Category: Miscellaneous

>Learning About Qt

>I’ve spent most of my time in the Qt world teaching. I started of with the Independent Qt Tutorial back in 2002. In 2006, the Qt 4 edition of the tutorial turned into the Foundations of Qt Development and actually got printed. 

Now, it is time for a new project. I really want to get out there teaching about Qt. Last year I met my goal – I spoke several times about Qt in public (the IT University in Gothenburg, a BitSim technology evening, at a customer and at FSCONS’08). So, more speaking. You might have seen my entry on my Embedded Linux Seminars. They are shaping up nicely – working at the logistics right now. Some places are good for on-site training, other places are better suited for open enrollment sessions where I need somewhere to be.
Anyway, there is another component to the training – I want an on-line, free, tutorial to the beginners. Having the Qt SDK and QtCreator actually makes it easier than ever to get started. So, for those of you who wants to get started, I’ve got a blog that will teach Qt in small increments – the Learn Qt blog.
Why small increments? There are three reasons:
  • Less to read per chapters for those who wants to get started.
  • Less for me to write for each entry – I have a daughter and a house now, so it is harder to complete large chapters.
  • The chapters can be more focused on one task. Making them easier to grasp, as well as being better suited as a reference (at a later stage).
Being a blog, the entries all appear in the wrong order. So here are the first three entries in the right order:
Learning Qt is not all about reading a tutorial or about completing exercises. It is also about getting to know what is out there, be it tools, 3rd party extensions, or other tutorials. So, if you have a resource that you feel would be useful to a Qt beginner, do mail me (e8johan / gmail). I’ll put them on the blog at a reasonable pace, so don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t appear this afternoon.
I’m sure that there is a million things that can be improved on. For instance, I want every tutorial entry to have an abstract and tags. I would also like to launch some excersises matching each blog entry. If you have ideas, feel free to comment or drop a mail. And remember – this is all work in progress!

>World of Fun

>I enjoy a good strategy puzzler now and then – my long time favorite games are Lemmings, Settlers and such. Just the other day, I discovered that World of Goo is available for Linux. I just downloaded and tried out the demo – and everything works right out of the box (I use an old Kubuntu install that has been upgraded too many times). Nice, nice – time to spend $20 on more tracks :-)

>Standing up!

>As a very proud father I have to show this to the world – Lisa can get up to standing by her self. My wife just managed to catch this historic moment using her cell phone before Lisa fell over. It looks as if the time of moving everything fragile and expensive into closed cupboards has come :-)

>Clearing the Attic

>Let me just say this first: yes, I’m a sick individual.

I’ve been clearing out my room at my parent’s attic. This is some of the left overs that I donated to recycling.

Com-ports anybody (ISA cards)

This is proper printer paper!

Some of my old boxes of proprietary software…

…and even more (notice the right one – I used to do Fortran’77)

Memory, all sizes and sorts. Perhaps a gigabyte in total :-)

Mice and keyboards…

Crappy picture, but it says “COMAL, advanced course”
“The components of a computer”
“according to von Neumann”

Life has been good :-)

>My Little Brother

>Little brothers are fun. The first years we knew each other we spent our days teasing each other and beating the other one up. But if someone else touch him, we where a team at once.

These days, we spend our time competing in on-line racing and sharing computer parts. Actually, this is more fun than beating each other up :-)

However, it is still important to beat him at everything that we try. My success rate is getting worse and worse by the years and now he is quicker than me on the virtual track. Thus it is a bit of a pain to admit that they guy actually has talent. I just stumbled on his photo stream and I’m stunned. My little brother can really use a camera!

>A tip

>The Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H motherboard will not boot with 4 GB on board unless you first update the BIOS. This means that if you buy 2x2GB of RAM, you will need to boot using one DIMM, update the BIOS and then insert the second DIMM. Failing to do so will just bring frustration and anger.