Talk at X JPL

This thursday and friday the X Jornades de Programari Lliure take place at Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. As you can see in the program I will be talking about translation communities dynamics (mainly on KDE) on Friday from 16:30 to 17:00.

Other KDE people like Aaron Seigo, Aleix Pol and Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas also also talking at the X JPL.

N9 disappointment

It seems the default applications will be closed source, so yeah, looks cool, uses Qt and bla bla bla, but still not a real Free Software phone as they sold it to us.

Of course I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.

Beware of KDE 4.6.4

Some tarballs appear to be broken.

Catalan Police hitting pacific protesters

Catalan Police doing what they know better, being brainless idiots.

KGeography questions: Top Left or Centered?

We the KGeography developers are in a disagreement of what looks better, centered questions or top left aligned ones, so we are opening this poll for you the users to decide. Please hop onto this post on the KDE Forums and vote!

Akademy-es 2011 starting today

Akademy-es 2011 is starting today :-)

Today talks include a talk about translations by part of Catalan KDE translation crew, how about how to contribute by Aleix, one about telepathy by Alex and me speaking about potatos.

Thanks to our kind sponsors Google and Qt/Nokia :-)

Qt Designer texts: disambiguation vs comment

Qt Designer has two fields regarding translations for text properties (e.g. the text of a Label, or the tool tip of a Widget) disambiguation and comment (that unfortunately map to the comment (for disambiguation) and extracomment (for comment) XML attributes in the .ui file), let me give a bit of explanation of what they mean since I've found some errors on it's usage while fixing a bug we had in our translation scripts (aka scripty). First some background on how translation works, when you ask for a string to be translated (e.g. "Run") you can give some context that acts as an extra key (e.g. "Verb" or "Noun") so translators can do different translations (Run, Verb) -> Ejecutar (Run, Noun) -> Ejecución This extra key is what you write in the disambiguation field On the other hand when you write something in the comment field, it only appears as a comment to the translator, so if you have two texts with the same text (e.g. "Run") and different comments (e.g. "Verb" or "Noun") it will not work, so only use the comment field to give extra information for fields whose text is unique but the meaning might not be easy to understand to the translator. So there is no reason at all to do things like <string extracomment="General information">General information of the identity.</string> since you are giving less information in the comment field than in the text itself Also just remember it makes no sense to add disambiguation or comment to a text property that is empty since at the moment we can not translate empty strings, so things like this are also not useful at all <string extracomment="Open file dialog"/> Finally if you use KUIT markers they need to be in the disambiguation field

Akademy-es 2011 schedule ready

We just published the schedule for Akademy-es 2011 that will happen in Barcelona from 20 to 22 of May. Make sure to register if you plan to attend!

Akademy-es 2011

KDE Spain is organizing in Barcelona the Akademy-es 2011, the annual meeting of KDE users and contributors in Spain from May 20th through May 22nd.

During the last events attendance and the technical quality of the papers have increased significantly making the Akademy-es, is one of the most important KDE events worldwide.

New this year, the event will take place in two different locations, thereby adjusting each activity to its ideal location. Friday's activities will be held at the Campus Nord of the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya and weekend ones will be at school Sant Marc de Sarrià.

You can find more infomation at the event website.

Hero of the day: Thomas Freitag

I've just commited a patch to Poppler made by Thomas Freitag that implements Pattern tilings in the Splash rendering backend (the one used by Okular) instead of falling back to the default Poppler::Gfx implementation. This means that for example for a pdf page that previously took 34 minutes to render, now renders in 250 msec. Not bad eh?

Fixed one of biggest Okular crashers

I just fixed one of the biggest Okular crashers https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243434 (around 20 to 30 duplicate reports). This one was not really difficult to fix (actually it is just a one liner), but it was difficult to fix for me since I could not reproduce it

It took a while to find someone that had the crash and was willing to help me debug it (thanks Adrià). So please, all users reading this blog, be more proactive when we ask questions in bugs, because, you know, it is in your best interest answering our questions and helping us pinpoint where the problem is.

KDE Main Modules Minor Point Relase Policy

The release-team has written a minor point release policy for KDE main modules.

You can find it at http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Minor_Point_Release_Policy

As far as we know it covers what we already do, just makes it a bit more official and standardized.

KDE 4.6 dinner in Barcelona^WBadalona

This Saturday 19 the Barcelona & surroundings KDE crew will be celebrating the release of 4.6 with a dinner in Badalona. Read the Community Wiki page for more details and join us! It'll be fun :-)

Dublin Airport Terminal 2 fail

Today is the first day my Aer Lingus flight to Barcelona leaves from new shiny Dublin Airport Terminal 2 instead of Terminal 1 and it really shows it is new and has some rough edges.
* Aer Lingus self checking machines are not able to read most passports, thus almost everyone has to queue on the check-in desks
* Security clearance trays get stuck in the ramp that is supposed to get them back to the beginning of the queue (can't believe no one tested this)
* VIP lounge WiFi has only http access

All those three things worked perfectly on Terminal 1 :-/

Dear Lazyweb: Know anyone at multimania?

Since the end of december, the webpage of my father at http://usuarios.multimania.es/sacorbera has been lost in hyperspace redirecting to a 404 error at multimania.de.

The interesting part is that if I log in via multimania.es all the data is there, it is just that the domain seems to be lost (¿misconfiguration?).

I have been trying to contact multimania admins via mail and all the forms i've found in their web without any kind of success. So please if you happen to work at multimania or know someone that works there or know someone that knows someone... Tell them to fix this problem.

Second Linux Kernel patch accepted

After my first ever Linux Kernel patch 8 years ago (yes I'm getting old) i successfully got a new one accepted a few weeks ago that fixes the temperature problem i was having with my laptop. Yay for scratching your own itch :-)

KDE Spain looking for a place to host Akademy-es 2011

We are looking for a place to host the annual Spanish KDE event, if you feel like helping us co-organize the event please visit http://www.kde-espana.es/akademy-es2011/ubicacion.php

KWalletEditor no longer depends on Qt3Support

I've just commited to trunk (KDE 4.7) the last of the changes I started doing a few days ago to make KWalletEditor not depend on Qt3Support/KDE3Support. Basically that meant rewriting all the Q3IconView and K3ListView as KListWidget and QTreeWidget with the associated Drag&Drop changes. I've been testing the code for the usual problems of this type of porting while doing the code changes but something might have escaped me so I'll be more than happy if you give it some usage and report to me any problem you might find.

My top 10 blog posts of 2010

Here the top 10 of blog entries visited in 2010 in my blog:
10 - Poppler, Qt4, Windows and my desktop
9 - Performance of radeon free drivers
8 - Is the X11 engine slower than raster just because of the drivers?
7 - Morocco trip
6 - 3g USB dongle stopped working in Ubuntu 10.04
5 - Poppler-Symbian pdf viewer
4 - Poppler for windows
3 - keyboard crazyness
2 - Konqueror 4.4.4 vs Firefox 3.6.6
1 - Qt, gitorious, merge requests and Open Source

One can extract several interesting things from this list:
- Last year i did not make interesting blogs, 6 out of 10 are from either 2006 or 2007 or 2009 (but not from 2008 :D)
- People seem interested in my poppler-symbian project. It did not get very far but there's a proof-of-concept at http://projects.ufocoders.com/projects/pdfviewer/repository in case you are interested in doing the work
- People want to use poppler in windows (it gets two entries in the top 10), strange that all those users almost never sent patches to the project, seems like windows culture is not so much about collaborating but about just using (and complaining in the list it's too difficult to build)
- People reading my 2007 entry about radeon drivers performance should really be looking somewhere else
- There are 5 blog entries that already where in the top 10 of last year
- There's nothing like a good rant to get the top spot of visits ;-)

Okular website translatable

In the past few days I've been working on using the existing i18n functionality in the KDE website framework (AKA capacity) in the Okular website.

The functionality was added ages ago but it needed some tweaking to support all the Okular website needs.

I've also worked in making scripty extract the messages automatically to .po files so each day the contents of the website are extracted to the trunk/l10n-kde4/templates/messages/www folder.

Of course this can be added to any of the KDE websites. I've added some documentation to the Capacity techbase page, if you find you need more help do not hesitate to ping me on IRC.