Life of a Developer

>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…

>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!

>I just wanted to say thanks for a great time to everyone at XDIN. On Monday I start working with Bitsim – to them I just want to say let’s have a great time!

>It is seldom that I get really hocked on some piece of technology. FPGAs, formula one and Qt has been able to really get my attention this far. Today I tried a new candidate in that list: pandora. The Pandora Internet Radio is really amazing – the kind of indexing they’ve done of the music is really amazing. I really hope that they can arrange for broadcasting rights withing EU ASAP because I really like it.

>After some googling and trying I managed to fix the issue with “Using “. Apparently the installer of Opera 9.02 manages to set a value for the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AutoplayHandlers\EventHandlers\ShowPicturesOnArrival\(default). To fix the issue, simply select the (default) entry and delete it. You should get a new (default) but without a value. This removes the odd text.

Apparently Opera 9.02 seems to be the cause of my problems with the mute keys not working either… so much for a browser with integrated bittorrent support for Windows. I guess I’ll just have to find another client instead.