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>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.
>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.
>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).
>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…>SpeedCrunch 0.7 beta 2 has been released and hopefully it will be released as a RC so that we reach 0.7 within reasonable time. Ariya has done a great job squashing bugs and preparing the new site.
It has been quite a while since I took the position as maintainer of SpeedCrunch, and I have not made far less than I ever expected. This is much due to changes in my life – I’ve moved to a house, changed jobs, wrote far more than I ever expected – all good things. I just never expected to run out of free time as I have done recently. Hopefully I will regain some of it during the spring when my side project will be finished.
As for SpeedCrunch – the race is on for 0.7. If this beta runs along nicely there will be a release candidate soon and then a final. Perhaps we can have it ready for the X-mas gift rush :-)
>Trolltech recently published an article about a Qt adapted mouse gesture recognition package. You can find project details here. In the SVN trunk quard (Irek Khasyanov) and myself have prepared support for diagonals – so now you can tell the difference between a box and a circle – great news.
>I’ve just started using CMake to build Qt 4 applications on Windows. The problem is that I cannot get the application icon into place. I’ve used the RC_FILE variable for this in QMake. Does anyone know how to do it with CMake?
>The winter is getting closer. It is raining almost every day. The grass is getting too long and it is hard to find a gap in the calendar to cut it.
The last couple of weeks I’ve spent almost every free moment preparing the inside of our garage and trying to fix the last outdoor issues that are possible to deal with before the winter.
Hopefully this winter will bring more time for coding and more reasonable work-hours-per-week than I’ve seen this autumn. Also, there will be snow, X-mas and holidays! I can hardly wait!
>First of all, I just want to point out Witold‘s Qt 4 video tutorial – great stuff! He really aught to be syndicated to PlanetKDE.
A few days ago – probably more than a week – I received a copy of Ezust’s book on Qt 4.
In it, I found my 15 minutes (12 characters?) of fame.
It is great for the ego to see one’s name in print!