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.

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.

In the this time I have:

• Left my job at Mendeley working on a cool piece of research software. It was time to move on to other things and there are no hard feelings on either side, hopefully my work on there will continue to be well received and more Linux people (although Windows/Mac are also supported) will check out the cool Qt/C++ reference manager.
• Moved back from London to Edinburgh. I’d been away in Ipswich and London since leaving university and the call of Caledonia became too strong to resist!
• I proposed on the top of Cairngorm to my beautiful best friend and girlfriend. It was here that we’d had our first long chat while walking down seven years ago this summer. She said yes so we’re now planning the wedidng for 2010 and are both very excited!

Here’s a picture of us a few minutes after getting engaged (more and bigger photos to follow on my Flickr):

All this stuff has got me thinking more about the future so I’m trying to do the following:

• Plan my wedding and try to find a marital home for my fiancee and I. Also, buy a very cute puppy for us to have.
• Nail the currently freelancing I’m currently doing for my secret dream employer so that it will become a permanent position.
• Not install Linux on my new Macbook as it’s not fully working yet and I want to try and avoid wasting time fiddling and force myself to help the KDE Mac project.
• Stop wasting time messing unnecessarily with my computers when they work fine. Stop reading blogs that aren’t incredibly interesting. Stop following people on Twitter that aren’t incredibly interesting. Possibly stop using Twitter altogether for this reason

Generally I just want to try and start to make the most of my life a bit more, focusing on the things in life that matter (my faith, my fiancee and meeting actual goals with KDE/bass-guitar-playing rather than messing about).

It’s a bit of a random time for resolutions but hopefully this is a time when I can turn over a new leaf and start being a bit more useful again. If I’ve not achieved anything public in music or software in a few months then I want someone to slap me!

I read this and felt torn. On one hand the protesters are voicing their complaints against the British Army’s part in death of thousands of civilians. On the other hand they are raising the issue in a hugely polarising way which probably does more damage to their cause than aid it. After this brief pondering I returned to my week.

Over the following days the typical figureheads gave their sound-bites to the media about how awful this was and about how the protesters should be ashamed of themselves. Gordon Brown made one of his stereotypical comments, trying desperately to prove that he can do something right to a increasingly disappointed public. Basically, an fairly expected reaction.

What was unexpected was today’s story about David Davis MP calling for it to become a crime to incite hatred of serving soldiers. “Inciting hatred” is the clever new way to sweeten further restrictions of our free speech in a way the public will seemingly happily accept. David Davis admitted personal concerns about the war but insists that British soldiers are “our finest young men and women, the cream of society“.

Personally, I believe that most soldiers are brave men and women. I don’t think that they are necessarily finer people than the doctors or members of the emergency services who save lives daily but that’s another debate. I’m came pretty close to joining the military myself. I had several successful interviews with the British Army and was one away from a university bursary which would have got me a place in Sandhurst after graduation. Despite my current pacifist leanings I respect the opinion of those disagree and I respect those in the military.

The initial reasons given for the Iraq war have been revealed as mistaken at best and outright deceit at worst. Iraq is turning into a nightmare with thousands upon thousands of civilians displaced or killed. There are several accounts of Iraqis describing Iraq under Saddam as a better place to live. If more of the military had been men like Malcolm Kendall-Smith and Ben Griffin then perhaps we wouldn’t have this disaster our hands.

This is why at the next election I will be voting for a party that campaigned against the Iraq war and is putting forward a bill to repeal some of the laws that have reduced our civil liberties. It’s time to take a stand against these attempts by Labour and the Conservatives to further reduce our freedom and increase their power. It’s time for the government of this country to be led by a party that stands for the rule of international law and respects the rights of the citizens of this country.

Rules: Once you’ve been “tagged”, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be “tagged” (on Facebook). You have to “tag” the person who “tagged” you. If I “tagged” you, it’s because I want to know more about you. (I’ve only “tagged” people on Facebook).

1. I’ve been seeing my girlfriend (Lindsay) since we were both at school. She is amazing and I’m a very, very lucky man.
2. I treat life like a software problem. I’m convinced there must be some algorithm for “solving” all the world’s problems.
3. I became a Christian at 17 but wasn’t raised going to church.
4. I love dogs and hate cats. I want to train all the world’s dogs to eat the world’s cats.
5. I exfoliate and moisturise. I am/will be mocked for this but don’t care because my skin is awesome.
6. If I ever couldn’t be a software engineer any more I’d become a full-time bass player.
7. I have my nipple pierced, resulting in the nickname “Nipples” at school. Most people called me that rather than my name, including a fair few of the teachers.
8. Cycling has been my main method of transport for about 10 years so I have an strong dislike of bus drivers and people who beep their horn.
9. Deus Ex is my favourite computer game. It is incredible and and you should play it even if you don’t play games. It is a work of art.
10. I hate tea and coffee.
11. I think of myself as Scottish before British.
12. I constantly wish I had enough time to try and help everyone through all their problems.
13. I look forward to being married but fear becoming a parent too young.
14. Sometimes when I meet random people on nights out I like to convince them I have a really bizarre job. Last time was a paramedic for domestic pets.
15. I was one interview away from joining the British Army’s Infantry.
16. I have landed a plane. (In real life, not just in a computer game.)
17. I think Babylon 5 is possibly the best piece of TV or film ever made and if you disagree then you are wrong.
18. I can’t cry and haven’t done so for over three years. This slightly worries me.
19. I care very little what random new people think of me unless I’m in a situation like an interview or my good impression means a lot to my coworker/friend/girlfriend/family member.
20. I’ve known I was going to work with computers since primary school.
21. I think if you are not Scottish you shouldn’t be allowed to wear a kilt (possibly by law).
22. My music collection contains almost no female artists, probably because most of it is progressive rock.
23. One of the most endearing things someone can do to me is take the piss out of me.
24. I relish all criticism as one of my goals in life is to improve myself as much as possible in every area.
25. I generally hate romantic comedies unless they have John Cusack in them and then I irrationally love them.

As a result of this I’ve taken to sporadically reading relationship-help books and books about the differences between men and women psychologically. The most recent of these was recommended to me by a good female friend; the classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

The book basically uses the model of two species from different planets interactions to represent the stereotyped (the author admits this) but often valid problems in the interactions between men and women, focusing this book on those in romantic relationships.

I think a lot of the points that John Gray makes are fairly apt, about how men and women respond to their negative emotions (men tend to want to be by themselves, women tend to want a sympathetic ear but not to get solutions to their problems). We didn’t find this particularly revelatory; after a relationship as long as ours you tend to work these things out for yourself.

What I found interesting was that instead of challenging the fact that neither of these slightly extreme reactions should actually be challenged and improved upon (encouraging men to become more open and women to be more pragmatic when upset) John Gray instead seems to imply that you should just learn to accept that a few days a month (his rough estimate) your partner will act irrationally and selfishly and you just need to let them do that to get it out of their system.

I’m pretty glad I didn’t read this at the beginning of our relationship or I think my girlfriend and I would have developed some fairly destructive attitudes towards dealing with our differences. I think understanding these are a key element in improving a damaged relationship or knowing how to better communicate with your partner but I think blind adherence to John Gray’s advice could actually be fairly damaging for a relationship that doesn’t already have problems.

I’d probably recommend reading this book if you are having problems communicating with your partner but if you are happy and both of you are sharing your feelings and honestly and openly dealing with issues in your relationship I’d say it’s perhaps one to miss. Regardless of your camp I’d personally recommend from following his advice to the letter and perhaps strive for a great relationship all the time and moving beyond your biological impulses to try and become a better partner.

In Obama’s autobiography he quotes a friend who used to swear a lot. Obama read’s the audiobook version of his own book.

Hilarity results here.

(I’m not saying swearing is good/bad or that Obama is therefore good/bad because of this. However I’m still childish enough that this makes me giggle like an idiot…)

Apparently I’m a member of Generation Y as I was born in 1984. As I’ve been working in the last few years, especially in my time at BT, I’ve found myself having a very different attitude to my older coworkers. I’ve sometimes felt that maybe I’m just a “rebel” and need to learn to conform, but reading this blog has been a bit of a wake-up call in helping me to realise why I do some of the things I do and how I can be better motivated.

I’d say it’s a must-read if you are either in Generation Y yourself, or you are a manager who has staff from Generation Y working for you and want to understand how to keep them well motivated.

If you want to find out even more about this stuff, the company behind the blog Naked Generations does consultancy and have worked with some pretty big names already including the British government.

Check it out!