TV shows tonight

Posted by rae in entertainment, the Net, video
at 2:58 pm on Monday, 30 March 2009

show list
shows on tonight – click for large

Wow, quite a few shows on TV tonight.

Until recently I used the site TV Rage to have a calendar showing upcoming shows. But then they changed their APIs to not include iCalendar data. :-(

The place I found out about TV Rage, TV Calendar says it also uses EPGuides.com, so maybe they have iCalendar data I can use?

Worst case I can write a quick CGI script to read XML from TVRage and convert it to iCalendar on the fly.

Seems like a lot of work to go to though..

Update:
So, along with the screenshotted shows…

there were some others!

So wow, that’s like 12 shows! Which is good because the rest of the week is pretty bleak until Friday..

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Books to read

Posted by rae in entertainment
at 10:15 am on Friday, 20 March 2009

I’m finding it harder to find good hard SF books to read. One recent “find” was Charles Stross, a friend of Cory’s who he’s worked with.

I’m just going to put a list of books to look into here, possibly updating it over the next while.

mammoth Saturn's Children

I guess this would be an ideal opportunity to use my Amazon Associates thingee, but I’d have to dig it up out of email. Ah well. Here are Amazon.ca links: Mammoth, Saturn’s Children.

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Why Qt 4.5 is a really big deal

Posted by rae in development, work
at 10:38 am on Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Okay, this will be a post about software development, but I’ll try to avoid using jargon in explaining the impact of yesterday’s release of Qt 4.5.

Qt
Qt software

So first of all, what the hell is Qt? Well, it’s a software library that allows programmers to easily write programs that run on Mac, Windows, Linux and even cell phones. If a developer want their code to run on all these platforms without using something like Qt, it often means man-years of work, and platform-specific oddities can arise, such as Adobe not having a 64-bit version of Photoshop on the Mac (because they use Code Warrior’s PowerPlant on the Mac, which is no longer supported except as an open source project). Qt is also an extremely powerful and fast library, which is not often the case for these kinds of things.

Ok, so what’s the big deal with version 4.5? Until yesterday, if you used the Qt library, you had to either:

But yesterday for the first time, Qt is available under the terms of the “Lesser Gnu Public License” (LGPL). This license allows developers to use Qt, and not release the source code for their program, and not have to spend thousands of dollars a year.

That’s enough for now. My compile is finished. I may come back and add more later.

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Hmm, I really should cleanup this blog..

Posted by rae in Reid, web site
at 12:12 pm on Monday, 2 March 2009

It’s looking pretty sad at the moment. :-/ It’s because I haven’t fully recovered pics.tnir.org, so there are missing graphics here and there. Maybe I will just use a pre-canned theme so that it looks ok or something. My main problem is that I turn off Wordpress’ “translate returns into
tags” auto-filter, which isn’t a setting. I have to hand-edit the PHP code every time.

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