Hello Planet Freedesktop!

To Planet KDE, i'm now member of Planet Freedesktop also ;-)

This is my presentation post for FreeDesktop planet readers. I work mainly on KDE, as maintainer of kpdf and some other apps, but i'm also an active developer on freedesktop cvs due to beign one of the main commiters to poppler cvs tree.

In Poppler related news i can tell that we have already merged the xpdf 3.01 changes in the tree, that mainly give us support for images with alpha channel and we are trying to get a new release, that will probably be qualified as "unstable", as there are quite heavy changes, to get some testing out there :-)

Mozilla and their i18n problems

First of all note this is AFAIK and that i'm not a mozilla developer nor specialist nor user (only when i'm on windows that is not much).
You probably noted that yesterday Mozilla tried to eclipse our 3.5 release with Firefox 1.5 release, i thought, ok, i'll download it so my father can use it on its Windows machine, so there i go to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all.html to get the catalan version of Firefox 1.5 for Windows and wooops, it's not there :-/ So my father is forced to use the old 1.0.7 version.
Obviously i'm not requesting to have a fully 100% translated catalan version of Firefox when we don't have one in KDE (http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/ca/index.php) but at least a 1.5 release reusing the strings from 1.0.7 would be enough as i'm almost sure most strings are the same, but Mozilla foundation has historically been a bit bad on the i18n side making translation teams provide the i18n'ed binaries instead of doing the build along the English binary and that cause that kind of problems.
I hope they can solve this issue with i18n as it's one of the strong points Free Software has.

KDE 3.5 released!

Announcement

My contributions to this release are some minor features in kpdf like support for images with alpha channels and two new programs inside kdeedu.

Also don't forget to visit the visual guide for other highlights.

Congrats to everyone involved in this release!!!

The second

Some days ago my expedient on my university's online campus got updated to reflect i have the second best average mark of the 213 people that ended the CS degree this year, now my only duty left is to discover who was number one and kill congrat him.

On side news: Spanish media reports that the newborn princess will get university level studies, damn! THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Kombination

You may remember a past blog (http://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2005/09/some-gaming.html) about two games i was writing for KDE4. Kiriki has not changed anything since it can be said to be finished, but crossedWords changed its name to Kombination (damn K-names! ;-)) and has progressed a lot as you can see here thanks to Pino Toscano helping with it. You can actually play with the exception that scoring does not work, blank tile can not be changed to a letter and that word checking does not work.

And word checking is our largest problem by now. With word checking i mean "how to decide if a word is valid or not".
The first obvious thing one thinks is "ask the other users", but you have to think as a game designer that other players can be "bad people" and always refuse your words so that solution has this problem.
Second obvious thing is "use kspell", but this has problems as for example in spanish you play with unaccentuaded tiles, so you do not create "balcón" but "balcon" so kspell will tell you that word is invalid.
Third obvious thing is "use a preprocessed list only with acceptable words even if they are written wrong", that solution also has problems, italian word list extracted from aspell is 25Mb, spanish one is 6.5Mb and catalan 149Mb!!! that means that loading that into memory to check needs a lot of mem and that kombination would be HUGE to distribute.

Anyone has a fourth idea?

BTW you can get kombination from /branches/work/kde4/playground/games/kombination/

I hate monarchy

This is just a rant and not KDE related, if you are reading this from the planet you can just skip it.

Well, the title says it all, i can not stand monarchy, those people that break the rules, "law is the same for everybody" they say, yeah, that's why there's someone out there that will be the ruler of my country just by having been born, i think i was not given that right when i was born.

My hate has always been big, but today there was the drop that made the glass full; the princess entered the hospital to give born to a new bloodsucker from Spanish monarchy and TV is making connections to the hospital each fives minutes just to report there are no news!!! Come on! I don't give a damn if he is born or not, but i could *try to understand* a connection if the new prince has been born, but just stopping a movie each 5 minutes to tell there's no news is just insane!

Viva la República!

It's official, i've been unfair

When i said "Mandriva 2006.0 does not like KDE" i should have said "Mandriva 2006.0 does not like KDE enough to have a IMHO serious bug fixed before their official release".

People seem to have interpreted that Mandriva is anti-KDE and that is of course wrong.

It's official, Mandriva 2006.0 does not like KDE

Why do you ask? Well the reason is http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16432, they have a bug in all their Qt/KDE programs that is not present if you use the original Qt library, so they are patching the library to work worse than the original one, great...

KGeography and Tajik

Just got a nice mail from Roger Kovacs about the Tajik translation of KGeography Albert, Just wanted to share some positive events surrounding KGeography. Tajikistan is a small poor nation, somewhat isolated, and quite behind in technology. A small NGO in Dushanbe called Youth Opportunities, has formed a student Linux User Group called SDTLUG for School Days Tajik Linux User Group. These middle and high school students chose to translate KGeography as their primary project. So you will see the translations for "tg" growing in the next months. I don't want to flood your e-mail, but if you would like some photos of the students, I can send them along. For more information about Linux in Tajikistan you can look at www.tajikngo.org (although Victor, the director of Youth Opportunities has just started to redo the web site - you can still take a look around.) I know the students will probably learn more about Geography from doing the translation work, than they would in class! In addition, some of the students in the LUG know Russian as their primary language, and they have contacted the Russian team and will be submitting translations to them to include in svn. Thanks for the great tool - it provides in so many ways! Roger Kovacs Thanks for that! I'm glad my program helps people :-)

Some gaming

Lately i've been coding some Qt4/KDE4 small things, the first one is a clone of gtali (that is a yahtzee clone) called kiriki, it can be found at branches/work/kde4/playground/games/kiriki and it's [almost] done. Comments accepted :-)



The second one is a scrabble clone, that is going to be MUCH more difficult and i've been coding for it only 2 or 3 hours in total but i already have a nice board, thanks to Danny Allen of course, my colors where much uglier :-D

BTW i need a GOOD name for that, current working name is crossedwords but it's ugly IMHO

Awarded at Akademy!

Wooooooooooooooo, both Enrico and me have been awarded in aKademy 2005 in the "Best new application or improvement to an existing application in the last year" category thanks to our KPDF work. Thanks to all of you that sent patches or reported wishes or bugs, and of course thanks the jury for choosing us.

update: forgot to mention the other winners with all the excitation :-D
In the "Best non-application contribution (eg for documentation, artwork, web work, translation, library development or similar) in the last year" Lauri got awarded by is work in the documentation team
In the "Jury's choice for contribution to KDE, especially (but not exclusively) in the last year" both coolo and ossi got awarded for the SVN transition

Akademy day 3 talks

Today has been a quite interesting day

Keynote from Trolltech
Very interesting figures about the [quite widespread IMHO] adoption of Qt, most impresive is that there were 94 people working for them at the beginning of the year and they are now up to 140!!!

Multimedia API for KDE4
Quite interesting too, there will be some nice features in KDE4 related to multimedia, KDEMM will have the possibility of having different backends for the same frontend, that will also allow backend API changes (gstreamer we know you) without that meaning KDEMM API changes

2005 KDE-Edu BOF
Quite nice brainstorming about what to do with edu apps for KDE4, summary at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=28%20August%20meeting

The Poppler Library
Hey dudes! That was my presentation, i was afraid no-one would come beign that late in the afternoon and having to battle with Mathieu Chouinard and Simon Hausmann, but at last there were about 7 person there (but some heavy dudes likes Cornelius and Riddell there), not that much, but that was good because i was a little worried as that was my first conference in english ever, it seems my pronuntiation was good enough as Riddell's transcript seems to have all it right :-D
BTW you can get the slides at http://conference2005.kde.org/slides/poppler.kpr or http://conference2005.kde.org/slides/poppler/index.html if you don't have KPresenter installed. You can also read the transcript (interesting because it features the small questions and answers session) at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Poppler+Library+Talk
Finally the videos are available at http://ktown.kde.org/akademy2005/

Akademy day 2 talks

Krita
Wow, Krita has needed a long time to get got shape (almost 6 years since KImageShop) but the shape IS really good. Congrats to all the Krita team as they have some features that are very rare among free-software image editors for linux

KCall
Don't know if it was that the talk was boring or if it was that i was tired but i was in a almost-slept state for all the talk, so i can not report much apart from KCall beign a VoIP program and it beign rewritten as part of a Google Summer of Code

Firefox and KDE
Not much new as someone already said, but good news that Dirk is getting payed to do the port and that things may be finally get rolling.

Quanta and docboocks
Another WOW goes for Quanta, not only a very powerful HTML application but a killer editor for our documentation team as it gives many nice features to be able of editing docbooks

That's all for today, more tomorrow :-D
And BTW don't forget to go to http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Talks+%40+aKademy+2005 to read some nice transcripts

Akademy day 1 talks

Novell Desktop
Not too good IMHO, it was a user oriented talk given to a hacker audience, moreover the slides told that evolution was *better* than kontact :-S At least they use kopete :-)

mEduxa
Another not so good talk for a KDE conference IMHO, it was mostly oriented to problems related with netsharing, etc. Very few KDE things related, just how they got to choose over gnome and not much more.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu
That was a really misleading title, as there was nothing Ubunti and Kubuntu related. What Mark did was talk about kollaboration successes in things like Wikipedia and things he is trying to do to create that kind of kollaboration on Distro and upstream related things (bugs, translations, etc)

NX
Never seen NX in action before, but in a word, it's WONDERFUL! I see why Kurt is pushing to have a free-as-in-speech NX client

And more... We have all been invited to a party on the behalf of Novell, THANKS!!

I'm in malaga!

I just arrived to Málaga, i'm sharing the residence apartment with aseigo and someone else that is still sleeping :D
I've already met chouimat and saw a lot of people sitting in some tables at the bar discussing but last night i slept only 2 hours so i'm going to try to sleep a bit now.

PS in kpdf

You may have noticed that in kpdf we now open PS files too if ps2pdf is present on the system. There has been quite a heated discussion about if using such a trick is good or not.

I'll tell why we have added it, the results are quite acceptable, in any case, if you get bad results, well, it's kpdf, you explicitely opened a PS file with it and got the "Converting from ps to pdf..." message, so if it is not completely fine you should guess why. AND you get all that "nice" features kpdf has like text search that kghostview does not has.

Coin3D conference

Today's conference i've attended in the Free Software convention i mentioned yesterday has been about Coin3D. It has been given by Karin Kosina, SiM developer and FSFE member, and she's a woman, glad to have woman at that high level.

As a summary i'll tell you that the conference has been a introduction to Coin3D that is a nice set of libraries to work with 3D graphics at a higher level than using OpenGL. The results are quite fascinating as you can get quite impressive results with only a few lines of code. Furthermore the lib is completely compatible with OpenInventor 2.1 API.

As a Qt/KDE related note i'll say that they use Qt has the default gui binding library for their library, she said they also had bindings for GTK, MFC and Motif available but they were all quite dead and lower quality than the Qt one. Way to go :-)

SkoleLinux conference

Today i have assisted to a SkoleLinux conference given as a talk of IV Jornades de Programari Lliure.

The talk has been given by Markus Gamenius, it has been quite informative about how SkoleLinux is being quite successful as there are already 200 schools from all around the world that use it. He has also commented that there is commercial support given for the distribution by four companies and that is hurting them because they are small and compete with theyselves and with the others (IBM, MS, etc) so they want to merge in a SkoleLinux Inc., a good move. He also has spoken of the pressions schools have by MS and from some people from the government not to ditch MS, nothing new, but it always surprises me when i see the corruption even advanced countries have.

In the KDE related side, he has explained that they choose KDE instead of gnome because the thin clients they use (LTSP) need 2MB when running KDE but 3 when running gnome, quite a win on our side :-). I also felt sad when he said that they were using KDE 2.2, as a side effect on being based on Debian stable, i feel the pain for they users :-/

Call me Mr. Engineer from now on :-)

Well, last Thursday i presented the final project you have to do here in my university before ending the studies (someone told me it's called Master's thesis, others degree dissertation, don't really care), so I'm done with my CS degree and I'm now an "Ingeniero en Informatica" "Computer Science Engineer" or something like that. I got 9.5 out of 10 for my project so i can not be sad about it :-)

Now I'll have to find something to do before i start looking for a job in September so expect my kde contributions to grow a bit, or not ;-) As i may even try to get the Driver's License, as beign 23 and not having it it's beginning to make me feel ashamed ;-)

I am rude and paranoid

Well at least that is what krh says, but i don't think he is right. Moreover i think he does not even know how to read English or maybe my English is bad enough to be unreadable.

I'll explain the situation.

He has asked that all my patches go though the mailing list so we can discuss them, a fair thing. The problem is that all/most of my patches are being put back by small even sometimes bad suggestions (see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/2005-June/000517.html where he suggests changing an enum to an int). BUT i COULD live with that.

The big problem is when he goes on and commits http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/poppler/2005-June/000541.html a HUGE patch that allows real selection (a nice thing) but without sending it to the mailing list. Where is the discussion? That is what really makes me sad, my patches have to be discussed but his not, maybe being a Red Hat employee gives you superpowers and your patches are never bad? Not sure about that...

This makes me wonder if what everyone says about fd.org is right and that all they want is to drag kde people to make them loose their time trying to get their patches accepted. I'm almost sure this is not true ;-) but it is what it really seems to be happening.

So i send him a mail explaining that and all i got is an answer saying I'm rude and paranoid, that he has made all he can to make his selection patch available for all backends and that it's kpdf devels choice to work or not on poppler.

So here is my answer Kristian, i do not care if the selection patch is available or not for all the backends or not (well i do, but the mail was not about this), what i do care is about the DOUBLE moral there is in patches, mine got discussed and yours not. Also you should not say that i can choose not to work with poppler, as if kpdf does not get to use poppler, poppler will be just an evince extension, and you don't want that, right?

Update: Per Kristian's request i've made the mails public at aacidtokrh and krhtoaacid.