Specifications: Correct when writing, Gentle when reading

I got a BlackBerry Z10 a few days ago.

I had not tried to use it as my main phone until yesterday since it needed a MicroSIM and i had a regular one.

Yesterday I got myself a MicroSIM and put it on the device to find out I could not access the 3G data network.

No problem, my operator has a website where you put the make and model of the phone and they send a SMS to the phone that autoconfigures it.
I went there and was surprised to see there was no BlackBerry listed at all.

OK, time to write the APN settings by hand, so I went to the Settings and started to look where to write the APN details, found them and realized they were disabled(greyed out) so I could not write the correct values.

After lots of searching I have come to understand that the phone obeys a indicator of the SIM that can say "I know how to connect to 3G data, no need to letting the user edit it" and when that happens, the BlackBerry Z10 happily complies and locks you out from editing them.

Problem is, my operator SIMs are wrong, they say "I know how to connect to 3G data, no need to letting the user edit it" and then provide wrong data.

And BOOM! I have a nice paperweight worth 600€

BlackBerry fan forums are full of people that say "BlackBerry is just doing what the spec says, blame your operator".

I say to them "I've used that SIM in Apple devices, Samsung devices and Nokia devices and had never any problem connecting to the Internet". Because the manufacturers were smart enough to let me edit the APN settings and write there the correct values if I wanted.

And this brings us to one of the mantras of engineering, be Correct when writing stuff but be Gentle when reading. It's good the BlackBerry browser is following that mantra, otherwise you'd hardly be able to render any webpage.

So people at BlackBerry, please come of your senses and let people edit stuff. This way maybe I'll get to use your device and people around me will see it and will want to buy one.

Otherwise I'll just wait until the Ubuntu Phone is a bit more usable and start using it. It may not be as polished (at the moment) but at least it's open source and I can fix crazy stuff like this.

Update: With BB 10.1.0.1627 I've been able to edit the field and now my 3G data works again

builds.kde.org tests report for 4.11 release - 15 April 2013

We are 59 days away from Beta 1:
* kate has 1 tests that fails
* kde-runtime has 1 test that fail
* kdelibs has 1 test that fails
* kdepim has 8 tests that fail
* kdepim-runtime has 21 tests that fails
* kdepimlibs has 14 tests that fails
* nepomuk-widgets has 1 test that fails
* okteta has 1 test that fails

Everything else that belongs into the 4.11 release is green

You can find the up-to-date info at jenkins http://build.kde.org/view/KDE%20SC%20master/

Okular welcomes undo/redo for annotations

Thanks to the amazing work of Jon Mease Okular now has undo/redo for annotation editing in master. Give it a go, it's quite cool :)

Now let's see if we can get Jon to do the same for Form editing, everyone give him some love!

builds.kde.org tests report for 4.11 release - 1 April 2013

We are 73 days away from Beta 1:
* kate has 2 tests that fail (down 2-3 from 2 weeks ago)
* kde-runtime has 1-2 tests that fail (no change)
* kdelibs has 1 test that fails (up 1 from 2 weeks ago)
* kdepim has 7-8 tests that fail (stable from 2 weeks ago)
* kdepim-runtime has 19-22 tests that fail (up 0-3 from 2 weeks ago)
* kdepimlibs has 12-16 tests that fail (stable from 2 weeks ago)
* nepomuk-core has 1 test that fails (down 2 from 2 weeks ago)
* nepomuk-widgets has 1 test that fails (stable from 2 weeks ago)
* okteta has 1 test that fails (stable from 2 weeks ago)

Everything else that belongs into the 4.11 release is green

KDE Frameworks 5 day at Barcelona

This last Saturday, Alex Fiestas, Martin Klapetek, Miquel Canes, Aleix Pol and me spent the whole day acquainting ourselves with the KDE Frameworks 5 codebase and starting to work on some of the tasks described in the Qt 5.1 and kdelibs cleanup epics.

It was a great day but i still have to say I find myself a bit lost in Frameworks land, we'll have to repeat it soon to get more in the loop :-)



I'd like to thank Blue Systems for hosting us in their office in Barcelona.

builds.kde.org tests report for 4.11 release - 18 March 2013

We are 87 days away from Beta 1:
* kate has 4-5 tests that fail
* kde-runtime has 0-2 tests that fail
* kdepim has 7-8 tests that fail
* kdepim-runtime has 19 tests that fail
* kdepimlibs has 12-16 tests that fail
* nepomuk-core has 3 tests that fail
* nepomuk-widgets has 1 test that fails
* okteta has 1 test that fails

Everything else that belongs into the 4.11 release is green

KDE SC 4.11 Release Schedule

You can find it at http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.11_Release_Schedule

There are two main changes agreed by Release Team against the previous releases:
* No specified time between Beta and RC tag and release. We will try to release them ASAP after the tag to make them as useful as possible
* No release with broken tests. We won't release if there are tests that do not pass in build.kde.org. So please start caring about tests that do not pass

KDE 4.10 Release Party in Barcelona

This Friday 22nd of February we are having the KDE 4.10 Release Party in Barcelona. Fill in the wiki or tell me if you want to come!

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.