Older blog entries for e8johan (starting at number 214)

I have been playing more and more with QIde which seems to be really promissing. Now it even supports code completion using ctags.

Anybody getting close to Gothenburg in the beginning of September and being interested in meeting some Trolls - mail me - e8johan at gmail.

I'm waiting for my new laptop. I'm switching from a Latitude D400 to a Acer 8204WLMI. Will be great! I'm considering two different distros for it - Kubuntu and SLED. Anyone having an argument for or against any of them? Just drop me a mail - I'm e8johan at gmail.

SpeedCrunch

I've committed the current state to branches for versions 0.7 and 0.8. Lets just fix the parser bug and 0.7 is ready for a non-beta release.

F1

Really nice race this weekend. It really should be raining more often. Too bad for Alonso and Kubica - and Villeneuve.

Garage

Finally painted the inside - just a pair of car siluettes left. I'm planning to do a Volvo Amazon on one wall, as my wife likes that car. On the other wall I want to do a F1 racer - not sure if it is going to be a modern one or a classical.

The last week of my vacation and things are starting to get moving... there are two major things happening for me on the web right now:

1. The Independent Qt Tutorial for Qt 4 is down due to a book contract - yippie! It is only 99% sure yet, so nothing is guaranteed, but it looks as if I will have alot to do the next six months :-) The Qt 3 edition is still available along with my humble articles collection.

2. SpeedCrunch is moving to Google hosting and gets a public SVN server and issue tracking. I will start adding the planned features to the issues too... The plan is to use SVN as in the KDE project with branches for each planned release (currently 0.7 and 0.8) along with the trunk for bleeding edge development. If you feel that you need an account - mail me. I'm e8johan and use gmail.

Update: The KDE SVN HowTo - thanks for the link Ariya!

The vacation has lasted for two almost weeks and I feel more busy than ever so here is a short summary of what I've been up to:

• I bought a garage from Mellby Industri and have put it together, painted it and am currently doing the finishing touches. Here is an in-progress photo.
• I've been planning a Qt Quickstart with Trolltech - which I hope will be great. I'll tell you more about this when it is over - impressions, recommendations and such. This far, Trolltech has proven to be really nice to work with.
• On the Trolltech front - I've also been published in Qt Quarterly, issue 18. It will be on-line in a while. For those of you having the printed version, my bio-picture is my business photo, I do not look like that all the time :-)
• I've been playing with GWT, which is a nice tool to use (small example of mine: TicTacToe). I'm planning to do something creative here, I just have not found the time yet.
• I've been playing with QIde. I believe that this might become something really great as it works on all Qt-supported platforms and is simple enough yet powerful enough. I have contributed with a small patch to fix 64-bits issues.
• I've had a quick look at Qt 4.2 technical preview. This looks really great, but I seem to crash Designer at times. I'm sure that this has been solved in later snapshots, I just have not had the time to build them and try.
• I've tried to start building the class list in the QtCentre Wiki. The progress this far is not huge, but my goal is to cover all the main classes from Qt 4. While doing this I saw that some of my resources have been implemented as some sort of standard link type in the wiki - thanks alot guys!

Well, today it seems to be raining so I'll try to catch up on my invoicing and accountancy.

Tried out the RoundedPanel by Bouwkamp - great stuff - easy to use. Here is the updated application.

I've been playing around with gwt for a while now, so here if finally something useful: TicTacToe - enjoy!

Maybe not very new, but it seems like a good idea to me: Thumbstacks.

Also, when playing around with GWT I ran into this site. It is a really nice collection of custom widgets and solutions. The only thing that I miss is that the sources aren't downloadable as tars or zips.

It has been a long time since my last blog post - and there are many reasons. Some are work related, others related to me building a house. Either way, here is a summary of the last couple of weeks:

Work
At work there has been alot of focus on a new software release that we finally released yesterday. Today feels great - I can finally relax again.

House
The ceiling on the upper floor was completed this weekend. That was a heavy load of my chest - so now I've focused on getting the lawn better (keeping it short to prevent weeds from getting out of hand). I also managed to get some potatoes going in a corner of the garded. I could not imagine that it would be so much hard work to get the grass out of the dirt to be able to plant the potatoes...

Sports
The F1 season has finally got up to speed and things are developing... not nicely, but developing. I'm a fan of BMW and Villenueve and I had expected more. At least he out-performs Heidfield most of the time.

Internet
I discovered the qtnode.net site just recently. A great effort - keep up the good work. I will try to make some wiki contributions if I can find the time.

The Google web kit was also released in the last couple of weeks and I believe that it looks good. I'm currently working on getting a GWT-based UI working with a php backend.

Coding
The quick summary would be: too little. I'm disappointed at my own pace regarding SpeedCrunch, and my tutorials. Hopefully I will be able to find some sort of spare time soon...

I just saw mpyne's blog entry on Abakus. My ideas for the calculator(s) in KDE are:

• A common calculating engine, perhaps an API with different backend for different projects, but something common.
• A common plug-in architecture connected to the calculating engine. It should be possible to create plotting plugins as well as plugins for simple mathematical functions.
• Three levels of calculators: #1, a "command like" calculator for konqueror (write: calc: 1 + sin(35)*1.25 and get the result), #2, a fully fledged calculator (keypad, scriptable, plotting and printing, etc.) and #3, a deskbar calculator available for kicker.

As for the porting of SpeedCrunch to Qt 4, this has give the application a whole new audience: the windows users. This is imho a great way to show what open source software is all about - here you are, a free calculator that you can modify an play with. When mentioning this I just remember, SpeedCrunch is available on the cover DVD of PC World, Spanish Edition, the issue for April 2006.

Time for the annual tax return forms... This year I've been running a business on my own in paralell with my day-time work. Also, been geting a house and mortages along with it. All this sums up to a hell of a lot more paperwork for me :-/