okular, libgs and crashes on Debian and derivatives

If you are trying postscript rendering on okular, be advised you need to have a recent version, the more recent the best. (around 8.60 or so should good enough)

Unless you use Debian or any of its derivatives that reuse their patches (like Ubuntu) because they are using a patch (06_libpaper_support.dpatch) that makes libgs crash when you reuse the gs instance.

Fortunately for the patch creator there is not any program i know that reused the gs instance, until now. Okular is reusing it and now we crash because of someone patching library code and not being prudent.

So next time you touch library code be prudent! And if you are not the main developer of it be more than prudent!

Translations, Merchandising and a plug

This saturday we hold the KDE 4 Catalan translation marathon, if you want to join KDE Catalan translation team it's the moment! Come and help us making the translation ready!

I have some merchandising left from Akademy-es, 5 baseball caps, 3 t-shirts (1 S, 2 XXL) and "lots" of stickers, if you are from Spain contact me. Of course all money goes to the e.V.

And now the shameless plug!

A friend has started a new Software Company in Barcelona, called AteneaTech, they specialize on Web Accessibility and Usability and with SaaS and any kind of custom development you need. So if you need such a service from anyone, think on them and i'll win a dinner for each new customer that mentions me ;-)

helgrind is back!

Today i was having a hard time debugging some code of mine that used threads and i thought of helgrind, as of valgrind 3.2.3 trying to use it gives you

Helgrind is currently not working, because:
(a) it is not yet ready to handle the Vex IR and the use with 64-bit
platforms introduced in Valgrind 3.0.0
(b) we need to get thread operation tracking working again after
the changes added in Valgrind 2.4.0
If you want to use Helgrind, you'll have to use Valgrind 2.2.0, which is
the most recent Valgrind release that contains a working Helgrind.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Let us know if this is a problem for you.

So i downloaded valgrind 2.2.0, but it complained about me having a too new glibc, so i downloaded valgrind from svn and YES! it's there :-) It made me realize i needed to add QDeepCopy to some QStrings and it is working now :-) Yet again valgrind to the rescue!

Poppler 0.6.2 released

Available from http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.2.tar.gz

Changes since 0.6.1:
poppler core:
* Fix CVE-2007-4352, CVE-2007-5392 and CVE-2007-5393
* Fix a crash on documents with wrong CCITTFaxStream
* Fix a crash in the Cairo renderer with invalid embedded fonts
* Fix a crash with invalid TrueType fonts
* Check if font is inside the clip area before rendering
it to a temporary bitmap in the Splash renderer. Fixes crashes on
incorrect documents
* Do not use exit(1) on DCTStream errors
* Detect form fields at any depth level
* Do not generate appearance stream for radio buttons that are not active
* mingw fixes

build system:
* Require fontconfig >= 2.0
* builddir != srcdir fixes

Qt4 frontend:
* Improved documentation

misc:
* Fix FSF address

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Spanish computer shops to sell Free Software

I read from a Mercè Molist article (spanish) that the "Spanish Association of Small and Medium Sized Computer and New Technologies Companys" will inform their clients about free software, computers more compatible with it and how to claim back Windows fee if you bought a Windows preloaded computer. A really nice move, let's see what's its future.

Paris here we go

Just bought my tickets for KDE-edu meeting in Paris. In 40 days i'll join the edu KDE crew to ensure KDE keeps being the best educational desktop out there :-)
BTW, from yesterday to today the plane ticket price was like 15€ more expensive, so if you are planning to come, reserve FAST!

Iberia is weird

So i go to Iberia.es to book some flights. I try to get Barcelona->Paris (just one way) for 30th November. Price is 632 €. OUCH. Then i try Barcelona<->Paris (roundtrip) coming back home the 2th of December and it costs 136€. Errr, what?

Anyone with insight in how flight companies work can explain that nonsense? Or is it just that French hate us and they let us go to do some tourism and come back but not just go? :-D

Update: The french hating us is a JOKE. I've been twice to Paris and it has been great.

Zaragoza here we go

Just bought my tickets for aKademy-es 2007. In 30 days i'll join all the Spain KDE crew and do some talks, party and coding, all in the correct proportion. Now i just need to think what to talk about... And BTW you are ALL invited to join us and enjoy the event, it's free!

Poppler 0.6.1 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.6.1.tar.gz

Changes since 0.6.0:
 poppler core:
  * Fix printing with different x and y scale
  * Fix crash when Form Fields array contains references to non existent objects
  * Fix crash in CairoOutputDev::drawMaskedImage()
  * Fix embedded file description not working on some cases

 Qt4 frontend:
  * Fix printing issue
  * Avoid double free
  * Fix memory leak when dealing with embedded files

 glib frontend:
  * Fix build with --disable-cairo-output
  * Do not return unknown field type for signature form fields

 build system:
  * Support automake-1.10
  * More compatible sh code in qt.m4

 utils:
  * Fix build on Sun Studio compiler

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

CMake HEAD got faster reinstalls

On Friday Brad King announced on kde-buildsystem@kde.org "Repeat installations are now lightning fast", today i tried the CVS version of CMake (cmake version 2.5-20071007)

Well, it's not lightning fast, but it's a considerable win, here kdebase went from about 240 seconds to 75 seconds, so congrats to the CMake team and thanks for improving CMake in a continous way!

QImage::Format_ARGB32_Premultiplied is your friend

If you have looked at QImage in Qt4 you'll have noticed that there is the typical QImage::Format_RGB32 and QImage::Format_ARGB32 plus QImage::Format_ARGB32_Premultiplied.

Maybe you have wondered why is there, well, i'll tell you, it's FAST.

I have done a simple test rendering 100 times gear-flowers.svg wallpaper in a qimage of 1024x768. The results follow

RGB32: 20351 msec
ARGB32: 39273 msec
ARGB32_Premultiplied: 20248 msec

So if you look at the numbers, you'll see ARGB32_Premultiplied is actually faster than RGB32 that is not even producing correct results.

So QImage::Format_ARGB32_Premultiplied should be probably renamed to QImage::Format_ARGB32_UseMeBecauseImFast :D

Performance of radeon free drivers

The other day, i updated to KUbuntu gutsy and saw it ships a free graphics driver for my Ati X300 card (r300 based). I switched to it from the non-free driver but i have went back.

Why? Well, actually it does work, but it is slow, for example, hiding and showing again a normally sized ktuberling, takes around 180ms on the fglrx driver while it takes 550ms on the radeon driver.

But well, after all, as far as i remember they reverse engineered the driver, so i should congratulate the people doing it, it's a bit slow but works, so people that NEED a free driver or where the non-free one does not work can actually use the card now, thanks :-)

This is with driver 6.7.194 which i would say is latest released version.

UPDATE: Setting the driver to use EXA makes it go as fast or faster than fglrx driver in this scenario of swapping ktuberling windows, now i ask me why this is not the default :-S

UPDATE 2: Now blogger.com newsticker makes CPU go to 100% on both konqueror and firefox. I think i'll wait for the next iteration of the driver.

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.