Older blog entries for chakie (starting at number 259)

mikehearn: indeed, now I found it. I stand corrected. :) It is apparently not always a visible option, so I must've always searched for it when it was not selectable. The previewing makes Evolution more sluggish than it needs to be, as just scrolling among messages with the cursor keys meant that it had to render every single message.

Been doing some work on a KDE style installer. The basic idea works pretty well, I can install any style that normally would be installable with tar zxf style.tar.gz && cd style && ./configure && make install. It's actually far too simple, so it must be severely broken somehow. The UI is currently a minimal proof of concept thing that only lets you browse a file or enter an URL, an "Install" button and a log window. I'm about to clean that up a bit and add a screen for generic options so that the user can affect some parts of the installation. Luckily making UI:s in Qt/KDE is so dead simple.

At work I got a new nice Linux machine, which unfortunately is based on RedHat 9. I tested Gnome on that machine, but it failed miserably to impress me in any way, so I now use KDE instead. Unfortunately the KDE version is of course ancient and IMHO badly configured (as always with RedHat). I've tried to use Evolution to access our Exchange server, but it's darn buggy and slow (even on a 2.8GHz Xeon with 1GB memory...), and I can't configure it to behave the way I like (is there really no way to get rid of the preview pane?), so I rather use Outlook on the old laptop I have. It's much snappier even though it's 2GHz slower with half the memory. :/

I have a new job, at Nokia. The place is nice, the people great and what we're doing is exciting. It's a long time since I last enjoyed working... I'm at the Home Communications division, meaning that I don't directly deal with mobile phones. Instead I have to dig deep into DVB stuff, which is a nice change from the Java I've been doing for 3.5 years. Unfortunately I can't really say too much more about the job so far...

Released version 0.82 of Civil today! An important milestone, as the it has suffered a bit from lack of time. I hope to be able to push forward and release 1.0 sooner or later.

This version sees the addition of the new setup dialogs (screenshots should be up soon), much improved LOS code and the normal array of bugfixes and small feature additions. This version is also the first one that allows different battles from the same era to be simulated, and eventually older battles too. We're actually building up a pretty generic wargame engine that suits wars that have infantry, cavalry (fast moving infantry) and artillery (or archers). I'd like to add some battles from the Napoleonic wars and eventually some medieval battles as well as something from the Shogun era. Oh well, those are just plans for the future.

nymia: I hope you don't code UI code manually? You do use Designer to get all the gory layout and boring widget fiddling right?

When I started out with Qt somwhere along the 0.9x versions there was nothing that could help you do dialogs, and creating larger dislogs was a major pain. Then came DlgEdit and Qt Architect and now we have Qt Designer. I like Designer a lot, it really makes creating dialogs easy and fun. Of course, it won't do the actual logic for the dialogs for you, but hey, you can't get everything. :)

Morons

mglazer: well, I think those celebs have pretty good ideas. Of course anyone can put up such a site and mock those who dare state their unhapppiness with the war and Bush. I read some comments to some of the celebs I've heard of, and man, did those comments sound dumb. Maybe you should try to work actively to improve the conditions of the non-adult (down to 13 year old) prisoners of war that you so kindly host at Guantanamo...

Coding

Nothing useful...

ask: interesting links. As for the Guantanamo case, I never understood why those poor guys were forgotten there, and why the world has not raised more hell about them. Some of them may be guilty of some kind of crime, but none of them deserve the illegal treatment they get. What could be done about it? The US media is ridiculously pro war and anti everything foreign, and the UN has no real power anymore either.

Sad...

raph: as you are fixing up the RSS generation code, could you please also fix the XML-RPC generation code that is used for diary.getDates()? It seems the generated XML is lacking a <value> tag around the array. See this link for some more info, it's the last comment.

It would be nice to be able to complete my little KDE Advogato interface. :)

Quiet and nice weekend.

Did some more work on the manual for the Civil scenario editor. Fixed some small bugs too.

Hohum. Have a little idea for a little side project that I'll hack up one day. It's been a while since I developed something KDE related. :)

Started working on a little manual for the scenario editor for Civil. The actual editor still has some rough edges, but it works pretty well and can be used to create scenarios just fine.

A new release should be out next week if all goes well.

Got some wood that I'll use to build something to put our rear speakers on. Will be fun, I like to do stuff with wood (and plastic, for that matter).