>Firenze

>The last week end my wife and I took the chance to visit her sister in Italy. It was nice going from 10 dgC and rain to 20 odd dgC and sun. Not to mention the feeling of vacation – even though I spent quite a few hours writing. I produced some twelve pages on how to provide help in Qt applications.

The writing is for my book that is more or less official now that it has an ISBN and all. You can even find me if you search for authors on Amazon. Kind of fun – but also stressing. For me, the project is far from done. Many pages to write – and the stress of having to keep the quality.

I have been writing for quite a long time. It all started with the independent Qt tutorial for Qt 3. That got me some jobs writing for the Swedish computer magazine Datormagazin. Since then I’ve written white papers and an Qt Quarterly article and since the summer I’ve been working on “The Foundations of Qt Development”.

In parallel I’ve changed jobs and will now try to get closer to the hardware. For the moment I’m building uClinux kernels and configuring Spartan and Virtex FPGAs. Great fun! I’ve also been assigned to do seminars on this – I recently spoke at FPGA World in Kista/Stockholm. What I’m trying to say that there is quite alot of writing-ish tasks at work too.

Anyway – over the last four or five months I’ve developed a working process that gets me fairly productive. It starts with an outline, pinning down the important issues to cover. After that I design examples to cover everything that I need – and adding details to the outline from doing the examples. Finally, the exhausting part is converting five-six pages of outlines into twenty-twenty five pages of quality text with the right parts of the example sources included. The last phase is best to do in one go – or at least as few gos (goes?) as possible. That means that after that I need to relax, work less for a day or two and just let the brain have some leasure time.

This brings me back to Saturday evening, Firenze – the last minutes of a warm summer evening.

>New Camera

>I’m planning to get a new camera for this Christmas, and this time I’d like it to be slightly more pro-ish than my current HP. The plan is to be able to do some more serious photography while still being able to use it as my vacation camera.

My current idea is the Canon EOS 400D – but it seems to be lacking vibration compensation.
I can get it for around 830 EUR including the EF-S 18-55mm lens, a 1GB memory card (SanDisk Ultra II) and a camera bag. Does any of you photographers know a better buy in the range 800-900 EUR? Mail me at e8johan, I use gmail, or just comment this post.

>ISBN

>I’ve just got an ISBN of my own: 1590598318. Makes me happy and stressed – that actually means that I have to complete this thing on time.

>Crosstools

>I’m just sitting here waiting for crosstools to finish. Hopefully this will make my work really smooth (fewer hours to charge for though). If everything works I will have a bootable image for an ARM hardware by tomorrow.

BTW – anybody from Gothenburg who enjouys playing with Qt – mail me (e8johan, gmail) or post a comment.

>Stockholm and Open Source

>I read this article in today’s edition of NyTeknik about a consultancy company (Omicron) recommending Stockholm to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office. The biggest issue was that some functions where missing so advanced users such as controllers and “technical people” (teknikfolk) might need to keep their old Office suites. Smaller issues where that some fonts where different and other cosmetic details. The big benefits was that all users got started right away – no need for additional training – and the licensing costs.

Another nice aspekt is that the representative for the city of Stockholm says that this is not only about licensing costs. The report is a part in a bigger operation to evaluate possibility to use open source within the city.

Finally, the number of users that can be affected are 25000. Pretty neat if it works out.