So this year I was the first time at FOSDEM in Brussels. Brussels is a very nice city, I didn't expect this. It reminded me on Paris, it has the same french flair and beautiful architecture.
But I digress. The exhibition at FOSDEM was smaller than e.g. the german LinuxTag, but there were much more talks. I myself gave two of them: CMake and friends, where I gave a quick overview over CMake (the buildsystem), CTest + Dart (Unit testing and Continuous Integration) and CPack (packaging). It was only a 15 minutes Lightning Talk so I couldn't go to deeply into details.

So finally I decided to do a completely fresh install on my notebook, a Dell C640. If you are looking for a notebook which is good supported by Linux and FreeBSD, I can really recommend it, everything works out-of-the-box. also under FreeBSD, also the external VGA connector, useful when giving talks etc.

So, in the last days there have been several things which made me think "This rocks !".
Wanna know what ? So here we go, without any special order.

So I am back from aKademy in Dublin, and at first I want to say:
I'm feeling very honored that I received one of the three aKademy awards: Best non-application contribution: CMake for KDE4.

Recently it seems to me that Ruby is now really taking off, everywhere you hear news about it.
You know, there is Ruby on Rails, which is really the hype nowadays.
And there is an effort to get a Ruby implementation for .NET: http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET/ .

So today I tried to optimize some code using std::string from the Standard Template Library and found something interesting.

Let's say you have strings to assign which sometimes get longer and then again shorter. To avoid unnecessary memory allocations you can use std::string::resize(size_t n); so you create the string and then resize it so that it is big enough for the longest string:

Recently it seem a lot of projects are switching to CMake.
Just today I read the news about Debian forking cdrecord and almost missed the little note near the end of the article:

Wanna chat directly with other cmake users ? Ask questions ? Exchange your experiences ? Share your cmake scripts with others ? Let the world know how much you like cmake ? How it made you understand your buildsystem again ? How it brought the fun back to hacking ? And how it finally brought world peace ? ;-)

Then just come in and join at #cmake , a new IRC channel created just today on Freenode.
You're welcome ! :)

Alex

Hi,

now that I found that skype for Linux doesn't support video, is there a good solution ?

Ekiga ?

Or FFserver on both ends ? Is ffplay able to ffserver streams ? (the docs mention only windows media player)

Hi,

well, imagine you find something in cmake which doesn't work or there is something missing.
Now, luckily enough, cmake is Free Software, BSD licensed. So, you can just have a look at the sources, write a patch and send it to the cmake developers at [email protected] .