Canon Ixus 850

I'm planning buying a Canon Ixus 850 if i can get one for a reasonable price (between 300 for a barebone one and 350€ with extras) before going to akademy 2007. Anyone has first experience with it and want to give some comment? Please abstain people that have a Olympus/Sony/wathever :-)

See you on Saturday on Glasgow :-)

SpreadKDE rebirth

Thanks to Pier-Olivier Thibault & Luke Parry we got a new and shiny SpreadKDE webpage. Paraphrasing Pier-Olivier

*****
We'd like to invite you to our new website http://spread.kde.org where you'll find all the information you need. As of today, the main feature we implemented is a managing system for people who are willing to organize events on the behalf of KDE. If you have any question about spread.kde.org, feel free to ask them here on kde-promo@kde.org or on #spreadkde on Freenode.

We strongly suggest you that if you're willing to organize an event, to make it so through the spread.kde.org website as it will help us make the website more usable for you all.
*****

As always help is welcome so if you want to help KDE building spread.kde.org have a look at Building SpreadKDE

KTuberling themers wanted

If you can draw and always wanted to help KDE but did not know how, this is your opportunity!

As you may know KTuberling got a nice SVG engine a month ago. The problem is that i am not able to draw, and even if the KDE world has some nice artists, they are overloaded with work, so more people on board never hurt.

Contributing themes for KTuberling is VERY easy. All you have to do is draw a nice SVG image.
As example, here are the two themes that we have currently
potato-game.svg and default_theme.svg, the themes.HOWTO file and the two .theme files for the SVG files potato-game.theme and default_theme.theme

If you have any code question do not hesitate to contact me at <aacid _AT_ kde _DOT_ org>
For graphical guidance contact kde games graphics dude at <johann _DOT_ ollivierlapeyre _AT_ gmail _DOT_ com>

KDE fame is waiting for you!

New Strigi blog

Due to problems with kdedevelopers, Jos has opened a new blog at http://strigi.sourceforge.net/?q=blog/2. While clee adds him to the planet, see his latest post about strigi, Xesam and akademy 2007 at http://strigi.sourceforge.net/?q=node/32.

More news tomorrow at the same time!

TaxiPilot looking for developers

Thomas Friedrichsmeier, TaxiPilot's author is looking for development helpers to port his small but nice game to KDE 4. So if you are looking for a nice introduction to KDE 4 development do not hesitate to contact him!

okular and PS files

I'm having some problems deciding what to do with PS files on okular, seems strange, eh, since PS is so old and unchanging one would think it's a solved problem. At the moment we are using libgs instead of calling the gs binary to render the files but there are some things i am not sure, here is the list of pros and cons of using libgs.

Pro:
* Using a library seems the right thing to my programmer mind
* We don't have to interact with gs using non-portable X properties like kghostview does
* We don't have to write the images to disk and then load them like ligature does

Con:
* Everyone (kghostview/evince/ligature) uses the gs binary
* libgs is not much widespread among distro packages, although that is improving and okular using it would probably "fix it"
* if libgs crashes it takes down the whole process
* libgs API is not what one would like it to be

So anyone out there that has the magic solution?

Of course, testers and constructive comments are more than welcome for the ghostscript okular backend, actually for all okular parts :-)

poppler 0.6 Release Candidate 1 released

Today i released poppler 0.5.9 aka 0.6 Release Candidate 1, this is the first time i do a release on the poppler project, so hope i did it right :-D

Changes include:
- Merge xpdf 3.02 changes
- Qt4 frontend is not marked anymore as unstable
- Support for Sound objects
- Support for Opening/Closing page actions
- Support for page duration
- Improve PS Tokenizer performance thanks to Scott Turner
- Various speed ups by Krzysztof Kowalczyk
- Beginning of Interactive Form support by Julien Rebetez
- xpdfrc is no longer used for anything
- Add AbiWord output device and pdftoabw program by Jauco Noordzij
- Fix security issue MOAB-06-01-2007
- Lots of bugs fixed

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

We are targetting 27th June for 0.6 release, but that may slip depending on feedback from this release.

sjfonts 2.0.2 released

Today i released sjfonts 2.0.2, only change is the addition of ĞğŞşİı characters to SteveHand font. Thanks goes to Serdar Soytetir!

Where's my ballot paper?

I'm upset, VERY upset. I just came back from the electoral college for Spanish 2007 municipal elections and i had to spend at least 5 minutes in front of all the stacks of ballot papers looking for the one i wanted.

And the problem was not that there were much possibilities to vote (that would have been a GOOD THING™). The problem is that someone had put other party ballot papers on the top of the stack of the party i wanted to vote, so i had to actually realize there was two stacks with the same ballot papers and then start removing ballot papers from the top of both until i actually found the one i wanted to get.

I feel shame of living in the same neighborhood than someone so dull and simple that wants to fuck that small party i vote and doesn't have a better idea than putting an even small party ballots on top of it.

And then i went to complain to municipal representative and he said something that can be summarized as "Shit happens", Very helpful, eh? :-/ He could have said "I'll double check next time", even if it had been false it would have made me feel better.

aKademy 2007 GPG Signing Party

Anne Wilson has kindly offered to coordinate the key signing party for aKademy 2007. If you are going to be on Glasgow go to http://akademy2007.kde.org/conference/keysigning.php, follow the instructions and you will get your key signed by fellow KDE people :-)

Car's working again

Yesterday the car was not working, but it was due to the battery was empty, a dude from the RACC came and started the car with his battery. So my father and I went around to do some kilometers and now everything is working again :-)

Bring on good old mechanical things!

That may seem a strange sentence coming from a computer science person like me, but at this moment i'm hating electronics.

Today i lost a lunch with some friends from one of the local LUGs because the Renault Megane we bought second hand two weeks ago decided to act weird. This car is equipped with a proximity sensor (maybe RFID?) that comes in a card, so to open it you just have to go near the car and open it. And to start it you just have to press the brake pedal and push the "Start" button.

My father did this at 6 am and came back home at 6:30 am to get the keys of the old car because he could not get it started.

This morning one our before the lunch time i did the same, went into the car, pressed the brake pedal and pushed the Start button, and a "Electronics Problem" message came up on the status panel. I still had time so i could have went lunching with the metro, so i got off the car and pressed the close button on the card to close the car.

No reaction.

So i pull off a key that is inserted on the card and use it to close driver's door, but doing that still leaves co-pilot door and back door open.

ARG!

So i call try to call previous owner of the car, my uncle, and he says he never had this problem.

Then i go home, pick up the car's manual and see it says there's a mechanical lock on doors you can use to lock them, good! Back onto the car i discover there's no suck lock on my car :-@

I go home again, look into the internet a Renault number, phone them and i explain them the problem. The dude says that i should get onto the car, press the "lock doors button" and then go off it and close driver's door with the key. Back onto the car i try that, doesn't work either, opening driver's door unlocks all other doors.

At this point my mother and I were already pretty desperate. At that moment i remembered a friend whose sister had a Megane too. I phoned her and luckily she was with her sister. And bam! she had the solution, it seems the car thought it was powered on, so all i had to do was put the card onto the slot that there's on the car, push the "Start" button twice and then a "Please remove the card" message appeared, so the car thought it was off, we got off the car and could even close all the doors using the card buttons.

We still did not try to get the engine started again, that will have to wait for tomorrow, but at least we could close the doors! Unfortunately more than hour had passed with all that and i could not make to the lunch :-(

So next time you design something cool with electronics, please think of the failure scenario and that a mechanical way to fix it is always welcome!

KTuberling SVG

You may have read the list of games not making the cut for KDE 4.0 at Johann's blog. KTuberling was in the position of "We all love (or have relatives that love it) it but nobody is working on it".

So i got up my mind and started coding the SVG port, in two days i already had it working, with exception of text, everyone that has tried to draw text in Qt, knows is not so easy as it might seem, but i hope to get it working in less than a week.

Mandatory screenshot:


I have not made any optimization attempt and it works quite snappy on my machine, but it is a fast machine so if anyone with a slower machine could test it and give me his opinion i'd be happy.

Of course any comment is welcome (except "You should be working on something more important")

Started aKademy Arrival and Departure pages at wiki

So i started Arrival at aKademy 2007 and Departure from aKademy 2007 when you can voluntarily write yourself to try to find partners to make the trip from and to the hostel more KDE oriented :-)

See you in Glasgow :-)

Update: Seems that was already started on techbase, wonder why someone decided TECH base is a good place for that, but oh well, please go to http://techbase.kde.org/Events/Akademy2007/Attendees if you want to share your information.

kde-i18n-ca: Extend and embrace

So for KDE 4 we switched from using KDE's own mimetype database to shared-mime-info from freedesktop (thanks David!) this has lots of advantages i don't need to explain, the only obvious problem i could find was the lack of translation to Catalan, but that can easily fixed when you are a translator yourself and you know how to trick others to finish your work, so thanks to Josep Ma. Ferrer and me, shared-mime-info has now a translation to Catalan :-) And the good thing of sharing things is that gnomies, xfceis, roxies and all others using shared-mime-info will benefit from our translation :-)

Cannot find konq-kubuntu.rc problem and fix

On one of the five machines i've upgraded from Edgy to Feisty, i got a weird error with Konqueror. When starting it, i got a very weird Konqueror without Address line for example and two symptomatic errors
konqueror: WARNING: KXMLGUIClient::setXMLFile: cannot find .rc file
konq-kubuntu.rc
konqueror: WARNING: KXMLGUIClient::setXMLFile: cannot find .rc file
konq-kubuntu.rc

For us that know some KDE programming that means Konqueror was trying to find the konq-kubuntu.rc
file to create it's gui but failed to find it.

Quick solution was looking for some file that referenced konq-kubuntu.rc I found it at .kde/share/apps/konqueror/profiles/webbrowsing

As i had another working machines it was easy to see that XMLUIFile=konq-kubuntu.rc should be XMLUIFile=konqueror.rc and now it is working like a charm :-)

aKademy registration deadline #1

Remember, if you want the aKademy organization team to handle accommodation booking for you, you should register and PAY before April 30th.

Of course if you can handle booking accommodation for yourself you are allowed to register later :D

Back from Albacete

I'm back from the nice conference organized by LinuxAlbacete people. I reused the talk Aaron gave at Guademy about KDE 4, and people seemed to like it quite a bit, i'm not as good as Aaron giving speeches but i know how to do jokes in spanish and Aaron not ;-)
It has been a pleasure beign there and eating some mancheguitos with you :-) Good luck for next year and keep up the good work!

kdemail.net is alive again

I noticed it because i started getting spam on the address again *sight*

Short note to those who were subscribed to mailing lists using kdemail service: Check you are still subscribed, but as administrator of the kde-edu mailing list i remember seeing some messages saying "foobar@kdemail.net has been automatically unsubscribed due too high number of bounces"

Update: Seems only smtp and mail aliases work for now. As imap and pop3 connections are refused. :-/

KDE SoC Projects

Bigger annoucement later at The Dot, but for the anxious http://code.google.com/soc/kde/about.html