New Camera

I'm planning to get a new camera for this Christmas, and this time I'd like it to be slightly more pro-ish than my current HP. The plan is to be able to do some more serious photography while still being able to use it as my vacation camera.

My current idea is the Canon EOS 400D - but it seems to be lacking vibration compensation.
I can get it for around 830 EUR including the EF-S 18-55mm lens, a 1GB memory card (SanDisk Ultra II) and a camera bag. Does any of you photographers know a better buy in the range 800-900 EUR? Mail me at e8johan, I use gmail, or just comment this post.

ISBN

I've just got an ISBN of my own: 1590598318. Makes me happy and stressed - that actually means that I have to complete this thing on time.

Off-season entertainment

As the F1 circus has stopped for this year, I've put together two playlists for all grand prix fans out there (hi Tom!). Try watching The History of the Grand Prix Car and The History of Motor Racing. Both available directly from YouTube.

Crosstools

I'm just sitting here waiting for crosstools to finish. Hopefully this will make my work really smooth (fewer hours to charge for though). If everything works I will have a bootable image for an ARM hardware by tomorrow.

BTW - anybody from Gothenburg who enjouys playing with Qt - mail me (e8johan, gmail) or post a comment.

Speeding ahead towards SpeedCrunch 0.7

The last changes to the 0.7 branch brings fixes to CMake builds of both Mac (thanks Matt!) and Win32 binaries (now with application icons). We are getting really close to a final 0.7 release.

Spammed the Planet

Sorry guys - I just managed to do what I hate when others do. I successfully spammed Planet KDE. Notice to blogger users - that is what updating your template does...

Nothing to see

Just trying to convince blogger beta to update the RSS flow.

Stockholm and Open Source

I read this article in today's edition of NyTeknik about a consultancy company (Omicron) recommending Stockholm to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office. The biggest issue was that some functions where missing so advanced users such as controllers and "technical people" (teknikfolk) might need to keep their old Office suites. Smaller issues where that some fonts where different and other cosmetic details. The big benefits was that all users got started right away - no need for additional training - and the licensing costs.

Another nice aspekt is that the representative for the city of Stockholm says that this is not only about licensing costs. The report is a part in a bigger operation to evaluate possibility to use open source within the city.

Finally, the number of users that can be affected are 25000. Pretty neat if it works out.

Quiet due to Beta

I just switched to Blogger Beta and it seems that it caused my RSS feed to stop getting updated. Bummer. I've asked the syndications that I know of to update their settings and to use my ATOM feed as it keeps on working.

Passion for Work

It was a long time since I felt that work was this fun. Right now I'm running uClinux on a soft processor in an FPGA. Right now I get a kernel panic - but still - it is custom hardware with custom software and I can poke at it anywhere in the chain. Well, no time to write here, I'm off to compile my second Linux kernel for the day :-)

Doing hard time

My poor little laptop is feeling busy right now. Synthesizing hardware using Xilinx Platform Studio and compiling a new kernel (for the hardware) in a VMware Player session yeilds good usage of the processor cores. I did not pay for having lots of idle cycles - work harder! (making whip sounds and gesturing wildly over the poor Acer)

Logitech + Cygwin = frustration

This little Logitech + Cygwin hickup just stole about 16 work hours from me. It is always nice to find a solution, just wish that I found it earlier.

SpeedCrunch for the Mac

Thanks to Matt of A Qt Blog SpeedCrunch now comes as a Mac OS X bundle. It has been tested on a PPC Mac, but is supposed to be universal. The size of the download is pretty large (12 MB) but that includes Qt 4 and support for both x86 and PPC. Oh - one more thing - it does not support translations yet - but the numbers are the same everywhere so as long as you can live with English you will be ok.

Winter View

The snow melted away the past weekend, but I still wanted to share a winter photo from last week.

See the Path

Witold Wysota just sent me a patch for the mouse gesture recognizer (mgesturer) for visualising the gesture while gesturing. Great stuff! I've added it to the clean-up branch where I'm working for the moment.

Now you can see the gesture!

Right now I'm waiting for quard to get the live recognizer to work properly before I will prepare the next real release.

If anybody feels ready to write a GTK+ binding - get in touch. I'm e8johan and use gmail. The gesture recognitions part of the code is completely toolkit neutral. All that it takes is some sort of event filter.

Speedy Crunching on the Mac

Matt of A Qt Blog has fixed the CMake file for SpeedCrunch so that it can be used to build a Mac OS X application bundle. Great work! You can find the Mac branch of SpeedCrunch here: http://speedcrunch.googlecode.com/svn/branches/mac/.

Gesturing freely

Once again quard (Irek Khasyanov) has performed miracles. The trunk contains a version of the mouse gesture recognizer that can match movements live - no need for a special activation key - just pick a distinct enough gesture and it all works. Visit the repo at http://code.google.com/p/mouse-gesture-recognizer/source .

Computer parts

I recently went to look for my old graphics card - an old Geforce 4mx. That meant entering my own scrap heap room - the only room I still keep at my parents (I wonder my my wife don't want me to bring all this home).

The room is located at their attic and is quite small, maybe 2 by 3 meters. The floor is packed with CRTs and chassies.

Every geek needs a collection of AT and ATX power supplies. On the top of the shelves are a whole range of marginal stable single board Pentium and Pentium II computers.

Looking at the rest of the shelves you can see mini PCs (some works - the rest are kept since the chassies are small and nice). You can also see some old motherboards (and my brother's hand).

The other side of the room is also charmingly decorated using the cheapest shelves money can buy. You can see a hot-swap HDD case, a motherboard and a single board computer without memory.


On the way out I ran into my Mac pile. It is an LC-II and something more expensive - do not remember what, but I used it for its black and white SCSI scanner.


That is pretty much all the computer junk I keep at my parents. I'll try to go through the collection here later.

Taking care of the plants

This post is somewhat overdue, but I just have to tell you anyway. During the summer vacation I helped my wife when she had to take care of something at her office. The fourth entry says watering the plants, and it is six weeks overdue.

Looking at the desk - here are the plants. I just found this a bit ironic.

Installing, compressing and being dynamic

Ariya and I have had a discussion on whether SpeedCrunch can be built as a statically linked executable on Windows, and if that is a useful thing to have. Ariya has also wanted to try using the UPX binary compression tool on SpeedCrunch. Tonight I sat down and played around with this and these are my findings:

#1 On Windows, we will always require an installer for some users. That is because we need to create start menu entries and such. Perhaps a platform specific part of SpeedCrunch could do this when executed the first time - but an Installer is still nice to have (it also brings and uninstaller which has proven very nice on Windows).

#2 A statically executable for Windows is also nice. Portable applications are gaining popularity and some users are satisfied with a single exe file instead of installing something.

#3 I have not succeded (yet) when it comes to building a Qt environment for Windows that yeilds executables not depending on mingwm10.dll. This has to be solved before the executable can be distributed all alone.

#4 Using UPX on the statically compiled executable brings it from 9 613 312 bytes to 3 182 592 bytes. I bet that I can save even more space by having a think when I configure Qt. (The installer for the dynamically linked version is 4 546 560 bytes).

Snow

The snow arrived during the night - forcing me to take the train to the office. The weather info said snow in south-east, but apparently they meant south...

The garden this morning...