run a Messages.sh file to create your .pot file

Some people regularly ask me how to create the .pot file of their program. They know the Messages.sh file is the key for it but they also realize that doing

cd /path/to/my/project
bash Messages.sh

Does not really work and then they are a bit stalled.

The answer is quite simple, but you need to know it ;-) You have to run the extract-messages.sh script that lives in the l10n-kde4/scripts

That still will fail as the script tries to save the .pot files in a folder called "po", so all in all these are the commands to get the .pot file of your project

cd /path/to/my/project
mkdir po
bash /path/to/l10n-kde4/scripts/extract-messages.sh

And that's it :-)

KDE 4.5 lunch in Madrid

After countless KDE release parties in Barcelona the KDE people in Madrid seem to have gotten their act together and are organizing a KDE 4.5 lunch release event in Madrid the 21st of August. Drop by and make sure you organize enough to make sure there's another one in 6 months ;-)

l10n.kde.org: an apology

Yesterday i had a look at the l10n.kde.org database and noticed there were about 300 people that had registered there in the past 4 years to help translating KDE and most probably had not been contacted.

Even if i didn't put the system into place, you guys need an apology, so here it comes: "We are sorry".

Besides saying "oh fuck!" i started mailing them all (some registered like 4 years ago) and this morning i've already got some answers.

Some had managed to overcome the blackhole of not getting any answer and actually contacted the translation team and were already alive and kicking. Good :-)

Some had moved to gnome and obviously are not interested in translating KDE anymore. Bad for us, there's no better way to keep an user that getting him involved

Some others had become KDE developers meanwhile :D

Some people still want to translate. Great!

Most of the address just bounced off though :-/ Lost contributors :-(

So remember if you add a way for people to contact a team, make sure it does not get lost and there is anyone looking at that mailing address, database, forum, mailing list or whatever.

And BTW i'm in the process of killing/reworking the l10n.kde.org database so this does not happen again.

Akademy 2011 Berlin

See you all there next year

Bug your distro to package lcms2

Yesterday i tried poppler with lcms2 instead of the regular lcms1 and some pdf give a speed improvement of 10%, the problem is that it seems that almost no distro packages it so we can't really depend on it. So please if you want a "free" speed improvement in poppler bug the packagers of your distro to package lcms2

KDE Translations in danger of being removed for 4.5

If you are a user of KDE in ones of these languages you might want to contact me at aacid@kde.org since the old translators seem to have gone AWOL and if no urgent work is done in the less than three weeks that are left to 4.5 on them they will not be released with KDE 4.5

The endangered languages are:
* ar - Arabic
* csb - Kashubian
* eo - Esperanto (they are not AWOL but still endangered so help is always welcome)
* fy - Frisian
* hi - Hindi
* mai - Maithili
* mk - Macedonian
* si - Sinhala
* tg - Tajik

Konqueror 4.4.4 vs Firefox 3.6.6

People say Facebook doesn't work in KHTML? Where is the send button in firefox?

And yes, i know that's something probably that is "my fault" since the button seems to show up for other people that is sitting in the table around me.

Planet KDE Español

Hi, this is a announcement for the newly created Planet KDE Español. This planet aims to be a collection of blogs around the KDE world written in Spanish, so if you blog about KDE and think you should be included in the planet drop me an e-mail at aacid@kde.org

I like shiny images too

Though unfortunately not all week :-/

Join the translation crew

Hi, this is a reminder that the KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so even if you do not know how code you can help translating the KDE Software to your mother tongue or some other language you are fluent in and make a difference.

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE Software Compilation 4.5 sources are frozen for new messages so new messages are going to be introduced before the release and also the release date is close enough (1 month approx until tagging) that you will see your effort be released really soon.

One of the teams specially looking for contributors is the Gujarati team, that met the essential requirements to be shipped with KDE SC for 4.4 but does not to 4.5

And remember, even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so i can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

European politicians gone mad

So, i've been trying to ignore the issue, but it is really difficult, so here is my rant, European politicians are about to approve a law that will force search engines to store searches for some time (from 6 month to 2 years). The official reason for that is creating a "early warning system against paedophiles and sex offenders".

There are lots of fishy things in that law:
* Do you really need from 6 months to 2 years of searches for a "early warning system"? I find that a bit contradicting at least
* When someone uses the "think of the children" reason, they are usually going for the lowest instincts of human, because obviously anyone opposing to protect the children is immediately evil. Well, that is going to end up forcing children to stay at home, or even forbidding them at all that way, with no children they won't be molested, right?
* The other thing that you get when you say that you oppose to such intrusive measures is "you should not be afraid unless you have something to hide", and they are right, i have lots of things to hide, it is called PRIVACY
* And finally the most important part, the law is going to be useless, if i am an *evil* dude i probably know how to use Tor or some other anonymous internet access so storing all that searches will not help at all.

So for me the bottom line is that:
a) Politicians are useless and fail to contact proper experts that confirm the measure is not going to help at all
or
b) Politicians are evil and even though they know the measure is not going to help at all, they are just going to approve it to fuck up with us citizens

And well, i don't know if a) or b) is worse :-/

Offer for Linux Magazine.es wanabbe subscriptors

If you were thinking to subscribe to Linux Magazine.es you might want to have a look at this offer, which imho is quite good (>= 2€ for 6 numbers) and you even get to choose to donate 10% to KDE or other Free Software organizations.

KDE Blog reaches 1500 blog posts

This is just a congratulations blog post to our (in KDE España sense) own Baltasar Ortega for reaching the remarkable number of 1500 blog posts (well 1502 at the moment :D) in his KDE Blog (only in Spanish).

Keep up the good work!

BTW, KDE España has a planet for those interested in the mumblings of its members

Akademy-es 2010 slides available

You can find the Akademy-es 2010 slides at http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2010/doku.php?id=materiales.

The videos will be available soon, hopefully.

Here some photos:


Unfortunately we have people like apol that was neither of the two big photos since they were made at the very beginning and at the very end of the event.

Complex systems are complex

Under such a obvious title i want to state how much things mostly work by luck in modern software systems, let's pick bug 232918: Translations do not work on KDE 4.5 snapshots.

I was never able to reproduce this error until Johannes Obermayr let my play with his machine today. Why? Because my kdebase installation was old, but i really never bothered updating kdebase to try to reproduce this problem since kdebase has nothing to do with translations, right? Right, it doesn't.

So what was happening? Well, a not obvious use case of KComponentData in KStyle together with the new feature that integrates Qt and the KDE Development platform more closely was triggering a bug in KComponentData, and the thing is that the bug had been there since r718911 (that is almost 3 years ago), but it wasn't until a while ago that it was triggered by the combination of that KStyle and Qt/KDE plugin.

So yes, writing software is complex, and what causes something to break (the Qt/KDE Plugin) is not always the one to blame (in this case KComponentData)

BTW for those curious, the bug fix together with the explanation of what it is a bug can be found at http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdecore/kernel/kcomponentdata_p.h?r1=1112279&r2=1132109

Also while on it, I found a bug in an openSuse patch where they where adding three default catalogs but adding 4 to numberOfSysCatalogs variable, cheers to tittiatcoke for quickly fixing it.

Akademy-es 2010 talks streaming

Hi, just a heads up that Akademy-es 2010 talks will be streamed, you can get the info at http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2010/doku.php?id=streaming. Yes, we know not a very Free Software friendly format, but that's what you get when you reuse the University hardware. The talks will also be recorded and published somewhere somewhen.

Interviewed about Okular

Akademy-es 2010 coordinator interviews me about Okular. Read it in spanish at his blog.

3g USB dongle stopped working in Ubuntu 10.04

If your 3g USB dongle stopped working in Ubuntu 10.04, install the usb-modeswitch package. It fixed the problem for me.

Poppler-Symbian pdf viewer

So yesterday, i grabbed poppler, freetype and Qt sources and in 45 minutes hacked together a proof of concept PDF viewer for symbian. Pretty cool if you ask me, the ugly side is that if i ever get some more work on it and want to get it into OVI store I need to pay 50€ to register into it and around 200€ more to get the app to go through Symbian signed, of course what i'm not going to do is spend 250€ to get a free app into OVI store, on the other hand i could of ask for some € for the application (3€?), but i'm not sure it's a good idea either.

Akademy-es 2010 schedule published

Akademy-es 2010 schedule has just been published, you can see it at the event web page. It includes talks of all kinds, ranging from purely development ones to how to deploy KDE using thin clients passing through KDE programs on Windows.

On a related note we are very happy that we almost have 80 registered attendants at the moment, if you want to register, remember tomorrow is the last day!

And finally i'd like to thank our sponsors: Cenatic, Bilbao city, University of Basque Country, Euskaltel, Basque Country Government, Qt/Nokia, cast-info, irontec and ESLE, not forgetting our media associates Linux Magazine and Todo Linux, the host ETSI Bilbao and of course the local organizers itsas.

Bought plane tickets for Akademy

I just bought the plane tickets to go to Akademy, Dublin->Heathrow->Helsiki, 2.5 hours to change planes in heathrow, should be enough i hope, all in all 300€ could be better but could be worse too i guess. So see you in tampere :-)

KDE Workshop in OpenSegovia 2010

Eduardo Robles Elvira (aka Edulix) will run a workshop on introduction to programming using the KDE platform in OpenSegovia 2010 that is held in Segovia from 15 to 17 of Abril. The workshop is scheduled on Thursday 15 at 16:00. For more information you can have a look at the event webpage.

How to kill tourism

So today i was coming back to Dublin from my weekend trip to my home Barcelona and in my trip i saw a man from the check-in desk be rude to a group of women, he probably had his reasons but if your work is facing the public you should never be rude to anyone; a woman telling the customs officer "My passport was stolen"; a boarding message in a spoken english that was so bad that people did not understand that boarding would be done for rows 10 to 27 first; the men seating besides me speaking on how specially Barcelona felt to them and how they would recommend the visit but put a remark that you should be careful with petty crime.

Probably today was a bad luck day for me but if 4 of 4 things i realized were bad, something wrong we are doing, the problem is that fixing this is not easy so you can put this blog in the random rant/head dump section.

Lightning talks at OSS BarCamp

I'll be giving two lightning talks at OSS BarCamp this saturday, one about poppler and other about the KDE localization project. More info at http://www.ossbarcamp.com

KDE in Interlingua

If you are interested in Interlingua, Giovanni Sora just started the translation of KDE to Interlingua, i'm sure he'll welcome any help. Just comment here or drop me a mail at aacid@kde.org if you want to contact him.

KDE SC 4.4 talk at iParty 11

Baltasar Ortega of kdeblog fame will talk about KDE SC 4.4 at iParty 11, that will be held in Castellón from 8 to 11 of April. The talk will be Saturday 10 at 17:00. For more information you can go to the event page.

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 :-)

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