iCurve Goodness
Today was a great day. Finally I was able to get my hands on wonderful iCurve laptop stand. It looks great. It feels great. It is great.
4 CommentsImproving Chat Log
During last two weeks I’ve been secretly working on porting chat log widget to new code base. And alongside with improved code structure I’ve also been able to improve its usability.
The King of Dirty Hacks
Sometimes in C++ you may feel the need to write a piece of code that uses private functionality of third-party classes. This could be very noticeable with Qt, where you have very little control on included classes, and asking nice Trolls to include functionality you need could take some time, and the only alternative would be duplicating half of Qt-code and modifying class names. But there’s a neat trick that was advised to me by Justin. Interested? Read along.
Mac Supremacy: ⌥⇧K =
Unfortunately not all Mac users are aware that they possess very powerful shortcut mechanism, available in all native applications that allows to enter cool symbols with little effort — just a single keystroke!
These shortcuts could have been reproduced on other platforms, such as Microsoft Windows or Linux, but they would clash with many Alt-Whatever shortcuts that are already present in many applications. They have some sort of equivalent in face of Win-Something shortcuts (the Option “⌥” key that’s used to enter these shortcuts is located at the same place as Win key on Windows keyboards), but Win-shortcuts are commonly used for doing desktop-wide things, like controlling music player, IM application or hiding windows.
Note: In order to maximally enjoy this post, please either view it on a Mac, get this image (501KB), or use Safari Test.
UPDATE: Added information how to change keyboard layout, and how to access rarely used symbols you don’t want to memorize.
UPDATE2: Matej Cepl informed me that on X11 there’s Compose key which could help in typing diacritics and some other symbols.
Testing the Psi world
During a couple of past days I’ve been actively working on creating a small sets of helper scripts and files to aid creation of unit tests. In theory, they should help us to fight bugs aggressively and to help valgrindizing individual bits of code, which means fewer bugs and better performance.
But how to actually use it? The rest of the post will serve as the first bits on topic and as a reminder to myself. Be careful, it contains some techie stuff.
