Akademy-es 2008 recap

So it's already a week since Akademy-es 2008 ended. And i have to say it was a quite a success. We had around 60 attendants, 20 of them being from outside the region where the event was organized, maybe not highest total of attendants but for sure the highest number of "foreigner" attendants, attending from far shows commitment.

Some of the slides can be downloaded at the talks page and the videos will probably be available next week.

I want again to thank the local organizing team and our sponsors for making the event possible!

And now the photo, with few people because it was made late in the last day :(

Don't buy a Labtec Standard Keyboard Plus

So my keyboard broke, the current one lasted for about two years, not bad.

As i'm quite special about the layout of keyboards i ended up buying a Labtec Standard Keyboard Plus, that is basically a cheap keyboard with the standard layout, but after having used it for less than 24 hours i've to say, DO NOT BUY it.

The keyboard has probably been tested by the slowest typer on earth, if i try to write KDE i always end up with KE or KD, the keyboard is unable to detect fast keypresses of SHIFT + D + E and that happens with a lot of combinations. What a shame, so let's see how i can explain that to the clerk of the shop to get my money back.

Mozilla Camp Europe 2008

This past saturday i was at the Mozilla Camp Europe 2008 that was held in Citilab at Cornellà. I was invited by one of the local organizers and being so close (5 metro stations) i had no excuse not to drop by.

The event was about 200 people, not bad, but once you know the Mozilla Foundation paid for almost every trip it's not that impressive, if you get the trip paid, going to such an event is much easier ;-)

And that makes you think Mozilla has LOTS of money, they paid the trip to Barcelona for about 150 people and have about 150 employees around the world, and that with just a free browser as a product. That sounds like success to me.

And now to an overview of the talks:

Aza Raskin spoke about things they are doing in the labs like Weave, that duplicates sessions from your computer to your mobile so you can have a continous browsing experience and about Ubiquity that is krunner for Firefox.

David Ascher spoke about Thunderbird and how it's gaining calendaring support (can you say Kontact?) and how there are *only* 20 or 30 people working on it. I wonder what the kdepim module could do with so much man power :-D

Next Christian Sejersen spoke about Phenec, Mozilla's attempt at the mobile browser. I have to say i liked the description he did of the interface so installed it on the N810. Took like a minute to start up, so removed at the very moment.

Then it came the translators meeting, with around 40 people around, i wonder if we could do such a big translators meeting for KDE, it would be interesting.

Later a talk about leaks and testing. I came a bit late at the leak part but basically ended up with the impression that they know they have lots of leaks to the situation they've done a tool that tells them how much nodes of the DOM tree were leaked when loading some pages. The testing bit was totally out of place as it was "this is what we do at our company", little to do with Mozilla at all.

The Embedding Gecko talk, the speaker acknowledged embedding Gecko into an app is total mess since they don't have stable nor simple APIs so they are trying to create one given that KHTML/WebKit is hurting them.

Then another talk about Weave and we went to a nice dinner in a restaurant in the beach in Barcelona's Vila Olímpica.

You can see a few photos i made at http://kde.cat/aacid/fotos/mozcampeu2008/

Aligned data when doing a new

Dear LazyWeb...

I know i can use the gcc aligned attribute to align a variable, but is it possible to do that with memory i get doing a new or a malloc?

That is, i have a class that needs to have one of it's members aligned, so i need to declare the member to be aligned but that is not enough, i need to align the object itself, how?

Akademy-es 2008

So as every year since 2006 the KDE Spanish community is gathering to discuss and enjoy in our own micro Akademy. This year we are doing it in A Coruña together with the GPUL dudes of Guademy fame. The dates are from November 21st to 23rd.

The registration site just opened so click here to register!

See you in A Coruña!

Poppler 0.10.0 release

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.10.0.tar.gz

Differences with latest stable series (0.8.7) are quite interesting, you can see them all at the Poppler 0.9 Releases list of http://poppler.freedesktop.org/releases.html.

As a summary it includes:
* Initial JavaScript support
* JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
* Some crash fixes
* Better support of malformed files
* Some rendering improvements

So you should be all using Poppler 0.10 now to get a better PDF experience ;-)

Looking for PDF with Japan2 fonts

The other day we realized poppler did not correctly supported Adobe-Japan2 fonts, so i went on and did some work that should make it work, but then i have no file to test, so if you could do

cd /
find -name "*pdf" -exec grep -H Japan2 {} \;

or

locate -0 .pdf | xargs -0 -n 1 grep -H Japan2

and send me (aacid@kde.org) a link to the pdf or the file pdf itself of all the files that match i could try to see if i did really fix it or not :-)

PC, MAC, GUADALINEX and LINEX compatible

You can read on fellow Catalan KDE translator blog that his son got an English learning CD that states to be compatible with two of the spanish regional goverment distributions, interesting to see that on an "Oxford University Press" material.

It does not state "GNU/Linux" compatibility, but it seems a sign that we are getting there.

Photo of the CD

Poppler 0.9.1 (0.10 Beta 2) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.1.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 2 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes your chair break.

Differences with 0.9.0:
Core:
* Fix crash on some AESv2 encrypted files (bugs #13972, #16092, #17523)
* Improve parsing of broken files (bug #17568)

glib frontend:
* Minor improvements to the demo application

utils:
* pdftohtml: Generate the outline file in the same place of the other generated files (bug #17504)

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Poppler 0.9.0 (0.10 Beta 1) released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.9.0.tar.gz

WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.10 Beta 1 release, it should work like any release from the 0.8 branch, but do not blame us if it makes LHC destroy the world.

Differences with 0.8 branch:
 Core:
  * Initial JavaScript support
  * Annotation improvements
  * Improvements in the Arthur based renderer
  * Improvements in the Cairo based renderer
  * Added a JPEG2000 decoder based on OpenJPEG
  * Small fixes in ActualText implementation
  * Fix jpeg rendering when not using the libjpeg based decoder
  * Movie fixes
  * Do not get out of memory on documents that specify huge fonts
  * Emulate Adobe Reader on documents with duplicate keys in Dictionaries
  * Forms improvements  

 Qt4 frontend:
  * Annotation improvements
  * Forms improvements
  * Add the possibility of extracting embedded fonts
  * Initial Movie support
  * Documentation improvements
  * Small improvements in the PS exporter

 glib frontend:
  * Annotation improvements
  * Attachment fixes

 utils:
  * updated man pages
  * Added -listenc to pdfinfo and pdftotext

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

Looking for aKademy-es organizers

Somehow i managed to forget to announce here we are looking for organizers for this year KDE Spain users and developers meeting. If you are interested have a look at http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2008/ubicacion.php. We are accepting proposals up to september 15th.

Poppler 0.8.7

Just two fixes, but you really want it as fixes a regression in Form handling introduced in Poppler 0.8.6.

Got it while it's hot http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.7.tar.gz

Looking for people

Dear Lazyweb,
At the poppler project we are trying to relicense all our patches as GPLv2 or later so that in case that xpdf is ever relicensed to something newer than gpl2 only we are not stuck because of patches.
The problem is that we have problems getting answers from everyone, so i'm posting this so that in case you know some of the missing people in person or have IM adreses of them, you can bug them for me.
And now onto the names:
- Marco Pesenti Gritti
- Kjartan Maaras
- Timothy Lee
- Carl Worth
- Ed Catmur - specially problematic has his mail server bounces mails

KHTML rocks

'nuff said. Keep it rocking guys!

Maemo scratchbox on amd64

So it seems the maemo scratchbox refuses to install on amd64, has anyone succeded in doinng so? Can i fool the script, or do i need to run a virtual machine with linux i386 inside and then run the scratchbox inside that?

KDE 4.1 adoption seems high

KDE 4.1.0 was released this very same week and already 17% of Konqueror users of the last month to my blog are using Konqueror 4.1, seems quite high to me

Catalan Summer of Code

So Catalan government decided to run a project similar to Google's Summer of code program. That's cool, the bad news is that the law that grants the money was approved as of May 30th and i just discovered the site because i was doing some random browsing.

So if you can read catalan go to http://www.lafarga.cat/beques/bases-de-la-convocatoria and start thinking what to do for Free Software.

Actually it seems like it's non-published on purpose so either:
a) It fails and politics can say "See Catalonia has no interest for Free Software" and they can go on paying Microsoft for doing sucky and patchy translations of their products to Catalan (yes they pay twice, license and translation)
b) Someone's son needs to make sure he is the chosen one, so the less publicity the better.

Bug your distro to package OpenJPEG

The new poppler major version that will come out in a month or so, sports a new JPEG2000 decoder based in OpenJPEG that is better than the current one, for example, it renders Google scanned docs, that is good. Yay! The problem is that actually not much distros package OpenJPEG (i could only find Debian), so go to your distro bug tracker and bug them to include OpenJPEG.

And BTW:

Poppler 0.8.5 released

Available from
http://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.8.5.tar.gz

Changes since 0.8.4:
Core:
* Fix crash on PDF that define a page thumbnail but it's not a Stream
* Fix crash when Annots object is not of the desired type
* Fix crash when obtaining fonts in PDF where XObjects link themselves in loops
* Fix crash on documents with an IRT object
* Saving should work much better now
* Plug some memory leaks in Annotation handling

Utils:
* pdftohtml: Don't crash on documents that specify an invalid named dest for a link
* pdftohtml: Make html output to keep all the spaces with
* pdftohtml: Improve a bit text layout
* pdftohtml: Make xml output valid xml

Testing, patches and bug reports welcome.

As a side note, one of the four crashes was a CVE while the other three where not, of course the four are as critic as the other.

kpovmodeler looking for help

Andreas Zehender wrote

I'm looking for a skilled KDE developer with some knowledge in povray and 3D stuff, who will follow future KDE technology changes and keep kpovmodeler compilable and stable.!

So if you are interested mail him!