Qt presentation tomorrow
So, I’m holding a brief Qt presentation on a demo i made a few weeks back. It’s pretty, and got a ton of stylesheets on it. Going down tomorrow at work. Hopefully people will be a little bit interested at least. It’s not that often I dare get my ass up there behind a podium, or speak up at all for that matter.
To be honest, I don’t know why really, I just hate being in front of people talking and possibly saying anything that might be wrong. Of course, there’s a reason why I’m doing the presentation, and not someone else. I’m the only one with any substantial experience at all of this subject, so why not basically.
Also, I’m feeling horribly stressed as of late. I started on a project last week, and it’s getting to me. Need to take a minute, sit down, and calm down.
IKEA and stuffs
Once again we’ve been to IKEA. Once again, we got back home with a ton of stuff. Picked up a lot of smaller things we needed, lights, bowls, etc. Also, we went by jysk and finally found a half-decent tv-bench. We didn’t really love it, but agreed that with some white paint, we could actually stand it for a year or two. It’s taken almost a year of bickering to finally find a tv bench that we both can agree to buy. Hilarious :).
To sum it all up as simple as possible, we have no really good space to put a tv at, either its a bad angle towards the sofa, or it’s in the middle of the floor, or we have a too small space for most tv benches. Also, I have a htpc + a huge amplifier, both are … not quite sure, but both chassis looks to be based on 4U rack-mountable machines (H16xW43xD43cm approx), and both need to fit in the tv-bench. Annoyingly, almost 90% of all tv-benches havent been planned to fit that size HTPC/amplifiers. It’s a standardized size, sure it’s the absolute largest standard size you will see on this type of hardware, but it’s still standard.
Let’s take an example, the chassis of both machines are 16cm high. Out of maybe 10 benches we found that have “high” shelfs for dvd’s etc, only 1 or possibly 2 could fit a 16cm machine. The rest where around 15,5cm, or sometimes simply not deep enough, etc. Why the hell is there a common form factor, and the designers of furniture can’t deign themselfs to look it up and design the furniture to hold the common hardware?
Anyways, we did find a few benches that could’ve worked… except… they where so freakishly ugly it’s not even funny. Take EINA avlastningsbord for example. Looks decent on the pictures there, but in reality the material/finish looks like cardboard box that’s been standing out in the rain and then dried up. Lerberg was actually a candidate, just because it was so cheap, and we only need to use it as long as we live in this apartment. Check out the max load of it though, 10kg?? We couldn’t even have put the tv on it, and we only have a 20″ LCD tv. Not to talk about the 25kg htpc or 16kg amplifier. Flärke was another really cheap option, except… it simply doesnt fit with our furniture, and it doesnt look very good, AND machines doesnt fit in the bench.
Either way, we found a bench finally – at jysk. They didnt have it in store yesterday, so hopefully I’ll be able to pick it up today at another store. Can’t find any pictures of it, so just saying it looks half decent at least :).
Continuous integration and buildserver
Filed under: Configuration Management, Management, Ubuntu
So, I finally got around to trying out continuous integration and got a buildserver at home. Ok, not much use on any 1-man projects, but should be good enough for some testing at least. I’m currently using cruisecontrol for it, and so far so good. I’ve got a few points I sincerely react against, but I’ll get back to that a bit later.
For those not knowing what continuous integration is, I suggest reading the above link. Basically, when you run a project, you always run into some “final” integration problems. People have coded each on their own side, and you wind up having to “integrating” the code so that it all works as supposed. In the one extreme, you have everyone coding on their own tree from start to end, and then you finally have an integration session. In this shitty situation, you have no clue how long it will take. On the other extreme, you have “perfect” continuous integration, where every single line of code is tested and checked that it doesnt screw things up.
A buildserver such as cruisecontrol is an excellent tool for doing “good” continuous integration. What it does is as follows, it connects to your central code repository, checks for any changes. If there was changes, it downloads them, and then rebuilds the project(s). If you have done it properly, you also have a ton of tests that you can run on the project. This is then reported or output in several different ways. Did it fail, did it succeed, and so forth.
I might be able to convince my new project manager to use a cruisecontrol server for the project I am working on at the moment, and he sounds like he likes the idea. We just need to consider everything for this project, and I need to figure out just how it works and how to configure it etc etc etc =) . Either way, I think it will be interesting to find out more about this type of development, and to see if it actually changes the development in any large way.
Oh, yes, I currently got two things I need to figure out with cruisecontrol. If I got it right, it doesn’t support GNU Make. Not supporting make seems… well, to be honest, totally stupid. It’s been one of the biggest make systems for 20 years or more, so there’s bound to be like 500000+ projects out there already running Make. I know it’s an old system, but it works, and it’s there already.
The second thing, I’m not totally certain of this, but subversion support seems to be abysmal. I need to look more at it however to find out the lay of the land or something.
Re: “Miljövän rasar mot flygshow”
http://www.gp.se/gp/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=113&a=442174
I need to comment on this news story as it really annoyed me.
I’ve personally grown up with airplanes and airshows very close to me as my father was a pilot, I have quite a few old friends that are pilots, and I’ve always been interested in airplanes and I admit that this might have coloured my perspective very heavily. However, the hypocrisy and bullshit, if you excuse my language, that Lotta Holmberg spews forth is just plain wrong.
Before she even considers throwing stones in her own glass house, she should contemplate how she herself is living. She’s even so mentally deficit as to admit that she hasn’t even stopped her “yearly trip to the sun”. Now, let’s do some really simple math on this.
Let’s consider how many people get anything from a trip with a charter airplane “to the sun”, approximately 200-500, let’s say 400 to err on her side. Average trip time from this country to “a place in the sun” would be approximately 5-6 hours airtime, so a grand total of 12 hours both ways. Split the airtime per passenger, 12/400 which turns into 1.8 minutes per person on the airplane.
Now, let’s consider the airshow. There was a grand total of maximum 6 hours or so of airshows per day, average of 3-4 airplanes in the air at all times (rounding to 4 to be nice to you), so a grand total of 6*2*4 = 48 hours in the air during the whole airshow. 45000 persons visited the airshow and had a great time, making for a total of 48/45000 hours per person and which turns into… tada, a massive 3,84 seconds airtime per visitor.
To make it simple, let’s make the assumption “all airplanes turns out as much green gases as any other” (your charter aircraft is gigantic in comparison and shiny new with perfect green engines (yeah as if, you freakin mooch going with the cheapest 30 year old crap airplanes on the market and still flying commercially), while “mine” at the airshow are very small, but at the same time very old so probably having a bad efficiency with a big exhaust of gases in comparison to their engine size). So, 1.8 minutes = 108 seconds, divided by 3.84 seconds, 28.125x less gas output per person in comparison to your “yearly trip to the sun”.
I got about 50 other reasons why airshows are a good thing and needs to be there, and why you should keep your mouth shut. Please stop throwing stones in a glass house and stop putting your feets in your own mouth.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to visit 420 airshows to use up as much green gases as you have done with your “yearly trips to the sun” — calculated based on you being old enough to have been on 15 “yearly trips to the sun” vs Göteborg Aero show.
Crispy burnt hungover wreck
It’s been a long and rough weekend. Friday started out easily, just softing at home and preparing for the day after…
Saturday was the big day, Göteborg Aero Show 2008 :-P. It’s such a damn long time since I was last at an airshow, but it was awesome. I loved it so much. I’ve seen all the old nice airplanes, heard a lot of news (well, news to me, I’ve been out of the loop for a long time now). My sister managed to run into old friends of my father, and we got a vip visit to some really sweet airplanes :P.
We also got to see some really nice airshows. I think in general, it was a very nice show, but there was a few kinks. If I understood it correctly, this was the first sh
ow that these people planned so I have full respect if a few things didn’t turn out perfect (practice makes perfect after all). Also the people planning it didnt anticipate just how big success the airshow would be, which made for some minor kinks as well. None of this was really a big problem. The biggest problem I noticed was that we had to wait 45 minutes in line for food (they kept running out). Also, the spitfire had some problems with the ignition, so they had to cancel that flight during the saturday schedule, which made me very sad as it’s always been one of my favourite aircrafts.
Also, a big big big downer, swedish airforce is so horribly low on funds so they can no longer fly their airplanes properly from what I’ve heard on the news. It showed at this airshow as they didn’t fly the jas 39 gripen at all. They had a rather … weak display of 3 gripen on the ground, that was it from what I saw (except for a few helicopters as well). Privately funded groups, fantasts and hobbyists did more of a show than the military did.. I’m not blaming the airforce, I’m pretty much blaming the idiots in suites running this country. Damn hippies.
Once we left the airshow, unfortunately had to leave 30-45minutes early due to crayfish party and to get ahead of the lines from the airshow, I realized that I had burnt my face to a crisp pretty much.
I got home, showered, switched clothes, and ran down to go to the crayfish party, met my girlfriend in the door, and she started laughing like a maniac and went on to thank me for preparing so vigoriously the entire day for the crayfish party (even coloring myself for it)…
Either way, we went for the crayfish party, I winded up getting overly refreshed, fell asleep on a clapping chair for almost 45 minutes. See image for a demonstration of what kind of chair it was. I’m still sore today from that :P.
And today, we winded up starting the day with cleaning up a bit in the apartment, doing dishes, and so forth before my mother + sister + kid came for a visit. Nice day in general imho.
Long entry :-).
Iptables-tutorial explained
Filed under: Frozentux.net, Iptables, Linux, Netfilter
So, time to explain whats happened to the iptables-tutorial, it’s been rather dead for a long time now. This is kind of meant as an explanation on what and why things has gone downhill with it, but also kind of a try to define for myself what went wrong back then.
By now, it’s almost 8 years since I started writing on it. It all started as a short term project, a real tutorial if you wish. Due to the demand, I was rather amused at keeping it up, writing more material and so forth, but with time it took more and more effort to keep up to date and to add all the material I wanted in it. While the tutorial was at it’s high, I had 25 000 unique visitors per month on the main iptables-tutorial site alone, and all that traffic generated questions, and lots of them. At times, I received 70+ e-mails with questions per week, which required hours of attention. Also, Apress contacted me at this time asking me to write a book on iptables for them.
Having that burden on top of a project that was originally intended to have fun, learn and to get more experience makes a project much less appealing. Also, at the same time, me and my then girlfriend broke up, leaving me in devastation. In a sense, I lost my muse at the same time as I was the least interested in writing. I spent several weeks trying to get somewhere, but didn’t manage to get 2 pages out of me. This is where I dropped the tutorial the first time. I pretty much went MIA.
Either way, after a while (a bit over 2 years to be precise), I decided to give it another try. I had for a long time wanted to start writing again, and got around to it as I had the time and will. To make a long story short, I got too much to do with school and work and life in general for a while, but managed to get version 1.2.0 out before this happened. Another year later, I managed to get 1.2.1 out, and finally 1.2.2 which was the first printed version at lulu.com. Due to several minor problems, which turned out to become pretty large problems imho, I later decided to pull down the print version while getting my life together again so that I could focus on what needed doing again.
This is where the iptables tutorial is at this time and date. I’m not really sure what I’m hoping to accomplish with this post really, more than generally give people an idea what’s been going on around the iptables-tutorial and try to explain why it’s been … well, not keeping up with developments in iptables and netfilter.
I’m not exactly certain what will happen in the close future with the iptables tutorial. I’m currently working on a few other projects which are better defined and that should hopefully be possible to “finish” properly.. Ie, once I’ve done them, they should stay done. Once those projects are done, I might get back to the whole iptables-tutorial.
Tired of Javascript/CSS
CSS is not my strong side, actually web development isn’t at all, yet I have this bad habit of wanting to learn things I don’t know since before. That being said, not sure if i got this right. Putting an absolute object (div for example) inside a relative object makes for an unhappy combination. Problem is that the outer container does not resize for the absolute object (depending on how you interpret the standards, I guess this is correct behaviour).
Take the following rather long example:
<html>
<head>
<style type=”text/css”>
.hump
{
position: static;
width: 400px;
}.lala
{
position:relative;
background-color:blue;
width: 400px;
}
.hoho
{
position:absolute;
background-color:red;
left:0px;
top:0px;
width:50%;
}.rofl
{
position:absolute;
background-color:blue;
left:0px;
top:20px;
}</style>
</head><body>
<div class=hump>
<div class=”lala”>ewrio
<div class=hoho>lala</div>
</div><div class=”lala”>
<div class=hoho>lala</div>
<div class=rofl>hejhopp</div>
</div></div>
</body>
</html>
You have two options.
1. Add height attribute to lala (making it static height).
2. Write a javascript to dynamically change height of the area depending on how large content is. I’m currently working on this as I really want this solution.
There is probably a much better solution to this, so if you know of a better way, please let me know!
British boffins perfect process to make any item ‘100% waterproof’
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/27/new_waterproofing_technology_pioneered_by_uk_firm/
This looks cool, damn that has applications from hell. I wish I came up with stuff like that. Well, more than the general idea of “oh, lets make everything hydrophobic”, to the “hm, if we do like this, then maybe we can make anything hydrophobic”. Ideas are easy to get, to actually implement and get an idea on how to do it is harder. Maybe if you’ve spent as much time doing physics and chemistry, as I’ve spent doing computers, it gets easier… “Turn on the flux capacitor Mr Scott!”
Plusenergi continued
Just called them, money received. But now they want the fees also. I’m refusing. If they had sent the bill to the right address to begin with, this wouldn’t have happened.
In other news, making a new linux x86/qt4.4 compile of the tanker demo. Build environment setup, should have a binary able to run on the target platform within a few minutes. I’m having a blast with QT to be honest, as I started coding in it a while ago, and I’m really just starting to “get it”. The fast prototyping ability of new graphical user interfaces is awesome, and the customizability with both stylesheets and inherited widgets.. I like it :-). I usually avoid changing widgets, it’s a bit of a mess since I’m still rather new to the language, but I will do my best at it soon 😉 .
Cuckolding electric utility company
Just wanted to say, f***ing electric utility company, they’re pissing me off so much right now. Plusenergi has done pretty much every single thing wrong that they can. When we moved here, they tried charging me for the actual apartment, and then my girlfriend for the basement (owned by the landlord). Then it took several phonecalls to get that right.
This time around, they’ve sent my electric bill to my old apartment. So, they send my bills to the right address for almost a year, then all of a sudden decide that my old address should have it, but still sends the bill for the right electric installation?
Anyways, I got the second notice about electrics last wednesday, paid it asap, and just checking it with my bank, it was paid this friday, and the money was docked. Today, I got a debt collection mail from svea inkasso, so I call them, tell them I’ve paid the bill, they tell me that they’ve made a remark about calling to check with plusenergi before taking any further steps (yeah right).
Not satisfied, I call plusenergi directly to ask them what’s happened. Oh, they have _hopefully_ fixed my address again, that was the first order of business. Then I went on to ask if the bill was paid, nope, it’s not according to them. Double check account numbers, reference numbers and so forth, everything checks out. Their final word “can you call us back tomorrow, maybe the money will be here then”.
No wonder Electric utility companies are so doing so freakishly well these days. The people who used to turn into pirates are today turning into representatives and executives of the electricity companies. Whatever you _ever_ do, avoid plusenergi, I’ve had it with them.