white is not the new color

Let us start with a screenshot:

The graph itself is not something new, since I just recreated SquirrelFish Extreme comparison (against its predecessors). The focus is actually the tool which was used to generate that bar chart.

For the code and a little explanation, check out what I wrote on Qt Labs on the topic of QtScript-based bar chart.

I could sit for hours finding new ways to be awed each minute

Just like Jim Rohn said: Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book, these days I force myself to read more books more often than before. Here is a list of English fictions that I managed to read fortnightly, in the order of my preference, just in case you are looking for good books and want to read some of them as well.

• Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. I always wanted to finish this one and finally I did. Needless, it is only one of its kind. At one point in your life, you simply need to read and digest this book, because there is just Santiago in each and everyone of us.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I wrote the short review before. I also watched the movie, but the movie was not even close to the book.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an award winning book from Mark Haddon. You may finish this small book in a day, but that day will be the day that changes your life. The story is about an intelligent (lots of excellent math references in the book) but autistic young boy who tried to find the villain that murdered a dog. However, the story unfolds into something a lot bigger than that, something that changed his life significantly.
• The Witch of Portobello, again from Paulo Coelho.The witch, who was murdered, was a woman named Athena. She was very special and her life story was narrated by her relatives and friends. A trivia: find a sentence that exists both in this book and The Alchemist.
• Conn Iggulden's Emperor series: The Gates of Rome, The Death of Kings, The Fields of Swords, The Gods of War. A heavily fictionalized story of arguably the greatest leader ever in the whole Roman Empire, Julius Caesar. I really like these books and want to write a separate short review for this series.
• Marina Lewycka's very funny A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Both entertaining and educating. I wish someday it will be made into a movie. Set in modern day England, the story of the tractors is told by one of the protagonists, a brilliant old immigrant from Ukraina.
• A Thousand Splendid Sun by Khaled Hosseini (again). A sad story about Mariam and Laila, two Afghan women. It is a very nice read, especially after The Kite Runner. I am, however, a bit spoiled because fews of the plots become more predictable once you recognize The Kite Runner's patterns.
• The Book Thief, an award-winning bestseller, written by Markus Zusak. A sad but vivid story of a young German girl's experience during the second world war. She was closed to Death several times, and it was Death who narrated her story of life.
• The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury, that draws the commonly used theme: the adventure to find out hundred years old relic, supposed to be guarded by the Templar knight in the old time, which may change the foundation of the religion.
• Sandstorm, a wonderful thriller from ex-SAS Michael Asher. George Sterling, upon a hint that his son who was missing in the desert some time ago, mounted a journey to try to find back the lost son. Right from the beginning, it was not smooth at all and soon he would be involved in a mystery larger than just a family reunion.
• A collection of short stories, The Veteran by Frederick Forsyth. The highlight is the short story of the same title, a detective investigation of a murder that looked boring and usual at the beginning but then revealed a much larger matter in the end.
• Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Everyone knows the Nicholas Cage version (of the movie), but trust me, the book is much much better. Set in the second world war, the story is about the struggle of an Italian captain in an island in Greece.
• Another one from Raymond Khoury: The Sanctuary. Again about a secret, a centuries-old relic, that was supposed to change the way we look at the life and the universe.
• The Apocalypse Watch, written by Robert Ludlum. A top-notch agent disappeared after successfully sneaked into a supersecret military facility. What did happen to him? His brother was set to find that out.
• With a backdrop of second world war, The Black Order, a spy-thriller by James Rollins, is a story of the search for the cause of life. Introducing the concept of quantum evolution, apparently it was also possible to abuse the technology to "modify" the life itself.
• A reporter was missing and someone was supposed to find him. All of sudden, a mystery and a big conspiracy were the stake. Andy McNab's Crossfire.
• East of The City by Grant Sutherland. Yet another thriller (albeit with a slow start) about an underwriter which, when doing an investigation, was dragged into his dark past.
• What if you try to trace the mysterious girl who lived in your place before? That is what Michael Connelly wrote in the tech-thriller Chasing the Dime. At first, it looked just normal, but soon it became an important part of a dangerous game.
• Ultimate Weapon from Chris Ryan. A story of two men fighting in war-time Iraq to find their loved one.

I may forget some other books. But maybe those are not really important after all.

on coincidence

Kein Sieger glaubt an den Zufall.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

(English translation: No winner believes in coincidence)

Photo by this girl.

graphics dojo in 2008: a wrap-up

If you show some friends an ancient trick to multiply two numbers in your head within seconds, typically you would either get a dismissal ("Fast? A calculator or Google is faster!") or an excitement ("How useful!"). Each response is justified. In our daily activities, we seldom face the situation that force us to only multiply two numbers and right at that moment you don't have a calculator (or Google) at your disposal. However, knowing such an art can help you to improve your overall math skill, cast away the unnecessary fear, build your passion for math, and makes you ready for the next level. As Louis Pasteur once expressed, "In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind".

The same goes for some of the graphics examples I have written for that Labs Graphics Dojo corner, and also what I have shown in my Developer Days talk. The most common comment is "Blazing-fast? Just use OpenGL!" That is very true, and I could not agree more. However, googling for 27*31, which gives the answer one second faster than my brain, will not make me fall in love with math. The concern of the talk was more about the tricks and the passion behind them. It could be only me, but I feel that developers start to lose passion for graphics, even though they have to deal with lots of user interface stuff. We are practical enough already, we know when to use Google or when to do it ourselves, but we can not afford to let the passion goes away. After all, Zack started it under the name Graphics Dojo not e.g. Graphics Oracle, as it is merely a training place rather than a collection of solutions.

Although it is implicitly stated, if I were Louis Pasteur, I would have gone further and said "chance favors the prepared and passionate mind".

That is, 2008 is coming to its end. Around mid 2008 Samuel and I agreed to resurrect our beloved Graphics Dojo corner. I hope our attempt did not fail (miserably), in particular since I was new to this wonderful world of graphics.

Squeezing a couple minutes here and there, making the best out of rainy weekends, firing vim to code during some sleepless nights (instead of browsing the web aimlessly), redirecting my passion to graphics between fixing WebKit bugs, here is a list of biweekly Dojo examples that I managed to pull off this half-year:

• Genie effect, after the similar one made popular in Mac OS X.
• Flick charm to make any scroll area flickable.
• Custom web view with panning support, useful for touch device.
• Image colorizer using painter composition.
• A simple image viewer with support for remote URL drag-and-drop.
• Visual Google, where your search result is accompanied by the thumbnail previews of the hits.
• Small tool called websnap, given a web page it will create the preview.
• Parallax sliding effect for, say, a home screen in a mobile platform (phone, portable device, you name it).
• SVG rasterizer using WebKit as the rendering back end.
• Quake-like underwater effect. Simple old school trick.
• HSV pie with QImage pixel manipulation.
• Dreamy feeling by bloom effect, as some sort of composition example.

And while you are there, check out examples written by my fellow Trolls:

• WolfenQt, a Qt version of Wolfenstein 3-D along with embedded Qt widgets.
• Bloom filter as an example of the new pixmap filter feature.
• Translucent widget, for X11.
• Text zooming through painter scaling.
• Radial blur like in the nineties.
• Mix widgets and Graphics View to have widget acceleration with OpenGL.

Happy New Year!

oh, Clifford

"You could not live without quaternion, could you?", so was the impression of my advisor.

William Hamilton and William Clifford are my heroes. I fell in love with quaternion some time ago and used it with passion in my dissertation (check the summary). Those who had done extensive polarization analysis using matrix and quaternion would come to the usual conclusion: for this context, quaternion and polarization analysis is a marriage made in heaven.

Now I realize that few days left until 2008 is gone. This would mark my biggest failure for this year. Sadly, I fail (again) to learn Clifford algebra in depth.

fragrances

I decided to ask her. "Sorry if I'm rude, but isn't your perfume Escada Moon Sparkle For Men?"

She smiled. "Yes, and it is wonderful. " She continued smiling. "I got it from a customer, I work in a bank."

"Ah, I see."

"Don't you also use Bruno Banani Pure Woman?", her turn now to ask me.

"Oh, yes I do. So I feel that my other half is always there."

One second passed. Then we shared a laugh.

code less. create more. with Qt Creator.

Congratulations to the Qt Creator team for the Beta release! In case you live under the rock, Qt Creator is the new-IDE-on-the-block. It is now open source and it has just reached beta, so just download it (Windows, Mac, Linux) or learn more about it. For the braves, check also its shiny new open repository, start git cloning and hack on it!

happy holidays (from Qt Software)

(Or see the video on YouTube)

genie in a bottle

Let us start with a screenshot:

For the code, the hack behind it, and a screencast/video, check out my Qt Labs blog entry.

every day a false start and it burns my heart

This week in Oslo we have visitors, as evidenced from this picture:

(Zoltan, Holger, Simon, another Zoltan, Enrico, Tor Arne, Ariya).

Basically we are doing a QtWebKit hackfest. Beside the usual three musketeers of us (Guardians of QtWebKit here in Oslo), we have also two Zoltans and Akos (not in the picture) coming from University of Szeged, as well as Holger (WebKit open-source developer) and Enrico (Italian ueber-hacker).

We managed to nail down a lots of stuff, among other the discussion about development workflow using git, a heavy round of final API review, brainstorming on the DOM API, ACID3 patches merge and some font handlings, lots of bug fixes and touches such as fix for annoying focus problem, cursor flashing, proper non SVG build, multiple file chooser support, state save and restore signals, native plugins instance lifetime, file extension for images, autogenerated inspector qrc, fix for Enter does not work, missing plugin icon, and many other stuff, including non-technical ones.

It is a fun hackfest and we certainly need to do this more often :-)

knocked out

The beauty of taking a trip from/to South East Asia is simply its ridiculous journey. In the last 72 hours, I have been in 6 different airports, gone through 7 hours timeshifting, trapped 3 times in inhuman traffic jams, exposed to 40 Kelvin temperature drop, and of course enjoyed only sporadic in-flight sleeps and food.

For my aging, weak body, it hardly comes as a surprise that I am K.O.

scrolling through the paragraphs, clicking through the photographs

I heard that seven is a magic number. I am seeing the seventh winter in my life. How magical.

For roughly 300 weeks I stay in Europe already. And I will still be here for some time to come. But after reaching some of my goals, missing many others, I decided I will pay my home country a visit.

Bracing for the impact of reverse culture shock.