Miscellaneous – Page 7 – Life of a Developer

>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…)

>Speaking – live!

>To all of you in the Stockholm region, I will speak about Qt at ECS’09, the GUI session. Go there, it will be fun. I’ve even got source code in my slides :-)

>QtCreator Plug-ins

>I just saw that Prashanth Udupa has published a guide to writing QtCreator plug-ins – nice!

>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.

>Samsung HD735LJ

>Dear lazy web, does anyone know what SMART the attribute with ID 150 for the Samsung HD735LJ indicates? My tool says:

raw value = 150

status = FAIL

value = 1

worst = 1

threshold = 99

In addition, my atapi info source in my windows logs says that the drive controller is failing…

>Bad news…

>I’ve followed Formula 1 for more than ten years. I guess that the combination of engineering, danger, speed and serious noise got me hooked. Anyway, today BMW announced that they will leave the sport at the end of this season, and for me as a BMW fan, that is bad news.

So, for a little analysis from my part. FIA claims that BMW pulling out is another proof that their cost cutting measures are needed. I believe that there are more reasons:

– FIA and F1 is governed by an odd bunch. Mosley and Eccelstone really seem to like playing politics. And they have contriversial political standpoints, nothing one wants to be associated with.

– Constant rule changes and interpretations. For instance, why where huge changes made to the aero rules before the 2009 season, but then the double diffuser design was accepted. This led to higher speeds, not lower.

– No final rules for next season, meaning that they cannot get started on next years car now (as this year’s car really is a disaster).

– Cost and results, of course, paying millions of euros to score mediocre results doesn’t really improve the situation.

So, finally, two wishes for the future. First, lets find a way to keep Sauber F1 in the game. Second, I hope to see BMW on the race track in other high profile series (no, not S/B/WTCC – more like LeMans, F1 or perhaps DTM).

>Cloud or Qt?

>I just read about the Google Chrome OS – sounds nice. I wonder if it will be a simple view onto the cloud, or if it is time for a new Qt port :-)

>More Embedded

>For all of you out there who wonder why Qt for Embedded Linux is nice – here is a tutorial on QVFb. I’d say, apart from the API and the general quality, that tool really makes the difference.

>Embedded Tutorial

>The LearnQt site has been up for a couple of months now. There is a lot of writing in the pipeline, I just have to do some polishing (the famous 80/20 rule seems to apply). I’ve been meaning to extend the site to reflect my interests. Right now, it contains the generic Qt tutorial, but I’ve added a category called Embedded Linux with articles on using Qt in embedded Linux (you guessed it from the category name, didn’t you :-P).

Also, there seems to be something odd with my WordPress template for the site. When looking at one individual article, instead of the main page or a Category listing, list bullets and block quotes break down. If there is any css wizard out there willing to help, I’d be more than happy. Do mail me at e8johan, gmail. The issue has been solved – thanks!