>Thanks to Matt of A Qt Blog SpeedCrunch now comes as a Mac OS X bundle. It has been tested on a PPC Mac, but is supposed to be universal. The size of the download is pretty large (12 MB) but that includes Qt 4 and support for both x86 and PPC. Oh – one more thing – it does not support translations yet – but the numbers are the same everywhere so as long as you can live with English you will be ok.
>Winter View
>
The snow melted away the past weekend, but I still wanted to share a winter photo from last week.
>See the Path
>Witold Wysota just sent me a patch for the mouse gesture recognizer (mgesturer) for visualising the gesture while gesturing. Great stuff! I’ve added it to the clean-up branch where I’m working for the moment.
Now you can see the gesture!Right now I’m waiting for quard to get the live recognizer to work properly before I will prepare the next real release.
If anybody feels ready to write a GTK+ binding – get in touch. I’m e8johan and use gmail. The gesture recognitions part of the code is completely toolkit neutral. All that it takes is some sort of event filter.
>Speedy Crunching on the Mac
>Matt of A Qt Blog has fixed the CMake file for SpeedCrunch so that it can be used to build a Mac OS X application bundle. Great work! You can find the Mac branch of SpeedCrunch here: http://speedcrunch.googlecode.com/svn/branches/mac/.
>Gesturing freely
>
Once again quard (Irek Khasyanov) has performed miracles. The trunk contains a version of the mouse gesture recognizer that can match movements live – no need for a special activation key – just pick a distinct enough gesture and it all works. Visit the repo at http://code.google.com/p/mouse-gesture-recognizer/source .
>Computer parts
>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.
>Taking care of the plants
>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.
>Installing, compressing and being dynamic
>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).
>Snow
>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 is approaching 0.7
>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 :-)