Category: Miscellaneous

>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!

>

This machine drives wooden poles into the ground, then the operator puts a concrete pole on top of the wooden pole and drive it too into the ground. This makes quite alot of noice. It goes something like BANG BANG BANG BANG… for about eight hours a day. The photo has been taken from my office window. Needless to say – I’m very fond of this machine.

PS. Another nice feature is that it produces a lot of dust so my car now has a yellow-ish colour tone.

>This weekend my DM500-T has finally debuted as my own little media centre. It was given the highly important task of recording the F1 race and store the TS file on my little file server. The file server is a little Debian box built around a slow VIA Mini-ITX card with passive cooling. All that I need to do before it is allowed in the living room is to replace a fan in the chassis with a quite one and get some rubber suspensions for the harddrive.

Installing Debian worked like a charm – starting from the minimal network installation CD, downloading what I needed and configuring Samba to handle the file sharing. All I need to do is to install acpid to make it possible to turn the box off – it does not have a keyboard. Apparently using ssh, logging in and running shutdown was not a wife compatible solution :-)

The only thing that I’m looking for to make the Dreambox setup complete is a good slideshow software for the DM500. Any tips are welcome!

Finally, this was kind of funny.

>I’ve just updated my page listing GCC error messages with a whole bunch of new messages. Lots and lots thanks to Diederik from Codingdomain. He just send me a mail with a whole list of error messages and solutions.