Since yes­ter­day this blog is ten years old so, time for some his­to­ry.

It all start­ed in ad­voga­to where you could still read it to­day! (Please read it here in­stead ;-)

Then it moved to PyDS an ear­ly python desk­top blog plat­form with a web in­ter­face, and was host­ed in PyC­S, a free ser­vice.

Then PyCS kin­da died, and I start­ed gen­er­at­ing a stat­ic blog and host­ing it in my IS­P's free host­ing. That sucked bad.

Then I start­ed my own com­pa­ny, and I had my own server­s, so I start­ed host­ing it there (even to­day this blog is com­plete­ly stat­ic HTM­L!)

Then PyDS start­ed act­ing weird, so I wrote my own blog­ging soft­ware, which is a re­al mess, per­haps 25% fin­ished, but it does things ex­act­ly the way I like them.

Cur­rent­ly, this blog is syn­di­cat­ed in Plan­e­ta PyAr, Plan­et Python, Plan­et Qt, Plan­e­ta LUGLI, and a cou­ple oth­er places.

This year, I de­cid­ed to make the blog com­plete­ly bilin­gual (English and Span­ish), but I hate trans­lat­ing it.

Ac­cord­ing to the stats I have avail­able, the blog is in av­er­age more pop­u­lar now than ev­er (but yes, my most pop­u­lar posts were years ago ;-)

These are the most pop­u­lar pages in the last year:

• PyQt By Ex­am­­ple

  Each of the parts of this se­ries is in the top ten most vis­it­ed pages. So, I re­al­­ly need to write more in this area since it seems to be what brings peo­­ple to the site.

• Re­spond­ing to ran­­dom blog post­s.

  A post ex­­plain­ing how an­oth­er blog­ger is wrong. I think I make a good point, even if it's a bit cheap as a way to bring read­­er­s.

• Queue Man­age­­ment for Qmail

  Oldie but good­ie... not re­al­­ly use­­ful nowa­­days.

• How to make your own dis­­tro

  Yikes, peo­­ple, stop read­­ing this, it's just wrong :-(

• Python Keyring is se­ri­ous­­ly nice

  Fi­­nal­­ly some­thing re­­cen­t!

• What I do for a liv­ing

  An­oth­er new post, I like it a lot.

• The Lin­ux Boot­ing Process Un­veiled

  A di­­dac­tic post. I think it's still the bet­ter ex­­pla­­na­­tion on the sub­­­ject I've seen around, if I may say so my­­self. For ex­­tra irony points, my cur­rent dis­­tro does­n't fol­low this.

• Cre­at­ing pre­sen­­ta­­tions us­ing re­struc­­tured text

  An­oth­er not-­­so-old post, I do this a lot :-)

• Cus­­tom wid­gets us­ing PyQt

  This is al­­most 6 years old, for a de­p­re­­cat­ed ver­­sion of PyQt, and is com­­plete­­ly bro­ken for cur­rent ver­­sion­s. Stop read­­ing this.

Lesson­s:

1. I need to write more about Qt and/or start flame­wars with clue­­less IT writ­ers

2. I need to search for an­­cient ma­te­ri­al and de­p­re­­cate it

3. Hav­ing your own host­ing and blog­ging soft­­ware is neat

4. 10 years is a lot of time: 860 posts (or 913, de­pend­ing on how you coun­t)

I have long known that ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ment is an ar­du­ous process. I have al­so long sus­pect­ed one of the rea­sons it's ar­du­ous is the de­vel­op­er. I should be more speci­fic, I am one of the rea­son­s.

That's be­cause I don't know what I am do­ing, and I don't mean that in the "I am a lame pro­gram­mer" sense (even if that's al­so true some­what), but in the sense that I lit­er­al­ly don't know what the app should look like, or what its fea­ture set should be.

So, I have de­cid­ed to em­bark on a se­ries of ex­per­i­ments I will call 24-hour app­s.

Here are the rules:

• I shall cre­ate a neat ap­­pli­­ca­­tion, sta­ble, use­­ful, us­able and de­­cen­t-look­ing.

• I shall do it in no more than 24 hours. Af­ter that time, it should be at least good enough for a pre­view re­lease, if not a be­­ta.

• Those 24 hours can be split in two or three ses­­sions

• Time spent do­ing icon­s, doc­s, etc, counts.

• All de­vel­op­­ment shall be pub­­lic (I am us­ing github)

• I must have a use for the re­­sult­ing ap­­pli­­ca­­tion, and it should be at least an ad­e­quate so­lu­­tion for that prob­lem.

So, what's the first pro­jec­t? I call it Die Schere (The Scis­sors in ger­man) and it's a video ed­i­tor.

It's not a kden­live re­place­men­t, it's just the video ed­i­tor I wish I had when I need­ed to glue a piece of one video with a piece of an­oth­er.

In the old, pre-dig­i­tal world, that was done us­ing a cut­ter and scotch tape. I want Die Schere to be as use­ful and com­pre­hen­si­ble as that was, but use­ful for clum­sy peo­ple like my­self.

Here is a video af­ter to­day's ses­sion, which last­ed 8 hours:

The ba­sic func­tions are there, even if lots of work is still need­ed.

• You can load clips to work with them

• You can cut clips (like us­ing a cut­ter!)

• You can choose the cut points in­­ter­ac­­tive­­ly or by ed­it­ing a time

• You can ar­range them (like us­ing scotch tape!)

• You can gen­er­ate the out­­put video

As a back­end it's us­ing men­coder, but there's no rea­son it should­n't work with ffm­peg or melt if some­one writes 20 lines of code.

Most peo­ple nowa­days have more than one com­put­er. Of­ten, you are us­ing one, and would like to do some­thing in an­oth­er. In this video, I will ex­plain how triv­ial it is to do that with­out leav­ing your seat in a mod­ern Lin­ux us­ing KDE.

We will use the fol­low­ing:

• Avahi, a ze­ro­­conf im­­ple­­men­­ta­­tion to let you find your com­put­ers in your net­­work with­­out wor­ry­ing about IP ad­­dress­es, DNS, etc.

• kr­f­b, the KDE Re­­mote Frame Buf­fer. This is a pro­­gram to share your desk­­top over the net­­work.

• krd­c, the KDE Re­­mote Desk­­top Clien­t, a VNC, RDP clien­t, which is what you use to see a desk­­top shared via kr­f­b.

I am sure users of oth­er op­er­at­ing sys­tems or desk­top en­vi­ron­ments will say they can do it just as eas­i­ly. In that case, feel free to do your own videos ;-)

Keep in mind that ac­cess­ing re­mote desk­tops over the in­ter­net is a whole dif­fer­ent beast, and this so­lu­tion is not meant for that case.

As usu­al, this video was record­ed us­ing qt-record­my­desk­top. There was mi­nor edit­ing us­ing men­coder.

The com­put­er used is the orig­i­nal Asus eee PC 701 4G, so you can see this is not ex­act­ly a hard­ware-in­ten­sive op­er­a­tion. I find the eee's small screen is great for this kind of ful­l-screen de­mo, be­cause it's not big enough to drown the im­por­tant part­s.

The span­ish trans­la­tions of most ses­sions of "PyQt by Ex­am­ple" are al­most done, thanks to sev­er­al vol­un­teer­s.

To­mor­row I will up­load at least one.

If any­one wants to trans­late them to oth­er lan­guages, I will be hap­py to in­clude those too.

Do­ing a rou­tine up­date in my desk­top, I was sur­prised to see Qt 4.5 is now in ex­tra! Way to go Arch!

I had a bad start, because all fonts were broken, but after running fc-­cache -fv as root and my user it looks ok again.

In fac­t, it fix­es a bug that has been an­noy­ing me for a year.

Per­for­mance seems to be snap­pi­er. That may be a bit sub­jec­tive, but things like the an­i­ma­tions in krun­ner now are re­al­ly quick and smooth while be­fore they were jumpy.

And... I can try to make flash work in uRSSus! Yay!

UP­DATE: it just start­ed work­ing: