Why small KDE projects are useful for the big KDE picture?

On Wednesday, Burkhard Lück began sending mails to the kdegames mailing list about the shortcomings we had regarding translations not being loaded, not being possible, etc.

One of the most reported issues was that translations of theme names were not used even though they had been translated. That shocked us as we use the typical KDE way of using .desktop files, so we investigated a bit, and came up with with a very small test case that showed that the kdelibs class for accessing .desktop files was not working correctly.

In less than two hours we had the bug fixed. So that's why small KDE projects like kdegames are useful for KDE, they are as good testers as anyone else.

KUbuntu Gutsy issues

Yesterday i updated to what will be KUbuntu 7.10 to 7.04. Here are the results:

* They still poppler patch kpdf even if the 3.5.7 packages for KUbuntu 7.04 did not, so expect that i still treat KUbuntu users as second class users when reporting kpdf bugs.

* There's a ¿kernel? bug that hogs the CPU https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/udev/+bug/119315/

* My network configuration was lost, resulting in not being able to access the internet anymore, that is because now my second network interface is supported (that's good) and so what before was my eth0 is now eth1 and nothing worked (that's bad)

* They fixed a bug i reported about exit dialog accelerators not working correctly

* kdesu hangs randomly https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144397

* XF86Mail key is hardcoded to a new mail message and you can't reassign it to something else like for example opening KMail https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/144398

* They added a ugly user list to kdm that when disabling it results in an even uglier kdm https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/129309

All in all, my opinion is quite negative at the moment.

New KTuberling playground and looking for a description

Thanks to Jocelyn Etienne KTuberling in KDE 4.0 will feature another nice playground



Besides, the other day, Robert Knight, our konsole overlord warned me that normal menu users, current name of the game is "Potato Guy" and the description is "Game for Children". First is actually wrong because of this new playground and second is really really precise, eh ;-)

So i'm open to any suggestion for both name and description.

Kate welcomes Find Selected

Thanks to quick work by Sebastian Pipping (sping) and some small contribution from my side, kate will have in KDE 4 the "Find Selected" feature.

Basically it's the find feature, but starts find automatically on the selected text and does not show the find dialog. At start it may seem not useful enough, but those used to Eclipse (ctrl+k) and nedit (ctrl+h) will surely welcome this new addition to kate

Poppler 0.6 released

Poppler 0.6 is available from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.tar.gz

Changes since RC2:
- CairoOutputDev fixes
- Allow pdftoppm to read/write from stdin/stdout
- API work on Qt4 frontend
- Fix pdfimages produces inverted image for black & white image
- Fix error on the NFKC text matching routine
- Add support for word and line selections
- Do not enforce %%EOF at the end of file
- Pad zeroes instead of aborting when rendering 1-bit images
and the stream is too short
- Update glib bindings documentation

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Junior Jobs for KBackgammon

KBackgammon is KDE backgammon client. SHOCK!!!

It did not get as much love as other kde games for the KDE 4.0 release but we decided to keep for reasons that are not important now.

What is important is that i created 3 Junior Jobs for people that want to start with KDE 4 development and don't know where to.

If you want to have a look at them see:
Bug 149275: Enable antialias in KBackgammon
Bug 149276: Convert config dialogs to .ui files
Bug 149277: Remove engineSet usage

All three should be "fairly" straightforward even for a newcomer.

So get your brain ready and start coding.

Modern art is ...

... curious. Have a look at this photo from me at the Pompidou Center of Paris.



You have to have guts to tell people that's art.

poppler 0.6 Release Candidate 2 released

Today i released poppler 0.5.91 aka 0.6 Release Candidate 2

Changes include:
- Various memory leaks fixed
- Compile with --enable-fixedpoint. Bug #11110
- Header cleanup
- Remove dependency on debugxml. Bug #11187
- Allow access to more document metadata in glib and qt4 frontends
- Several glib API frontend improvements
- Fix crash on accessing embedded files
- Build on Sun Force compiler
- Render '*' instead of the actual content in password form fields
- Fix pdftohtml complex output. Bug #9746 and #11610
- Windows build fixes
- Improve Japanese font support. Bug #11413
- Do not exit the program on files that confuse libjpeg
- Update required cairo version to 1.4
- Fix CVE-2007-3387

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Weird PS files needed

As you may know, i'm currently working on adding PS support to okular. It's currently more or less working, the problem is most files i have around here are result of a few programs "printing" to PS, so most of them are basically "the same in their internals" and thus are quite unuseful for testing. What i need are PS files with different page sizes, different page rotations, etc. the weirder the better. If you have or know where to get some of this kind of files, please mail me at aacid@kde.org with the details.

Avoid Ya.com

<BEGIN RANT>
Let me begin with something everyone agrees with "All spanish ISP suck".
That said i have to suggest any spanish reader out there to avoid ya.com.
I've been a Ya.com ADSL user for two years now, and besides minor hiccups and their broken DNS servers i was fairly satisfied, but not anymore.
On July 16th, my internet connection stopped working, it is still not working, and their technical service as marked my incidence as WONTFIX. They have told me all is fine in their side and what i have to do is call the company that is providing them the service (they are mere resellers) and tell them to fix my problem.
WTF?¿? Why do i have to call that company i'm not paying anything for my connection. I'm paying ya.com for my connection and any normal people would think it's them who have to fix my problems. But well, i did call the other company, four times, and obviously they told me "hi Mr Astals you are not our client and we can't help you, sorry"
So i'm giving up from Ya.com and just going to some other company to see if i have more luck.

On the Free Software side this means you won't have non-gui-blocking text search in Okular in less than two weeks (while i have done it for weeks) and that someone else will have to release poppler 0.5.9 RC2 (or wait until i get internet again)
</END RANT>

No internet

Since Sunday night i'm without internet at home, so all you that are expecting replies and internet actions from me (Chusslove, Yukiko, Miquel...) please have some more patience, the ADSL company told me "We are working on it".

Canon Ixus 850 (2)

So finally i got the Canon Ixus 850, it costed a bit less than 350€ and came with lots of extras (1GB memory, case, tripod and second battery). As far as i've been testing it i'm quite happy with it, quite fast when taking photos, quite good image quality and no problems using it with digikam. So that's it, i do not regret the buy, maybe it helps for others in the same situation.

Eclipse Europa can't use lineedits history

Yesterday i just installed the new Eclipse version at work and suddenly i realized i could not use up/down arrows to use lineedit's history. I filed a bug against their bugzilla that got closed as duplicate of a WONTFIX/NOTOURBUG bug :-(

Actually it seems the bug is on gtk but it quite astonishes me the fact that i'm using the same gtk i was and it worked on previous version of Eclipse.

So that forces us to ask the question: As a software developer, it's better to release a product that does not work and wait for the library we use to fix itself or should we workaround the bug as much as we can?

I'm not sure which one i'd pick with my developer hat, but as a user i tell you i want things to work :D

aKademy 2007 photos

aKademy 2007 was great! I did not blog as much as i wanted (actually i blogged 0 because blogger.com was unaccessible from the aKademy network) so here come the photos i made as small substitution. They suck a bit, but i've never been a good photographer so please bare with me! http://kde.cat/aacid/fotos/akademy2007/

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 :-)