A deeper look at signals and slots

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That’s the title of a very useful article by Scott Collins which describes how to combine Boost and Qt in the same application. Unfortunately, Scott’s website went dark many months ago and I’d say it’s not coming back. Luckily, I was able to get a copy from Google’s cache before it was squashed forever. I’d say right now this is the only place in the web you can get this wonderful article: A deeper look at signals and slots

Update: The Wayback Machine has a copy of the article. I’m keeping the PDF in my site just in case, anyway.

xkb-data y ~

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Si utilizas una distribución de Linux/BSD/etc con servidor X11 X.org (el 99%) y estás te ha afectado el bug 9763, que hace que para teclear ‘~’ (dead tilde haya que pulsar AltGr + 4 dos veces (en lugar de una), aquí tienes el parche que corrige el caso de la tilde muerta.

Para Ubuntu Hardy, hay paquetes en mi PPA

Y ahora, que alguien me explique qué clase de mantenedor es el de los mapas de teclado en X.org que cambia el mapa de teclado de español de España porque un usuario brasileño se queja de que cuando tiene puesto el mapa de teclado de portugués y está escribiendo castellano se le hace raro tener que pulsar AltGr+4 para que le salga la ‘~’ (que por otra parte, no hace falta para escribir el idioma, ¡es un carácter especial!). Grrrrr.

Kubuntu Hardy, ksynaptics

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Yesterday I started preparing my computer and myself to upgrade from Kubuntu Gutsy to Kubuntu Hardy.

As trivial as it might seem, any upgrade is quite complex to me because I use a lot of post-stable, and even post-unstable, packages coming from my PPA. I backport packages from Ubuntu unstable, Debian unstable and experimiental, and quite often I package myself versions which are not available yet in any of the former.

Given that the PPA “copy packages” feature does not work for me (when I copy a Gutsy package to a Hardy package, it is built but never made available for Hardy from my PPA), yesterday I spent most of the day producing Hardy versions of my packages and fixing issues (what’s with the libfcgi maintainers!? why are they slightly changing the package name almost with every release!?)

In the end, the upgrade went mostly fine: everything worked save for my USB external disk, the mouse in X, and the volume control. The only missing application was KSynaptics, which I use to disable the touchpad 99% of the time (I like it better my laser mouse).

The external USB disk issue was rather easy to fix: just add usb-storage to /etc/modules.

The mouse problem has drove me crazy for a couple of hours but I finally figured it: the new xorg.conf had set the mouse to InputDevice "Mouse0" "AlwaysCore" (whatever AlwaysCore means) and the fix was as easy as commenting out the "AlwaysCore" part.

KSynaptics missing proved to be a bit more complex. The application does not work with modern versions of X.org, apparently due to X.org people forgetting about proper versioning of APIs, therefore KSynaptics’ developer decided to stop working on it and starting a new application (TouchFreeze) with a different approach. While TouchFreeze works fine, it was missing the enable/disable touchpad actions, which are the only reason I wanted to use it. But my friends, that’s the joy of open-source: I took the sourced code and a few minutes later I had implemented those actions and added a “disabled” icon like the one KSynaptics had. Here is the patch against TouchFreeze 0.2, in case you want to use it (I’ve sent it to the author to inclusion in a future release of TouchFreeze)

Cooking

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Yesterday was a very kitchen-intensive day: about 10 hours baking pastries: muffins (magdalenes in Catalan), tarts (coca de la calda), eggrolls (rotllos d’ou; not Chinese/Korean eggrolls!) and almojàvenes (although here we do not add cheese to the recipe). It was a hard work but I’ve got breakfast and tea snacks for one month 🙂

Live translation

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At Guademy I live translated three conferences from English to Spanish. I have never done that but, given that the translators we had hired told the organization the day before the event they would not come (very unprofessional, btw), there was no other option than using me and my broken English.

All in all, it was an interesting experience. I was told my translation was about 85% accurate, which is IMHO quite good: I had not trained for that, therefore my “buffer” was quite small. The most difficult part of live translating was a) lisp (I’m used to American English, not to British English) and b) memory (I seldomly need to memorize something, therefore my short-term memory is quite bad). Fortunately all the conferences were about open source software I know quite well, therefore specific vocabulary was not difficult.