There are a lot of possibilities then. To mention a few:

cronjobs for recurring events (every day/week/month/year)
KTimer to execute commands (like a "minor KAlarm")
KTeaTime (much more simple)
KDialog for custom menu creation with your default timers using sleep command
…

I cannot help you with upgrading your debian system, but perhaps you could do a second installation of a newer one besides current and move to it step by step. In June you have to change anyways → https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/ soon will be end of service.

There are bugs in how KAlarm handles D-Bus calls in KDE 4.14. You need to supply the time as an hours:minutes:seconds value, followed by a space and your time zone name (e.g. Europe/Berlin). So, for your case, the following command should work (although you need to substitute your own time zone):

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qdbus org.kde.kalarm /kalarm org.kde.kalarm.kalarm.scheduleCommand "bash -c 'touch /tmp/touched'" $(date --date='now +30min' +'%H:%M:00 Europe/London') 0 0 "" 0 0

An easier way of creating the alarm is to use KAlarm's command line interface instead of the D-Bus interface:

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kalarm -t $(date --date='now +30min' +'%H:%M') -e touch /tmp/touched