kdegames revival

kdegames is getting hot :-) Just look at the mailing list number of messages or at the big number of replies my kmahjongg blog created. So now that kdegames has again a reasonable number of people we have created the #kdegames IRC channel so if you are interesed in game development or want to suggest some features for existing games do not hesitate to drop by and have a nice talk!

Poppler for windows

The most people that reach my blog from google are looking for the poppler-windows blog, so i thought i would do another one mentioning the cool Sumatra PDF Viewer by Krzysztof Kowalczyk. So if you want a poppler-based PDF viewer for windows, have a look at Sumatra PDF.

Konversation 1.0 out

Well, i'm not a konversation developer, only an user and translator, so i should not be really be doing this but as it seems the konversation team ran out of steam with the packagement and last minute fixes i'm going to spread it.

Konversation 1.0 is out :-)

Check out the HUGE changelog at the Konversation homepage.

P.S: Konversation is a nice IRC client for KDE ;-)

Weird reality

You go with a friend and buy a laptop. Boot it up, find Windows preintalled, start up the demo that is on the desktop that says "Know your new XXX computer" and it crashes. You do all the upgrades, start up the demo again and it crashes.

I'm still wondering if XXX company does quality control or they just pack up things and send them to the shops.

I'm not happy.

Update: I did not want to gave the names but as people keep asking shop is MediaMarket and laptop is an Asus Z93

Update 2: He went to the shop and got another one of the same model and seems to be working fine now :-)

No internet

Unless a miracle has ocurred today and someone materialized from nowhere to fix my phone i'm without internet all the weekend and already for 3 days so if you need me for something or are wondering why i seem to suddenly have gone dead is because someone unplugged my phone cable from the cable box that is outside my building and now i'm waiting a worker from phone company to come and fix it.

Update: Seems phone company workers also work on saturday and i just got my connection fixed :-)

okular snapshot released

A few days ago you got the oportunity to play with the KDE 4 Krash snapshot release, now the okular team provides you with more Krashing experience. You can test okular, the multiformat viewer successor of kpdf. You are all free of sending comments to the team, but remember, a line of code is worth more than one hundred words, so join the party and help us supporting more formats or perfecting the existant ones!

You can get the tarball at KDE's ftp server.

Update: There seem to be some problems compiling the snapshot against latest qt-copy, have a look at this page to find how to solve it.

FLOSS project survey

Today i got a mail from a person of a project i'm sort of collaborating about spreading a FLOSS survey a bit. I know you guys are a bit fed up with FLOSS surveys, but these people are serious, they already did a CVS
analsys of the KDE project and published it! not as most surveys you see around that finally don't publish much, so if you have five free minutes do not keep them free and take the survey!

KMahjongg revamp

Just look at this http://www.tabuleiro.com/mauricio/kmahjongg_svg.png new screenshot and compare it with the older one at http://www.tabuleiro.com/mauricio/kmahjongg_old.png.

You can see that KMahjongg for KDE4 will be nice eh ;-)

So all of you go and thank Mauricio Piacentini for his cool work, now!

Finished!

Today i finally finished HOMM5 :-) That means i have one adiction less to devote time to and that i would have more time for Free Software.

Only would because tomorrow i'm leaving for five days of holidays with my family.

About the game i'm only saying that it is as adictive as the previous Heroes of Might & Magic games even if it adds no new things at all. So if you like the previous versions you'll probably like this one.

Going back to Free Software, August is an interesting month because even most core developers try to take a holiday away from computers, the productivity does not get lower becasue we always get new blood like Will Entriken that is reworking/creating the Getting Started with KDE pages, a cool thing as that is a very frecuently asked question. Go Will!

Ya.com says "The internet is mine"

Ya.com, a Spanish ISP, has just thought the internet is of its property, as for now, each page you visit that does not exist, like http://www.thispagereallydoesnotexist.com/ will get you redirected to their search page if you are using their service, obviouly abusing from DNS power. They may argue this is to help the user as "maybe" in the search page they'll find what they really were looking for, but as i have experienced in real life it's nothing bug disturbing, as i typed http://newbugs.kde.org/ (URL where i thought Dirk was doing his experiments for the new bugzilla) and ended in a ya.com page thinking "since when do we have hosting on ya.com pages?".

I've already sent them a mail asking for the removal of this service, if you are a ya.com user please do so too and let's see if we can get the internet to work again.

If you want to test the pain i feel use 62.151.8.100 as your DNS server.

New blood

New blood in the KDE world should be a good thing, but sometimes it is not.

Why? oh! Why?

you may ask.
It depends on how you use that new blood.

A very good way to use the new blood is Season of KDE. You get new developers, features that interest them and some mentor to help them if they find themselves lost. Almost sure a win situation. This way we are getting a person (Rafael Rodríguez) to try to fix the VERY SLOW rendering of patterns in okular.

Then there is the bad way, and sorry Jonathan, i know i kinda promised you not to bitch more about Rosetta, but i have to. That nice Translate This Application button is the worst executed idea ever. It redirects you to a page where people will translate applications for KUbuntu (potentially overriding real KDE translation) and people will not know they are not contributing to KDE, moreover this people probably won't know the style used for translations, so their translation will be totally out of the rest of translations.

The good implementation of that idea should have been putting that person in contact with the KDE translators team, but that would remove the KUbuntu coolness from the equation ...

Things to see in Morocco

This is completely FLOSS unrelated, you can skip it now if you are 100% geek ;-)

Ok, now that i've eliminated 100% geek people, let me ask one thing.

Which are the must see places in Morocco?

I'm going there a whole week in December with some friends but we do not know much about the country so i thought asking here, probably some of you have been in Morocco and have good suggestions on what we should visit.

Thanks!

Update: I'm back from Morocco, if you want to read about it go to this blog post

Akademy hosting ends early!

Hi, this is just a reminder to all those people out there that want to come to aKademy but still have not registered. Last day to pay for aKademy hosting is JULY 23rd so you better get yourself to register and pay the hosting quickly or you will have to find accomodation by yourself if you register later.

Thanks TSS!

What's TSS would 99.99% of you ask? It's short for Transport Simulation Systems, the company where i work, and why do i thank them?

Because they sending me to aKademy 2006 and paying trip and hosting. This is quite a nice thing for them to do as the only KDE related thing we do is developing with Qt :-) It's so strange Tink suggested they are tired of me and they are sending me a few days off, hope not!

So, remember, if you ever are in need of a Micro or Macro traffic simulator using Qt that is multiplatform and somewhat remotely helps KDE, have a look at www.aimsun.com.

I suck

This is a follow up to the I rock blog from a few days ago, maybe with it, some people tought i am that kind of person that can only see his good points and thinks himself is perfect, just to make sure, i'm not that kind of person :-D

And why i suck? Well, today was my fourh fail trying to pass the driving test and i did get into contrary direction no less!!!

Well, at least i lasted a bit more than that poor girl that could not even start because she did not remember of disengaging the hand brake :-/

Well, five is a good number right?

Registered!

I'm #20. That is a quite high number given aKademy 2006 registrations started this morning :-)

See you in Dublin!

Racist me? No!

Well, i'm getting the habit of blogging about non FLOSS things, this is about this morning discussion with a woman on the underground.

So that's the situation:
* I get though the entrance, a woman does too, two north-african get throught the entrance without paying
* Woman says "Here in Spain we do pay for the service!" in very loud voice
* The north africans think its better saying nothing and just continue their way
* i have a "Let's improve the world" feeling and try to argue with the woman
* "That was a bit of racist comment, don't you think?"
* "Racist? Me? No! What bothers me is that they are no paying!"
* "Yeah, that's what you said in Spain right?"
* "I did not even look at their faces!"
* "Come on, if it had been me you would have also said in Spain..."
* "Well, really i wanted to inform them, maybe they don't know..."
* "You really think they are utterly stupid and don't know they have to pay?"

And some more strange things she said i don't completely remember.

Maybe the woman does not want to be racist, but her subconscious is, maybe only a bit, but...

Spying a bit on GUADEC

Today i went to Vilanova to assist to a few talks of GUADEC to see how our gnome friends where doing.

Today and tomorrow are the "warmup weekend" and most/all the talks where in spanish or catalan and directed towards the local people. I went to a dbus talk, 5 mins of GTK programming (where i thanked $DEITY that we do not use C for doing OOP), a talk about l10n of gnome to catalan (they seem to be doing a bit better in terms of number of translators than ca l10n team of kde) and a talk about the new distribution that will go into all catalan schools next year, based on Suse, using gnome desktop as default but also shipping KDE.

Some things worth mentioning:

• They had rather big posters hanging on the outside of the buildings where GUADEC takes place, that is a GOOD THING and we should do something similar, AFAIK it was not done in málaga last year.


• They seem a bit more concerned about us that we about them, at least all talks i went mentioned KDE in some way or other, i don't remember that happening in Málaga (although maybe it happened)


• It is much nicer having the conference center in the center of the village, like GUADEC in Vilanova or this year's aKademy in Dublin, than in the outside like happened in Málafa


• Gnomies are normal people! WTF i thought gnomes where small people with a large beard!


• They had a nice o'Reilly stand in the main hall selling books, although some of there were not really ON TOPIC there (think JavaBeans)


• There was WIFI hotspots for all around, first time i listed available networks i thought "i'll go home with some hundreds of neurons less"


• There were very few power plugs


• Warmup weekend is free, but the core sessions are 30€, i think making contributors pay is not a good thing


• freenode IRC network was not working (probably due to too many people trying to connect from the same IP)

All i all, is nice meeting/hearing people that have different preferences so you don't end up in self indulgence

Shame!

Warning: This is not KDE nor FLOSS related, you can freely skip it if you don't want to read a real life rant.

Yesterday, in Catalonia there was a referendum to vote about a new statute of autonomy.

And more than 50% of voters did not vote, i feel shame for that. Not voting means you are out of game, you can vote yes, vote no, do a blank vote, put KDE logo on the voting envelope, or even put a photo of yourslef on it, but VOTE!

If you don't vote, you just demonstrate that you are nothing more than a drone, going to work, having some vacation, seeing world cup on TV and repeat, you can not express a "i'm dissapointed with politics" with abstention, you just demonstrate dullness of mind.

I rock :-)

Just saw on Adriaan's graph that i'm the oldest commiter with a 100% activity percentage :-).

Obviously i'm not the best commiter, coolo, dfaure, and mlaurent have to fight for it, but ei, i'm the first on something :-D. Cheers to markey for beign the runnerup on the oldest commiter with 100% activity!

More seriously, we might consider removing commit rights from all that oldies that only have a "square" for their first week and never ever commited anything more.