Life of a Developer

>Lots of preparations as the holidays are getting closing – quickly. Right now I’ve prepared 1.6kg Swedish meat balls (this is about a third, just before frying them).

The next stage was the Christmas tree. A nice Swedish spruce (gran) with decorations, next to my favourite working arm chair. The pillow is made from the original clothing.

And what is this?

It is the top of the decoration that we use to cover the hole over the stairs since the upper floor is far from done. The other side looks more appealing. Thanks to Illum, Copenhagen for the idea. My wife noticed the style there. Using the right thread and amount of balls – we use 27 – a “cloud” of balls is created.

>One of the things that have annoyed me since I started working with an Acer laptop was that when working in Windows the GraviSense application appeared in the Alt-Tab list even if it had no window to show. To save that extra Tab key press I asked Raymond Chen for a tip on how to make it go away. The solution was to set the WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW extended style bit. Taking this and the good old LCC-Win32 compiler I put together the following little snippet and the window disappears from the Alt-Tab list but stays alert (I shook the laptop gentry to trigger it).

#include <windows.h>

int APIENTRY WinMain(HINSTANCE hinst, HINSTANCE hinstPrev, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
HWND acerWin = FindWindow( NULL, “ACER_GraviSense” );

if( !acerWin )
return -1;

SetWindowLong( acerWin, GWL_EXSTYLE, GetWindowLong( acerWin, GWL_EXSTYLE ) | WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW );

return 0;
}

And they say that Linux is for those who wants to hack the system… :-)

>Qtopia Core goes Open Source.

>Finally I have no more dead-lines this year. This does not mean that I can relax for the next couple of weeks but it means that I’m no longer working with a knife to my throat. Next month will be interesting… I’m planning to write seven chapters for my book, around 170 pages. I also plan to write two articles for Datormagazin (some 10 pages with a small font – almost 20 A4 pages when using Word with its default font). I guess 200 pages per month (10 pages per work day, 1.25 pages per hour, including research) is what it takes for a technical writer and that is one of my professional options that I’m looking into for the moment.

Anybody out there needing help with white papers, articles, documentation or any other text in February – feel free to contact me. I would prefer to work close to Qt technologies, but I’m open for other suggestions too.

>Right now I’m building a dll file on Windows using the following make file:

all: sum.dll

sum.o: sum.c
gcc -c sum.c

sum.dll: sum.o
gcc -shared -o sum.dll sum.o

To build a so file on Unix I have to change the first and last lines to read sum.so instead of sum.dll. The same thing applies on OS X, but there I want to build sum.dylib. Does anyone know if there is a little flag or such that I can use to let GCC add the right file extension to the resulting file without having to play around with environment variables and such?

>As of today I will spend all my working time on my book on Qt and other Qt projects until February. Hopefully this will mean a boost in productivity – I just want to avoid working myself to death :-)

>Now it is just two weeks left until Christmas. Three weeks until the new year. The current state is that I have bought one Christmas gift – lots to go – and that my wife’s birthday is on the last day of the year. This means getting at least one more gift.

I also have to complete two more chapters for my book project – and complete my current customer project. I’m helping an automotive company some 70 kilometres from Gothenburg with their test management system.

Now, I’m not the one in the biggest rush – not by far. King Bore has not even got started. It is still between five and ten centigrades above freezing and no snow in sight.

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…

>In a comment David recently asked me if I had any reading tips on KDE, Qt and Python. I must start by saying that I have done little more than Hello World(TM) using PyQt.

Anyway, David, I would recommend you to start by visit Riverbank Computing – they have sections on both PyQt and PyKDE. They also manage the Python bindings for Qt. Then there is Boudewijn Rempt‘s book on PyQt GUI Programming with Python Using the Qt Toolkit – a book that I have been meaning to read for years. Finally there are two wiki resources #1 and #2.

>A little winter themed board game for all of you geeks out there. I wonder if they will do a C++ version with exceptions and some multiple inheritance for the slightly older kids.

>The next F1 season will kick of March 18 in Melbourne. Until then, do enjoy the lovely track of Pau (too short for F1 races – which is sad). Back in 1998 Montoya created history by lapping everyone. You can see it all in this two part YouTube playlist. When writing about Montoya I just cannot forget the fastest F1 lap ever. Just listen for the down shifts and how nice the car handles when pressed through variante Ascari. Just beautiful!