Process your reviewboards!

Our "All Review Requests" page in https://git.reviewboard.kde.org has 13 pages of reviews, when sorting by "Last Updated" you'll see that from page 1-6 are reviews that have been updated in the last month, 7-8 in the last two months, 9-12 in the last year and 13 in more than one year.

That's a *lot* of reviews that either where not reviewed at all or where not followed up.

Please, people, pay attention to reviews, if stuff needs to be improved (either if you are the submitter or the reviewer) do speak in a timely manner so we can get stuff commited as nicely as possible.

Let's make the world nicer and review other people's code when they ask for it :-)

Otherwise i'll start closing review requests as discarded because what's the point of having stuff there rot that probably doesn't even apply anymore? ;-)

Unit testing KColorButton

Around two weeks ago, a bug about was reported in which Okular crashed when changing the color of highlighted text. After a bit of debugging i found that the bug was actually in kdelibs in the KColorButton class.

This is a class I had never looked internally so it was a bit hard to decide where to start looking for a fix. Then I decided to look at the git log and realized the last commit introduced by a fix for color selection not working correctly on double click.

I took my chances and saw that reverting that patch actually removed the crash, so now I knew where to look :-)

After a few minutes looking at the code i came up with a 3-line patch that fixed the crash and still made double click work correctly. I'm so awesome \o/

But that wasn't enough, I needed to *prove* I had fixed it, so i decided to create some tests, that was a bit harder since it involved "clicking" in buttons and stuff, but QTest to the rescue and a few hours later I had this nice unit test that will warn us if that breaks again :-)

So next time you fix a bug, unit test it! And don't complain it's graphical, that's no excuse!

And of course the tests run just fine in build.kde.org even if they show buttons/dialogs :-)

Okular git repo contributors in 2012

Thanks to:
- Aaron Seigo
- Albert Astals Cid
- Bogdan Cristea
- Burkhard Lück
- Christian Holme
- Dario Freddi
- David Faure
- Dirk Mueller
- Fabio D'Urso
- Guillermo A. Amaral B
- Ivan Čukić
- Jan Binder
- Jaydeep Solanki
- Jon Mease
- Jonathan Marten
- Luigi Toscano
- Mailson Menezes
- Marco Martin
- Mohammad Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun
- Parker Coates
- Patrick von Reth
- Pino Toscano
- Sandro Mani
- Sebastian Dörner
- T.C. Hollingsworth
- Thomas Etter
- Tobias Koenig
- Yuri Chornoivan
- Yury G. Kudryashov

That's 29 people, 1 more than 2011, so I guess we are doing a bit better ;-) Let's make this 2013 rock even more :-)

Of course sorry I'm not mentioning people that did bug reporting, bug triaging, promotion, translation and other bazillion of things that helped Okular but did not end up in a git contribution, I was lazy and getting the git names is very easy. Your help is also very much appreciated.

KDE/4.10 branched

KDE/4.10 branches have just been created for all the git repos (except for kdelibs that already had it) and SVN branches/KDE/4.10/ has been populated with the modules still in SVN

From now on, if you want something to end up in the 4.10 release you'll have to commit it to there (in addition to master for future releases)

Tomorrow 17 December 2012 at 23:59 UTC, the following freezes for 4.10 kick in

* Tagging Freeze for Release Candidate 1
Only compilation fixes for all platforms are allowed to be committed.
Everything else (even showstopper fixes) have to be run through reviewboard, with the release-team and the affected maintainers as reviewer.
Tagging will happen on December 18 at 23:59 UTC

* Hard API Freeze
The API is now frozen. No more changes to APIs or header files (except docs) after this date.

* Hard Message Freeze
You need to contact kde-i18n-doc for every single string change

* Artwork Freeze
All artwork is frozen on this date. No new artwork should be added. Existing artwork can continue to be tweaked and fixed.

* Bindings Freeze
No new additions to the language bindings, except optional bindings as permitting by the kde-bindings team.

* Documentation Freeze
No more changes to documentation or handbooks after this date.
For typos, spelling and simple grammar changes you have to mail kde-i18n-doc for approval.

If you have to update program version numbers, library abi numbers, bugzilla program version numbers or stuff like that, please do it as soon as possible.

http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.10_Release_Schedule

And this is why one needs cops

And then they drive like mad with their cars, and wonder what? They hit one of their own http://youtu.be/xr_lRr-4_5k?t=1m56s

Yes, I am aware that there are cops out there that do a good work, but sharing the work with these people should make them sad.

Okular tiled rendering merged to master

Okular tiled rendering (more info) has been merged into master and is scheduled to be released with 4.10 KDE Applications release. There are a few open issues that Mailson and Fabio are working like crazy to get fixed for the upcoming Beta 1 release this thursday. It would be great if you can give it a try anyway and report any issue you might find.

KDE Spanish forum in forums.kde.org

Since a few weeks you can find the KDE en Español sub-forum inside the always awesome KDE Community Forums. Go there if you have something to ask or share and you prefer communicating in Spanish.

10 years ago...

http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=185057

Who would have thought I'd still be around?

4.10 dependency freeze in two weeks!

Copying from the 4.10 Release Schedule page

Thursday, November 1, 2012:
From this moment on it is not allowed to add new dependencies or bump dependencies versions. It is possible to get an exception for this. Post the patch to reviewboard and add the release-team as reviewer. We will check if the dependency is needed and is available on all platforms.

In other words: If you have a feature that requires a new dependency or a version of a dependency that is higher than currently checked for in the build system, you need to have committed this change before this date.

Active port of Okular merged

Marco just merged the Active port of Okular to the master in the okular repository. Now people that have the proper dependencies will also get an active-documentviewer binary that is a touch optimized experience based in the Okular core libraries.

You can find a video of an old version of it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvLVqiFC6_4

ktouchpadenabler 0.1.1 released

What is ktouchpadenabler?

ktouchpadenabler is a kded daemon that listens to the XF86XK_TouchpadToggle/XF86XK_TouchpadOn/XF86XK_TouchpadOff key presses and toggles/enables/disables your touchpad accordingly.

What's the difference against 0.1.0?

The only difference is updated translations, the code is exactly the same. Thanks to the translation teams for their work :-)

You can find it at http://download.kde.org/stable/extragear/ktouchpadenabler-0.1.1.tar.bz2.

4.10 Soft Feature Freeze in 13 days!

Remember the 4.10 Soft Feature Freeze is in 13 days so try to get your features ready for merging as soon as possible. If you add your features to the Feature Plan you get two weeks more until Hard Feature Freeze, and if you don't need those two weeks you should add them anyway since it really helps other teams like promo, Q/A, etc. to have the features listed in one place.

Okular user forum

I've never been a fan of forums, but it seems our users like them so we've created the Okular subforum inside the awesome KDE Community Forums.

It shows that moving existing topics to the okular forum we already have 61 of them .D

Of course bugzilla is still the place for bugs and wishes and the mailing list is still the place for development, but if you have other user questions, don't hesitate to share them in the forums!

Okular tiled rendering manual

Mailson Lira has written a nice webpage explaining how his tiled rendering work for Okular works.

This is still not merged for 4.10 but we hope to get it ready by then.

And of course thanks to Google for his Google Summer of Code program that allowed Mailson to work on this project.

Randa 2012: First Half of Awesomeness

Time passes fast when you are enjoying the great company and the great location that the Randa 2012 meeting provides.

It's been a busy time for me in the Education part of the meeting.

I've worked on the following items:

kdeedu

Kalzium

- Fix uninitialized memory use
- Fix memory leak
- Make molecule downloading more user friendly
- Let kalzium open molecules both from command line and from clicking in the file manager
- Look and feel improvements to the calculator

Rocs

- Fix uninitialized memory use

Step

- Fix uninitialized memory use

Website

- Make it a bit more localization friendly (now we should not show images with text besides the KDE Edu logo)

kdegames

Thanks to Ben we now have kdegames on jenkins, which made me fix some bugs there :)

Killbots

- Make tests work without the game being installed

kmahjongg

- Fix compilation when libkmahjongg is not installed in default folders

kshisen

- Fix compilation when libkmahjongg is not installed in default folders

kdelibs

- Fix a bug with menubars when editing toolbars

l10n-kde4

- Regular tasks of moving files around

And of course this is just the things that resulted in commits, between the various random things I've helped people around with their questions that fall inside my area of expertise, for example helped Frederik Gladhorn integrate the KDE translation system on the Qt AT SPI project so we can provide an even more polished accessibility solution to our users and also "chaired" the KDE Edu discussions whose results you can find in the Notes links at http://community.kde.org/KDEEdu/Sprint2012

And finally to get some relax I've also contributed to the soluttion of the puzzle containing last year's group photo


And also got photographed for next years puzzle ;-)


Thanks all that donated to the pledgie and made Randa 2012 happen!

And now back to Awesomeness!

Trobadour knowledge about QImage

If you are using QImage::Format_RGB32 and the QImage constructor that takes uchar * data make sure your format is 0xffRRGGBB (i.e. the missing alpha channel is exactly 0xff) otherwise some operations won't work.

KDE SC 4.10 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.10 Release Schedule has just been made official. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.10 goodness by late January 2013.

By the way, Soft Feature Freeze is in 7 weeks!

Got my Join The Game Welcome Pack :-)

http://jointhegame.kde.org/

The death of http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/*.php

The KDE SC Release Team has decided to not use the http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/*.php files generated from the changelog_branch_*.xml anymore.

If you want your bugfix to be linked from the announcement make sure it has the "Version Fixed In" correctly set so it appears in this query (and in the future replace 4.9.1 with the correct version ;-))

KDE Randa Meetings Pledgie

Lots of people meeting and shaping the future of KDE software. Help make it happen!

Copy&paste from the Pledgie site

For the fourth year, the intense sprints in Randa, Switzerland will include key KDE projects and top developers, all collaborating concurrently under one roof, isolated from noise and distractions.

Every previous Randa meeting has been concentrated and productive, generating exceptional results; organizers and participants expect the same and more this year. And the meetings have produced significant breakthroughs for KDE users and developers.

While the participants are unpaid volunteers, there are hard expenses like accommodation, food and travel to get the volunteer contributors to Randa. If you are not attending, you can still support the Randa meeting by making a donation. As in the past, the Randa meeting will benefit everyone who uses KDE software.

KDE 4.9 Releases Dinner in Barcelona

Awesome as always :-)

4.9.0 is out!

Yay! I'm so happy that we got it out of the door, 4.9.x is going to be amazing :-)

Personally I'd like to thank Fabio d'Urso for being my new Okular co-developer (actually he did more commits than me, but don't tell anyone) and implementing the store annotations to pdf files feature both in Okular and in poppler. Fabio you rock :-)

Dear Lazyweb: Who is right g++ or clang?

#include <stdio.h>

class A
{
    protected:
        static void foo()
        {
            printf("HI\n");
        }
};

class B : public A
{
    friend class C;
};

class C
{
    public:
        void useFoo()
        {
            A::foo();
        }
};

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    C c;
    c.useFoo();
}

g++ compiles, clang complains that A::foo is protected and can't be used in C::useFoo.I know friendship is not inherited, but this is actually the reverse of inheriting, so does anyone has any pointer as to where i should open the bug? clang or gcc?

Joined the KDE Game!

A few days ago I decided to go to http://jointhegame.kde.org/ and "Join the Game".

For those of you unfamiliar with the term it means i became an official supporting member of KDE eV by donating 25€ each 3 months.

In exchange i get this nice image

A membership card and a welcome gift (waiting for them, i just joined so still not here), the invitation to attend the annual general assembly of KDE e.V. (which doesn't mean much since i'm already a KDE e.V. member) and regular first hand reports about KDE's activities.

That's cool and it's what the webpage lists as benefits, but I think the other huge benefit I get is that KDE has a more stable source of income (it's better to have 100 people donating 100€/year that one donating 15000€, because that one might decide otherwise for next year and you take a big hit).

So if you like KDE and want us to keep doing development sprints, paying for the hardware, etc. you might want to Join The Game with me so we get a more stable source of income.

Of course you can also donate a single time via paypal (and other means) at http://kde.org/community/donations/ but I sincerely think being a member of Join The Game is great and after all it's just 0.28€ per day, of course we live in though economic times so only you can decide if you can afford to be part of this great club ;-)

4.9 Dinner in Barcelona (4th August)

Following our tradition, the KDE-ers of Barcelona (and anybody from anywhere that wants to drop by) will celebrate the release of 4.9 with a dinner. This time will be on 4th of August at 21:30 in the Hola Manito Restaurant in Gràcia.

Of course everyone is invited to come and remember that if it's too far for you, you can always organize something in your own city, according to the KDE users map there is people around with a common interest!

Your chance to help #2: Improving bugzilla for old developers

A while ago our amazing sysadmins upgraded our bugzilla installation from something aging to something more modern. Hurrah! We are not a billion years behind in another software! Hurrah!

Unfortunately this meant we lost some of our ¿custom? code that allowed to show the Votes column in searches like this (click on the change columns link at the end).

One can still see the votes in a particular bug, but for things like wishes it was very useful to be able of sorting by votes.

So it would be extremely cool if you can try to implement this, be warned, it's probably not going to be easy to implement and moreover bugzilla is in perl, but i'll owe you a few beers if you make it :-)

If you want to help do not hesitate to contact me on aacid@kde.org and I'll forward you to the appropriate people, or even better just join the #kde-sysadmin channel in irc.freenode.net and present yourself as volunteer to do this job.

Your chance to help: Improving bugzilla for new developers

The other day I was talking with Fabio, a new Okular developer (a blog post on his awesomeness coming soon), and realized that he had permission to commit to the git repositories but not permission to close bugs in bugs.kde.org

This disconnect comes from the fact that bugzilla is not tied to your identity.kde.org user.

After speaking with the KDE sysadmins we agreed it'd be cool to enable permissions in bugzilla if there is a matching address (it would be cooler to match the accounts, but that's probably a gigantic task)

So we are looking for someone that can write some sql to do this:

1) find the user_id from someone's email address
2) insert an entry into user_group_map for the editbugs group and that user_id
3) insert an entry into user_group_map for the canconfirm group and that user_id

Additionally the code has to be smart enough to
1) print a notice if no bugzilla account was not found for the given email address
2) be written in a way as to not cause issues if the user already has those rights

The script can written in which ever language you prefer (though we expect some sanity in the choices if possible ;-))

If you want to help (and you know you want) do not hesitate to contact me on aacid@kde.org and I'll forward you to the appropriate people or even better just join the #kde-sysadmin channel in irc.freenode.net and present yourself as volunteer to do this job.

KDE/4.9 branch created

KDE/4.9 branch created.
Do not forget to push your fixes there too
Do not forget from tonight we have a freeze until RC1 is out
EOF

Qt Contributor Summit 2012

So here I am sitting on the lounge of the Qt Contributor Summit listening to jlayt-highschool-time music and doing two simple qtbase patches. I have to say that it's been a nice two days of technical discussion, here my highlights:
 * RIM are shipping full Qt libraries for BlackBerry 10 and next unreleased/unannunced QNX release
 * At last it is clear that QML Components are a pressing need and there were like 4 different talks/bofs/panels about it
 * There's lots of random huge companies using Qt, from HP in plotters to Scania on cranes, so the future is bright :-)
* People at Nokia/Qt are worried about their future but no one really knows anything set on stone so all you get is fear cropping up
And now some pictures
https://twitter.com/tsdgeos/status/215727012717924352/photo/1
https://twitter.com/tsdgeos/status/216176177910530050/photo/1
https://twitter.com/tsdgeos/status/216176177910530050/photo/1

Free Software - Free to pay

A few months ago a professor from the math department of FU Berlin filed a few bugs to poppler and Okular about video playing not being totally implemented/bug free.

After a few mail exchanges it became clear that given the always scarce resources in free software projects his bugs would not be fixed/implemented in a timely way since the poppler/Okular priorities and his' did not align.

Then the unexpected occurred, instead of complaining or giving up, he said "Well, i have a little money around" and I promptly suggested a few third party companies/individuals that would be interested in doing paid development and voilà! some time after, those features were developed

One of the often overlooked features of Free Software is the non existent vendor lock-in, in the non-free software world, if the company creating the software you use thinks your feature is nice to have but not important enough to develop, you are out of luck, it'll never happen, in the Free Software world you can have someone else develop it for you and get it merged upstream relatively easily.

Akademy-es 2012 - First day gone

So the first day of the Akademy-es 2012 is already gone.

My day started early in the morning in Barcelona getting train to go to Zaragoza. Got there in less than 2 hours. Nice :-)

After getting to the hotel we headed to the nice Seminario building where today's talks took place.

We started with the welcoming ceremony with the local autorities (City Council local free software companies association (CESLA)), followed by me doing a quick summary of all the talks that would follow in the whole conference.

After that, Paul Brown (of Linux Magazine Spain fame) did a great talk about the whys and how of some typical/silly questions we in the Free Software world get. This was my first time attending a Paul Brown talk and I have to say he is really a gifted speaker.

Then we recharged our energy with coffe and pastries and got prepared to listen Agustín explaining how KDE is great for companies and to Baltasar talk about Plasma Active, unfortunately I could not attend those last two talks since I was helping moving some stuff to the place where tomorrow talks will take place, but I'm sure they were awesome :-)

You can find some photos in Alex Fiestas' twitter, http://yfrog.com/kedhqjhj, http://yfrog.com/odsc5kkaj, http://t.co/euiscuzi, http://yfrog.com/ntnmmrnj, and of course you can watch the #akademyes hashtag.

ktouchpadenabler 0.1.0 released

What is ktouchpadenabler?
ktouchpadenabler is a kded daemon that listens to the XF86XK_TouchpadToggle/XF86XK_TouchpadOn/XF86XK_TouchpadOff key presses and toggles/enables/disables your touchpad accordingly.

You can find it at http://download.kde.org/stable/extragear/ktouchpadenabler-0.1.0.tar.bz2

Okular behaviour on Left/Right Arrow Key

Another question about what you, the okular users, think of a new feature proposed and implemented by Thomas Etter.

Please comment in the forum and not here since it makes it much easier to keep track of all the opinions!

Akademy-es 2012 it's here!

It is the time of the year of Akademy-es, the yearly KDE users and developers spanish meeting, if you were wondering were are the news, stop wondering! It's here ;-)



The Akademy-es 2012 will take place in the nice city of Zaragoza from 18th to 20th of May

Registration is open and the schedule is almost final and of course a big thanks to our hosts and sponsors.

See you in Zaragoza!

Reminder: KDE 4.9 is at the corner!

May 3: KDE 4.9 Soft Feature Freeze
May 17: KDE 4.9 Hard Feature Freeze
May 24: KDE 4.9 Beta 1 Tagging

Which means 1 month to Hard Feature Freeze.

Okular word selection on double click

I've just commited a change that implements a wish created 3 years ago "Double click to select words".

Another little nice feature for Okular :-)

It felt good doing some actual coding instead of being the code review monkey I am these days in the KDE/poppler worlds.

/me goes back to the boringness of reviewing other people's code :-/

Okular: Multiple bookmarks per page

Following the series of "We don't kwow what to do so we are going to ask you", we present you "Improvement on Okular bookmarks: How to handle more than one bookmark per page".

Please head over http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=100729 and give mailson your opinion!

KDE SC 4.9 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.9 Release Schedule has just been made official. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.9 goodness by early August 2012. Remember you can keep up to date with releases using the http://www.kde.org/releaseschedule.ics calendar file.

Okular users we want your input!

Sometimes the decision of how a program should behave is not right or wrong technically but based on the user expectation.

In Okular we are asking ourselves what should happen when you have two lines with the following text

This is an ex-
ample

and copy it. Should it return "This is an ex-\nample" or "This is an ex-ample" or "This is an example"?

Head over to the KDE forums and vote!

Okular now with hyphen aware search

Thanks to Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun (of column text selection GSoC fame) we can now search for words that have hyphens to split them between lines.

This is a new feature so it'll be only available with KDE 4.9.0

Okular 0.14 released!

KDE 4.8 just got released and that means Okular 0.14 also got released!

First of all I'd like to thank everyone that has done a git commit in the KDE 4.7 → KDE 4.8 trip, here the list in alphabetical order: Aaron Seigo, Aleix Pol, Christopher Reichert, Dario Freddi, David Faure, David Palacio, Elvis Stansvik, Frederik Schwarzer, Geoffry Song, Jiri Baum, Kevin Kofler, Martin Ueding, Michal Svec, Michel Ludwig, Mohammad Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun, Montel Laurent, Niels Ole Salscheider, Patrick von Reth, Philip Muskovac, Pino Toscano, Ralf Habacker, Stephen Anthony, Yuri Chornoivan.

That's more than 20 people! Awesome :-)

This release introduces new features like improved text selection in documents with columns, table selection tool, LaTex rendering in annotations, improved embedded support (for use in e.g. Kile), better layouting for facing pages, smarter screensaver/powermanagement handling, improved page label support, default zoom configuration, improved Landscape printing, etc.

You can find a non complete list of bugs and features in bugzilla.

And best of all there's already new features in the pipeline for the next release :-)

Let's keep the ball rolling!

Come Dine with Me and KDE 4.8

KDE is releasing 4.8 the 25th of January (if all goes well) and to celebrate that KDE España is organizing two dinners, one in Madrid the 20th of January and another one in Barcelona the 27th of January. Coincidentally i happen to be on both cities on the dates the dinners happen so if you are around come and chat with other KDE people! More info at http://www.kde-espana.es/news.php#itemCenasKDE48

My top 10 blog posts of 2011

Top 10 blog entries with more visits in 2011 in my blog:
10 - Poppler 0.18.0 released
    Poppler's latest major release gets the last spot on the list, PDF greatness for all!

9 - Okular and Send by Mail
    Interesting discussion of where does a feature belong. Outcome: kparts will get plasma share-like-connect awareness and you'll be able to share (including sending by mail) stuff from there :-)

8 - Poppler for windows
    Poppler for windows, a classic in my top lists since I wrote that blog originally in 2006!

7 - My CPU fan does not speedup
    When the CPU melted i discovered why, there was too much dust in the fan... :-/

6 - Blinken: First KDE App on the Nokia Store?
    KDE starts conquering the N9 application space, KAlgebra followed soon

5 - XPS viewer for Linux
    Microsoft seems to be succeeding in forcing XPS down people's throat, i did not expect linux users to have a need for XPS viewing

4 - keyboard crazyness
    Somehow Google loves this blogpost and sends people searching for keyboard to it

3 - KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule
    People wants to know when new awesomeness will be out. Answer: soon!

2 - N9 disappointment
    Wonder if people reaching this page understand my disappointment, the N9 is an awesome phone, it just it doesn't meet my free software expectations

1 - Beware of KDE 4.6.4
    We had a small slip when packaging KDE 4.6.4, people wanted to know about it

Help KDE España while subscribing to Linux-Magazine.es

If you were thinking to subscribe to Linux-Magazine.es you might want to have a look at this offer, which lets you to pay the amount you want for 6 issues (well, actually it has to be >= 2€ but 2€ for 6 magazines borders stealing in my opinion :D) and you even get to choose to donate 10% to KDE España or other Free Software organizations.

KDE España is looking for Akademy-es 2012 locations

In KDE España we are looking for a group or organization in condition of co-organizer for Akademy-es 2012. If you are interested have a look at the call for locations page. If you are interested do not forget to send your submission in before February 25th.

Sad story of the day: Qt and XF86XK_TouchpadToggle

Today I realized Gnome has support for XF86XK_TouchpadToggle, i.e. if you press the key in your keyboard that has the touchpad with an X symbol over it, it toggles the enabled state of the touchpad.

This is very useful if you are like me and attach/detach a mouse various times during the day.

Since as far as I know this is not supported in KDE, this afternoon I decided to write a quick kded module that would listen to XF86XK_TouchpadToggle and call the corresponding XInput2 functions to toggle the state of the touchpad.

Investigating XInput2 was supposed to be the difficult part since it is out of my area of comfort, but at the end it resulted it was not that difficult and the desired effect can be achieved with no more than 10 lines of code.

After getting the correct XInput2 calls I started to build the skeleton of my kded module and when I was going to register the global KAction to listen for XF86XK_TouchpadToggle I realized Qt does not have support for this key, which means I can not use a KAction for that. Sad :-/

This has resulted in my getting diverted from my original goal and writing a patch for Qt5 to support the XF86XK_TouchpadToggle key and two other ones. Sadly this does not solve my immediate itch so I will either live with that itch or try to detect the keypress at the X level, but i'm not sure that's something I want to do :D

Update: I went the X11 way and it was not that painful. I now have some code that works, putting it in a git repo as soon as I get one :-)

Join KDE! Translate KDE!

It's that time of year again, KDE is nearing a new release day and it's time for translators to work on the making sure that new software/features are properly translated so that the thousands of KDE users can enjoy it in their native language.

Unfortunately translators come and go and KDE software continues to grow and grow, meaning that sometimes some languages fall below the line of what we consider an acceptable amount of translations for them to be shipped with the KDE releases.

For this 4.8 cycle this is the list of languages that was in 4.7 and if the release was today would not be released: Arabic, Bulgarian, Galician, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Latvian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Uyghur and Walloon

Obviously this does not mean that they will not released with KDE since each translation team has a different work schedule and some of them only work when really close to a release, but if you are a user enjoying KDE on one of the above languages you should think on volunteering to do some work so it stays that way. This is your opportunity to make a difference, write me to aacid@kde.org and join KDE by working on translations!

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)