Why I am Every Qt Expert’s Worst Nightmare

As I’ve noted before, I have been interested in Qt development for some time and finally got to where I could allocate the hours to learning.  I missed out on local Qt training a while back so I’m dependent on documentation along with patient people online.

The latter have been a huge help.  I’ve encountered some weird and frustrating situations from which many friends have rescued me.  The former, however, have been severely lacking.  But let me share the pain with you progressively.

I decided to create an application for the Nokia N9.  The app will make use of GPS and cellular services mainly, and shouldn’t be very complicated.  I chose Qt Quick because I wanted to see how mature QML really is at this point.  Plus I’m allergic to C++. 

MeeGo and the N900 meet blogger irresponsibility

This morning got off to a roaring start, as a fast-filling thread plopped onto maemo.org seemed to have it from an authoritative source that there will not be a version of MeeGo to run on Nokia’s N900.  The fear, uncertainty and doubt spread like wildfire, naturally igniting the ideal 140-character vehicle for misunderstandings, Twitter.

It became obvious to me that the root problem was a misunderstanding by a CNET Asia blogger that was picked up by speed-readers and blown up into a noisy tornado of nonsense.

I’ll break this down for those interested.

Qt | Podcasting + conferencing + Twitter

A handful of people with ties to the maemo.org community have been kicking around the idea of a new podcast.  I’m not going to go too deeply into the proposed format at this time but rather will present the technical wishes discussed so far and solicit input from the readers on how to address them.

Interested?  Read on!

How Nokia helped improve my conversational style

I’ve always fancied myself an efficiency expert, but admittedly not due to any formal education.  Rather, an innate laziness has always ironically motivated me to constantly and intuitively look for process improvement.  Laziness, more than any other factor, is the true mother of invention.

But as successful as I’ve been in streamlining business processes and practices, that did not translate easily to communications.  I was constantly criticized, personally and professionally, for using ten words where two would do.  This has been, in yet more irony, a byproduct of the same storming brain that could identify quantum process leaps that had eluded peers.  So many things rattling around up there at the same time that honing in on one of them has always been a challenge.  In addition, I always wanted to share as much information as possible with listeners.  A job recruiter recently remarked that I am one of those who, when asked the time, tends to describe clock construction.  I had to admit he was right.

Cloudy days for data, Part 2

Inspired by blog articles from Michael Dominic K. and Henri Bergius, in part one of this series I touched on the conflict between the order of databases and the freedom of files.  The latter are fiercely hoarded and guarded by information workers who in many cases don’t really care about the object so much as the information it conveys.  But what are files, and why does this issue of managing their chaos even exist?

The modern electronic file is a data or readable text object meant to store and/or convey useful information.  It can constitute one or more records (I’ll even consider a graphic image as a record in this context).  The beauty of a file is its common independence from the confines of enterprise data stores.  This is especially true in the case of files based on open source and highly-accepted commercial formats; they are often accessed by a multitude of viewers or renderers.

But that independence comes at a cost.  The further a file object lives from a data management system, the more risk it can introduce and encounter.  Versioning, detail accuracy and unapproved copying are just some of the risks.   Files also consume storage space often disproportionate to the value they add, especially as they are wastefully replicated in myriad emails and hard drives.  The cheapness of onsite storage has helped exacerbate this, removing old constraints that once encouraged conservation over ease of access.

James Strock and Modern Leadership

I recently attended a meeting of our local chapter of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and as is often the case I was inspired by the guest speaker, this time a gentleman named James Strock.  His presentation was on 21st century leadership and how it does differ from the skills and experience required, say, centuries ago.

I jotted down some notes and I’ll share them here as bullet points rather than write up an entire treatise on his work.  However, some of the speculation is my interpretation/extrapolation and not necessarily what the speaker said verbatim: