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the emptiness of all things

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less(1) is more(1)*

*min@imal $ man more

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When you're doing something you don't want to be doing, what do you tell yourself?

dmug

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While listening to a friend muse

The sun is waning, yet light floods under the eaves. My dawn is unveiled.

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Getting started with command-line Qt (on OSX)

I decided to play with Qt, a framework in C++ for building cross-platform user interfaces (and more!). I’m using OS10.10. The installation process wasn’t as smooth as I had hoped, so here is a rough guide to help others avoid some pitfalls I encountered.

1. Download Qt

I’m using Qt 5.5.0, but this outline may be constructive for other versions as well (no promises). You can fetch Qt 5.5.0 here. Note that, for reasons detailed in step 3 below, I downloaded the offline installer for OSX.

2. Download and Install XCode 5

I used version 5.1.1. You can fetch XCode 5.1.1 from here. XCode is required to provide Qt with particular command-line tools and the OSX SDK necessary for proper project compilation. I downloaded XCode 7, thinking that this should be a drop-in replacement for XCode 5 for Qt, but getting XCode 7 (or 6) working with Qt is more involved (but still possible). If you want to use newer versions of XCode with Qt, I hear that you can download the Qt source and compile Qt after installing XCode 6+ (and the OS10.8 SDK may be necessary to have in XCode).

The nice thing about XCode, for people who actually use it directly (myself not included), is that you can do side-by-side installations. I suggest first renaming any XCode launcher present in your Applications folder to something unique, such as “XCode<your_version_number>” to preserve the launcher when/if you install another version of XCode.

3. Install Qt

Just follow the installer. I used the online installer (which totaled about 11 GB of files to install, by the way) first. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the command-line tools to play with them myself, so I uninstalled the Qt online installer and then downloaded and installed the offline installer, which made specific reference to including the Qt libraries. I later found out where the command-line tools were and realized that the online installer probably put them in the same place, so the choice of which installer to use is up to you. Do note that the offline installer appears to install fewer things, though, as the total install size was about 6 GB, I believe.

4. Follow a Qt tutorial

I followed the simple text editor tutorial. Note that I did not use QtCreator but instead used a text editor. I may some day use QtCreator for rapid prototyping, but I wanted to make sure I had the freedom to tinker with everything in a barebones manner.

The end of the tutorial doesn’t teach you how to compile your new Qt program from the command line. See step 5 for that.

5. Learn `qmake`

I followed the Qt tutorial on using qmake. If you followed the same tutorial that I did in step 4 (the text editor tutorial), remember to add the “RESOURCES [...]” line to your `application.pro` file.

Here is my `application.pro` file for reference:

CONFIG += qt

RESOURCES = application.qrc

HEADERS += mainwindow.h

SOURCES += mainwindow.cpp SOURCES += main.cpp

TARGET = qttestapp

6. Build your application

It’s time to use `qmake` now. If you run `qmake` alone or with arguments from the command-line, chances are that your environment is not currently aware of the tool. Qt, like XCode, is set up to allow for side-by-side installations of various versions. Because of this, Qt leaves managing the pathing in the command line to you.

You can either give the absolute path to `qmake` when you invoke it, or you can add the Qt binaries location to your path. To add the Qt 5.5.0 binaries to your path using the default installation settings for Qt (installation into your home directory), use the following in your command line (or place it in your shell’s `.profile` [or other, appropriately-named] configuration file):

export PATH=~/Qt5.5.0/5.5/clang_64/bin/:$PATH

Now you can run `qmake` without fully-qualifying the tool. Here is how I ran the tool in a command line (note the addition of “QT+=widgets”, which solves issues referencing the necessary files for preprocessor directives such as `#include <QtWidgets>`).

qmake -o Makefile application.pro “QT+=widgets”

This will generate a makefile. Run `make` to process the makefile.

You may get build errors. I had to add some `#include [...]` directives to solve missing-type errors. When you fix your build errors, if any, run `make` again. Upon successful compilation, you will have qttestapp.app (or an app by another name, depending on what you named your build target) waiting for you in your compilation directory. Double-click the app to launch it and continue learning!

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Punctuation in Quotations

foo(”this is why it was so hard for me to “ “accept putting the comma inside the quotes “ “in proper English essays”, null);

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To oversimplify it, engineering determines what the reality is and theory determines the consequences and structure of that reality.

Robert Gallager in The Principles of Digital Communication

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When I was young, I trusted people. Now I just wish them the best.

George Carlin (?)

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I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it.

George Carlin

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Dynamic `checked` attribute in (Ruby) Slim

Just do this before you spend hours only to find out that dynamically including or excluding the `checked` attribute in Slim is literally impossible without inline HTML.

<input type=“checkbox” [etc.] #{ check_it ? “checked” : “”}>

A little disappointing to see the minimal markup broken with this one-liner, but at least I don’t have to abandon Slim for it.

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The Hardest Way

“You always choose the hardest way to do things,” she told me.

It’s true, but it’s not always so easy for me to mentally differentiate between the hardest way and the most robust way. Sometimes it’s my ego, sometimes it’s the wide-eyed engineer who just thinks more detail or development is cool, and sometimes it’s my criticality and cynicism that says to me, “if you skimp on quality up front, you know you’ll pay for it in larger ways later.”

It’s the designer’s eye for quality in me that causes me to write nearly-overkill parsers and input processors to make my program as user-friendly as possible even when the implementation language just isn’t designed for easy text processing, like C#. 

It’s the hopeless romantic in me that doesn’t want to disappoint you with a botched moment that leads me to mentally orchestrate what we’ll need for every event and forget that the real finesse lies in connecting them all together to make a peaceful, fluid day.

But it was my ego that led me to think I really could light the barbecue briquettes with eucalyptus kindling to cook our lunch today. So we didn’t pick up lighter fluid yesterday, and you ended up having to go get some today while I watched over the food. That was my fault, and I’m sorry about that.

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Prompting

I’ve realized that when the things I do become monotonous and tedious, or when I have little that I am inspired to do, I pass time by journaling my own life. When I find myself with little free time, busy with new, exciting, and[/or] fulfilling things, I do not document my own life.

Now, no moral obligation convicts me to write about my life. I have realized, though, that when I want to reach into my past sentiments and experiences in order to connect with another person, they are often cloudy in my mind, and I have no documentation of how I once felt and what I did about it. I journaled as a pastime instead of marking my journey in case I ever needed to backtrack for some reason. My journaling has proved far more valuable to others (or potentially more valuable, had I had documentation of critical times in my life) than it has to me.

With that said, I endeavor to add another valuable activity to my life, an activity that I’ve already had but treated as casually as video games--blogging. With an inspiration revealing to me and reminding me of the actual great value of this activity, and without the self-deception that journaling is productive work (but is more akin to an investment that will pay out in time), I aim to increase my blogging frequency.

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Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves.

Dhammapada (v. 80)

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We still talk about programming as if typing in the code was the hard part. It's not - the hard part is maintaining the code.

Mikito Takada in Single page apps in depth

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Why do you do what you do?

[Jose Gonzalez - Cycling Trivialities]

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Gerrymandering

Even Picasso would be surprised.

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Demonstrate Freedom

I lifted my hands from my keyboard this morning, very disgruntled with whatever I was coding at the time. It was design and creation, but it was empty. Frustrated, I kicked across the floor in my chair, away from my desk. I sighed and stood up abruptly, letting my chair spin out of control. "What's the point?" I pulled Atlas Shrugged off of my shelf and walked toward the living room, closing my room's door behind me. There was more natural light in the living room.

I arrived there and laid on a couch. I started reading. I read every word but made no sense of it. My mind was already wandering. I started thinking about the couches and the group of roommates who purchased them for the house. The roommates are all gone now, but the couches made me think back to the casual dinner and movie parties they hosted. Twenty to thirty people. I never felt like I belonged at those, even though they were hosted in my own home, but I miss those now that they are gone. There is an emptiness now that made the sense of not belonging actually feel like home because that was how I fit into those events.

My mind and eyes wandered to the wall which is littered with quotes written on construction paper all across the wall. Half of the quotes were written before my time in this place, and they've outlived the roommates who wrote them, leaving me to wonder what it must have been like in this same house so full of energy and a community. And the quotes will outlive me as well.

I closed the book over my thumb, frustrated at that now, too. "What's the point?" I fell asleep thinking about Nancy. She introduced me to this place because her friend once lived here. That friend ironically left when I moved in--left to the very city I came from. My mind wondered while I slept, bouncing across people, and times, and places. With each thing I conjured, I relived it as if in the present, but I knew even in my dreaming that I was recreating it all and that no one was giving their presence to whatever community I dreamed up.

I shot awake, surprised only by the realization that I had slipped into dreaming. "Purpose. What's the purpose? What's the value of it all? Of everything." I knew that is what I was always asking myself. There was no busy work to distract me now, no obligations to demand my time. The question was staring my mind in the face. It was the only thing occupying my mind. It was the only thing I could address--I had to face it now, no matter what I wanted. I wasn't surprised by it. In fact, I had anticipated it. I welcomed it, because it was one of the few sane thoughts my mind would return to rest on. It was the result of my most critical appraisal of all things. That question, when not provoked by self pity, is one of the most honest things to think.

I put Atlas Shrugged on a tabletop next to the couch. The answer to my question was coming to my mind. I could hear me in my head, speaking to myself, because I knew the answer. I didn't want to tell it to myself, though. I had told myself similar things a few times before--

"I am not punished for my sins. I am punished by them."

"As a masculine male, my top priority is not my woman. No, it is my goal, my mission, my purpose."

--and it was exhilarating and terrifying because I step out of communities each time. The communities replaced emptiness and loneliness with rationalized abstractions that couldn't stand up to me being truthful with myself. By answering my question, I knew I was condemning myself; I knew I would tell me that most things I have done in my life have not been worth a damn thing in the greater scope of the universe. I've reinvented the wheel so many times.

Asking myself what the purpose was is a red herring. There is no question. There is only my statement: "my purpose is:" But when you pick something useless, you will come to find that there never was any value in it. And then you'll ask yourself, "What is the purpose of my purpose?"

There was nothing left to hide behind, so I said it: there is no value in anything outside of being accepted by and adding to a community you identify with. If that community doesn't exist, you can replace it with a placebo or you can become the pioneer and challenge and embrace comfort, security, life, and death and demonstrate freedom.

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"This is the generation that will decide whether the Internet is a tool for control, or a platform for innovation and freedom. A free, open Internet is a force for change, creativity; the backbone of a society where citizens are stakeholders, not data sets."

Matt Mason, BitTorrent Vice President