rullzer

So since it is vacation, Christmas is over and I have some time to fill. I have been thinking about some projects to do but could not really think of something doable in a few days. Since well I do not mind long term project I just want something where I have something working in a few days.

I had a nice idea that I borrowed from Tobias Koenig about bus-services. So I checked the transport company in Amsterdam. Wrote them a nice email if they have a way to communicate with the database. XML-RPC or something like that. Since I do understand they would not allow me directly on the database. An email came back that they do not have such a service and indeed could not allow me on directly on the database.

That is all understandable but the departure times are all available on the internet so I decided to give it one last try. A dump of the departure times from the database. But again they could not help me. Now I wonder why is that. I wrote a nice email that I just wanted to make a nice program. Why can’t they share that stuff with me? Or anyone else?

Now I could ofcourse parse the whole stuf by myself. But that would mean I had to write some ugly parser in their web of html. Which I do not like.

So that project won’t work for me. Then a friend of mine suggested a simple bittorrent client. That can run on a server and a nice client program to connect to it. So It can run while you are asleep or whatever. However after looking at a bittorrent file and the protocol I figured that would not be something I could have working in a few days.

So no project now. If you have any suggestions drop a comment please.

Qt has not even released a final version of Qt4.4.0 but 4.4.0_rc1 is already in portage. What does that mean? Well first of all that some people that complain that gentoo is now always up to date with its versions are proven wrong. Just run an ~arch system and you won’t really get more bleeding edge than that.

But the other thing Qt4.4.0_rc1 is that qt is that we now have qt-core. This means that you can compile and run qt programs on machines without X. I find this a huge advantage since I really like coding in Qt. First of all OS independancy this isn’t the most usefull feature for me since I only run linux but it is always good to know more people can use the things you create.

However the most usefull thing I find is the easy use of sockets and string modulation. It currently is masked ~M on x86. And not even keyworded on the other arches. However I added the amd64 keyword and compiled it on my home server. Compilation went smooth and a simple hello world program worked like a charm. So soon I can write some nice usefull (at least for me) servers in Qt wich should safe me a lot of time. Which is always a good thing

Yet another reason why I just love Qt.

First of all Happy Hollidays. Christmas is almost over and I hope you all had a good time. However on this second Christmasday I found myself at my girlfriends parents waiting for the other guests to arrive. Since it would take roughly 3 hours before they would come I figured I’d better do something. So after reading up on some blogs and articles I found wondering what to do next.

They their projector popped into my head. It has an USB-port. My laptop has an USB port. It did not take me to long to find out that I could do some nice things whit that. Acer has some software under windows. I was hoping they would have just posted the protocol online. But no. Ofcourse not. After browsing the Acer website and google. I could not find anything usefull about what command to send to the Projector (it does not help that Acer also creates a whole lot hardware).

So It was time to hookup my Laptop to the proejctor. Everything still works. And I was monitory /dev for any changes. The first thing to catch my eye was a bunch of new stuf in /dev/input. A mouse was automatically recognised. And it even worked. Moving some sort of analog stick around made my mouse move! Isn’t that magical!

However it is nice and all that I can use it as a mouse but who really cares? Now also tty12 was created. Which seems a lot more interesting. However I had ofcourse no idea what to send to the Projetor in order to get response. Now maybe I’ll hijack a Windows Laptop tomorrow and sniff some of the command send trough the USB port.

Ah well a nice project to work on during this vacation.