Well, it s been some time since I last wrote here and things are quite hectic, due to some real-life happenings.
Announcement
For those people that are insterested in a
small PDF viewer, based on
an actively maintained backend, and that
doesn t bring your computer to a halt when you try to zoom your documents when you need to see some details, then you might want to give
this version of xpdf a try.
I already received some reports for some bugs and fixed them, with one of them being a problem related by a kind user of
Gentoo.
Motivation
Some people have asked me why this even needs to exist in the first place and I agree that it would be better if it didn t: I would love to spend my time actually
using my computers rather than
fixing my computers for better tasks (read: studying Mathematics, etc).
The upstream maintainer of xpdf uses it as one source of income and keeps it running across many system (even legacy ones). I
imagine that this one of the reasons why he tries to keep xpdf almost self contained, with many parts that could be delegated to other libraries, and with some abstraction code that makes the code compile even in the presence of
very broken compilers. Of course, this means, in part, that as long as you take more duties, maintaing the code becomes more and more complex.
He told me that he doesn t offer an open development tree because he wants to give his customers some advantages over the public version and his reasons are perfectly justifiable, of course. He also manifested the interest of possibly basing xpdf on a more modern toolkit and, when I asked him what that would be, he mentioned that, perhaps, it would be Qt. The development of xpdf will, quite probably, take newer directions.
Unfortunately, xpdf has not seen a new upstream release since
2007-02-27. It did, though, have
some patchlevel updates released. Taking care of the maintainance of the code is a
high concern for distributions.
Some people, though, would like to
keep it simple (me included). Unfortunately,
some efforts to
maintain it had
not had the
necessary coordination and duplication of effort has occured.
Proposal
I am willing to become a patch aggregator for the code in xpdf with a poppler backend. I would love to give it some refactoring too, drop some of the legacy code that is not used (and only serves to make the code hard to read), and adopt some good coding style standard (I particularly
like the one from the Linux Kernel with the proper adaptations for C++).
I have already
contacted the people at Gentoo, and I would love to get people from Fedora, Ubuntu, and Suse involved also. Alas, the last time I tried to mail their mailing lists, I got messages telling me that my messages were rejected or waiting for moderation, because I was not a subscriber. I never heard back, since.
I appreciate it if you could help spread the word.
Thanks.
For the second time (First time was in 2008; I didn't join in 2009 as I travelled to Nicaragua on that date), I took part of the World Naked Bike Ride. The WNBR is a global effort, where people in ~150 cities all over the world go cycling nude on the streets of our towns, with varied demands, including:
One of the things I most like about WNBR is its diversity. Not everybody goes for the same reasons. As people who read me often will know, I took part because I believe (and act accordingly!) that the bicycle is the best, most efficient vehicle in by far most of the situations we face day to day, but we need to raise awareness in everybody that the bicycle is just one more vehicle: On one side, we have the right to safely ride on the streets, like any other vehicle. On the other side, we must be responsible, safe drivers, just as we want car drivers to be.
Ok, and I will recognize it before anybody complains that I sound too idealistic: I took part of the WNBR because it is _tons_ of fun. This year, we were between 300 and 500 people (depending on whom you ask). Compared to 2008, I felt less tension, more integration, more respect within the group. Of course, it is only natural in the society I live in that most of the participants were men, but the proportion of women really tends to even out. Also, many more people joined fully or partially in the nude (as nudity is not required, it is just an invitation). There was a great display of creativity, people painted with all kinds of interesting phrases and designs, some really beautiful.
Oh, one more point, important to me: This is one of the best ways to show that we bikers are not athletes or anything like that. We were people ranging from very thin to quite fat, from very young to quite old. And that is even more striking when we show our whole equipment. If we can all bike around... So can you!
Some links, with obvious nudity warnings in case you are offended by looking at innocent butts and similar stuff:
The eSATA SheevaPlug is supported by the Debian installer and by Debian
now. I've updated the 
Like you, dear Internet readers, I have no shortage of reading material. I have ready access to more engaging, high quality, informative and relevant information than I can possibly digest. Every day, I have to choose what to read, and what to pass by. This seems like 
Some minutes before the release of 3.20100610 we convinced 
A bug fix release
Some people still ask me from time to time when I'll upload