I love eating fish and chips, don't you? If you do like them then learn how to prepare your very own special fish and chips meal!
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=razq7QIALSg]
I just want to say welcome to my brand new nephew Ian Peters! Born on Feb 3 and weighing in at 7 pounds and 4 ounces. Naomi and I went up to visit him this morning. What a little cutie! It looks like we're next on the list!
Nokia went and bought Trolltech, the makers of the Qt Toolkit. I use Qt extensively for both home and work related programming. It's an excellent API built right on C++ but has bindings in Java, Python and many other languages.
This where the power of the GPL and Open-source in general becomes so important. Trolltech's is worth roughly about 0.1% of what Nokia is worth. In a situation like this Nokia could discontinue Qt, disband Trolltech, or bloat the software like Microsoft does. But the fact that it's open source means that anyone can just grab the current source and fork it over to a new project. At that point we may not have such a good company like Trolltech working commercially behind Qt, but the community could take charge and run with it. If Qt was a purely proprietary piece of software it would disappear completely and we'd all be forced to switch to Gtk. =)
Now that's the worst case scenario. Fortunately it sounds like Nokia is trying to play nice with the open source community. They have made an open letter to the open source community, a letter to existing Trolltech customers, and to Trolltech's partners. They explain that they want to continue to actively develop and support Qt both commercially and in open source. Above that they also are going to become a patron of KDE, Qt's biggest "test-case".
I'm not scared of this merger. At the worst case it would mean no more commercial support for Qt but continued community support. At the best case it means a company with a ton more money to hire more developers!
And since Trolltech is a commercial company interested in making money (as well as a kick-ass OSS toolkit) and Nokia is a commercial company interested in making money I don't think too much will change.
All in all we'll have to wait and see which way the winds of change will blow. I continue to support Qt by actively developing with it.
Well well well. My phone was ringing so, as usual, I checked the caller ID. Movie Gallery. Great, I thought, what overdue movie do I have out this time? Wrong, instead the wonderful voice on the other side asked if I still wanted a Nintendo Wii. Hmmm... I had to think hard on this one. I was in the habit of going to Superstore 3 times or more a day to see if a shipment has come in as I thought that that would be my best course of action. I had put my name on a list at Movie Gallery but I never thought I'd receive a call from them. Lo and behold the deed is done. I am now an owner of a Wii. I got Mario & Sonic Olympics, and extra Wii remote, and the classic controller. I would have got Zelda but I'm going to see how these games pan out. I'm on the lookout for another nunchuk but everyone's sold out of those as well. Oh, and the price was $249, 20 bucks cheaper then superstore and 30 bucks cheaper than best buy. W00T is just the word I need to use right now. w00t!
Update: I'm posting this from my Wii. I went out and got the internet channel. I love this thing!
Welcome Xander Gabriel
2006 at a glance
Welcome to our baby girl!