Author: Johan Thelin

>The wether forcast mentioned snow on Wednesday. We had some yesterday and today it is really snowing away. Looks like I’ll have to buy a sledge for Lisa! Will be great fun.

Right now I’m sitting, writing about Qt’s new animation classes released in 4.6. Looking at the snow, writing about this, makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to implement animations that delete themselves and their items when the item leaves a given bounding rectangle.
Why? Then you can define a bounding rectangle, e.g. the screen, and create snow flakes with randomized animations and just let them drop.
I remember doing something like that back in the STOS/AMOS days. You created a sprite, defined an animation pattern and then forgot about it (as I recall). This was great for the 2D shooters of the time with aliens attacking in predefined patterns. Not 100% sure how the surviving aliens (yes, you have to take bad players into account, including me) where handled. The ones you hit could be taken care of in a collision detection handing function called from the inner loop… well, nostalgia might make me look at this in a forgiving light.
Anyway, the snow is falling. There will be more tomorrow. It will probably be cold all the way to Christmas. Looks like we’re in for a white Christmas.

>One month of flying

>It has been a month since I started working in my own business. My former employer has been very kind and let me explore this while on a leave of absense, i.e. I have somewhere to return to.

This Monday I sent my first large invoice to my biggest customer. Now, time to wait for the next pay. What have I learned this far?
  • Bookkeeping – there are a lot of receipts to handle, especially when starting. Insurances, web servers, car insurance, etc.
  • Working from home – it works fairly well for me. I’ve come up with a scheme to keep myself motivated and actually working. However, a simple business lunch now takes three hours instead of one.
  • Money takes time – I’ve been given offers, signing deals, working more than ever, and my next pay check is still not due until mid January. Worth thinking about.
  • Time is not money – at least not yet. By being self employed I’m so much more flexible so that I get more quality time with my family, while making the money that I need (and some extra, but I guess that is for future expenses).

So, one month done, many more to come. This far, I’m looking forward to work every day.

>FSCONS 2009

>So, it is kind of stupid to write about these things afterwards, but the time before a conference is always filled with preparations and far too much time spent in OO.o Impress.

The last Saturday I attended FSCONS’09. This turned out to be another great event (I’ve been there two years now). I met lots of interesting people and got faces to a couple of names who’s blogs I’ve been following for a while now.
My plan for this year was to do two workshops – one on Qt for Embedded Linux (which I try to focus on), and one on the Qt SDK, trying to get people started. Both these sessions turned into something else – probably due to the unclearness of what a workshop is intended to be.
The Embedding Qt workshop (slides) had a great turn-up. The idea was to go through the configuration process of Qt/X11, Qt/embedded targetted at QVFb and then have a look at the configuration and deployment of Qt for an actual embedded target. Given a 90 minutes slot, I knew that compilation time was going to be an issue. When it turned out that only one attendee wanted to give it a try, this session turned into an ordinary talk (the one brave guy gave up after the Qt/X11 build – thank you still!). However, the talk was great, lots of interesting questions and great feedback. I really enjoyed the interaction with the audience and at the end Knut Yrvin (an actual norwegian troll) showed up, adding even more facts to the discussion.
The Qt SDK workshop (too few slides to share) also had a great turn-up. My plan was to get people to install the SDK and then show them the basics. I think that something like 5-10 people actually ran the installer, so that was a great success. The demo, however, could have needed some more planning from my side. I showed signals/slots, some widgets and the concept of layouts. For that, I used 40 minutes of my 30 minutes slot, so there where loads of unaswered questions at the end (thanks for everybody coming up to me afterwards having a chat).
To summarize – my aim with workshops did not really work in this setting, however, the quality of the audience and the resulting discussions turned this into a great event for me. I hope that you liked it as well!

>Warning – broken links ahead

>So, the day finally came when I switched from a fairly broken and badly styled MediaWiki-based web page to a WordPress-based one instead. This not only means better management abilites, a working search engine, a proper editor, etc. It also means that links are broken. I don’t write are likely to be – there are broken links out there as I have not migrated all contents. If you run into one – feel free to tell me and I’ll try to sort it out.

The result from this move will hopefully be a more professional presence on the web for my part. Unfortunately I do not have the time I want to polish the site – now I have to prepare my workshops (1, 2) for FSCONS. These events always seems to be so far away into the distant future when I sign up for them – and now it is only two weeks left…

>Off to DevDays

>I’m packing and trying not to forget anything, because my brain will be in auto-pilot-mode tomorrow at 4:50 when the taxi comes around to start my journey to DevDays’09 in Munich.

I’m really looking forward to this, and this year, I’ll even get to speak a few words in the Qt in Education track on Monday. But the biggest upside is to meet all the people in real life. I’m especially looking forward to meeting the QtCentre crew – and all the trolls of course.

>KDE 4

>I’ve finally made the switch on one of my working, production mode, computers. The switch from KDE 3.x to 4.2.2 (I think – whatever Kubuntu comes with). I must admit having been sceptical to all the hype about plasma here, plasma there. Social desktop? I want my old workstation look and feel – I thought.

I absolutely love KDE 4. There is so much new, but everything that is different feels intuit. My very favorite feature is, this far, the device notifying plasmoid. Not having to show the desktop to mount, open or unmount my USB-stick is just – smart and intuit.

Now all I have to do is to find out how to change the clock to a 24h mode… (just noticed, taking the screenshot, after using the desktop for a week…)

>NeHe on OpenGL

>I just saw that Wesley has started to port the NeHe OpenGL tutorial to Qt post 1, post 2 and post 3. Great work! I did that back in the Qt 3 days – so perhaps this can be of interest: NeHe chapters 1-12.

As for the Independent Qt Tutorial. It was a while since I updated, and it only applies to Qt 3. Way back we started to move digitalfanatics.org to a wiki format (yes, it is damn ugly), but the tutorial hasn’t been moved yet – thus the lack of incorporated updates.