wanna curve away? it's such a perfect day

If you were at my Special F/X talk, Desktop Summit in Las Palmas, or if you watched the recorded video (135 MB Ogg), you might notice the tongue-in-cheek gratitudes to Lufthansa dan SpanAir I expressed at the beginning of the talk. The story goes as follows. As all of us, the Trolls, left Oslo to fly to Las Palmas, our flight got delayed twice, in Oslo (by Lufthansa) and Madrid (by SpanAir). Like every other dedicated (read: foolish) hackers, I took advantage of the delay to fulfill my dream (read: obsession): writing my own presentation tool. Hence, the special thanks.

Of course, like every other dedicated hackers, I cheated (after all, great artists steal). Inspired from the previous discussion with Simon (and Holger), I just took S5 and wrapped it with QtWebKit. The result is something I called s5runner. The 200-lines Qt/C++ code (and PyQt, thanks to David) is best demonstrated by watching the following short screencast:

Few extra features added on top S5 are screen blanking (white or black), night mode (just for the fun of it), syntax highlighting (useful for code snippet), countdown timer (because my laptop has 100x computing power vs my wristwatch), and (my favorite) live editing.

I will definitely reuse this for my upcoming talks.

(again) the map of my world gets smaller as I sit here

I always wanted to help Marble, but I am guilty because until now I can't afford any time to play with it. All these years, I used to compile bleeding-edge Marble from time and time, use it, and basically that is it. Although since a long time ago I promised Torsten that I was willing to help Marble, actually only right after Gran Canaria Desktop Summit finally I devoted some time to study its code. The three of us, Torsten, Andrew and I also had a short but fascinating discussion during the summit.

Now, I still don't manage to contribute anything to Marble yet, but I already have something in my pipeline. You will likely hear from me in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Since I reckon I enter the wonderful territory of mapping world, I thought, well, let's familiarize myself a bit with the technology. I took a look at the interesting experimental Google Maps API v3 (which BTW does not require an API key). Using QtWebKit, I wrote a simple 300-lines example that shows a magnifying glass over the map (see the screencast). Of course, the area under is the zoomed version of the map.

Since I am flirting with Qt for S60 these days, I thought about bringing that example to the phone. However, instead of relying on Google Maps, I decided to leave the dark side and jumped to use OpenStreetMap instead. The result is effectively an example of how to render the tiles from OpenStreetMap using Qt, which also runs on S60. It does even have the night-mode feature.

Video, you asked? Thanks to Alessandro, here is the 52-second videocast that demonstrates it (or watch on YouTube), running on Nokia 5800:

paella de marisco

Also known as seafood paella, something we tried when we were in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. Now I am motivated to cook it myself, sometime in the near future, in particular since I am also a fan of mussels.