Domain squatters

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Yesterday I spent the morning trying to find an easy to remember, short and nice domain for an idea of mine. Nothing really new, but it’d be useful for me to put a few programming skills I’m forgetting in practice again. After more than 4 hours, I was so frustrated I gave up: domain squatters have registered essentially any potential domain I could come with.

A lot of those domains have been registered for ten years or more, and never have been used for anything.

Many domains are registered by domain-speculator organizations like Sedo, which sell some “great domains” and then use the money to pay for all the other domains they have in the pocket.

Worst of all is the other squatted domains, the ones not owned by Sedo or the likes but by individuals. How can Joe Smith keep paying for a hundred of domains he never uses year after year? Because Google and others seem to be fine with squatters showing Google ads in squatted domains.

So here comes my message to Google: maybe you don’t do evil, but you are supporting the ones who do evil. Please enforce your already-existing AdWords policy to make ads in squatted domains a breach of policy.

Even better: I’d love if NICs started “rescuing” squatted domains.

By popular request: Kopete KIPI plugin

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Should we call it Kipiopete? 😀

Every time I blog about KSnapshot or KIPI, people comment or even e-mail me asking for the same feature: make it possible to send pictures directly to a contact in Kopete.

I thought I’d need to fiddle with Kopete internals, or even wait until KDE Telepathy would be ready, but no: it turned to be very very easy thanks to the rich DBUS interface Kopete implements. Once more, the best way to implement this turned out to be a KIPI plugin, which means you can now also send to your contacts your photos from Digikam, your pictures from Gwenview, etc. Yay!

Mandatory screenshots:

Wait a second! What was that last screenshot? It looks like KSnapshot works on Windows!? Sort of, more on that soon.

A few warnings, though:

  • Facebook does not allow file transfers but Kopete < = 4.5.4 wrongly reports Facebook contacts as being able of accepting files. If you try to send a picture to a Facebook contact, the transfer will fail. This is fixed in Kopete 4.6 (i. e. the KIPI Kopete plugin no longer shows Facebook contacts).
  • For some reason, Pidgin does not accept several files at once. It seems Kopete tries to send them too fast, or something like that. KMess, on the other hand, has no problem accepting all my photo collection at once via MSN Messenger.

Wt PPA: end of support for Ubuntu Jaunty

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Ubuntu Jaunty reached end of support life last October and apparently packages have been removed from Launchpad PPAs too.

Given that it is impossible for me to build binary packages for Jaunty in the Wt PPA due to missing packages, the Wt PPA will no longer provide new packages for Ubuntu Jaunty. The last stable version of Wt for Jaunty is 3.1.6.

On April 2011, Karmic reaches end of support, and Hardy reaches end of support for desktop (support for servers will be available until April 2013). I will provide Wt packages for those distributions while Launchpad supports them.

Packages for 3.1.7a are already available for Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid and Karmic, as usual. Packages for Debian Lenny (in the Wt OBS repository) and Ubuntu Hardy packages will be ready in a few hours. Source packages for Debian Sid are available from mentors.

KIPI plugin for screenshots.debian.net

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The screenshots.debian.net site is a public repository of screenshots taken from applications contained in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and its derivates like Ubuntu.

It was created by Cristoph Haas to help people get an impression of what a certain software will look like on your desktop before you install it. Everybody can take screenshots and upload them through the upload form. So far there are about 3100 screenshots, which is actually a small number if you consider Debian Squeeze contains about 15000 source packages

After I hacked a bit on KSnapshot, the KDE snapshot tool, Sune asked me to add an export to screnshots.debian.net command. I had not thought of it before but that looked like a great idea, it would make the process or taking-screenshot, visit-upload-form, upload-each-screen so much easier!. So I started to develop my first KIPI plugin.

Here is the resulting Debian Screenshots plugin, as you would use it in KSnapshot:

Being a KIPI plugin, it is available not only from KSnapshot but also from Digikam, Gwenview and the other applications which support KIPI plugins:

Which makes me think: what about having a debshots (the software powering screenshots.debian.net) installation over at kde.org and have screenshots for all the KDE applications? What do you think? Promo team? Sysadmins? Setting it up shouldn’t be difficult: I’m no Python or Pylons expert (I’m more of a Ruby and Wt C++ guy 🙂 and got it running in a VM in an afternoon, even solving some SQLAlchemy 0.6 issues.

Hello Planet Debian

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My name is Pau and I am a software developer at Arisnova, a Spanish company specialized in Linux and Windows software development for the supervision and control (SCADA) of industrial environments.

In Debian, I am the maintainer of:

  • witty, AKA Wt, a widget-centric C++ library for developing interactive web applications, with an API much like Qt‘s
  • libmsn, a library for connecting to Microsoft’s MSN Messenger service
  • (co-maintainer) ACE, the Adaptative Communication Environment, an object-oriented framework that implements many core patterns for concurrent communication software

I also happen to be a KDE developer. How’s this related to Debian? You’ll find very soon.

KSnapshot gets social

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When I blogged about the freehand region capture feature I added to KSnapshot a couple of weeks ago, it caught me by surprise that post quickly turned into a wishlist for KSnapshot. I didn’t expect people missed anything in our good old KSnapshot after so many years of development.

Some of the feature requests were very difficult to implement (antialiasing in freehand capture; drop me an e-mail if you know how to do without redrawing the whole selection polygon)[DONE thanks to kdepepo, will be in 4.6] but most of them are pretty reasonable, in my opinion: include mouse pointer, annotations, send to mail, send to Facebook, print, etc.

I quickly started looking into how to e-mail the picture, how to print it, how to send to Facebook, etc, which seemed quite some work. And then Aleix pointed me to a very easy and quick way of getting all those and more in KSnapshot: the KIPI plugins Gwenview, Digikam and others are using.

This is the result:

Now you can send you ksnapshots to Facebook:

Or print your screenshot:

KSnapshot gains free-region capture

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From time to time I need to take a screenshot of some application or a part of my desktop. The obvious solution in KDE is KSnapshot, which is perfect if you want a rectangularly-shaped picture.

Unfortunately, sometimes I want to capture something not rectangular, something which looks more like an ellipse, or even some odd shape. That means I have to take the snapshot, go to Krita, edit and save. Four steps. Ugh.

No more!

I have just committed free-region capture to KSnapshot, which makes possible to capture arbitrary shaps:

Now you can capture only the nice logo from our friends over at the Libre Software World Conference, no need to take a rectangle with a lot of background color:

And this would be the result:

Isn’t it nice?

Wt: new repository for Ubuntu packages

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Wt (pronounced ‘witty’) is a C++ library and application server for developing and deploying web applications. The API is widget-centric and offers complete abstraction of any web-specific application details. You could say it’s like Qt but for the web.

I have been packaging Wt for Debian and Ubuntu, and providing backports for Ubuntu, for years now.

So far, Wt packages were just one more citizen amongst the many other packages in my PPA. Invariably, I received complaints and suggestions pointing in the direction of chaos and havoc: installing Wt from my PPA and running apt-get full-upgrade meant many packages were updated (just try and do that on a Hardy: half the distribution is upgraded :-)). Some of the updated packages were as essential as g++, Boost, Qt, Samba, ALSA and GStreamer. While I seldomly broke anything, I understand people would be worried for their systems, especially people running servers.

From today on, Wt packages will no longer be available from my PPA but from a new, dedicated repository: the Wt PPA.

The Wt PPA contains only the essential packages required to install Wt on a basic system. You do not need to enable backports, proposed or anything: just add the Wt PPA repository to your out-of-the-box Ubuntu and install the libwt* packages. Currently, packages for Hardy, Jaunty, Karmic and Lucid are available. Packages for Maverick will be available as soon as bug 647597 is fixed.

Click here to go to the Wt PPA

I hope you enjoy it.

PS If you need packages for Debian Lenny, check my OpenSuse Build Service repository. Read more at the Wt wiki