Thursday, October 30, 2008

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/

Friday, October 17, 2008

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!

Saturday, October 11, 2008

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 ;-)