Posts

QT Designer with Clojure So, as promised, here’s a few notes on how I am using Qt Designer with Clojure. Some important things to remember: You must use Qt Designer with the QtJambi plugins installed. The easiest way to do this is to run designer.sh (Linux / UNIX / Mac OS X) or designer.bat (Windows) from the distribution folder that QtJambi came in. If you’ve got QtJambi installed as a package under Linux then you may need to check that the QtJambi plugins are correctly installed , they weren’t in my case....

Distributing QtJambi with Clojure. How to bundle up Clojure programs for distribution One of the questions I’ve seen coming up a few times is how to distribute clojure programs. The obvious answer is to build executable JAR files. A while ago I produced a simple database application for my girlfriends recruitment business, NRecruit. I developed this using Clojure on my Arch Linux based laptop, and deployed to her MacBook running OS X Leopard....

After many a dalliance with R6RS compliant(ish) Scheme implementations I have found myself inevitably drawn towards as new Lisp dialect instead. While I’m pleased to see Ikarus maturing to the state where it really is a very usable it’s not what I’ve been using to get stuff done. No, instead, I (like everyone else it seems) have fallen for Clojure. I won’t harp on about Clojure - you can read about it everywhere, instead I’ll just make some practical notes in the following posts....

Ikarus So… For a good long while I have been tracking the Ikarus Scheme implementation. I like it because it tries to comply with R6RS, compiles to some pretty quick code and recently added 64bit support. I like it so much that I even package it and a number of related libraries for Arch Linux. However, Ikarus has a single annoyance for me - it is not easy to extend it with C libraries....

A useful dialog There is an application that I have been working as an employee and a consultant for five years now. In the course of development I routinely run into a dialog in this application that handles errors at a global (or at least global to the GUI) level. This dialog is very useful, it stops the GUI bombing out totally and presents the user with the sad news that something has gone wrong and allows them to report such an error....

Ranting and raving? I’ve waited a long time to talk about this. I was all ready to rant and rave about the torrent of lies that the media would put out. As it turned out, however, one of the nice things over the last couple of weeks is that there have been pockets of journalists who’ve have taken the time to actually accurately portray Bill Gates career in the computer industry....

Listing installed TrueType fonts in Emacs In this new fangled age of TrueType support in Emacs it’s really useful to know the names of the Monospace fonts installed on your system in the format that Emacs understands. If you are on a Linux/UNIX system running Xorg with fontconfig installed then add this function to your .emacs file (defun list-monospace-truetype-fonts () "Provide a list of available monospaced truetype fonts on this machine" (interactive) (set-buffer (get-buffer-create "Monospaced Fonts")) (call-process-shell-command "fc-list :spacing=mono:scalable=true family | sort" nil t) (setq buffer-read-only t) (switch-to-buffer-other-window (current-buffer))) You can set these fonts in a number of ways, currently I am getting the most joy using this form:...

Tech content? Hmmm I am aware that I should put more technical content here, trouble is I don’t have much to say at the moment. Work is dragging on with the same old problems with different hardware. Outside work I am actively working on something (smallish) using Erlang to get my skills in that area up to scratch before starting something else (still smallish, but bigger). Schmap In the mean time here are a couple of things that happened yesterday....

It starts with the Aphids. When we put our plants on the balcony this year those dastardly greenfly hit them with a vengance. We tried a natural remedy, based on soaked nettles.. but without success we were left with no other option but to pray for ladybird or hover fly lavae. Just when we thought we would never get any luck we spotted the first ladybird lavae. They’re ugly little critters but with plenty of aphids to munch on they soon grew big and strong....

Nic seems to specialise in taking shots of me in compromising positions. Here I am at the local Biergarten (Lochham) , drinking König Lüdwig dunkels bier (my favourite German beer) and supporting Germany in the match against Portugal. For some reason it looks like my ear was bleeding, it wasn’t. Role on Turkey.. probably not one to be in the center of München for given the reaction of the Turkish population here following their victory the following night....