Postings tagged with rant
About delegates and cell renderers - data formatting in Qt
Warning: the following blog post has a rant-to-usefulness ratio of 3:1.
Last week I needed to perform some data formatting on Qt list view. From reading the documentation alone I could not find a satisfying answer. When asking on IRC the answer was to use proxy models. This would have worked, but having two models for one view can create all kind of correspondence problems (think of sorting etc.). And there is [this ...
Who wants my feedback for the Maemo6-Qt tech preview?
During the Maemo Summit there were several talks about the upcoming Maemo 6 platform and also about the transition from GTK+/Hildon to Qt. One of them - the "(Introduction to the) Harmattan UI framework" also mentioned where to get the code for the Maemo 6 UI Framework from. So I went there and cloned the two available repos (tech preview of the framework ...
Rant: Trade Imbalance Penalties
Barack Obama on CNN: "We can't go back to the era where the Chinese or the Germans or other countries just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them".
Found this quote when searching for stories supporting Financial Times Deutschland's story about US and UK officials ...
Why Squeak is not the answer, part 2
Error handling (or god forbid, exception handling) is one of the weak parts in Squeak. A great deal of course comes from its dynamically typed nature. However, the greater impact probably comes from the utter lack of guard clauses in most core librares I've seen so far: Objects will happily accept any kind of parameter and continue to wrack havoc on them until the debugger, at some later point (IF we are lucky), stops the travesty.
Let's move on to BitBlits, where the lack of parameter checking and the absence of proper initialization quickly crashes your VM. Why use BitBlits at all? Because Morphics are crap. More precisely, they feature:
- poor performance (I guess all the redrawing with overlapping Morphic instances doesn't come for free),
- a hideously complex class hierarchy
- undocumented models (say, the model ...
Priceless...
Interesting how German computer scientists use their office hours: Elements of an EmotionML 1.0.
<emotionml xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2008/11/emotionml">
<emotion>
<category set="humaneDatabaseLabels" name="Amusement"/>
<intensity value="0.7"/>
</emotion>
</emotionml>
Found at plasmasturm.org.
Static Panel Nonsense
Vuntz, you ask for angry reactions, here is your first one: This static panel stuff is the biggest nonsense I've seen in years! You've presented us an early April's fool joke, didn't you?
Please visit some real people and look at their Windows or OSX desktop, look how they customized the Quick-Launch area respectively their dock and then come again, please.
Important hint: Whenever you try to improve something, you should be ...
Firefox Certificate Insanity
Christopher, this kind of insanity and the arrogance with which related feedback is handled, is exactly the reason, why people want alternate browser UI's. Sometimes I really wonder if Mozilla's UI designers serve the users, or if they just serve their ego.
Combine this need for custom UIs with the uglyness of Mozilla's bloated XPCOM APIs and the inability to keep ...
29 years and still immature...
g++ just gave me this error message right now:
./JavaScriptCore/kjs/ArgList.h:133: error: extra qualification 'KJS::ArgList::' on member 'operator new'
Would be nice if this language (or its compilers) would have matured that much, that you don't always need exactly the same C++ compiler as the guy writing the code you try to compile. It was just 29 years ...
Leaving Gentoo behind - UPDATE
Today I freed myself from that incredible mess Gentoo had become on my box. Having shiny new software again should let me forget the pain quickly. Also, reconfiguring my GNOME desktop was a mere by-product of copying my home folder back onto the box (yay!).
UPDATE: Wow, it makes a huge difference whether you evaluate a distro thouroughly or just give it ...
Nag Screens have reached GNOME now
Dude, this sucks! Really. Nag screens[1] finally have reached GNOME: When you insert a CD unknown to the MusicBrainz database, Sound Juicer shows a nag screen asking you to upload that information to MusicBrainz.
I understand that people want to support their favorite service, but in the case of MusicBrainz this is support is really annoying: MusicBrainz - at least as ...
Launchpad's Personal Package Archives
Probably inspired by openSUSE's Build Service Launchpad provides this excellent Personal Package Archive (PPA) service.
It's quite exciting service: You just request your PPA, upload your source packages via dput command, and get them built within freshly setup Ubuntu environments. When building succeeds your packages are placed within some apt-get repository. No further maintenance steps required.
Unfortunately the service is not perfect yet: It seems to be ...
Female Chauvinism
When watching Marc-André I've got one of those women's magazines into my hands and started reading. For a moment I wondered, if male chauvinism isn't just a bizarre invention of female chauvinists - that bizarre was the picture of men drawn there. Really hope, those articles and columns were some kind of bizarre female humor, males cannot gasp. Otherwise it's ...
Car Broken Open
This morning I had to find my car broken open. Since coming back to Berlin one year ago, this is the second time, some asocial bastard damaged my car. Its not even a new or expensive car. It's a trusty, 15 years old Vectra. What has happend to this place?
Is is time to leave this city of criminal ...
Mathias, with one “t” (and “h”)
Btw: There are several spellings for the name my parents gave me, and I've got this variant:
Mathias with one “t” (and “h”)
I don't know why my parents have choosen this variant. People really seem to have problems with it. Every time someone writes it down, I have to explain the spelling: *“Oh, just one 't', please” - “But with ...
Whatever happened to Gentoo ..
... but when it comes to delivering shiny new software to the masses it got slower than ... cough ... Debian! The latter already has epiphany-webkit, based on epiphany-2.20. But here on my Gentoo box, the newest epiphany ebuild is for 2.18?!? Oh well ... one reason less to stay with Gentoo I guess =(
Liquid Bomb Complot
Luis, there was no prevented assault involving liquid bombs in London. There just are airport owners who want to force you to enter their overpriced "duty free" shopping malls. ;-)
At least that's the idea I had when waiting for my flight on Nottingham East-Midlands: My brand-new water bottle was thrown away at the security check, after the check there was ...
Let's talk about quality...
"Let's talk about quality...", that's what I was thinking, when the Six Mrd. Dollar baby called Vista, presented me that dialog box:
libzip supports PPMd
Got some WinZIP compressed archive using their propritary PPMd compression today. The evaluation period of my Wine powered copy of WinZIP has expired and I was not willing to renew it. Documentation for their PPMd is available, so I added PPMd support to libzip. Actually I already looked at it some months ago, but was too embaressed by Dmitry Shkarin's coding style ...
