Dear Lazyweb: Know anyone at multimania?

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

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

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

Second Linux Kernel patch accepted

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

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

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

KWalletEditor no longer depends on Qt3Support

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

My top 10 blog posts of 2010

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

One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 6 out of 10 are from either 2006 or 2007 or 2009 (but not from 2008 :D)
- People seem interested in my poppler-symbian project. It did not get very far but there's a proof-of-concept at http://projects.ufocoders.com/projects/pdfviewer/repository in case you are interested in doing the work
- People want to use poppler in windows (it gets two entries in the top 10), strange that all those users almost never sent patches to the project, seems like windows culture is not so much about collaborating but about just using (and complaining in the list it's too difficult to build)
- People reading my 2007 entry about radeon drivers performance should really be looking somewhere else
- There are 5 blog entries that already where in the top 10 of last year
- There's nothing like a good rant to get the top spot of visits ;-)

Okular website translatable

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

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

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

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

My valgrind talk at OSSBarcamp 2010

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

Join the KDE translation team

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meego Conference goers advice

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

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

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

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

My CPU fan does not speedup

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

Qt, gitorious, merge requests and Open Source

Begin of rant

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

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

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

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

And that's it.

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

End of rant.

KDE España at the LSWC

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

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

Interviewed in KDEBlog

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

Back from Madrid

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

Picture stolen from Sebas twitter:

XPS viewer for Linux

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

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

Speaking at OSS Barcamp this weekend

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

Give libdvdcss some cpu

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

ebook-tools 0.2 released

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

KGeography video

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