Life of a Developer

>Witold blogged that he has published a new version of his Chart classes for Qt 4. They are based around the Interview framework and look really promissing. He has been doing some really interesting things with Qt 4’s support for MVC programming – just look at his OpenGL + MVC articles. It looks very interesting to me. For those of you not familiar with Witold, he is one of the leading members of QtCentre.org – and I would love to see him added to PlanetKDE.

The second new is that my RSS reader – Google Reader – has been updated. The interface is still a bit hard to get used to for me, but it looks like a change to the better. The primary reason for me to use Google Reader is that it allows me to check all my feeds from my mobile phone – a great feature for bored geeks :-)

>I have blogged about getting a new laptop, an Acer Travelmate 8204. I’m happy with it this far and have finally gotten around to actually installing Linux on it. The contestants where Suse and Kubuntu. Suse’s installer failed to boot, so Kubuntu won the trust on walk over.

When trying the Kubuntu live CD I ran into the issue of screen resolutions – my odd widescreen could not be selected. Some of you (thanks!) wrote and told me about the 855resolution and 915resolution packages – and reading instructions for them intimidated me. Thus, I decided to first attempt to get the ATI drivers going. To do that, I used the following lines from the Ogre Wiki (thanks!):

sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
echo fglrx | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
sudo sed -i -e 's/"vesa"/"fglrx"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Press alt-backspace

The parts in italics where changed by me to get things working – and to save a reboot. Now all I have to do is to install svn, Qt 4 and QtopiaCore and I’m happy for tonight.

>Issue 18 of Qt Quarterly was just released on-line. I would just like to recommend my article on mouse gestures – it was fun developing the code and fun writing the text.

>Got home from Prague today at 3:00 AM. Tired, exhausted and soon over-worked. Today I’ve spent a good three hours on the phone and written two quotations. We’ll see what we catch at the end :-)

>Since this year’s result is over the expectations in the budget I’m going to Prague. Will be a nice weekend!

>A couple of years ago my girlfriend (now wife) complained about me having christmas decorations up close to the easter holidays. To solve this problem I designed a pair of generic decorations.

It is (supposed to be) santa and Rudolph (the reindeer) – both in beautiful, easter compatible, yellow.

>During the summer vacation this year some friends of mine and myself built a garage. I planned to have it done in one week, but had to spend around five weeks getting the exteriour done. Now, my wife has painted two siluettes on the walls. First up was a Volvo Amazon, my wife’s dream car.

On the other side of the garage I originally planned for a BMW 850, but the profile is a bit too dull – much due to the aerodynamic properties of the car. Instead, I went for a F1 race car.

All that is left now is shelves, a workbench and cleaning.

>Sweden will have a new leadership! This will mean lower taxation on work, better education and – in due time – no taxation for owning houses. Great news IMHO.

A little bonus for some of us is that prime minister Goran will leave the political scene all together. No loss for Sweden there.

>I’m just going to refer to an editorial in yesterday’s Göteborgsposten (in Swedish). That will be my only blog entry on the Swedish elections taking place on Sunday.

>I was driving home and saw something strange a few days ago. Thinking about it – I have noticed it before, but this was a prime example. The picture below shows a tree that has got a foothold – it is growing.

Some of you might have noticed the closeness to the roadside. That is because the tree is a stick that has been placed there by the Swedish Road Administration – Vägverket. They have experimented with putting wooden sticks as markers to show where the road is during snow.
There used to have orange plastic sticks that they had to collect in the spring – some where lost others broken. It was a big expense. The new sticks where ment to be cut when the roadsides where cleaned – but apparantly not.

My hope is that Sweden will go from the country of round-abouts to the country of road-side death by trees.