This site has been lat­er­al.pyc­s.net, lat­er­al.­fib­er­tel.­com.ar, lat­er­al.blogsite.­com, and has been, for sev­er­al years, ralsi­na.me.

Well, I am slow­ly go­ing to dep­re­cate that URL, and the new URL will be //ralsi­na.me where you al­ready can find it since a few months ago.

It will in­volve some work mov­ing com­ments around and such, but noth­ing much should change, all old links should re­main valid, and all com­ments should stay at­tached to the right post.

I will con­tact the var­i­ous plan­ets that ag­gre­gate it, but since the feed will re­main con­stant thanks to feed­burn­er, I ex­pect not to lose any­one in tran­si­tion.

My team has been work­ing on port­ing some PyQt stuff to Mac OS­X, and we have run in­to sev­er­al Qt bugs, sad­ly. Here are two, and the work­arounds we found.

Na­tive di­alogs are bro­ken.

Us­ing QFile­Di­a­log.ge­tEx­ist­ingDi­rec­to­ry we no­ticed the fol­low­ing symp­tom­s:

• If you do noth­ing, the di­a­log went away on its own af­ter about 20 sec­ond­s.

• Af­ter you used it on­ce, it may pop up and dis­­ap­­pear im­me­di­ate­­ly. Or not.

So­lu­tion: use the Don­tUse­N­a­tive­Di­a­log op­tion.

Wid­gets in QTreeWid­getItems don't scrol­l.

When you use Wid­gets in­side the items of a QTreeWid­get (which I know, is not a com­mon case, but hey, it hap­pen­s), the wid­gets don't scroll with the item­s.

Solution: use the -graph­ic­ssys­tem raster options. You can even inject them into argv if the platform is darwin.

I found a cam­era to­day at home, and then it hit me: this was the cam­era we took to Is­tan­bul, dropped on the floor, nev­er worked again, and I nev­er found af­ter we came back! And it still had the SD card in it!

So, here are the pic­tures (not even fil­tered), so fam­i­ly can see them.

Fin­ished read­ing Cloud At­las, gave it 5 start­s. Here's a quick re­view:

I am not go­ing to ex­plain this book. It's enough, I think, to say I loved it, and that it's strange, and that it's a bit of a mis­tery.

Imag­in­ing a uni­verse in which all the con­tents of the book could be re­al at the same time in a way that would al­low all the pieces to be writ­ten as they are and yet, be, some­how, not the nov­el they are, but a found ar­ti­fac­t, is both de­press­ing and el­lu­sive.

At the end, I felt some­thing I can on­ly de­scribe as ret­ro­spec­tive hope, the feel­ing that things were sup­posed to end up bet­ter, but that even as ter­ri­bly as they did end, were it not by that ear­li­er hope, they would have been more grim.

The con­trol the au­thor has over his own style is im­pres­sive. This book feels writ­ten by half a dozen com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent writ­er­s.

Some quotes (which may on­ly make sense once you read the book):

"The sun was deaf­'n­in' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it."

"In the first set, each so­lo is in­ter­rupt­ed by its suc­ces­sor: in the sec­ond, each in­ter­rup­tion is re­con­tin­ued, in or­der. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary or gim­mick­y? Shan't know un­til it's fin­ished, and by then it'll be too late"

"What would­n't I give now for a nev­er-chang­ing map of the ev­er-­con­stant in­ef­fa­ble? To posess, as it were, an at­las of cloud­s."