Author: Johan Thelin

>It has been a week since I last blogged – and there are lots of things going on. Here is a quick summary:

– Book-wise, we’re currently in both tech review and copy editing – meaning that I get documents to look at from all directions. I’m trying to be structured, but sometimes it feels like there is too much coming in and too little getting done. Also, I seriously need to get the appendixes done. If you have a project that you feel would fit (either a class library or a development tool), comment or mail me (e8johan, using gmail).
– Work-wise, I’ve finally started to prepare for my first training sessions. I’m going to Denmark and Stockholm to teach Linux on Xilinx platforms. Will be fun.
– Work-wise II, I attended a great course called “efficient consultants” in Ängelholm last week. A good, balanced, material for the course, superb trainer (Lucas from Retorium) and a very nice evening getting to meet some of the guys from our Lund and Stockholm offices.
– Life-wise, Åsa and I are celebrating our second anniversary today. Hooray!
– Life-wise II, I will be celebrating my 28th birthday on Wednesday.
– F1-wise, great work of Kubica to finally out-qualify Heidfelt. A sad day for Heidfelt but a great fourth for Kubica. Also, congratulations to Hamilton for the championship lead. I’m just wondering if he can handle a change of luck – he can’t stay on top through an entire season…

>The dead-line to enter the Qt Centre Programming Competition is rapidly closing in. If you have not entered with you application, consider doing so. Right now we’ve got lots of prizes, and the chances for winning are quite high.

To quote Witold: “The bottom line is – if you have written a Qt4 application that doesn’t violate rules of engagement (it’s open source and portable), enter the competition. You don’t lose anything and you can gain quite much.“

Enter here: http://contest.qtcentre.org/registration.

>

I already long to go there again…

>Just release him.

>I’m so relieved. I’ve just completed the tax forms for this year. Now I just need to wait for eight months for the verdict :-)

>

Yesterday I visited Helder Correia (of SpeedCrunch and the Portuguese translation of Qt) in Oslo. It was the first time I visited the city as a tourist, so he guided my wife and me. We saw some nature, the city, some art (Vigelandsparken) and Holmenkollen. All in all, a great day.

>I’ve used GMail for quite a while now, but this weekend they’ve really pissed me off. Apparently I’ve been hit by some spam-fighting action and cannot view image attachments, nor send attachments. Really annoying – I’m happy that I have a fall-back mail address and that I still can access my GMail address book.

>Yesterday the Swedish government announced that the real estate tax (fastighetsskatt) is removed and replaced by a flat rate service fee. Hooray!

The reason for my happiness is the unfairness of the way that the old taxation was calculated. You actually had to pay a percentage of the estimated value of your real estate. That means that if your neighbours sell their houses at a high price, you’ll end up with a higher estimated value and thus have to pay more tax. If this was not absurd enough, we add double taxation to that. If you make profit from your real estate you have to pay taxes on the profits as well. This second tax is fair, in my opinion, as it is a percentage of an actual profit. The problem was the double effect of the taxes combines, and the fact that the old real estate tax had to be paid for any real estate, not only the one that you are making profits from.

Anyhow, that is soon history. Hooray again!

>When playing around with Qt on Windows one always runs into the console issue. Some sooner, others later. The problem is that a Windows application does not have a console by default. When thinking about this, it is pretty obvious, given the nature of Windows.

This means that qDebug and friends cannot output to anything, so you don’t get any feedback at run-time. The solution to this has always been to add a line reading CONFIG += console in the project file.

Now I’m trying to find out how this is handles when I’m building using CMake. Does anybody know? Please leave a comment!

>Dexen deVries just sent me a lovely little GCC error message: unable to find a register to spill in class. An actual internal GCC error causing the compiler to show its internal intermediate code. This looks like, quoting Dexen, “…ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp…“.

I’ve added this to my collection of GCC error messages. If anybody knows a proper solution to this, do post a comment. Any new error messages are also welcome!