Qt designer bug

Step 1: Start Qt Designer. Open your form. Qt designer hangs. Kill that stuff.
Step 2: Restart, but open another form. Qt Designer works just fine.
Question your sanity and repeat step 1 to see whether the hanging was just a glitch in the Matrix. Be stumped to see that it hangs again.
(Possible extension: create your favorite permutational combination of step 1 & 2 and repeat into infinity 😉 )

If this scenario seems familiar to you, then certainly read on…

Remember my little QtWorkbench issue I blogged about? Well, it seemed, the story got a tail too (that’s why I had to blog that first before I could say this =)).

During my struggle for correct compilation, I had modified the windowModality flag of my QMainWindow to Qt::Modal, in a desperate attempt to guide my app into the “Right Thread”. 😉
If I had modified that flag at any other point, I would have noticed the problem immediately, but being preoccupied with my QFtp thread problem at that time, I never went back to Designer and didn’t notice..
I know, it’s a stupid of me, but I still think it’s kind of a bug in Qt Designer. If you shouldn’t change the window modality of a main window, then they shouldn’t let you. 🙂 Moreover, you can’t change it back since as soon as you open your form, the form gets simulated in real-time and the dead-lock occurs. Or maybe even eventloop hijacking, sounds more l33t. 😛
Luckily, the gui is stored in plain XML, so you can just delete that section and you’re all set.

Mobistar on the road

One of the first things I tried when I got my cell phone, was using it to connect my laptop to internet. We happened to be on vacation in the middle of nowhere (which Limburg is to most Belgians 😉 ) so it was the ideal situation to try out my brand new GPRS subscription. 🙂 I had no idea where to start, let alone which proxy servers etc to configure. Surprisingly enough, I actually managed to find some info through the Orange World portal (which I first had to enable an account for) which, combined with some info I found on the internet with the clumsy built-in browser, enabled me to connect my Opera browser to the internet, yay!
I used the Mobile Network Wizard that came with the rest of the Sony Ericsson tools. I needed my data cable back then, but figured this was only a matter of configuration to get it going over bluetooth.
Continue reading Mobistar on the road

IDE wars: the battle for Qt

In my search for the best open source Qt-compatible IDE (for Windows, as for Linux, you don’t have to search ;)), I eventually settled with Code::Blocks. Don’t ask me why anymore, it’s been too long. 🙂 (I do remember testing QDevelop and Qtclipse). But if you have a look at CB, you will see it for yourself: a very stable, clean and versatile IDE. Qt support comes in the form of an (unofficial) plugin: QtWorkbench.

First of all, getting this plugin to work was REALLY a PITA (It involved compiling CB from SVN which was a challenge on it own), but very recently the author seems to provide some binaries which should make the experience all the more pleasant. 🙂 I was so happy when I first got it running, that I really didn’t care about half a dozen plugins being lost in the build process. 😉 (I never took it up again, who needs plugins? 😛 ;)) What’s more, code completion just worked and QtWorkbench created my .pro file all by itself.

After the honeymoon moment was over, I really got some nasty trouble though. Compiling debug simply did not work because apparently I don’t have the Qtdesignerd.dll and QtW insists on including it in the project file. So let’s remove it outside the autogenerated block like this:

CONFIG -= designer

Okay, first hurdle taken. Another hurdle was unfortunately a whole less obvious.
Continue reading IDE wars: the battle for Qt

which php.ini?

ok, so you need to modify php.ini to change some php setting but you’re on this ill-managed cpanel server having like tens of them.. So which one is the active one? 🙂
Just ask php itself 😉 :
php -i | grep php.ini

Gaim 2.0

Gaim 2.0 is _finally_ there! Sorry, I should say Pidgin by now, but who knows? 😉 I think the Pidgin thing is, apart from its spelling (I always make mistakes causing me to fail finding the homepage ;)), actually a good thing:

  • Nice(r) connotation.
  • Better logo.
  • Bye bye law suits 🙂
  • Overall, I believe this is an excellent release (understatement). The only thing I found better in the latest beta I tried, was the available icon in the systray. It used to be just a green circle. Now, they added a speech balloon to it (please make that optional ;)). The user interface/usability has improved tons, so I might become tempted to drop Psi. Won’t happen any time soon though. 😉

    Note: you might have problems accessing the Pidgin website. It seems the release is not officially announced yet and they are probably migrating the old site first before doing so. First post, LOL!