On the #qtruby IRC channel kelko thought up a simple way of adding blocks as targets to Qt::connect() calls. After some more discussion rickdangerous suggested also adding a simple method that would work like 'signal_connect()' in ruby-gnome, which just takes a single signal name argument and a block. I've just added the code to both the Qt3 and Qt4 versions of QtRuby. There are three variants that allow you to replace the usual SLOT(:foobar) with a block.

One of my pet hates in GUI widgets is the 'spinbox', and I especially dislike the idea of a floating point spinbox. I think for technical reasons I had trouble wrapping the KDE3 floating point spinbox in korundum, and couldn't get particularly worked up about fixing it. But I was a bit depressed to find out that Qt4 has a floating point spinbox widget (although I didn't obstruct its inclusion in Qt4 QtRuby).

Charles Nutter writes in his blog
The two core JRuby developers, myself and Thomas Enebo, will become employees at Sun Microsystems this month. Our charge? You guessed it...we're being hired to work on JRuby full-time.

A left handed person asks on Slashdot about the difficulty of using a touch screen when the scrollbars are on the right hand side. When Alan Kay and others developed the original WIMP interface at Xerox PARC in the 1970s their systems always had the scrollbar on the left. For some reason Apple chose to move the scrollbar to the right, and everyone else, except NeXT just copied them.

I usually find what Eric Raymond has to say interesting and entertaining, and I enjoyed 'The Cathedral and he Bazaar'. But in this recent interview, he talks about the importance of the transition from 32 to 64 bit OSs and how it creates a 'window of opportunity' to make the Linux desktop popular, that will only last until 2008.

I found this blog entry on coding as a career limiting move interesting, how could being really good at writing code possibly be a 'career limiting move'? I've been a professional programmer for a very long time, and I've come across very, very few people who are brilliant at writing code - maybe a handful before I came across the KDE project where they seem to be all over the place.

I've just read about the forthcoming Greenphone with a Qtopia development kit. If I can port Qt4 QtRuby to it, I want one right now! I could hack together custom apps to access web services like google via GPRS. It has 64 Mb of RAM and 128 Mb of flash, with expansion slot which sounds as though it should be enough to fit a QtRuby development environment. Does it take standard sims, or can you only use it with certain service providers?

I thought the discussion on the Gnome developer list about C vs C# vs Python etc for writing desktop apps was very interesting. A lot of it could equally well apply to the KDE project.

One comment caught my eye:

In a way, yes - if we didn't have the original GNOME desktop and libraries
written in C we could have had so many language bindings in the first place? How
many language bindings exist for KDE that didn't first have to present a C API
to enable the binding...

Michael Larouche writes about the new KDialog api, and how it is simpler to understand than the old KDE3 one. It reminded me of one of my favourite talks at the 2004 Ludwigsberg aKademy, when Mathias Ettrich discussed similar usability improvements in Qt4. I'd like to describe a couple of features in QtRuby and Korundum that make such constructor code clearer still.

Here is the original C++:

The Qyoto C#/mono bindings are getting quite close to being useful. I first started on them about two and a half years ago, and so it's taken forever to get going. But we've just passed a key milestone, which is getting the cannon game tutorial t7 working. That means you can now define custom slots and signals in C#, and connect them to C++ or C# slots and signals.