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.