Life of a Developer

>I’ve just bought a DM500T DreamBox – this means Linux in the living room :-)

After an hour of work (and lots of thanks to Anders) I’ve got all channels from Boxer up and running (meaning the standard package – free channels, Discovery, Eurosport and some others). And my wife looks as if she’s actually accepted my new toy :-)

>I’ve been playing around with Joomla for a while now. It can be quite frustrating when you know what you want to achieve and how to do it in plain HTML, but you cannot find the right solution. Now everything except a decent style template is alright.

One example of what Joomla makes easy is the Software Projects section. Here you have a list of news for both projects: SpeedCrunch and the Mouse Gesture Recognizer. Then each project has a page or each own. The only problem now is that I haven’t updated the project pages in a while :-)

>Trolltech just announced their Labs site. This means that you will have to redirect your RSS readers from QDevBlog to the Labs blog site. It also means that there is a new place for cool Qt software projects. To me, the QtConcurrent, seems to be the most interesting project right now – but to some of you, the WebKit or test cases of Model/View models are more useful.

>I’ve recently noticed that the quality of the Swedish sub-titles at Discovery Channel has dropped dramatically. It seems that the translators work on a word-by-word basis, so the results can be described as machine-translated-ish. Yesterday’s highlight was the program host saying “Lifting it inch by inch” and the sub-title saying “Lyfter det 2.5cm i taget” – that is “Lifting it 2.5cm at a time“. Time to get a dictionary including phrases :-)

Other favorites include “Do you want coke” at the drug dealer – the translation was “Do you want a Coca Cola” (often refered to as a Coke in Swedish).

>Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that I don’t spam PlanetKDE this time. I just did a minor modification to my template and last time that resulted in all entries being re-aggregated there…

>Since the great Qt/KDE programming forum run at QtCentre has such a bad ranking at Google I just thought I’d tell the world this: QtCentre’s forum for Qt and KDE programming is great.

Sorry for stealing your bandwidth to bring you this message!

>It is only four weeks left until the I know what to do every other Sunday! According to the pre-season gossip it sounds almost too good – the right team is among the top three.

>Raymond Chen, author of my very favorite web log The Old New Thing, has written a book with the same name. Now you can get a couple of bonus chapters from the book’s site – great! I just have to say that I love it – just making a 33 points list to summarize how to not get your application to run in the Windows 95 MS-DOS prompt makes great reading. At least for the little technologist that lives in all of us. I still remember the joys of trying to writing my own feeble snippets of code doing something in extended mode. They probably would not run in Windows 95.

By the way – I’ve met him and can testify that he actually speaks Swedish :-)

>I recently re-discovered the folklore site. It is a collection of stories and photos related to the original Macintosh in one way or another. It seems that the site hasn’t been updated in a while, but the stories still makes a nice read. My favorites are the engineering stories showing nice solutions to problems and the evolution of pieces of software – all mixed with portraits of the people involved.

>I’m getting to closer to my writer’s leave. I’ve been working on my book project since Christmas but on Monday I will start at a new customer assignment. The new assignment will use Qtopia and embedded Linux so I’m really looking forward to it.

During my leave I’ve learned a few things:

1. You cannot, efficiently, try to churn out a large amount of text on one subject every day for more than around two weeks.
2. Varying languages is hard. Writing for weeks in English and then having to write for three days in Swedish was hard – but it was even harder to get back up to speed in English. (Notice that I’m a native Swedish speaker).
3. Developing examples on one subject and varying by writing the text about other examples developed earlier helps providing variation, thus increasing productivity.
4. Spending eight hours on something that you used to do for four hours does not double productivitiy. That requires something like ten to twelve hours.
5. Working for more than ten hours a day on a single task for a longer period of time is pointless.

This might sound very negative, but I think that this time has been a great experience.