Another “best year ever” at froglogic slowly comes to an end. We’d like to take the opportunity to thank all our customers and partners for the trust you put in us and look forward to continue working with you in 2012.
Here is a team photo we took at our Christmas Party last week where we toured the Elbe river, harbor and new “Hafen-City” with a barge.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012!
Your froglogic Team
After an eventful year in the Qt world it’s time for the annual Qt Developer Days again. We are very happy that the tradition continues and as it looks the European event, which starts today in Munich, will be more than well attended.
If you are at dev days too, make sure to drop by at our booth to see what’s new in Squish for Qt and beyond. #qtdd11
More than two weeks passed since Nokia announced that it will adopt Windows Phone as their platform for smart phones. This obviously raised a lot of questions about Qt’s and also MeeGo’s future and a lot has been said in blogs, public and private discussions.
From a personal point, all engineers here are froglogic are big fans of cross-platform software and think that Qt always was and still is the best toolkit to develop C++ GUIs.
From a business point we are of course also very interested in a successful future of Qt. While we as a company are not fully dependent on Qt anymore (about 40% of our clients use use our Squish for Qt product), the Qt market is still a very important one for us.
So for many reasons we are very interested in Qt’s future and further success. We had many discussions with different people and wrote up our take on the situation in an announcement today which you can read at froglogic.com.
I’ve been a happy ccache user for years. It’s a great tool for avoiding unneeded recompilation by reusing previously cached results – thus speeding up builds quite substantially. Unfortunately, it only works for gcc; there is a ccache patch for MSVC around but it never quite worked for me.
Hence, I decided to write a program which works just like ccache except that it can be used with MSVC. It’s a Python script which is meant to be used as a drop-in replacement for the cl.exe program.
The script basically generates a hash sum out of
After computing the hash sum, the cache is checked for whether an this hash sum was used previously. If so, the previously generated object file (and the compiler output) are re-used instead of invoking the actual compiler. This can save quite some time.
The program (as well as a bit more documentation) can be found at github.com:
https://github.com/frerich/clcache
Maybe this is useful to somebody – I’d be happy to get any feedback.
KDE must have grown so big and old that it became unpopular to be associated with it. At least I cannot help having this sentiment after observing a couple of sub-projects trying hard to not be tied to KDE too closely.
Granted, the times when K* versions of applications popping up every day were a bit excessive. But the “kool” umbrella apparently helped to form a critical mass of developers, translators, documentation writers and others. More creative names for new components were introduced later when the desktop got polished for a wider audience.
The last few years saw a couple of sub-projects leaving this pool or not wanting to fully join in the first place. A couple of them are still located in the kdesupport module, others – like the newly announced ex-KOffice Calligra Suite will move elsewhere.
Granted, the authors always had some specific individual reason for their decision. Even if it’s just their personal preference – a right which should be preserved in an open and free software project like KDE. In this post I am just looking at this with from bird’s eye view. Similar to the view on the subject being different in macroeconomics compared to microeconomics. This allows just generalized assumptions about the motivation of individual entities. Factors one can presume:
What I am more wondering about is the effect on the project as a whole. Fragmentation is a challenge. Not only for technical reasons (e.g. management of source code, documentation and translations) but also for brand awareness. Having a common brand not only helps with attracting users but also contributors. As far as the focus on a specific platform is concerned….the more the better. Let’s just keep in mind not to get attached to a single one too much. KDE has already outlived some vendors in the past. And with regards to git: I love it. How KDE will deal with one of its strengths (distributed nature) will be interesting to see as it can also become a challenge to put things together in the end.
I listed the last point solely because I sometimes get the feeling that some more self-confidence in what we are doing is required and warranted 
Squish has supported a list of shared script directories that are not bound to a specific test suite since quite a long time already. This however involved setting an environment variable and starting the Squish IDE from a commandline terminal so that the environment variable has an effect on the squishrunner process.
Today we merged the support for a new view into the Squish 4 IDE which handles the list of globally shared scripts nicely. It still supports the existing environment variable (SQUISH_SCRIPT_DIR), by reading it on startup and populating the view with the listed directories. Additionally it also allows to add and remove directories from the list using the GUI. Management of the files and folders in those shared script directories is of course also possible.
Tests executed by the IDE will automatically get the necessary environment variable set so that the findFile() script command will search in the shared script directories. We also added a new menu item to make it easier to setup automated squishrunner execution or just executing it from a commandline terminal in a way that also includes the shared script directories.
So while the environment variable will stay for the squishrunner commandline executable, managing the scripts, editing them and running tests with them will be more convenient. This feature will be part of Squish 4.1 which is going to be released in a couple of months if all goes well.
After three years in froglogic’s office space it’s time to move on. We’ve outgrown this place after the last hires. Last year we already had to give up on the idea of having a dedicated room for a test lab. The machines got spread out to other rooms. Then, the library room with its sofa had to go. Foosball games were played in the meeting room thereafter which caused quite some scheduling conflicts between work and leisure. This was our third office space. Hard to imagine that we held a KDE quality meeting in the previous one.
When the hiring pipeline and growth projection resulted in 3 people ending up in a single room we started to look for a new space. The choice was quite big and real estate agents were bombarding us with often duplicated offers. Confronted with that freedom we started to become rather picky and filtered out the offers rather generously. Even if the space itself was shiny we discarded all places that did not have sufficient infrastructure around them, lacked nearby public transport or simply meant bigger changes in anyone’s journey to work. Quite some lazy folks we have become! Quickly the big choice collapsed to two almost neighboring places. After some back and forth between the respective interior designers we went for the one that did have so many pillars in the way. Just a few hundred meters away from here in “Gasstraße 18″ which is reminiscent of the gas plant that was operating here about 100 years ago.
The building we’ll move to reminds me a bit about the old Trolltech offices in Oslo where I enjoyed my life from 2000 to 2003. Old industry style building. From the inside, however, we’ll get a very modern black/white contrast style office with a lot of glass. Expect some people to bang their heads and noses against the doors and walls. Cries for inviting people to a house warming party, KDE sprints, more meetings and – most importantly – new developers that can now apply for jobs again! The new conference room table – as big as a small sailing boat – asks to be used and covered with pizza boxes!
The refurbishing of the interior is still going on. The new electric network was only activated today. And after the usual trouble with sub-contractors of Deutsche Telekom we even seem to have a working phone line. The SDSL Internet connection is still untested and besides that a lot of things are waiting to wrong: hardware breaking during transport, long running and forgotten network services not starting up anymore, Telekom deactivating our Internet connection when switching the phone line, etc. So please excuse possibly delayed answers from us during our move which will start on Saturday and hopefully come to an end on Monday at around noon.
It was nice to have attended Akademy again. Everything was well organized and the talks were interesting or entertaining. Or both. Particularly the improvised KDevelop presentation managed to impress.
Tampere was also a good venue. Big enough to offer a variety of place to stay, eat and hang around. But not too big as everything was still in walking distance. The Finnish people also showed their strong side of being gentle during the day and party professionals at night. One exemplary experience: while laying in a park on the “day after” some guy who apparently had too much to drink heavily throws up under a tree. As if nothing happens he opens a can of beer, lights a cigarette and walks away.
The only not so nice thing was the trip home: I had been heavily suffering from delayed baggage on several international trips during the last months. Up to a point where people around me started to switch from pity to amusement. Arrived at Helsinki airport one convenient hour before departure. More than enough time for a passenger to get on the plane. Apparently not for luggage. It arrived two days later. Granted, unlike being hit by this on the trip out it’s rather harmless at home. But I was sad about the tasty Finnish bread I imported (illegally?) being rock solid. And annoyed about the temporary shavers I bought emitting Aloe Vera and vitamin E but cutting my face until I looked like a victim in a horror movie.
Why oh why do airlines manage to screw up luggage transport so much? With all those computerized systems in place. Or because of the computers? I had long added Heathrow and Amsterdam on the list of airports to avoid. But Helsinki? I cannot help but feeling that airports accept way more traffic than they should do in order to get the fees by airlines. Airlines follow and accept too ambitious connection plans. Accepting a certain percentage of people and luggage missing their connections.
Advise for those returning from Akademy: get to the airport early. It’s not such a monster but relative to its size it’s absolutely overcrowded with people going on vacation.
After skipping the two last years I can’t help but attending Akademy again. Our company just released version 4.0* of our test tool Squish so I’m a bit more relaxed when it comes to thinking of hobbies I should have.
Also time to meet up with KDE contributors I still know and time to meet all the new ones in person. I’m also keen on seeing all the new ways to use spare cpu cycles and laptop batteries for impressive eye candy. Plus learning about latest developments from the alive KDEPIM and KOffice front.
Another reason for me going is the love for my mother country Finland. Tampere is just three hours away from the place I stay at almost each summer of my life. To show it I’m skipping the usual “I’m going to Akademy” banner and paste a picture of Lappajärvi which is my favorite of the >187,888 Finnish lakes.
We’ll exhibit at the STAREAST 2010 conference in Orlando next week. You’ll find us at booth #2 and on Wednesday 3 PM I’ll give a talk on my pet subject Cross-platform GUI Testing.
Last week I still was a bit nervous about the Icelandic volcano preventing me from flying over the Atlantic. I had seen pictures of booths remaining empty at the industry fair Hannover Messe because company crews and equipment did not make it there in time. But airlines schedules seem to almost be back to normal now. I’ll be flying with KLM and Martinair and was relieved to see that my airline KLM has people monitoring Facebook and Twitter for cries for help from stranded passengers.
My suite case is not yet packed, yet. I am obviously doing anything to avoid it. But the pile of things to take with me (like bags with sweet green gummi frogs) is slowly reaching its final height.