Posts

Why are the printing functions from most IDEs so bad? OK so I have not really compared the printing function in many IDEs, but the ones that I have used hardly offer any control over the printing at all and print in a large font.

The Hard Choices board game from the Software Engineering Institute is a game designed to teach the effect of technical debt in software development. Players choose between taking a shortcut or taking the “long way” and gathering more tools.

I have wanted to build a monitor for our Cruise Control build server ever since I heard about the use of lava lamps to report the build status. The “easy” way seems to be to use an X10 automation system but unfortunately I have not been able to find that for sale in Japan.

This note describes my experiences getting a 3D mouse to work in a Qt application on Windows. The 3DConnexion 3D mouse is a 6-DOF controller often used for CAD and engineering applications.

One of the problems with using CppUnit as the unit test framwork in C++ is that adding a single test requires updating the code in two files and in total 3 places.

We use CruiseControl to run automatic builds after every commit and I thought it would be nice to monitor the build status from within QtCreator. I also wanted to try creating a simple QtCreator plugin to see how easy it would be to extend it.

QtCreator is a powerful integrated development environment from Nokia for creating applications with C++ and Nokia’s Qt Framework. It is available on all the desktop platforms supported by Qt (Windows, Linux and Mac).

I have not been a big fan of IDEs. Several times I tried to get used to Visual Studio but always found it big, slow and not suited to the way I work.

“Gardening, not architecture” This Oblique Strategy caught my attention while flipping through the iPhone version of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s deck of cards for out-of-the-box thinking. Recently I had been thinking about Software Architecture, the role of an architect and how it relates to the actual work of producing working software.