Status Update

It has been quite a while since I last blogged. As always, there is not a single reason for this, but the major one is that have been swamped with work. This text will be a small re-cap and a way for me to start with a fresh-ish slate this year.

First of all, the Qt in Education material is finally completed. I was at the München Qt DevDays and presented what we had then. Since then the slides and exercises have been completed and received a polish. There is already a small errata in the Qt DevNet wiki. I choose to interpret this as a Good Thing – people are using the material.

Just after the new year, a team from Pelagicore attended CES. I did not go there this year (small kids change your priorities) but worked hard on a set of Qt-based demos that we ran there. The demos (and Pelagicore as a company) are focused on in-vehicle infotainment, or IVI as it is commonly written. Of course there are a million things that I as an engineer want to polish or add, but as a whole the event was a success.

So, there it is, a new starts. Now I will try to blog more frequently.

DLLs from Qt SDK

When installing the Qt SDK for Windows you get a set of pre-compiled Qt libraries as well as Qt Creator.

When using this Qt version for building an installer, it is important to pick the correct Qt dlls to ship with your application.

The SDK comes with two sets of dlls. One set resides in $BASEDIR/bin and the other in $BASEDIR/qt/bin. The former contains the dlls used by Qt Creator, while the latter are the dlls that you want to ship with your executable.

Thanks to Marcus for this tip!

QFtp needs login

First post with WordPress 3.0 – fingers crossed but so far it looks good!

I’ve learned a small detail today – QFtp requires login even if you do not have any username or password to give the server. Saves some time from debugging time knowing that calling login once fixes this. (Yes, me stupid)

For those of you learning Qt or wanting to get started with Qt, I will hold a session on the Kubuntu Tutorial Day. I hope to see you there!

Also, great rainy weekend. Got loads of stuff done ranging from catching up on some work to restructuring parts of the garage.

Pre-vacation Stress

It has been a long time since I blogged last. Life has been chaotic, and as June closes to an end, it is getting worse. However, I’ve promised myself to clear all current projects during June (apart from some continuously ongoing stuff) to have a fresh start after my summer vacation.

Loads of exciting things are happening this fall. Some highlights are:

  • I will start working full-time at my new employer, Pelagicore.
  • FSCONS will take place, and this year with more technical contents than ever and a specialized embedded track which I’m co-organizing.
  • I will continue with my QtLunch concept. If you are in the vicinity of Gothenburg and want to learn more about Qt and enjoy a good meal with fellow Qt users, drop me a mail!
  • I will blog more frequently… :-)

Moved from Blogger

So, blogger is shutting down the ability to publish via ftp. This more or less forced me to move away from their service. I decided to switch to a WordPress install on my own server (since I have experience from that). The moving process was easier than I thought it would be, but still not pain-free.

I started the move by backing up my blogger entries. This gave me an XML file of about 2 MB. I’ve heard rumours of people with large file sizes here running into time out issues.

The next stage was to back up all contents of my ftp site – if blogger felt that they had to mess around with it. I still want all my old links to work.

Then I switched to blogspot hosting. This worked great. As I wanted, all my images were kept on my server and the entries still referred back to the correct location.

Moving on, I installed WordPress. Did a quick check of all the settings. Added a non-admin user. Then clicked the big import button. I had to authorize the import and pick which of my blogs to import (I have four). Then the process of importing started and passed without any hiccups. Finally, I assigned the non-admin user as the author of the entires (the import button changes to set author when the import is completed).

What broke then? All entries and titles start with a >, looks like broken XML parsing if you ask me – but I’ll live with it. Also, source code seems to be broken right now, but I might be able to hack at that using css.

To summarize – it went better than expected, but not 100% perfect. Now I’m off to hand patch my atom and rss feeds for various planets to announce this move!

PS. A tip – you ought to be able to alter the blogger theme to redirect users to your new location. To achieve that, make the change BEFORE switching to blogspot hosting, as you cannot switch back.

>Overload

>It has been quite some time since I last blogged. Lots of things are going on, so the time to sit down and reflect has been… let’s say limited.

The last week, I sadly missed foss-sthlm, due to snow. Apparently Swedish trains are built for the summer, so I hope that there will be another get-together later this spring.
I’ve also been working hard on my embedded Linux course. The course date is kind of tight on the Easter, but hopefully STF can find a nice crowd to work with.
Finally, I’ve been spending time trying to learn QtQuick (QML, Declarative UI). I’m really enjoying Jürgen’s blog on this, as the approach feels new to me.