Given that I just was an assistant on my first KDAB Qt training course in Berlin last week I’m happy I haven’t let down my fellow Qt experts at KDAB; I’m at the company meeting in Iceland so would never hear the end of it if I’d not passed…

There’s been some horse riding (which I boycotted in favour of cake), whale eating (tastes like moist beef and was a non-endangered species, absolving my guilt), soaking in the Blue Lagoon and much banter has been had. I’ve also been fighting with our time-tracking tool, Charm (which is in KDE SVN) to try and get Carbon and Cocoa events working nicely side-by-side (Carbon is the C-based API that is not supported for 64-bit applications, which are the default on 10.6). I was pleased to see that Qt Creator (my current C++ IDE of choice) also supports limited amounts of Objective C which has made things slightly less confusing for a certified Qt Developer

Outside of work my fiancee and I have been planning our wedding and bought a house for us to live in when we get married. It was worryingly easy to do the whole thing, it required minimal paperwork. It’s in Broughty Ferry (on the outskirts of Dundee) and the sea is 100m away and visible from my new study. It’s all very exciting and I’m counting down the days until we get married and I move in.

At work, I’ve been involved in some more fun Qt consultancy stuff. It’s all been enjoyable and varied, something that really suits my childlike attention-span. I work from home for KDAB so they’ve had me flying to various places (Germany, Sweden, Denmark so far and Iceland next week) in the course of my duties. I like seeing new places but am a rubbish tourist so it’s been nice to be able to expand my horizons without much personal effort.

One of the nice things about working with Qt and other open-source projects is that I can get to contribute to them at work when a customer needs a feature/bugfix. One of my projects has involved a lot of QtScript and I used QtScriptGenerator for the bindings (wanted to try SMOKE but I couldn’t find enough of a solid internet presence to trust it fully yet). I’ve made a few fixes to support code written in C++ rather than Qt (handle exceptions better, do some automatic C++ standard library type conversion, support C-style single “void” parameter and bugfixing). This stuff is all available from the KDAB QtScriptGenerator clone on Gitorious and should all make it upstream eventually, I’ve made the necessary merge requests and a few of them have already been accepted all merged upstream and part of QtScriptGenerator.

I can’t wait till KDE and more open-source projects move to Git (and Gitorious/GitHub). It’s so amazingly simple to get patches merged and retain your attribution and handle local work branches while tracking upstream, with merging normally being handled near-automagically. This requires so much time to do in Subversion that it really pains me to have to use it now.

Another interesting project I’ve been working on recently is Homebrew, a package manager for OSX that seeks to use system libraries, be fast and make contribution incredibly easy (things that MacPorts and Fink seem to fail at). It uses Git as the repository backing store so you just fork from mxcl’s repository, use “brew create $URL” to create a template package from the URL and archive name, modify it until it works and make a pull request on GitHub. mxcl then looks over your contribution and merges it if it looks good. So far I’ve tweaked Qt and started adding the necessary dependencies to get KDE in there too.

I really like this model. I trust mxcl as a benign dictator, he is a good guy and makes sensible decisions (such as buying me beer), and I feel this method of contribution really opens the project up to many more people than it would otherwise. It also has the Steve Jobs/Linus Torvalds-type figure that I think is essential for any piece of software to have a clear set of goals and maintain a certain quality level.

It’s been nice for me working mostly on my Macbook now. Everything just works that I need to and I can still run pretty much every open-source application I used on Linux. It’s nice to see the vibrant OSS ecosystem on OSX and the attention to detail in applications such as Adium, particularly in having an attractive and easily usable interface. Hopefully I’ll be able to apply this level of polish to some of the KDEPIM apps in the next while too, currently they work great but look a bit nasty on OSX.

Too much writing, back to the code!

It’s an awesome place to work as I get to work from home which means playing my current favourite pretentious but awesome progressive rock nice and loud while I work without having to worry about irritating anyone else. It’s been awesome hanging out with the guys at GCDS and on my various expeditions (in their head office in Sweden at the moment). They are all really cool people who can have a decent laugh while getting lots of cool work done. It’s also been great for me to now have a job with so many amazing software engineers who I can learn from.

My only problem is that they seem like they are hiring everyone now. I thought I was special? Now I just feel like just another notch on the bedpost organisational chart! For each awesome person who gets hired I feel like I deserve to be here even less!

It’s also nice because it’s got me doing way more KDE stuff that I was previously. I’ve been actually getting involved in the KDE Mac project now and hopefully will get to push KDE forward through some (unannounced) work stuff too.

In short, KDAB rocks!

I tried running Linux on it but due to some still unresolved issue it’s not really usable as a main operating system yet on this laptop so I’ve been forcing myself to use OSX for a while and trying to learn some lessons from it.

As my first main contribution to the KDE Mac project I’ve been working at getting the packages easily buildable and distributable without MacPorts/Fink by using CPack (a cross-platform packaging tool that comes with CMake). This is the type of project that will probably be mostly committed in a oner into KDE Libs (post-review) and hopefully then available to basically any KDE project with a little configuration. I’m planning on starting with getting some basic packages without dependencies first (e.g. without KDELibs or DBus bundled) and then work up to an application bundle that contains all library and executable dependencies. If you’re interested what the result might look like then take a look at the Mendeley Desktop OSX package, built entirely using CPack that I produces while working at Mendeley.

Another thing I’ve found while building KDE for OSX is the need to build universal packages for all the KDE dependencies. This omits Fink unfortunately so I’ve ended up using MacPorts. Due to a decision I disagree with I’ve contributed to Harald Fernengel’s project for adding dummy versions of MacPorts packages that are already available on OSX Leopard. You can find this on gitorious.

For anyone interested, the current minimal dependencies for various packages in trunk are listed below:
kdelibs: pcre++, shared-mime-info, jpeg, giflib, libpng, dbus
akonadi: shared-mime-info, boost
kdepimlibs: gpgme, libical
kdepim: none

Once I’ve got a bit further I’ll get all this stuff on TechBase. Anyone interested in helping out or lending an opinion feel free to leave a comment.

Firstly open KOrganizer.

When it has opened right-click anywhere in the “Calendars” area in the bottom-left (marked with the red ellipse) and select “Add…” from the drop-down menu that appears.

Select “Journal in a blog” (marked with a red ellipse) from the “Resource Configuration” dialog.

Fill in the “Resource Configuration” dialog.

• Name: Choose a descriptive name for your resource, this is how KOrganizer will describe it to you in future. KOrganizer won’t reference this resource as being a blog again so you may want to choose something suffixed with “blog“.
• XML-RPC URL: This depends on your blog but for WordPress and Drupal this is the main URL followed by “/xmlrpc.php“, for Livejournal it is “http://www.livejournal.com/interface/blogger” and for Blogger it is “http://www.blogger.com/feeds/$YOUR_USER_ID/blogs“. For other blogs, consult their documentation or ask me for help and I’ll do my best to work it out.
• Username: This is the username you use to login and make blog posts.
  Password: This is the password you use to login with the above username and make blog posts.
• API: Use “(WordPress, Drupal <5.6 workarounds)” if you use either of those blogs. Otherwise it is MovableType for Drupal, Google Blogger Data for Blogger and Blogger for LiveJournal. The LiveJournal API is unlikely to work with LiveJournal as it isn’t yet complete. If you wish to implement the LiveJournal full API rather than using legacy Blogger one then please contact me.
• Blog: When you have chosen an API this list will be automatically populated using items from the server. If there is only one entry, it will be greyed out but the entry’s text shown and selected. If there are more than one (e.g. Drupal has one for pages and one for posts) they will be selectable. If there is nothing new displayed then one or more of your XML-RPC/username/password/API are probably incorrect.
• Posts to download: This chooses how many posts the API will download and sync. If you, like me, have made hundreds of posts then you probably want to keep this number reasonably low.
• Automatic Reload: This defines how often KOrganizer will download new blog posts from the server without notification.
• Automatic Save: This defines when KOrganizer will upload new blog posts to the server without notification. You probably don’t want to have this set to “On every change” unless you want it to be uploaded as soon as you hit “Save” in the next view.

You should now see your new blog resource displayed in the bottom-left corner (marked with the red ellipse). Let’s try making a new blog post. Activate the journal view by clicking the journal button (marked with the green ellipse).

We are now in the journal view and you can see on the left-hand pane that KOrganizer has successfully downloaded some of my blog posts. If we want to create a new one then click on the add journal button (marked with the red ellipse).

Fill in the “Edit Journal Entry” dialog.

• Title: You probably want to change the title of the blog post from the default.
• Date/Time: On most blogs selecting the date/time to somewhere in the future means the blog won’t publicly appear until then.
• Content: Write something about how I am awesome, like the pictured example.The rich-text should be displayed on your blog correctly (albeit with slightly nasty HTML).

• Select Categories: This list should have been populated with the ones from your blog and from the KOrganizer defaults. Sadly, I can’t seem to remove the latter and selecting them will do nothing unless they have been created on your blog.

When you click “OK” you may be prompted which resource you wish to save to. Select the resource we just created (marked with the red ellipse).

If you chose “on every change” for “Automatic Save” in the “Resource Configuration” dialog then your post has probably whizzed its way off to your blog already. If not, you can manually save it by right-clicking on your resource (marked with the red ellipse) and selecting “Save” from the drop-down menu that appears.

I hope this was and is useful to some people. If you find any bugs, have any problems or want any other features then please let me know either by email, my posting on this blog or by filing a bug in the KDE bugtracker.

If anyone else has a good plugin for WordPress for avoiding spam then please let me know as being on the Planet seems to result in me being spammed to oblivion.

Also, if you had anything interesting to say about Spore, Phorm or Chrome then please excuse me being a noob and post comments!

Eventually I got a shiny KVM virtual machine (which reboots and only takes the web server down for three seconds!) supplied by a friend which is treating me well.

The only problem now was I wanted a something that I could keep as an always-on fileserver for backups and various things I wanted an always-on system for. After a bit of hunting I found the QNAP TurboStation 109 II which has a 500Mhz ARM chip, 256MB of RAM, a speedy gigabit ethernet port, SATA and eSATA, USB ports, runs Linux and uses 14.4W on load and 6W idle.

By default it runs some crazy QNAP distribution but there is a (rock solid in my use) beta of Debian available for it, which has been done by one of the former Debian project leaders and is all-in-all a pretty nice experience. I have it now doing my regular incremental backups using rdiff-backup and running a few other miscellaneous servers, including CUPS for my printer which works amazingly.

I’ve had absolutely no problems with either the hardware or running Debian on it and I really recommend it to anyone looking for a (relatively) low-cost, low-power and low-hassle system to run as a small file-server.

I can’t say I’m surprised but I am pretty disappointed. When it first emerged on The Register that Phorm had been monitoring the internet communications of BT customers I was a BT employee. When it came out that BT outright lied on to those tech-savvy customers who raised the issue my opinions of my employer had sadly dropped to an all-time low.

I’m not someone who believes in publicly criticising the company I am currently working for (partly because the company I work for currently is awesome) and didn’t want to straight after I left at the risk of seeming bitter or unprofessional but I feel it needs to be publicly stated that I did not at any time agree with the actions that were being taken by my current employer and everything negative I found out second-hand and eventually was part of the reason I left.

I’m not sure what the management of BT that thought that Phorm was a good idea were up to at the time but I feel they may need a little reminding that massively alienating a huge portion of your technical user-base is probably not the best way to run an ISP, considering how much influence we have on our non-geeky friends’ technology choices.

As for their “anonymous” technology, if I’m “anonymous” enough for you to be able to track me across multiple IPs then I’m not “anonymous”!

Of what they’ve revealed so far I’m pretty excited:

• Open-source under a BSD license (can this interoperate with Qt?)
• Using Webkit
• A fairly rigorous test sweet meaning it should actually work on a decent number of sites
• Using a public source-code repository
• A process per-tab and per-plugin to stop the whole browser crashing
• Google Gears built in (hopefully increasing its use)
• Linux and Mac versions in the works
• A fast JIT Javascript engine

Even if people don’t like the browser its nice that this is being developed in the open and that this tech is being available to people under a liberal license. Personally, if it actually works as well as claimed I can see it becoming my primary browser. I’m not certain what the GUI engine is but it looks like something home-brew from what little look I’ve had at the source code.

To be honest, I wish I was still using Konqueror instead of Firefox but sadly Konqueror is too unstable and unsupported by too many sites for it to be usable for my daily work. Hopefully this will change when Webkit is a fully supported backend but until then looks like it’s non-KDE browsing for me

Until then, roll on the Linux version of Chrome!

Yesterday was pretty fun, saw a lot of great talks and met a lot of awesome people. My particular favourites were Celeste’s usability talk, Peter Siking’s printer dialog usability talk and the Plasma Frenzy (is it just me or does that sound like a scifi themed wrestling match?).

The talks were interesting and I was positive on almost everything that was said. The only thing that slightly twinged my pragmatism was the suggestion that GNOME and KDE collaborate more on underlying libraries. I suggested to the speaker that the reason we hack using GTK/Qt is because they are far, far less painful than writing straight C/C++ and that until KDE is willing to depend on glib or GNOME on Qt I doubt we are going to see a lot of the developers developing cross-DE solutions.

The social event in the evening was a good laugh. Held in a brewery, I managed to make the stupendous faux pas of asking for Stella when they have some stupid selection of local beers there. Whoops. I particularly enjoyed recanting with Riddell the complete list of everything awesome about Scotland and particularly didn’t enjoy being repeatedly whipped in the nipple by Adriaan’s jockey whip (why the hell he has that with him I’ll never know…).

Looking forward to the rest of today’s talks and starting the furious coding on Monday!