New job

Today has been my first day in my new job. I've started working as Software Engineer for

Since late August I had been doing interviews here in Barcelona but most of them were not really interesting only fullfilling the last of my four wanted points:
* Interesting job
* Linux related
* Free Software related
* Barcelona based

Working for Canonical gives me those four points and as an extra the salary is better than the average Barcelona job, so I can't complain :-)

As note i am almost sure my regular work will *not* be working in creating Kubuntu so don't ask me for feature improvements/bugfixes for it.

KDE/Harmattan brings me back to Berlin!

Until this summer I had never been in Berlin. And now after going there this August for the Desktop Summit, I am going back this weekend for the KDE/Harmattan sprint. My plan for this sprint involves trying to port KTuberling to Harmattan, should not be too difficult after my Blinken port, investigate how to use a proper kdelibs instead of libkok and try to learn as much of possible from all the attendants :-)

Okular and Send by Mail

There are regular requests about Okular having a "Send by Mail" menu item in the File menu.

In terms of implementation, it is a five minutes hack, since all you have to do is create a new KAction that calls KToolInvocation::invokeMailer with a few params and you are done.

Yet, i have been refusing to implement it since i do not think it is Okular responsibility to offer this feature.

I can understand that users are used to Adobe Reader having it, and in the unintegrated world of Windows it makes sense that every app includes as many features as possible since it is you versus the world.

On the other hand, in KDE land we pride ourselves of having things properly integrated and each feature in the software where it logically belongs, and in my book, the action of initiating the sending of an email, does not belong to a document viewer.

It is true though, that even if I've been involved in UI designing/programming for a while I can't still say I know what belongs to a given program or not.

Because once we add it to Okular? Why not to gwenview? And why not to Calligra? And And And?

What do you think?

Blinken: First KDE App on the Nokia Store?

Today Nokia approved Blinken for the N9/N950 and it appeared in the Nokia store.

I started coding Blinken (back then known by the ksimon name) in February 2005 and a few months later it joined the KDE Education project.

The last few months I've been playing with the N950 that the nice people at Nokia lent me and soon I realized that thanks to the Document Viewer (based in Calligra) it has some sort of kdelibs on the device (by the name of libkok) so porting KDE applications to it became a bit easier.

With the aim of having Blinken on my phone I started to work and after a few ifdefs for the mouse hover handling and a bit of QML for bits of the UI I ended up with this commit that makes Blinken available for another platform and to my knowledge makes it the first KDE application in the Nokia Store.

PelleTut, we love you too!

A nice user by the nickname of PelleTut just dropped by the #okular IRC channel and after me telling him "use evince instead of okular if you like it more/does what you want", he answered with a nice "lol, retard" and then quit.

Great way to convince us to implement those missing features!

Some Okular testing, please?

There are three newsworthy things today in Okular world:
* Michel Ludwig merged into master the branch he had been developing to help him use Okular better from Kile. This should had no impact in regular Okular users but as this is a biggish change it would be great if you all master branch okular users update, recompile and complain if you see any regression
* I committed a patch that will make the UI more responsive on opening for documents whose pages are slow to render. There is no real speedup, but the fact that you have the UI up and running sooner is nice. Again this should be pretty innocuous but if you run master and see any new weird thing on opening files let us know.
* I created a new branch named kill_poppler_thread whose only commit removes a lot of code from the PDF/poppler backend that is not needed anymore since there is now generic code that provides the threading functionality that code had. This should also be innocuous but i am a bit hesitant of merging it into master so it would be cool if some that use okular with PDF files intensively switched to the kill_poppler_thread and verified everything works as it should. If you do, please tell me and it will make my decision of whether merging into master or not easier.

KDE 15 years message from KDE España

KDE España decided to force me to record a video saying Happy Birthday to KDE. You can see it (in Spanish) at http://es.kde.org/notasprensa/15aniversario.php. And do not forget we have talks in four different cities going on this afternoon!

Updating the N950 firmware

I just got a N950 like probably some other KDE contributors will be getting this week. Thanks Nokia!

I am writing this blog to bring two things into your attention:
* The firmware shipped is not the last one, you might want to download the new one.
* Updating the firmware failed for me with a "USB interface: Device or resource busy" error

To fix this problem I needed to run
while true; do modprobe -r cdc_phonet; done
in a separate terminal and then it all worked (note it takes around 20 minutes to update, be patient) (kudos to google for showing me the answer in an obscure irc log)

Moved from Berlios

This weekend we learnt that Berlios would be shutting down at the end of the year. I went over there and realized i had three things in Berlios:
* The webpage of your favorite geography learning tool KGeography
* The webpage of the ioslave that lets you access the pre-http "web" kio_gopher
* The code of the ROAM 3D viewer I coded for my Master Thesis r3v

For the KGeography and kio_gopher webpages I've chosed userbase, in case of KGeography reusing the existing one that was quite good and for kio_gopher creating a small one from scratch.

For r3v I've went with gitorious, not sure it is the best code hosting around but i just wanted a quick place to dump this coded i created in 2005 and i already had an account in gitorious :D

Poppler 0.18.0 released

Poppler 0.18.0 is here! It took 9 months and was delayed around 3 months because of my infamous laptop dead but I was finally able to release 0.18.0 today.

The changes are too big to explain in detail (12000 lines changed in 236 files) but I'll give a few highlights:
* General speed improvements
* Quaility and speed improvements in the Splash renderer (used by Okular)
* Quaility improvements in the Cairo renderer (used by Evince)
* Better Annotation support
* Better Form support
* Introduction of pdftocairo, a command line utility that uses the Cairo renderer to render pdf pages to png, etc.
* Introduction of pdfseparate, a command line utility that extracts pages of PDF files
* Introduction of pdfunite, a command line utility that can merges multiple PDF files into a single one
* Removal of pdftoabw as it was unmaintained
* Removal of the Qt3 frontend as it was unmaintained

You can have a look at the full changelog going to the Poppler releases page and having a look at the changes of 0.18.0, 0.17.4, 0.17.3, 0.17.2, 0.17.1 and 0.17.0

KDE git 4.7 branches renamed to KDE/4.7

Since 5 days ago, the git repositories that used 4.7 as branch name (kdepimlibs, kdepim, kdepim-runtime, kdeplasma-addons, okular, mobipocket and the repos of what used to be kdeedu and kdeutils) now use KDE/4.7 to be consistent with the rest of git repositories that are released together in the KDE SC.

Be sure you work on the correct branch and do not push the wrong branch names again. Also it might make sense to run "git remote prune origin" on your clones so that the now unexisting branches are removed from your local copy.

Note: I did not do this work, but I haven't seen anything on the planet so I thought it made sense blogging about it

KDE l10n essential requirements changed

In the past we asked KDE translation teams to translate kdebase at least a 75% if they wanted to be part of a KDE release. With the evolution of KDE towards something less monolithic it made less and less sense to have that requirement, so today, going along with the split of the old kdebase directory of translations to kde-runtime, kde-workspace and kde-baseapps we have changed the requirement to be a 90% of kde-runtime.

It is a increase in percentage, but it is really a decrease of total messages required since previously 75% of kdebase was around 13000 messages and 90% of kde-runtime is around 3000.

You can check the essential requirements for what will be KDE 4.8 at http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/essential/

KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule was made official last Saturday. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.8 goodness by late January 2012. Remeber you can keep up to date with releases using the http://www.kde.org/releaseschedule.ics calendar file.

How a patch for poppler made me fix a bug in Konsole

In March, Tim Brody sent a patch to the poppler mailing list to make poppler extract accentuated characters of old pdf generated by latex (where the character and the accent where represented as two different glyphs) as a character plus a combining character. After testing the patch i saw it did not work at all, as it was changing the output of pdftotext from
R. L¨wen and B. Polster
o
to
R. Lowen and B. Polster
instead of
R. Löwen and B. Polster

Tim answered with a "WorksForMe" that left us quite puzzled for a while. It took me some time to realize it was actually Konsole's fault as it did not understand combining characters. A bug about that had already been reported by Thiago back in 2005. As i had been bit by that bug I decided to have a go at fixing it and after some days of coding I landed a patch to support Unicode composing characters in Konsole. Unfortunately it was already too late for KDE 4.7 so you'll have to wait until 4.8 to enjoy of this goodness (or use master ;))

P.S: Tim if you are reading this you never answered about the regressions caused by your patch so it was never committed to poppler

Okular Selection GSoC: In depth analysis

As I explained a few days ago Mahfuzur has been working on improving the text selection for Okular in a GSoc. Now he has made a very detailed blog post explaining all his work. Please go there and give it a read as it is quite interesting (and do not forget to try the code and give feedback!)

Try the new Okular selection branch

Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun has been working on a GSOC to bring multi column support to Okular text selection, it has reached the state where it would be nice to have other people testing it and giving some feedback about what you think about it. So please all you heavy okular users go, checkout the selection_and_highlighting branch and either write here or write to the okular-devel mailing list.

Berlin

I'm also doing a Lightning Talk about Poppler :-)

Beware of Ahtec laptops

A year and a half ago I bought an Ahtec laptop from one of its Spanish distributors (Ampliware), the price was competitive enough and was one of the few places I knew that sold laptops without Windows installed so back then it seemed a good idea.

The computer worked fine for a year and a few months, but unfortunately after coming back from my trip to the States the laptop would not boot (yeah, two weeks away with no one using it and then it doesn't work :-S).

As the warranty in Spain is 2 years I decided to get it to the same shop that had sold it to me to ask for a free repair, but unfortunately Ampliware seems to be out of business (no shops and all the phones i find in the internet seem to be dead) so I went to a different distributor that agreed to send the laptop back to Ahtec (which seems to be based in Netherlands).

It took a while for them to answer and the answer was not satisfactory. They said that the GPU had died because of the heat because of the fan exhaust was full of dust and that the warranty did not cover that since it was not a manufacturing issue.

That's quite shocking to me, a laptop is basically a black box so I could never ever had opened it to clean it up (the screws had a "warranty void if removed" sticker) thus the only way I can think of that the GPU would not die would be:
a) Not use the laptop much so the fan would not carry that much dust to the fan exhaust and it would not get blocked
b) The laptop being manufactured better so that the fan exhaust doesn't get blocked by dust

As asking for a) is kind of a no go for a laptop ("Sir here you have the laptop, but do not use it much or it will break) so I'd go for b) the laptop was either manufactured or engineered incorrectly and in my opinion that means it should be covered by the warranty.

The problem is that the shop that sold it to me is gone so i can not ask/complain/sue them and that the manufacturer is not from Spain so fighting for my warranty to be honored will be too expensive.

So anyone wants to buy some laptop parts? 2GB PC3-8500 RAM stick? P8700 CPU? 320GB HD?

Akademy-es 2011 videos and slides

You can find the Akademy-es 2011 videos and slides at
http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2011/material.php. Thanks to Victor for the work encoding them and putting them on the Internet and thanks to Kiko for making sure that the only videos that were not properly recorded are my talks :D

Reboot!

After approximately a year and a half living in Dublin i just moved back to L'Hospitalet: It's been an interesting time but at the end I missed Barcelona too much. So here I am, back in the city I like and unemployed :D So if anyone from Barcelona is looking for a talented C++/Qt/KDE developer have a look at my LinkedIn profile and if interested drop me a note at aacid@kde.org. I might also be interested in consulting from Barcelona to non Barcelona companies but at the moment I'm not considering moving again.

RFC: i18n extraction of desktop-like files

This is a RFC for an idea I want to implement in l10n trunk. I think it will make it easier for us i18n dudes and should not affect (or maybe even should help) the developers.

At the moment if you want to have translations in a file that is ".desktop like" but does not have one of the extensions we extract by default (that is *.directory *.desktop *.desktop.cmake *.kimap *.themerc *.kcsrc *.setdlg index.theme *.notifyrc *.protocol *.profile *.actions) you need to go to l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles and add a line like
find $BASEDIR/`get_path kdebase_kde-workspace`/khotkeys -name \*.khotkeys -print >> $filelist

My suggestion is move the responsibility of listing those files from l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles to a file in the program itself (that is, a file in similar fashion to Messages.sh). This serves various purposes:
* Make the developer know there is something he needs to keep updated (it's not the first time people move or delete files and the l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles get outdated)
* Make it easier for l10n maintainers to move things between l10n trunk and l10n stable, since the things are more autocontained and we do not need to worry about what in findfiles will get outdated or not, or might be reintroduced later if someone decides they need a stable branch

So all in all seems a win/win situation for me. What do you guys think?

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!