November 2011 Archives

Wed 11.30.11 - Here are my notes from the Qt Developer Days 2011 Day 2, the Conference Sessions of which there was many good & meaty sessions on Qt, Qt Quick, and mobile. The big dinner and party was also this evening, but that will merit a separate photo essay post.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

Qt Dev Days 2011 - Training Day

Tues 11.29.11 - I am at the Qt Dev Days 2011 in San Francisco(-ish) for the next three days and per my usual, I will be taking notes during the sessions and posting them here.

Today was the Training Day where one could choose one of five training tracks and I chose the Qt Apps with Nokia track and I am glad I did as the Digia trainer, Tuukka Ahoniemi, was funny, thorough, and informative on Qt Quick/QML matters big picture and small details.

The day started with Nokia's Kenny Mathers talking about the best way to make money from mobile apps and the Nokia app store. He talked about 'Next Billion' a favorite unspecified key phrase of Nokia presenters of the last year and I had an opportunity to ask him to clarify. And he did.

The day ended with Gordon Thornton walking us through how one submits one's app to the Nokia Store and demystified the process.

Now to go off to the Welcome Reception.

My notes are mostly a transcription but sometimes a paraphrase of what the speaker said and what their slides said, if exact quote then I will put it in "". The use of () is my notes or asides or thoughts.

Mon 11.28.11 - Tule fog photo taken while descending the Grapevine looking out into the Central Valley of California while driving up to the San Francisco Bay area for Qt Dev Days. By the time I started driving up Hwy 152 to Gilroy and finally saw stars and a clear sky, my eyes were rotating like the Mac beach ball during an app crash.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Fri 11.25.11 - While many retail stores and chains trot out their Christmas decor before Thanksgiving or even Halloween, decorum dictates that one should at least wait until the day after Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving weekend to put up one's Xmas lights and decor.

This morning Mitch, Linda, and some of Mitch's electrician colleagues were installing their annual Christmas lights and animated figurine extravaganza. Each year for the last three years, Mitch and Linda say this will be the last year of their putting up the whole kit and caboodle of lights and figurines, but each year it gets installed once again.

I am heartily glad that Mitch, his electrician friends, and Linda put in the time, effort and dollars to light up the neighborhood in such a fancifuly and delightful way.

The Holiday Season has now officially started!

Thurs 11.24.11 - Happy Thanksgiving to one and all. The dogs and I went out to cousin Lynn's house in Palm Desert where various members of the extended family had gathered for a lovely Thanksgiving feast.

Tues 11.22.11 - Looking ahead, looking behind. Photo taken late this afternoon when I was driving east on Westminster Ave through the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Base as the sky was very lovely.

Today was a busy day and when I had time to sit down with my computer tonight, I found out that Anne McCaffrey passed away at her home in Ireland yesterday at the grand age of 85.

While I didn't find Anne McCaffrey's Pern series until late in college, it was a perennial re-read fave throughout much of the last 20 years. I have loved the Tower & Hive (Rowan/Lyon) series as well as the more recent Freedom series that was an re-write & expansion on a short story she wrote in the 1960s. I loved how her worlds were built so well, like Tolkein, that in my mind, I can still wander Pern, Altair, and Deneb.

Anne McCaffery stands with Madeleine L'Engle and Ursula Le Guin as the trio of writers who have greatly influenced my life, my imagination, and my hopes for being a smart woman in this world and for the future.

Thank you, Anne.

****

John Scalzi's RIP, Anne McCaffrey

Jenna Busch's RIP Anne McCaffery, the single biggest artistic influence on my life

And the MeFi folk

Yesterday, my mom, sister, and I went to what my mom calls 'soul comfort food' for a rainy day - Ashoka the Great in Artesia.

I love the dal makhani at the Ashoka the Great's buffet, as it is a thick multiple bean stew/curry perfect to put on top of rice and just on the edge of my ginger capacity. The cooks put 1/8" fresh ginger cubes in the dal and while it is tasty, it is almost too much ginger for me.

My mom loves fresh ginger and loves lots of it. Through much of my teen years she would use nearly a whole root in dinner which was too much for my palate, as the dish would seer my tongue with ginger fire. If I would complain she would tell me that she didn't really put much in at all.

Seeing all the ginger in yesterday's dal, I encouraged her to go get some, when she came back from the buffet and sat down I saw that her dal had many ginger chunks in it. She ate about half her dal and then told me, "I don't taste any ginger in this."

On Friday in the way of any good internet bunny trail, I found myself at the PySide website wondering what progress had been made with the Python port/binding for Qt since I last looked, downloaded, built and inspected to see if it was fit for my mobile application development purposes back in April/May (or more like was my skillset I ready for building the most recent stable version of PySide).

In the first 20 minutes of traipsing down Python and Qt based bunny trails on Friday afternoon, I found myself in raptures of happiness, as it appeared to my eyes and reading comprehension that Nokia had taken on the PySide project and was moving forward with it as a legitimate wing of Qt. I was so excited that I called a non-technology-working friend and gushed about it to her (sorry).

I tweeted asking if any of the PySide folk would be at Qt Developer Days 2011 in San Francisco next week. I was ecstatic about the prospects of using Python for the logic in my Qt Quick apps rather than C++ or Javascript.

The major reason that I love both Python and Qt Quick/QML is that the code is by and large minimal and declarative but gets the job done powerfully without excessive grammar, wordiness, and very little punctuation, which makes my minimalist loving self happy happy happy. The very idea of Python + Qt Quick sounded too deliciously good to be true.

And it appears that after some months of Nokia dedicating employees to making PySide a robust binding for Qt and Qt Quick, that Nokia is now un-dedicating said employees and will be decommissioning their involvement in PySide to an add-on for Qt.

My hopes were crushed in less than two hours. Up in happiness of the possible perfect pairing of my favorite programming/scripting language with my favorite mobile framework, only to fall down the rocks of despair and sadness that so much potential was so fast dissipated.

Matti Airas the Nokia python guru on the PySide project does write in this email that he does see a future for PySide and mobile as an add-on for Qt in the community separate from Nokia. Here's to hoping that he is right.

Further hopes go to Python catching on as a good option to the various C languages and Java for mobile app development. And here's to hoping that PySide folks will be at Qt Dev Days next week.

****
Update from Wed 11.23.11 - Just to clarify, this post is for NaBloPoMo and is my joke on / to myself about moderating my enthusiasms in a world where the funding of technology projects is driven by management stratagems & quarterly profits, as I get so excited upon finding out a technology has finally reached the point that it will be useful and then, in this case, less than an hour or two later after searching for more info I find out that the project has been discontinued.

All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Sat 11.19.11 - After many months of hard work and much planning, design, and thought, Tammy and Ryan Callis had the Grand Opening party of their new Canvas Shop tonight.

It was good fun to not only see how they have transformed the 1940s era boat canvas space into a dual custom canvas creating shop in the back and a locally sourced art / creative gift shop in the front. They are selling a wide range of California created art and artisan created objects from local band's CDs to jalapeno jelly to handmade surfboards to books and paintings. It is wonderfully eclectic and a great addition to Seal Beach.

Canvas Shop
702 Marina Dr. (corner of Marina & PCH)
Seal Beach, CA 90740

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N950.

Thurs 11.17.11 - The one block of south-east and 2 blocks of south facing front line of houses in Seal Beach have an interesting little micro-climate where one home owner has roses and camellias all winter long and another can grow bananas and tomatoes around Christmas time. Go one block away from the south facing ocean front and no one can grow bananas no matter how hard they try, although my next door neighbor Earl does try to convince his stunted banana tree to grow.

The camellia bush on the south-east Anaheim Bay side always blooms in late December-early January, usually a month before the camellias at the Huntington Library and Gardens, the last two years it has bloomed in mid-December.

Today is the 17th of November and there are three big red, showy camellias' on that bush. Hello early over-performer! Hello micro-climate!

Hello Seal Beach, the land of a flower blooming somewhere in town every day of the year.

And yes to answer your question that you are thinking right now in your head, we have no real winter to speak of here in Seal Beach, just some fog and chilly-esque 55F degree nights. As Ryan says, "It's Seal Beach cold." Which means, not cold enough to scare the bananas away.

Wed 11.16.11 - Today during Scruffy's late afternoon / early evening walk, I decided to take the Nokia N950 along to see how it would handle low light and just plain dark photo situations. In each of the photos above, I only turned off the flash, kept the camera on Automatic, and did not change any other settings. The Nokia N950 did a fine job in the low light situations where I could hold the device steady.

Mon 11.14.11 - Stuck in traffic on the northbound 101 going to the combined HTML5 & Adobe Meetup where Stephanie Sullivan-Rewis, Elliott Sprehn, Neville Spiteri, and Greg Rewis spoke at on a variety of HTML5, CSS3, JS and image making subjects.

One of the reasons I rarely go to LA for geek meetups is that they usually start at 6:30 or 7pm, which means I have to sit in an 1 1/2 of traffic to get there. Compared to going to a live band, which usually starts at 10pm, which means I can get up to LA in 25-30 mins...

Living Small on Battening Down the Hatches, while Charlotte has a freezer full of pork, I have a freezer full of lamb (from the OC Fair).

Wendell Berry's Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front poem:

"Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years." - Wendel Berry, exerpt

Anina goes to the TechCrunch Beijing Disrupt and comes home to write Girls in TechCrunch

From a photographer living in Iraq, 5 Tips for Safely Photographing a Dangerous Event

Brian Fling has decided it is time to write Book #2:

"At the heart of all of these transitions is mobile. I've seen it have a transformative impact on some of the biggest and oldest companies on the planet. I've seen geniuses become dumbfounded. I've seen great intentions fail miserably.

I want to explore and share those stories. I do not talk want to talk about the virtues of native apps or HTML5 apps - or any other irrelevant discussion that revolves around the technology of today. Mobile is no more about the technology, as the printing press was about paper.

Instead this book will be as much a manifesto of 21st century experiences as it is a guide to using century old tools to solve the problems of today, even the ones we may not be able to define yet."

@Jyri tweeted: "If I had an angel credo it'd be to invest in quirky solutions to big problems: e.g. Valkee treats depression with light http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8877185/A-bright-word-in-the-ear-for-those-with-winter-blues.html"

Last but not least, Timo Arnall posts Three films on communication and networks. It is worth it to watch the videos/films.

Sat 11.12.11 - Deceased dragonfly found under the hood of my car today when I asked my brother to look at my car's spark plugs. The spark plugs are good for another 20k miles, the dragonfly isn't.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Fri 11.11.11 - Remembrance or Veteran's Day depending on where you live. A day set up to remember the WWI veterans, who are all gone, and the WWII vets are passing now.

Two of my great-grandfathers who served in the Great War, both returned to father daughters in February of 1920, one to still have relative good acclaim in the family and one who returned quite twisted and the echos still reverberate.

In Flanders Fields (1915)

In Fanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (1872-1918), Canadian Army Medical Corps

While tech pundits love love love to proclaim the DEATH of [insertwhateverissupposedlydeadthisweek], as a way to have something to write / talk about or as a way to drive traffic to their blog, the majority of the users on the web continue to ignore that [insert name of] is dead and continue to use it or they have never understood how to use and don't as a result.

If you have a blog, your blogging software most likely provides a subscription feed, be it RSS or Atom, or you subscribe to a service like Feedburner which produces a feed of which you can then track the statistics on.

Depending on your blog and readers, folks may find your subscription feed(s) easily and use it or they are baffled by how to use it or are indifferent. Some bloggers have actively pushed an email or twitter subscription as an alternative to their RSS or Atom feeds.

I have now been blogging for 8.5 years here at BlackPhoebe.com and my logs show me that I have more folks accessing my feeds (RSS & Atom) than Google Analytics says I have regular returners who access the blog via a direct link. The grand majority of the folks who subscribe to one of the RSS or Atom feeds to this blog and don't use the Feedburner one. Other bloggers may have a different experience, but I write from mine.

As a regular reader of blogs via their feeds*, it drives me nuts when a blog I like changes their feed URL with no warning. Much of the time it is when a blogger changes from one blogging CMS to another and in the stress of the move doesn't think about how the change in feed URLs will affect their feed subscribers, or other times it is during a redesign or a big re-arrangement of files and blogging structure.

Regardless of how the feed URL gets changed, I would like to encourage all the bloggers using a CMS that generates a subscription feed to pre-think any architectural changes and warn your readers before it happens, as well as keeping the old feed open for at least 2 weeks after the move/redesign/cleaning/change with a last post on the feed that tells folks where to find the new feed URL.

Be kind to your faithful readers.

* I am a fan of Sage light RSS feedreader Add-on for Firefox.

There has been quite the internet blog-o-sphere to do revolving around Michael Weingrad's essay "Why There Is No Jewish Narnia", which led to D.G. Myers asserting that "Fantasy is a Genre of Christianity", where upon E.D. Kain proposes that it is not Christianity but Anglophone culture that is the root of Fantasy literature in "Fantasy and the Anglosphere".

In "Fantasy and the Anglosphere" Kain writes,

"When I published my fantasy piece in the Atlantic it was linked (reproduced?) by Richard Dawkins' site and a number of the atheists in the commentariat had scathing things to say about fantasy literature. Apparently it is not enough that readers of fantasy do not, in fact, believe in their make-believe. Apparently the fact that dragons and sorcery are not based in science is enough to earn the scorn of some anti-religious types.

This reminds me of the reaction of many conservative Christian groups to various fantasy novels, from Harry Potter to The Golden Compass and the attempt by some conservative groups to ban these books in schools due to all that witchcraft and other devil-worshipping (you know, all those satanic rituals Harry Potter and Hermione engage in before the strange sexual acts begin.)

But many, many Christians and atheists and people of various other faiths enjoy fantasy. "

It struck my absurdity bone as darkly funny that folks are unable to enjoy fiction because it is not science.

*blink*blink*blink*

Hello.

And then being the internet it gets better, as Alyssa Rosenberg jumps in the fray with "Is Fantasy Inherently Christian?" and Adam Serwer joins in with "High Fantasy is a Subgene of Fantasy", wherein Mr. Serwer brings in the fantasy traditions of many cultures worldwide.

What I find interesting is that none of the writers above, after name checking C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Chesterton, with one or two brief references to Arthurian legends of the high Middle Ages, discuss the Romantic and Victorian infatuation with all things that we would now label as Fantasy: elves, fairies, the sublime, the door between the worlds, other worlds, etc. Not just the folks in the British tradition, but also Wagner (The Ring Cycle), the Russian literature around Baba Yaga, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Celtic revival of Yeats, Wilde, et al, etc etc.

Or how about the writer that both Lewis and Tolkein gave much credit to, George MacDonald. While MacDonald was a poet, writer, and minister, many of his tales border between a mash up of older Scottish fairy tales with the early Modern Christian allegory tradition, wherein the fairy tales come out a bit stronger in his stories than any claims to a 19th Century version of Pilgrim's Progress.

Wherever we want to trace the history and genealogy of contemporary Fantasy literature, it is far deeper and broader than Tolkein, Lewis, and Chesterton. The Bridge of Birds immediately leaps to mind.

Also to say that Judaism is only concerned with the here and now, and thus couldn't produce a tradition of Fantasy is also only looking at the last 100 years or so of history. I would love a time machine to take me back to 1100 or 1200 AD to Cordoba or Granada to sit at the feet of a Jewish storyteller and hear of the tales being told in that moment in Andalucia. Maimonides may have had a few good fantastical stories to tell that weren't all theological in nature.

We, a people who have lived through and beyond the age of the early Modern explorers, the empires where stories leaked back and forth between subject & subjector, as well as the Modernist love of all things industrial progress and the rational, dip into many strands of fantasy in our TV, books, films, and now internets, of which many of these strands may have root in the primary culture we live in right now or the stories may scamper up and down other trees and roots of places we have not yet seen nor heard of.

Many of the stories we now think of as Christian or Medieval are stories that have been radically reshaped or completely created anew in the last 200 years the Industrial Revolution, the Romantics, and the various Revivals of the late 19th century. How much of the current genre we call Fantasy is not necessarily the creative child of Christianity but really the rebellious teenager of rational Modernism?

Sunpig, aka Martin Sutherland, has been tweeting and blogging about the happy/bouncy/F*ckYeah that is Dananananaykroyd, a happycore band who just dis-banded from Glasgow, Scotland.

Martin described Dananananaykroyd as complex melodies turned up to F*ckYeah! Someone in the Noisey 101 video describes them as 'happycore'. I say, imagine if the Refused decided that they were really happy and Cold War Kids amped it up about 400 more bounces per millisecond.

For my LA/SoCal music friends, check Dananananaykroyd out, even if we won't see them live at Alex's.

One of the great promises of HTML5 with CSS3 and Javascript is that eventually, after much wrangling & negotiation, one will be able to write apps that can work across many devices regardless of platform and ecosystem. In the meantime, while we are waiting for HTML5 to have access to the contacts or camera on the mobile you could be possibly carrying, we can use future friendly practices to develop and design flexible web sites and apps.

Until the future web accessible world arrives, from a pragmatic standpoint, many of us if we want to access contacts, or the camera, or a variety of other APIs and features on our mobile devices, we find ourselves delving into hybrid native-web mobile worlds or diving into native mobile apps be it through a SDK or PhoneGap or the like.

Thomas Perl in a post-Nokia World 2011 blog post, Comparing Mobile OS SDK availability by platform, builds an argument for a very salient point for folks who are currently developing for native mobile apps:

"Now, people can argue that one can set up dual-boot or virtual machines to support all OSes, but that's not the point. The point is that if the SDK is available on all Desktop platforms (note that this is not the same as SDK targetting all mobile platforms), developers can retain their choice of Desktop OS on which they develop on, and are not forced to use OS X or Windows for development of apps for the corresponding mobile platform (I also understand the reason why these companies only provide the SDK for their own Desktop platform, but that is not a good reason from a developer's point of view)."

I agree with Mr. Perl. I don't want to be told which desktop platform I must use so that I can develop for a certain mobile. I find working in virtual box to be tedious after a short span of time. I would like the system I develop for to respect me enough to let me to make the choice about what desktop/laptop OS I prefer to use.

Bravo to Android, Qt, and PhoneGap.

Mon 11.07.11 - Eight years ago today, somewhere in North Carolina, Scruffy McDoglet was born as the runt of a litter maltese puppies. He has turned out to be a great dog.

Photo of Scruffy McDoglet taken by Ms. Jen two days ago with her Nokia N8.

Sun 11.06.11 - All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8 even though she felt like she was running late all danged day long. Shakes fist at time change.

Sat 11.05.11 - Tonight I went to the Park Ave Restaurant in Stanton for long time good and faithful friend Kimm Gardener's 50th birthday. It was really a lovely evening and many thanks to Kimm and Kelli Gardener for a great party.

More photos tomorrow when I am not tired, I promise.

Fri 11.04.11 - The annual construction of the winter storm berm began two days ago but really started to take shape this morning. I took photos of the progress when there was a break in the rain clouds about 9:30am or thereabouts.

All photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8.

Thurs 11.03.11 - Photo of Nancy Gieschen taken by Ms. Jen outside of Elite Restaurant in Monterey Park, CA, with her Nokia N8.

I have been compiling a list of links for how to use, design, and develop for the Nokia N9 / N950, yesterday was links to tips & tricks for the User, Designers and Developers. Today is all the great and very valuable blogs and podcasts that I have found to be a font of information on the Nokia N9/N950, Harmattan, creating N9 apps in Qt.

If you know of other good Nokia N9/N950 designer, developer, and Qt blogs out there, let us know in the comment section.

Nokia N9 & Qt Blogs, Forums and Podcasts:

Nokia N9 Developer Blog
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Blogs/blog/n9-developer

This Week in Qt Podcast
http://www.ics.com/learning/podcasts/

Blogasdf
http://juhaturunen.com/blog/

Cutehacks
http://cutehacks.com/

Ed Page (Python, Harmattan & Qt...)
http://eopage.blogspot.com/

fiferboy's developing
http://fiferboy.blogspot.com/

flors
http://flors.wordpress.com/

KDE Pinheiro (Designer who works with Qt)
http://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/

Meego Handset Forum
http://forum.meego.com/

Meego Aggregator
https://meego.com/aggregator

My Meego
http://my-meego.com/

Nokia Developer News
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Blogs/blog/nokia-developer-news

PySnippet (more Python & Qt!)
http://pysnippet.blogspot.com/

Qt Labs Blog
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/

Qt, Maemo and some other stuff
http://kunalmaemo.blogspot.com/

Qt / MeeGo Mobile Apps Development
http://qt-mobility.blogspot.com/

qtsource
http://qtsource.wordpress.com/

The MicroNokia Developer
http://micronokiadev.wordpress.com/

thp on Maemo
http://thpmaemo.blogspot.com/

I have been compiling a list of links for how to use, design, and develop for the Nokia N9 / N950. The first section tips and tricks is for anyone with a Nokia N9, the second section is links for Nokia N9/N950 designers and developers, and the third is Nokia N950 specific.

Tomorrow, I will publish a list of blogs and podcasts that I have found to be a font of information on the Nokia N9/N950, Harmattan, creating N9 apps in Qt.

If you have any tips and tricks links for the Nokia N9 or N950, be it for users or designers & developers, tell us about it the comments.

Nokia N9 and Nokia N950 general interest topics for everyone:

The Nokia N9 Swipe site:
http://swipe.nokia.com/

Nokia N9 UX Gestures - click on DEMOS (I found the gesture demos invaluable in the first hour of using the N950):
https://www.developer.nokia.com/swipe/ux/pages/getting_started.html

Nokia N9 MeeGo/Harmattan Swipe UI Tips and Tricks
http://blog.wapreview.com/15554/

Nokia N950 Close Apps:
http://my-meego.com/faq/showquestion.php?fldAuto=5&faq=1

Using Firefox Mobile on the Nokia N9 (I have been using a version of mobile FF from Sept on the Nokia N950 and it is great)
http://blog.wapreview.com/15780/

N9 Swipe undocumented feature; activate sane behavior (How to set the Swipe behavior to the gestures you want)
http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/n9-swipe-undocumented-feature-activate-sane-behavior/

How to Take Screenshots on Nokia N9 with ScreenshotMee
http://thenokiablog.com/2011/10/13/how-to-take-screenshots-nokia-n9/

FM Radio App
http://my-meego.com/software/applications.php?name=FM_Radio&fldAuto=488&faq=2

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nikon D7000 using a 18-200mm VR lens in Dan's studio yard on Wed Oct 12, 2011 as all the media madness was going on less than 100 m/yds away.

Tues 10.31.11 - All photos of local Halloween fun taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8. Click on a thumbnail to see the larger photos.

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, get your writing fingers and keyboards ready to roar, it that time again... National Blog Posting Month. Wahooo!

For NaBloPoMo 2011, I will be doing my usual mixture of text and photo blog posts with the goal of creating at least one per day if not a combo of both.

Will you be joining in on the NaBloPoMo November blogging?