Sunday, December 31, 2006

KDE Manifesto

Ok, three blogs in a day, i will have to stop or Aaron will think i want to beat him as blogMaster.

But just found the KDE Manifesto on kde.org (yes i know i should visit it more) and thought it is great and maybe there's more people out there that has never read it. So if you are like me, go and read the KDE Manifesto.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Morocco trip

We warned, this is not KDE nor Free Software related and it's long, i tried to use <!--break--> so that planets don't get it all, but i'm not sure it'll work.

So in this blog post i promised a blog explaining how my trip to morocco was, and i thought now would be a good time to write it. This is going to be long so grab some cookies.

Day 0:
Plane from Barcelona to Casablanca. Reach Casablanca late at night. My passport gets its first stamp on it. At the airport we get our first haggling experience to loan a minibus to bring us to the hotel, once we set on the prize the dude says there's no minibuses anymore, so taxi[1] here we go. We take the taxi to the hotel, our first introduction to a crazy way of driving, the hotel is an Ibis near the railroad station of Casablanca, very convinient as next day we are going to take a train to Marrakech.

Day 1:
Get up early, divide from the bigger group that came from barcelona, from now only four of us [photo] will stay together all the trip. Take a train[2] to Marrakech. Reach Marrakech some hours later, go to the hotel, Atlas Asni, very good and dirt cheap compared to what you would pay in Europe for a Hotel that has a fountain in the hall with real roses floating on it. Eat, go to the old part of Marrakech. Djamaa El Fna square [photo] its impresive, and more the first time you see it, snake enchanters, story-tellers and more. Go walking around the medina, but not in the tourist places, get lost, rain starts, we get a big feeling of "let's get to somewhere where there is someone". Ask a local for "La place"[3], he says, go left and right (well in french) and 15 minutes later, there we are, in the square again. Marrakech film festival is on, and all Matrix movies are going to be played at the time we get to the square, but it's raining so it gets cancelled. Go to the hotel.

Day 2:
Get up early, go to Saadian Tombs [photo], very nice site hidden through a small passage. Visit a small market nearby. Get lost again in a place not for tourists, well at least it's not raining and we are good enough to walk back our path. Go to Badi Palace and Bahia Palace, both are closed because it's already lunch time. Go to the square and eat[4]. Visit around the zoco (market), prices are cheap, but i have no need for the things they sell, so only see, sorry. Visit the Marrakech Museum and Ben Youssef Medrassa [photo], both well the visit and if you buy both tickets together it's even cheaper and you get a free ticket to see a small Kouba in front of the Museum, for me it was a bit disappointing compared to the other two sites, but it was free and near them :-) Go back to the square and take a carriage to see the city walls. I think the price he made us pay was more than the usual one, but it was still cheap for us and the trip was well worth even we had already seen most of the places while walking though the city. Go back to the square, at night it rocks even more as it's full of stands selling roasted meat. Go to the hotel.

Day 3:
Get up early, go to the Menara gardens [photo], a bit dissapointing if you ask, nothing more than a olive grove and a pond. Next step is another garden. Majorelle ones [photo], that's much better and there you can see any kind of cactus in my imagination. Go to the square, eat, be prepared so we can go back to Badi Palace[photo] and Bahia Palace[photo] when they open at the afternoon. Both are worth to visit even if very different, Badi is completely in ruins while Bahia is quite well conserved. It's our last day in Marrakech so go again to the square and enjoy it's nightly view from one of the restaurants with terrace.

Day 4:
Get up VERY early, the train to Fes leaves at 7am. 8 hours later we are in Fes[photo], the haggling with the taxi driver is unsucsesful so we find ourselves walking to the hotel that was not as near as we thought. Almost an hour later, three people that wanted to bring us to their hotels and a small attempt to get lost we get to the Hotel Batha. It's inside the old (XII century) medina. It's already very late so that day we don't have lunch. Go for a walk around the medina, it's streets are even more small than Marrakech ones, and as there, forget about doing good distribution in anything with motor, so donkeys and carts are everywhere. Unfortunately main medina street seems a "cheap bazar" from Spain, nothing to see. Kairouyine Mosque[5] is one of the biggest in the world but you can be in the very door and don't realize since it's inside a block of streets and there's no place to have a clear view of it. Unfortunately Fes seems to have much more fake guides and that makes our experience a bit worse as you have to keep saying "no thanks" every few meters.

Day 5:
The bad experience of fake guides makes us take an official one. It's well worth because with his guidance we get though places we would have not gone alone (too small streets, etc). As all guides in Morocoo it ends the guidance getting us into shops trying to make us buy because he'll get a comision, so don't buy anything while you are with your guide, come back later and everything will be surprisingly cheaper. Go back to the train station (this time with two small taxis) and take the train to Rabat, this time only fours hours. Go to the hotel.

Day 6:
Rabat is a much more occidental city than Fes or Marrakech, but it still has some nice places to visit like the Mausoleum of Mohammed V[photo], the Kasbah and the old medina, that is not as big nor impressive but it's worth a visit too. Get to the hotel to have lunch and dress well[photo], and off to the wedding! Yes! I went to Morocoo to a wedding of my friends Siddharta (Spanish even if the name doesn't seem like) and Meriem (from Rabat)[photo], both i knew in the Computer Science faculty. We get to Meriem's aunt house, not without problems because it's on a non tourist place and the taxi driver could not understand what we want to do there. We get up beign early and we are there even before the groom. Hours later we rejoin the group of people we came from Barcelona. Bride's family is very hospitable and gives us the better position in the lots of sofas so we can have a good view of the Henna cerimony in which bride's hands and feet are decorated with it. [photo] After a very good dinner, in which hospitality forces again foreign people to eat first we get to the hotel, more wedding tomorrow night!

Day 7:
Some walking around the new part of Rabat, it feels like a European city but we don't have anything better to do until the night. It starts raining so we run back to the hotel and stay there until the night party. The party is at the wedding hall of the Force Auxiliere, some kind of military force that rents the hall to live better. About the party, i can only say that it's georgeus. The bride weared five different suits during the night and the groom two. Each time they changed suits they entered the hall in the top of a throne carried by four people that did a dance while carrying them[photo]. They had two different live music groups and lots and lots of small typical moroccan cakes[photo]. All in all impresive, and even better, it was demostrated one can have a big party until late night and don't drink a bit of alcohol.

Day 8:
We got at 7 from last night party, but that is our last day on the hotel so get up early and get a train to Casablanca. There we check in in the same hotel as day 0 and go for a walk. Casablanca is an european city too, but in my opinion an uglier than Rabat one, there's nothing to see except the immense Hassan II Mosque[photo], that enough is worth the visit.

Day 9:
Get a train to the airport and back to Barcelona. A trip to remember!


[1] Note about taxis:
In Morocco there are two kinds of taxis, Petit and Grand (Small and Big). Petit taxis usually works like one would expect from a European taxi, there's taximeter and that's all you pay, except that it only takes three persons, very bad when you are 4 people. Gran taxis on the other hand take up to six + driver, for local people it works sort of as a bus, if there's free space, and it goes in your direction, you can get in. For tourists it does not work that way, you usually pay more than a local and that keeps the taxi for you only, they don't have taximeter so be careful!

[2] Note about trains:
Train system in Morocoo is very good, cheap (for a foreigner), clean and fast enough. First class is even wider and only 4€ or so more expensive. Well worth if you are doing long trips as we did.

[3] Note about people:
If you remove people that wants to sell you anything (from carpets to grass), all other Moroccan people is very helpful and sincere, so if you get lost like us, just ask!

[4] Note about eating:
All restaurants aimed to tourists have a very similar menu composed of salads, meat and pizzas. If you are vegetarian you can get into trouble because it's not logical for them someone with money does not want to take meat.

[5] Note about mosques:
Only Casablanca and Meknes mosques are visitable for non muslim people, and those two have to be visited with the hourly-visit-guide.

Notes about language:
[Almost] everyone in Morocoo speaks arab and french. Most people in the north can speak somewhat fluid spanish. There's few english knowledge but with a bit of interest from both sides you can get understood too.

Notes about toilets:
Local people don't use toilet paper so places not aimed for tourists and some of the aimed ones don't have it.
In from of almost all toilet's theres a person that will ask you a small tip, take it into account!

Notes about temperature:
In december the weather changes a lot from the middle of the day and the morning and night, so get you a coat but also a bag to put the coat in once the temperature starts to rise.

SVG meets blinken

Between yesterday and today i made blinken (KDE Simon Says clone) use SVG for drawing instead of fixed pixmaps. This makes blinken have the hability to let you play at any size instead of fixing the size at 644x525 pixels like it made before.

Here you have a screenshot showing both a fullscreen blinken and a very small one.


Of course credit goes to Danny Allen for the SVG drawing, to Pino Toscano for helping a bit with the math involved and for Qt4 for making SVG drawing so easy :-)

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Back from Morocco

In case you wondered if i had vanished from face of Earth, no, i'm still here, but i've been travelling from 1st December until today around Morocco with no internet access and no need to search for it (see i'm not an Internet addict), so if you mailed me and got no answer, that's the reason, i'll try to get up to date as far as possible. For the ones interested in the trip, i'm quite happy with it, i'll blog about it next week.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Distributor patches

Don't you like when distributions decide they are going to patch your program so it works worse? And not only it makes your program work worse, you loose your precious time debugging problems that don't really exist.

Ok, i know i blogged about that before, but the problem is still not fixed so i keep whining about it.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

KPDF printing and margins

Up to now, KPDF did not let you specify the margins for printing, it always printed with 0 margins, today, seeing that from time to time there's a bug report with people asking about printing PDF with margins i started implementing it, i'm almost done, but have some problems understanding what a user wants when specifying margins.

Let's put a simple example. You have a single page A4 document that has a black rectangle drawn at 2cm of distance from each side. Now you choose to print it with 5cm margin on top. Which result should you get?

a) The printed sheet has the rectangle with these distances: bottom 1.66 cm, top 6.66 cm, left 2cm, right 2cm. That means the available height got reduced from 29,7cm to 24,7cm so distance of 2cm is now 1.66 in the vertical direction, but as available width did not change, you get aspect ratio lost.

b) The printed sheet has the rectangle with these distances: bottom 1.66 cm, top 6.66 cm, left 3.43cm, right 3.43cm. That means the available height got reduced from 29,7cm to 24,7cm so distance of 2cm is now 1.66 in the vertical direction, and to preserve aspect ratio, the available width got reduced from 21 to 17.465 cm, resulting in 1.66 + (21 - 17.465)/2 margin in left and right.

c) Something else

I don't really know what a user would expect when printing, as losing aspect ratio is always a bad idea, but case b) is quite confusing too as you get margins on the horizontal side when you only put it on the vertical side, ideas?

Thursday, November 09, 2006

GPG trust paths

Today i found a interesting web that helps you finding GPG trust paths from one key to another, here are the truth paths from me to Amaya Rodrigo, a debian developer i never met, but given that web of trust (6 people with only one hop) i would rather be sure that the key really belongs to her and not to somebody that tries to supplant her.

Monday, November 06, 2006

67% vs 66.7%

In KPDF in the zoom combo we had
50%
66.70%
75%
in okular in the zoom combo we fixed it to
50%
66.7%
75%
but our usability dude still thinks
50%
67%
75%
would be better as it "aligns" things visually. What do you say?

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Thanks Zaragoza :-)

Just came back from the KDE meeting at Zaragoza, glad to meet again Antonio, Isaac, Ana and meet for the first time lots of nice people. Thank you guys, the weekend rocked! Thanks also to Warp Networks, DBS and the Zaragoza city council for sponsoring Antonio's and my travels and hotel rooms.

Monday, October 30, 2006

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Edit the changelog!

Looking at the changelog file it seems that only Pino and me have fixed bugs for the KDE 3.5.6 release, hope that is not true!

So remember, each time you fix a bug, put it on the changelog, that will help us having a good changelog and also will help you, because if you wait before the release it will be a harder work and you may not remember them all!

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

okular mailing list

Today we inaugurated the okular-devel mailing list. YIPI! :-) Feel free to subscribe, but keep in mind it's a developer mailing list so most topics will be about development. If you have suggestions we are happy to hear them too, but please use http://bugs.kde.org to report wishes against the okular product. And again, we have a mailing-list, YIPI! :-)

Thursday, October 19, 2006

kdegames survey

During the last aKademy we identified the need to conduct a survey about the current state of applications in the kdegames module, and also to collect suggestions for games in KDE4.

Mauricio did the hard work and thought the questions and created the poll itself. So please, take the poll to demonstrate his work was not in vain and to help kdegames developers decide what to do for KDE 4.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Barcelona 10th KDE Annivesari dinner

So not as big as the official event but at Barcelona some KDE developers, translators and users decided to gather and had a dinner and pub session. Go to http://cat.kde.org/index.php/Sopar_10è_Aniversari to see how the catalan KDE crew looks like.

Solution for KUbuntu 3.5.5 and USB not automounting

Well, some friends of mine had this problem, after updating to Kubuntu 3.5.5 packages their USB/iPod did not automount like before. At the end we discovered i had a newer libhal (0.5.7-1ubuntu18.1 vs 0.5.7-1ubuntu18) because they did a 3.5.3 -> 3.5.5 update while i did 3.5.3 -> 3.5.4 -> 3.5.5 and the 3.5.4 update adds the newer libhal, so if you are having problems with Kubuntu 3.5.5 and did not do the 3.5.4 update, add
deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-354 dapper main
to your sources and update and you'll see libhal update appear and hopefully fix your problem. Riddell toldme he is going to add libhal update also to the 3.5.5 packages, but meanwhile, try it.
Update 1:Seems that does not work for everybody, sorry for you, it worked for some.
Update 2:Seems that Riddell already added new hal packages to 3.5.5 repository so this is not needed anymore, just update and [dist-]upgrade.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

KDE 10th birthday Dinner at Barcelona

Well, it's not going to be as big nor interesting as the Official 10 Years KDE event but at barcelona we are also organizing our small event, so if you want to know some KDE people drop by in our dinner.

P.S: Yes, i know yesterday i missed okular features #4 blog, but it'll have to wait a bit more, good things are worth to wait for! Stay tuned!

Saturday, October 07, 2006

okular features #3

Overview mode



Okular provides a new displaying mode in adition to the single page and facing pages already provided by kpdf. In this mode you set the number of columns you want to see in the page view and the pages are layouted following this setting.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

okular features #2

Word processor-like text selection



Okular provides real text selection, that is you can select from half one line to the half of a line below it and get the lines in between completely selected. This fixes the problem kpdf had with the old rectangle based selection.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

okular features #1

Sebastian Klüger (Candy man from now on ;-)) suggested me to blog about the cool things okular developers are doing, so here i am, starting a bi-daily "okular features" series so you all can know them.

Extraction of embedded files in PDF documents



We are now able to extract embedded files in PDF documents, you can see here a screenshot showing a document with two embedded files. You can access the embedded files via the menu and also via the yellow bar that appears on the top of the screen when the document you have just opened has an embedded file.

Friday, September 29, 2006

okular lightning talk

Today Pino and me did a lighting talk in aKademy 2006 about okular. It was quite good accepted. Assistants liked all the cool new features okular has like REAL text selection, page rotation, overview mode, LOTS of document format support and annotation support. In short, okular rocks :-) As everything it could rock even more so do not hesitate to join us on #kpdf freenode channel and help us building the coolest document viewer out there.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

aKademy 2006 kdegames BOF notes

You can find them at http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDEgames+Akademy+2006+BOF+Notes

Summary:
* Identify if any game can be dropped
* Invite other programs to join the extragear
* #kdegames channel exists!
* We want to attract all that games programmers that use scripting

Sunday, September 24, 2006

aKademy - Day 1

Opening
The typical opening by politicians and university people but this time people had a Unix background so they knew what they were talking about, not like last year in Málaga when some of the people were just there "because i put money and i want to speak"


Keynote - Looking ourselves in the eye
Aaron spoke about ourselves, what KDE is, what are our challenges and what we can do to succeed even more. Basically we are a reef and we need to get KDE4 out :-D Also a nice presentation with photos of some KDE people in the most embarassment moments he could find.


QtDBus
Thiago explained us why we are going to use Dbus for KDE4, it is basically a DCOP solution but with the benefit that there are much more language bindings so we have more possibilities to have our application used, that is cool :-)


Portland
Waldo was here to explain us the necessity ISV and ISD have for xdg-utils, because they don't want to choose a specific desktop for their independent application so they need to have programs that let them install an icon, launch a browser or controll the screensaver without having to code specifically for KDE/Gnome/etc.


Phonons in Solids
And interesting talk about two of the new technologies we are going to have in KDE4. Solid is going to give as independent access to the hardware system which is a good thing like you as a KDE developer do not want to care if you are interacting with a Linux kernel, a FreeBSD kernel or a Windows kernel. Solid in the other hand is providing the application developers a quite powerful set of classes to do audio and video output and input. Instead of beign a full system like we had with arts it's based on existing code that is good because we code less and have the same functionality :-)


Keynote - The State of the Linux Desktop
John Cherry gave and overview of what the OSDL is, and specifically which are the goals of the Desktop part of the OSDL. Of course it includes the Portland initiative Waldo spoke about, but they also do market studies about Linux adoption and usage around the world. Of course you always need to take these figures with one or two grains of salt, but it seems we have a small but steadly growing percentage of users around the world, so "The Year Of The Linux Desktop" is near ;-)


Competition and Cooperation
A talk by John Palmieri (J5), a Gnome hacker, and no, we did not kill him ;-) At least not publically... He did a quite intelligent talk speaking why we are not really "the enemy" as fighting for a 1-5% market share is ridiculous when the major player has 95% of the market. He also spoke about the dynamics that keep KDE and Gnome improving, like the fact that when you see something in Gnome that is nice, you implement it in KDE and [try to] make it a bit better, then Gnomies see our implemtenation and improve theirs and so on.


Ricoh
That was a talk that really did not fit much in the KDE conference, as it was not Desktop oriented, but was quite interesting because i learnt how Ricoh have opensourced the stack that powers their [high-end?] printers, based on BSD kernel and a Java Framework, and that has made people some crazy things like implement Sudoku/Tetris/etc for the printers, wait, did i say it was not Desktop oriented? Some of their printers have a resolution of up to 800x600 so i think we could make a KDE version for Ricoh printers :-D Anyone up to the job?


Multi-Head RandR
Keith Packard from Intel and one of the X gods spoke about auto detection, auto configuration and autoAnything of X screens and how that can make us save battery power for our little and battery hungry laptops. Really my description is not good enough for the coolness he showed us in the demonstration.


Organization of KDE Events
Martijn and Claire illustrated us about how and what we should to to organize a [KDE] event, ranging from BIG things like aKademy or the KDE 4 Series meetings to some smaller things like regional meetings. Interesting to attend but difficult to explain, sorry for you guys that were not there!


KDE Support
Kevin Krammer explained us the huge amount of work that has to be done in order to help our ever growing user base. He knows that developers are getting out of user support because there are too many users to read their mails and help, so we need a new kind of people to do the interfacing between the developers and the users. That is a rewarding and also sometimes difficult work, but he insisted you can get into it without having much or any technical knowledge of KDE. So if you ever wondered what you could do for KDE if you do not have developing/translating/artwork/documentation skills, you just found your area! Join the support guys!


How To Make Your Program Popular
Inge spoke about his experience about beign the KOffice Marketing person. He clarified us that he really is not doing marketing, but just promotion that is a smaller subset of Marketing. Also it is "easy" to improve the promotion of your application, blog about it, send news to The Dot, speak of how cool it is to your friends and colleagues and soon you will create a nice promotion snowball :-) In the specific case of KOffice he told us that they have maybe even doubled the developer community by getting more awareness and also they have the "Next cool thing in Office Suites" tag so everyone mentions KOffice when speaking about ODF and such. Good work Inge!

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

KMahjongg 10th best Linux Game :-)

Techgage has voted the best 10 Linux games and KMahjongg is the 10th one :-) Congratulations to everyone involved! And be sure it will continue rocking thanks to Mauricio it will surely rock even more :-)

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

aKademy-es 2006 apology

At Akademy-es 2006 we did two contests that had rather nice prizes, unfortunately, the organizer (no, that's not me) has virtually disappeared from the face of earth, does not answer e-mails and does not go to LUG meetings, so i have no way to contact and put pressure on him.

So, sorry, you will probably end up without prizes and there's nothing i can do about it :-/

Friday, September 15, 2006

okular talk tomorrow

I know it's a bit late, but anyway i'll say it :D Tomorrow in my LUG we do a small series of talks where i'll do a small talk presenting okular and showing that thing that seems to be KDE 4. So if you are from barcelona get up yourself and join us. In the morning i'll also probably be on the local event of the Software Freedom Day.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

At last :-)

It has been a bit more difficult than what i expected, but finally got my driving license this morning. It was the fifth attempt but better fifth than sixth :D

Saturday, September 09, 2006

kdegames revival

kdegames is getting hot :-) Just look at the mailing list number of messages or at the big number of replies my kmahjongg blog created. So now that kdegames has again a reasonable number of people we have created the #kdegames IRC channel so if you are interesed in game development or want to suggest some features for existing games do not hesitate to drop by and have a nice talk!

Friday, September 08, 2006

Poppler for windows

The most people that reach my blog from google are looking for the poppler-windows blog, so i thought i would do another one mentioning the cool Sumatra PDF Viewer by Krzysztof Kowalczyk. So if you want a poppler-based PDF viewer for windows, have a look at Sumatra PDF.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Konversation 1.0 out

Well, i'm not a konversation developer, only an user and translator, so i should not be really be doing this but as it seems the konversation team ran out of steam with the packagement and last minute fixes i'm going to spread it.

Konversation 1.0 is out :-)

Check out the HUGE changelog at the Konversation homepage.

P.S: Konversation is a nice IRC client for KDE ;-)

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Weird reality

You go with a friend and buy a laptop. Boot it up, find Windows preintalled, start up the demo that is on the desktop that says "Know your new XXX computer" and it crashes. You do all the upgrades, start up the demo again and it crashes.

I'm still wondering if XXX company does quality control or they just pack up things and send them to the shops.

I'm not happy.

Update: I did not want to gave the names but as people keep asking shop is MediaMarket and laptop is an Asus Z93

Update 2: He went to the shop and got another one of the same model and seems to be working fine now :-)

Friday, September 01, 2006

No internet

Unless a miracle has ocurred today and someone materialized from nowhere to fix my phone i'm without internet all the weekend and already for 3 days so if you need me for something or are wondering why i seem to suddenly have gone dead is because someone unplugged my phone cable from the cable box that is outside my building and now i'm waiting a worker from phone company to come and fix it.

Update: Seems phone company workers also work on saturday and i just got my connection fixed :-)

Sunday, August 27, 2006

okular snapshot released

A few days ago you got the oportunity to play with the KDE 4 Krash snapshot release, now the okular team provides you with more Krashing experience. You can test okular, the multiformat viewer successor of kpdf. You are all free of sending comments to the team, but remember, a line of code is worth more than one hundred words, so join the party and help us supporting more formats or perfecting the existant ones!

You can get the tarball at KDE's ftp server.

Update: There seem to be some problems compiling the snapshot against latest qt-copy, have a look at this page to find how to solve it.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

FLOSS project survey

Today i got a mail from a person of a project i'm sort of collaborating about spreading a FLOSS survey a bit. I know you guys are a bit fed up with FLOSS surveys, but these people are serious, they already did a CVS
analsys of the KDE project
and published it! not as most surveys you see around that finally don't publish much, so if you have five free minutes do not keep them free and take the survey!

Friday, August 25, 2006

KMahjongg revamp

Just look at this http://www.tabuleiro.com/mauricio/kmahjongg_svg.png new screenshot and compare it with the older one at http://www.tabuleiro.com/mauricio/kmahjongg_old.png.

You can see that KMahjongg for KDE4 will be nice eh ;-)

So all of you go and thank Mauricio Piacentini for his cool work, now!

Friday, August 18, 2006

Finished!

Today i finally finished HOMM5 :-) That means i have one adiction less to devote time to and that i would have more time for Free Software.

Only would because tomorrow i'm leaving for five days of holidays with my family.

About the game i'm only saying that it is as adictive as the previous Heroes of Might & Magic games even if it adds no new things at all. So if you like the previous versions you'll probably like this one.

Going back to Free Software, August is an interesting month because even most core developers try to take a holiday away from computers, the productivity does not get lower becasue we always get new blood like Will Entriken that is reworking/creating the Getting Started with KDE pages, a cool thing as that is a very frecuently asked question. Go Will!

Monday, August 07, 2006

Ya.com says "The internet is mine"

Ya.com, a Spanish ISP, has just thought the internet is of its property, as for now, each page you visit that does not exist, like http://www.thispagereallydoesnotexist.com/ will get you redirected to their search page if you are using their service, obviouly abusing from DNS power. They may argue this is to help the user as "maybe" in the search page they'll find what they really were looking for, but as i have experienced in real life it's nothing bug disturbing, as i typed http://newbugs.kde.org/ (URL where i thought Dirk was doing his experiments for the new bugzilla) and ended in a ya.com page thinking "since when do we have hosting on ya.com pages?".

I've already sent them a mail asking for the removal of this service, if you are a ya.com user please do so too and let's see if we can get the internet to work again.

If you want to test the pain i feel use 62.151.8.100 as your DNS server.

Friday, July 21, 2006

New blood

New blood in the KDE world should be a good thing, but sometimes it is not.
Why? oh! Why?
you may ask.
It depends on how you use that new blood.

A very good way to use the new blood is Season of KDE. You get new developers, features that interest them and some mentor to help them if they find themselves lost. Almost sure a win situation. This way we are getting a person (Rafael Rodríguez) to try to fix the VERY SLOW rendering of patterns in okular.

Then there is the bad way, and sorry Jonathan, i know i kinda promised you not to bitch more about Rosetta, but i have to. That nice Translate This Application button is the worst executed idea ever. It redirects you to a page where people will translate applications for KUbuntu (potentially overriding real KDE translation) and people will not know they are not contributing to KDE, moreover this people probably won't know the style used for translations, so their translation will be totally out of the rest of translations.

The good implementation of that idea should have been putting that person in contact with the KDE translators team, but that would remove the KUbuntu coolness from the equation ...

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Things to see in Morocco

This is completely FLOSS unrelated, you can skip it now if you are 100% geek ;-)

Ok, now that i've eliminated 100% geek people, let me ask one thing.

Which are the must see places in Morocco?

I'm going there a whole week in December with some friends but we do not know much about the country so i thought asking here, probably some of you have been in Morocco and have good suggestions on what we should visit.

Thanks!

Update: I'm back from Morocco, if you want to read about it go to this blog post

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Akademy hosting ends early!

Hi, this is just a reminder to all those people out there that want to come to aKademy but still have not registered. Last day to pay for aKademy hosting is JULY 23rd so you better get yourself to register and pay the hosting quickly or you will have to find accomodation by yourself if you register later.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Thanks TSS!

What's TSS would 99.99% of you ask? It's short for Transport Simulation Systems, the company where i work, and why do i thank them?

Because they sending me to aKademy 2006 and paying trip and hosting. This is quite a nice thing for them to do as the only KDE related thing we do is developing with Qt :-) It's so strange Tink suggested they are tired of me and they are sending me a few days off, hope not!

So, remember, if you ever are in need of a Micro or Macro traffic simulator using Qt that is multiplatform and somewhat remotely helps KDE, have a look at www.aimsun.com.

I suck

This is a follow up to the I rock blog from a few days ago, maybe with it, some people tought i am that kind of person that can only see his good points and thinks himself is perfect, just to make sure, i'm not that kind of person :-D

And why i suck? Well, today was my fourh fail trying to pass the driving test and i did get into contrary direction no less!!!

Well, at least i lasted a bit more than that poor girl that could not even start because she did not remember of disengaging the hand brake :-/

Well, five is a good number right?

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Registered!

I'm #20. That is a quite high number given aKademy 2006 registrations started this morning :-)

See you in Dublin!

Friday, June 30, 2006

Racist me? No!

Well, i'm getting the habit of blogging about non FLOSS things, this is about this morning discussion with a woman on the underground.

So that's the situation:
* I get though the entrance, a woman does too, two north-african get throught the entrance without paying
* Woman says "Here in Spain we do pay for the service!" in very loud voice
* The north africans think its better saying nothing and just continue their way
* i have a "Let's improve the world" feeling and try to argue with the woman
* "That was a bit of racist comment, don't you think?"
* "Racist? Me? No! What bothers me is that they are no paying!"
* "Yeah, that's what you said in Spain right?"
* "I did not even look at their faces!"
* "Come on, if it had been me you would have also said in Spain..."
* "Well, really i wanted to inform them, maybe they don't know..."
* "You really think they are utterly stupid and don't know they have to pay?"

And some more strange things she said i don't completely remember.

Maybe the woman does not want to be racist, but her subconscious is, maybe only a bit, but...

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Spying a bit on GUADEC

Today i went to Vilanova to assist to a few talks of GUADEC to see how our gnome friends where doing.

Today and tomorrow are the "warmup weekend" and most/all the talks where in spanish or catalan and directed towards the local people. I went to a dbus talk, 5 mins of GTK programming (where i thanked $DEITY that we do not use C for doing OOP), a talk about l10n of gnome to catalan (they seem to be doing a bit better in terms of number of translators than ca l10n team of kde) and a talk about the new distribution that will go into all catalan schools next year, based on Suse, using gnome desktop as default but also shipping KDE.

Some things worth mentioning:

  • They had rather big posters hanging on the outside of the buildings where GUADEC takes place, that is a GOOD THING and we should do something similar, AFAIK it was not done in málaga last year.

  • They seem a bit more concerned about us that we about them, at least all talks i went mentioned KDE in some way or other, i don't remember that happening in Málaga (although maybe it happened)

  • It is much nicer having the conference center in the center of the village, like GUADEC in Vilanova or this year's aKademy in Dublin, than in the outside like happened in Málafa

  • Gnomies are normal people! WTF i thought gnomes where small people with a large beard!

  • They had a nice o'Reilly stand in the main hall selling books, although some of there were not really ON TOPIC there (think JavaBeans)

  • There was WIFI hotspots for all around, first time i listed available networks i thought "i'll go home with some hundreds of neurons less"

  • There were very few power plugs

  • Warmup weekend is free, but the core sessions are 30€, i think making contributors pay is not a good thing

  • freenode IRC network was not working (probably due to too many people trying to connect from the same IP)



All i all, is nice meeting/hearing people that have different preferences so you don't end up in self indulgence

Monday, June 19, 2006

Shame!

Warning: This is not KDE nor FLOSS related, you can freely skip it if you don't want to read a real life rant.

Yesterday, in Catalonia there was a referendum to vote about a new statute of autonomy.

And more than 50% of voters did not vote, i feel shame for that. Not voting means you are out of game, you can vote yes, vote no, do a blank vote, put KDE logo on the voting envelope, or even put a photo of yourslef on it, but VOTE!

If you don't vote, you just demonstrate that you are nothing more than a drone, going to work, having some vacation, seeing world cup on TV and repeat, you can not express a "i'm dissapointed with politics" with abstention, you just demonstrate dullness of mind.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

I rock :-)

Just saw on Adriaan's graph that i'm the oldest commiter with a 100% activity percentage :-).

Obviously i'm not the best commiter, coolo, dfaure, and mlaurent have to fight for it, but ei, i'm the first on something :-D. Cheers to markey for beign the runnerup on the oldest commiter with 100% activity!

More seriously, we might consider removing commit rights from all that oldies that only have a "square" for their first week and never ever commited anything more.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Popularity contest

Don't know if the [k]ubuntu running people already know of it or not, but i just found http://popcon.ubuntu.com/ a page that list the most "popular" ubuntu packages. You just have to install popularity-contest and dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest

Once the numbers get high enough it'll be interesting for developers to see how much their program is used.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Wish me luck

Tomorrow i'm taking my drivers license practic test, i'm going to need some luck to make it perfect so i get the license so i need your wishful thinking ;-)

On a side note i svn rm kpdf from svn! You have to use oKular on branches/work/kde4/playground/graphics from now on if you want to use kpdf on KDE4. I need helpers there as Piotr (that did oKular as part of a Google's Summer of Code) is not helping as much i would want, so if you want to take part come and join the fun!

Sunday, May 07, 2006

You know you're a freak...

... when you go to the annual party of your computer science university (FIB/UPC) and there's a giant poster that says

FestaFib 2006
lol omg wtf rtfm

and you are the only person among your friends that know what the second line means.


On the kpdf/oKular/poppler side i've been porting code from kpdf/oKular to the poppler-qt4 frontend lately and almost have a full port of oKular to use the poppler-qt4 frontend. After that i'll svn rm kdegraphics/kpdf and focus on trying to improve oKular to live to everyone's expectations.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Most used Free Software Browser

If you ask anyone that knows what a browser is and what Free Software is, what is the most used Free Software Browser, [almost] everyone will answer "Firefox!".

But it is not, sorry to be a bubble buster to all that people that thought Free Software was having a nice champion on Firefox.

What why is Firefox not Free Software may you ask? Simple, because of this

This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports (including Denied Parties, entities on the Bureau of Export Administration Entity List, and Specially Designated Nationals).


And everyone knows Free Software and Open Source definitions are completely AGAINST limiting who can use the software.

So probably most used Free Software Browser is Konqueror.

Update: Ok, i'm completely stupid and idiot, and wrong, because seems everyone accepts removing freedoms because someGoverment says it, does not make your program unfree, i completely disagree, but obviosuly i'm not a lawyer and as said i'm stupid and idiot so my opinion is worth zero.

BTW this never wanted to be an attack to Firefox or to anyoneelse, just a curious thing i discovered.

Anyways i thought one could post random thoughts on his blog, but now it seems planet.kde.org is an official kde channel instead of what it says it is "Planet KDE is an aggregation of public weblogs written by contributors to the K Desktop Environment. The opinions expressed in these weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors.
Planet KDE is not a product or publication of KDE e.V.; as such, it does not necessarily represent the views of the KDE project as a whole or the views of KDE e.V." So do not associate this idiot blog with KDE or KPDF or Poppler or other projects i contribute to, the only idiot here it's me, Albert Astals Cid.

Update 2: So it seems that restriction is not transitive, that is, one can download firefox from US to Spain and then one can download it from Spain to Cuba, isn't law something strange? /me is glad he has not anything to do with law in his life.

That strange feeling...

Sometimes i have that strange feeling that people are trying to make fun of me.

Just know i've had this feeling again, i've tried to go to a webpage of local radio that also uses internet for the broadcast so i could hear FC Barcelona vs AC Milan soccer match.

The interesting thing is that you can not make it work under linux because they're using a Flash 8 animation to load the audio player!

That itself is awful enough but what is even *nicer* is that once i've went into windows, loaded that flash 8 movie there's a "if you have linux click on this link". WTF! How can i be seeing that in linux if flash8 does not work on it? And even better the link does not work! :-D

Come on, can't you just give me a damn url...

Monday, April 03, 2006

Help with KDE releases translation

Translating the release announcements to different languages is important because that makes it easier for non-english speaking people and media to spread the good news that a new KDE version is out.

If you feel you can help, have a look at http://www.spreadkde.org/handbook/release_promotion/translations

Thursday, March 30, 2006

New live in kde-edu and oKular

This week oKular port to KDE4 got some help from one of our of the kde-edu guys, Pino Toscano, that has been removing Qt3Support calls, improving the cmake support and such much needed things, thanks Pino!

On the edu side, David Saxton has been improving kmplot in the same way, making it more Qt4-ish at a rate of 1 commit each 4 hours :-D

I for one welcome our new overlords!

Sunday, March 26, 2006

First step to World domination

Well, we all know in the deep of our heart that KDE mission is World domination.

We are on the first step to it, as for now once you have installed KDE from source you can not uninstall it anymore.

~/build-cmake/kdelibs4_snapshot$ make uninstall
make: *** No rule to make target `uninstall'. Stop.


PS: That is a joke, not in the way that it is not real, but in the way that i know that it is beign worked out, but i'm so frustated with cmake at the moment that i had to make a joke about it or die.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Let's do the poppler dance

KPDF from trunk (that is what will become KDE 4.0) just got switched to use poppler >= 0.5.1
STOP
oKular (that if everything goes well will be KPDF successor for KDE 4.0) will be switched during the week
STOP
We still do not use poppler-qt4 bindings because i have still to get them complete
STOP
Hope to get them complete for poppler 0.5.2
STOP
That does not mean i approve some distros silently patching KPDF from KDE 3.5.x to use poppler
STOP
LET'S GO TO THE STREET AND DO THE POPPLER DANCE
NOW!
STOP

Friday, March 03, 2006

We are doing right

You know you are on the right way when you are attacked by spanish trolls that accuse you of beign a damn catalan nationalist and also are attacked by catalan trolls that accuse you of beign a damn spanish nationalist :-D

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." - Master Yoda

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Font artist wanted

In blinKen we are using a font that simulates hand drawing to show status messages, the problem is that this font does not have some characters used by some languages so if you always wanted to learn how to use FontForge, now is your oportunity to learn it and do something nice with your artistic skills! Add that missing glyphs to steve font!

If you want to do it contact me for details.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Ubuntu woes

Have a look at this bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/callgrind/+bug/2700.

callgrind is not installable in lastest [K]Ubuntu stable version, and the bug is marked as rejected, how nice :-/

Catalan l10n team and Catalan government work together

Today it was announced that the KDE Catalan l10n team known as ( cat >> KDE ) will work together with TERMCAT, the organization that standarizes new words, usually technology related, in the Catalan language.

The exact collaboration terms are still not completed, but we will surely provide them access to the NX account we have on the OpenUsability server, so they can test the translations while we work on them.

So thanks also to Kurt and the OpenUsability team for providing us with access to that NX machine where the translators can have a look at how their translation will look in a given program, as that is often a program as they translate "unreleased" versions of the programs.

More info on http://www.lafarga.org/node/1052 (Catalan language)

Karma++

I just became a member of MSF so i got some karma boost :-) To all people out there that always thought "it would be nice beign member of a NGO", don't think it anymore, just do it!

Sunday, February 19, 2006

What my work colleagues liked about KDE

Some weeks ago i installed KUbuntu at work to help improving the multi-OS behaviour of our Qt based product.

What is interesting is to know which things they have liked more about KDE, first are konqueror shortchuts gg: imdb: en2es: es2en:, second there is RSIBreak, they like that cute program that helps you avoid RSI, and third and finally they woed about ... kruler!!!

So for all those that say that those little "toys" are not good for KDE shut up, i got office people interested in KDE with all those small progams ;-)

Saturday, February 11, 2006

KDE meetings, Languages and Trolls

Well, if you have a look at Akademy-es 2006 meeting news item on the dot you will see it turned into completely off-topic discussion. Probably my fault, i'm sorry.

This does not means i regret of the comment i did as it is completely right IMHO, let's have a cold look at it.

A) Someone asks language of the meeting
B) Jason Harris says he guess it'll be Spanish as it is the language the wiki is in and also is a event specifically for Spanish people
C) Antonio Larrosa reanswers and says that yeah Spanish will be the main language of the event and that we hope to get people from catalan, basque and galicean translation teams, so that languages will probably be present in the event too. Nothing strange, i remember i spoke Spanish in some moments in the "real" Málaga Akademy with Spanish people and i'm sure some germans spoke german between them also.
D) Someone called Javier Marcet, comes and starts with "Oh my ****!!" + strange sentence about political nonsense that IMHO doesn't fit + "Absurd!", and then asks us to forbid the usage of any language not Spanish.

Sorry, but that is trolling, see it as you want, but people will talk in the language they fell more happy with, forcing people to use a specific language is BAD.

Does this mean i will speak in Catalan to another Catalan if i know there are 10 people around that do not understands us?

Obviously not, noone, nowhere, at any time of the history, as done that, because i will be more "happy" sacrifizing some part of my "speaking mother tongue happyness" to win some "happynes" by the fact that there is more people that understands me.

Obviously you have the right to flame me and disagree, this is all about speech freedom.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Which 64-bit distro?

Probably this week i'm buying a new PC with the dual core 64-bit AMD Processor. Any suggestion of which 64-bit distro is better?

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

KPDF problem with Save As...

KPDF as a problem in which if you save a document over itself while it is open using the Save As... hability the document gets destroyed. So don't do it ;-) You've been warned. More at http://kpdf.kde.org/news.php