Author: Johan Thelin

>One of the nice things about Qt, in my opinion, is that they satisfy the needs not only of the F/OSS community, but also by the big dragons creating closed source software. They do this along the principle of “Quid Pro Quo”, that is, if you make money without sharing your source, you need to pay. If you share your source we [Trolltech, which I’m not affiliated with] share ours for free.

Anyway, holders of commercial Qt licenses can do the same thing for their software. This is what VCreateLogic just did with their GCF framework. According to Prashanth, they sold 13 commercial licenses in one month – congratulations!

I got to know GCF as a judge in last year’s QtCentre programming contest. It takes the abstraction one level beyond widgets and make it possible to build user interfaces using components. The cool thing is that you get a modern (albeit Microsoft-ish) look for free. And as GCF is dual licensed, you can try it out for your F/OSS project right now.

>So, as a final follow-up to my desperate out-cry, I’ve solved problem #2. Thanks to nosrednaekim for pointing me in the right direction. Also, to jucato, setting TerminateServer to true did not help, however I’m using an ATI card.

So, now everything works again and I will not try to achieve window wobbliness for another couple of months :-)

>I’m just following up on my last post – thanks to everyone commenting!

Regarding points #1 and #3, this was compiz running and wm. I’m back to kwin after having removed the file $HOME/.kde/share/config/compizasWM.

For point #2, I’ll deal with it as well, but is seems to be an issue in the proprietary ATI driver’s package. When changing to the free ATI driver I cannot get the resolution I want (I admit – I did not hunt for mode lines for very long).

>I just used the Kubuntu upgrade tool to get the latest goodies from Hardy (wobbly windows here I come). However, this resulted in a strange looking system. I’ve found three symptoms:

#1 Klipper and friends start in windows in the top left corner before finding their way down to the kicker dock.

#2 Selecting “logout” or pressing ctrl-alt-backspace results in a blank screen, a hard reset is required to get back to business.

#3 Window decorations are messed up. For instance, Firefox gets some old-style KDE 2-ish look and RMB clicking on the title bar results in what looks like an unthemed menu. However, the desktop menu looks alright.

If anyone knows of a good way to resolve these issues, do let me know.

>
Known to my wife and me as Tok, Lisa was born May 2 2008 at 10.46.

>As you already know, this years edition of the QtCentre Programming Contest, we will judge applications in a given range of categories. This time I will discuss the education and project management categories.

For us at QtCentre, the education category was accepted without discussion. The need and usefulness for the entire Qt community of having Qt and Qt-based tools in the education field is enormous. Just imagine having started with Qt or a competing technology – what would you pick for your first real world project?

Project management was another easy pick. There is a lack of easy to use project management applications out there. This gives room for new applications as well as innovation – something that we value and enjoy.

>This seems to be some sort of trend at Planet GNOME.

history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
96 ls
89 cd
78 make
33 rm
23 wget
22 grep
19 mv
16 sudo
16 kate
15 tar

What does it tell you? I tend to move about and look for files, make stuff, remove files, download things, search for strings using grep (preferably followed by some sed magic and xargs to open kate with the relevant files). Finally, I edit using Kate and build daily deliveries using tar.

>I thought I’d continue writing about the QtCentre Programming Contest 2008. First up, a rule change: paragraph 7 has been modified to include KDE 4.1.x for the Plasmoid contestants per request. Next, out thoughts on the categories, starting with collaboration.

We want to see collaboration applications, that is, applications that let users interact, create things together and cooperate. Why is this interesting? The world is a more and more interconnected place. While this is a challenge, it is also a place of opportunity, and an area where Qt offers a range of classes that helps you has a developer to be creative. These factors makes us believe that this is a category that can produce great results, so register your entry today!

>One of the better parts of being a member of the QtCentre administration team is that you get the opportunity to run the annual programming contest. In the first stage, we discussed how to pitch it this year. Last year we tried to divide the entries between developer apps, end user apps, libs, etc. This year we ‘re trying something different. The categories this year are: collaboration, education, project management, automation, demo, plasmoid and newcomer. If you are curious about the details, look no futher than here. I will discuss our thoughts when choosing these categories later on.

In the previous days we reached the next stage of the preparations. I got to talk to lots of interesting sponsors and partners. The nice thing to notice the all the positive feedback that we got. This year, the sponsors making the contest possible are: Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Integrated Computer Solutions Inc., Trolltech ASA, BitRock, Thorsen Consulting, Apress and basysKom. (Yes Apress are donating some copies of my book, the Foundations of Qt Development).

Now, I’m eager for one of the best stages of helping out with the contest – seeing the contestants and trying them out.

>Yes – I do suck at image editing – but Kubica did it – POLE!