I've loved reading the articles about whether or not the Microsoft OOXML document format should be an ISO standard, as opposed to the ODF ISO standard for word processing documents. In particular, Miguel de Icaza's heroic defence of his position against over 500 rabid anti-microsoft Slashdot posters. I admire someone who can think for themselves against entrenched opposition (eg Richard Stallman or Miguel de Icaza), and I don't actually care whether or not I agree with them or not.

I love the practical way the neo-liberal UK government make things happen to create a more 'business friendly' environment. The latest idea is to simplify science exams to allow more people to pass GCSE physics - what could be wrong with that? More scientific people and we'll surely have a more scientific country.

I'm quite excited by the things that the Semantic web will make possible, and one very interesting project is DBpedia, which aims to extract structured data from Wikipedia, link it with other datasets and put everything in an RDF triple store that you can either download or query via a 'SPARQL endpoint' on the web. I've been trying out using ActiveRDF to make DBpedia queries and showing the results in a Korundum KDE4 app.

The mEDUXa Canary Islands schools Linux project was based on Free Software, and we've finally got round to setting up a community version of it that people can hack. You can read about it on this KDE Dot News story and follow the link there for screen shots and more explanation. I'm quite excited by the prospects of Free Software in Education - it just seems inevitable that the Free Software Hacker Ethic will take over and change Education just as much as it has transformed the process of software development. Change education and you can change the World.

Now that there is a final release of QtJambi, I've downloaded it and had a good look at the sources. I'm happy to report that it looks very well written, very thorough and with much attention paid to issues such as performance tuning and working well with Java threads.

I've just got hello world working with the KDE4 version of the ruby korundum bindings. Here's what it looks like:

require 'korundum4'

aboutData = KDE::AboutData.new( "tutorial1", "Tutorial 1",
                        "1.0", "KMessageBox popup",
                        KDE::AboutData::License_GPL, "(c) 2006" )
KDE::CmdLineArgs.init(ARGV, aboutData)
app = KDE::Application.new
guiItem = KDE::GuiItem.new( "Hello", "",
                    "this is a tooltip",
                    "this is a whatsthis" )
KDE::MessageBox.questionYesNo( nil, "Hello World",
                              "Hello", guiItem )

I got it from the KDE Developer's wiki here. That example doesn't have the new KComponentData class that used to be KInstance, and so I'm not sure if you're supposed to pass 'aboutData' to both the KDE::Application constructor and the KDE::CmdLineArgs.init() method as above. Note that you need to require 'korundum4', so it will be possible to run the KDE3 version of Korundum at the same time

I've recently been working on a little Rails app that manages foreign exchange handling, and prints reports. I'm converting an existing Excel based app that does the same thing, and I needed to get data from a spreadsheet to use as test data. So I fired up OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet, it loaded it fine, and even had KDE file dialogs which is nice. I looked for an option the export to CSV (comma separated values), but there were only options for PDF and xhtml.

I read this recent article about Mono on the Mac and thought why don't I try building Qyoto on Mac OS X and see if it works.

I've recently been having a discussion with Eric Landuyt on the Korundum site help forum about wrapping custom C++ classes in QtRuby. I told Eric that you just needed to create a QObject derived class with the slots and properties you wanted to expose, give it a name via a QObject::setObjectName() call, and create it with qApp as the parent. Then wrap the class in a Ruby extension using an extconf.rb script to generate the makefile to build it. Once your new extension is loaded, you can find the instance of the C++ class by using Qt::Object.findChild() with the object name you gave it.

After I wrote about how to use an ActiveRecord model with a QtRuby Qt::TableView, Silvio Fonseca sent me a nice improvement where he has written a generic Qt::AbstractTableModel that will work with any collection of ActiveRecord instances. Meanwhile, Imo one of the ruby hackers here at Foton where I work, gave a very interesting presentation on Friday, about the new feature in EdgeRails called 'ActiveResource'. He showed how the same table model could be used to create a QtRuby front end to ActiveResource.

Silvio comments: