Just a short update: I have just uploaded the slides from the two talks I did at The Camp this year.

The first talk was a lightning talk about what is going on behind the scenes of a large IRC network as seen from an operator’s perspective. You probably won’t get much knowledge from the slides unless you were there.

The slides were made in Apple’s Keynote application and it’s absolutely horrible. I’m back on Beamer and LaTeX again.

The second talk was an introduction to Nokia’s Qt framework and how to write cross-platform GUI applications for both mobile devices and desktops (focus was on Linux and OS X only though). The presentation was followed up by a small workshop with roughly ten participants. We wrote a simple, yet functional, weather application that pulled weather data using Yahoo’s weather API and displayed it with fancy icons that changed dynamically depending on the current weather condition. It went really well and I believe that everyone who participated will now know how to get started with writing GUI applications using Qt.

Both slides are available from https://secure.0x90.dk/~ahf/talks/.

It was also great for me personally to try to do a workshop with a mixture of people with both coding experience and some with no coding experience at all. I hope that I will find opportunities to do this again in the near future. It was much more interesting than the regular presentations that I have done over the past years.

I’ve also had to find some personal projects now that I’m a full time coding monkey. Right now they includes a Qt “social” library that implements stuff like OAuth, the Twitter API, the Facebook API and so forth. I’m going to put it online under a two-clause BSD license when I feel like it’s ready for public review.

And yes, I know. I should stop spending time on this social bullshit and start working on some useful stuff, but hey, it’s interesting and I’ll probably get back to some of the much more serious IRC related projects soon’ish.

I have also been looking into what I can do on the iPad device, but currently it’s purely something I use on the train on my way to and from work every day. I’d guess that 80% of the uptime of the device is spend on Angry Birds and Amazon’s Kindle application. Both are nice applications and I hope that I’ll never have to order books made of paper again. I used to hate ebooks, but reading on the iPad seems to work and it doesn’t annoy me too much. Also, it’s lovely to have your entire bookshelf with you in your bag. I hope to try one of Amazon’s dedicated Kindle devices at some point. I can imagine it’s better at displaying text than the iPad.

Final note: I’ve joined BSD-dk’s board of trustees. It’ll be interesting to see what we can do there over the next year.

I hope that everyone has had an interesting summer.

Irssi 0.8.15 has just been released.

Check out http://www.irssi.org/ for more information and remember to read the NEWS- and ChangeLog-file.

New Features:

• Add active_window_ignore_refnum option With active_window_ignore_refnum ON, the current behavior for the active_window key (meta-a by default) is preserved: it switches to the window with the highest activity level that was last activated. With active_window_ignore_refnum OFF, the old behavior is used: it switches to the window with the highest activity level with the lowest refnum.
• Show new Charybdis +q list in channel windows (numerics 728 and 729).
• Allow servers to belong to multiple networks.
• Improve paste detection. Irssi now detects a paste if it reads at least three bytes in a single read; subsequent reads are associated to the same paste if they happen before paste_detect_time time since the last read. If no read occurs after paste_detect_time time the paste buffer is flushed; if there is at least one complete line its content is sent as a paste, otherwise it is processed normally.
• Show “target changing too fast” messages in the channel/query window.
• Use default trusted CAs if nothing is specified. This allows useful use of -ssl_verify without -ssl_cafile/-ssl_capath, using OpenSSL’s default trusted CAs.
• Show why an SSL certificate failed validation.
• Make own nick and actions use default colour instead of white.

Bugfixes:

• Change some characters illegal in Windows filenames to underscores in logs
• Fix disconnects when sending large amounts of data over SSL
• Show all nicks instead of just the first in an /accept * listing.
• Make several signals without parameters available to perl again. In particular, this includes the “beep” signal.
• Close the config file fd after saving.
• Check if an SSL certificate matches the hostname of the server we are connecting to.
• Fix bash’isms, use command -v instead of which and use bc -l in /CALC.
• Fix a crash with handling the DCC queue.
• Fix crash when checking for fuzzy nick match when not on the channel.

A more personal note: I’ve quit my job as an embedded software developer at NorthQ and I’m starting as a software engineer at Nokia at the beginning of the next month. I’m very excited about this, but it was not an easy choice to say goodbye to the good co-workers at NorthQ. But at age 20, I just couldn’t say no to Nokia’s job offer. I’m going to work with embedded Linux, Qt and other cool open source stuff that I’m probably not allowed to talk about.

Irssi 0.8.15 release candidate 1 has been released tonight. I’ve poked some of the package maintainers on IRC, so hopefully it’ll be available as an unstable package in your favourite Linux / BSD distribution or whatever you’re using soon.

Please test it and submit bugs.

For more information, please see Irssi’s website.

Irssi at Open Source Days 2010

Irssi was present at Open Source Days 2010 here in Copenhagen earlier this month. Here’s a nice picture of our fancy new banner that was kindly sponsored by Foreningen Fri Software.