New AiBO+ demo

I forget to write that I reached an other milestone in my AiBO+ project. I have been implemented a brand new PC application with Qt/Qwt to connect to the dog and transfer the robot states to the computer. This new tool was really needed for me to speed up the debugging and the analysis of the sensor and other data. For fun, I implemented custom gestures and ported the application to Windows and Android.

The usual demo is here:

How to clone a hard drive over the network

1. Download the Clonezilla and burn to CD or USB stick.
2. Boot two computers with the needed hard drives with the Clonezilla image.
3. On the source computer follow the steps and select the copy over network from this source computer.
4. During the final steps, the Clonezilla will write on the console what commands should be executed on the target machine.
5. Go to the console on the target machine and execute the needed commands. After a few questions, the cloning will start. Yuppee!

Rfkill hard blocking problem under Ubuntu natty

I experienced hard blocked wlan devices on my HP 2510p laptop with Ubuntu. Like this:

$ rfkill list all

0: hci0: Bluetooth
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

4: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: yes


The solution was on an Ubuntu forum topic: go to BIOS and restore the defaults.

Why don't use qrand() in a cross-platform Qt project...

I noticed in my project that the qrand() does not work (as expected) in the MinGW Qt, it provides 16 bit numbers between 0 and 32767. D'oh! It is a better choice to use the random module from boost.

Darázsfészek készült...

...ma este. Ez volt az alaprecept:

http://www.nosalty.hu/recept/darazsfeszek-2

Ami más volt: a szárított élesztő helyett 2.5 deka nyers élesztőt használtam, 2 tojássárgája helyett beleraktam a két egész tojást, nem használtam citromhéjat és vaníliarudat a töltelékbe, valamint normál dió helyett brazil diót használtam. A sütőformát belülről bár kikentem vajjal, de aztán liszttel és cukorral szórtam meg. A sütésnél nekem 200 fokon nagyon gyorsan (1-2 perc alatt) megkapta a tetejét, lehetetlen lett volna ilyen hőfokon 20 percig sütni. A végén 30 percet sült 175 fokon, és remek lett: a tészta is megsült, de nem volt száraz, kicsit lucskos maradt a töltelék miatt. Emiatt a tejes locsolás is a sütőbe tevés előtt történt meg: tejjel meg legyintettem kicsit tojáskenő ecsettel aztán vaníliáscukrot szórtam rá.

CMake+Ninja is awesome on Windows

The AiBO+ project is multiplatform, except the cross-compilation of the apserver for AIBO. Recently, I made efforts to make the new version of the AiBO+ work on Windows before doing a release. What I experienced that the CMake+MinGW building is braindead slow. I remember that it was slow in the past, but it is now like completely unusable.

One of my colleagues recommended me the Ninja as a new build system using with CMake. I tried on Linux, but it did not work since I have a bit of hackish way to cross-build the AIBO specific binaries. On Windows, it does an awesome job to build my software parallel and utilize the 100 % of the CPU horsepower for complation. It is very easy to use:
1. Download the Ninja for Windows (ninja-120715-win.zip) from https://github.com/martine/ninja/downloads.
2. Extract the ninja.exe from the zip somewhere and add the location to the path.
3. Generate ninja based build files with CMake: e.g cmake . -G Ninja
4. Build the your project wih a simple ninja command.
5. Install the software with "ninja install" command.

Edit: There is some kind of issue with the dependency checking when updating the source tree by pulling changes from a git repository. Ninja does not detect the changes properly.

Focus handling fixes for QwtPlot widget

I noticed that I don't receive focus in and out events for the QwtPlot and the keyboard focus is not grabbed properly.

What is my expectation:
- There is a QwtPlot widget without focus and if I click inside or outside the canvas area (e.g the axis area) with the left mouse button, I can grab a FocusIn event on the QwtPlot widget and the keyboard shortcuts work with the e.g QwtPlotZoomer.

Actual (out-of-box) outcome:
- Clicking on the canvas area, I don't receive FocusIn event for the QwtPlot widget (and I will never receive a FocusOut when clicking on other widgets) and the keyboard shortcuts do not work. I have to press on the canvas widget area to make the shortcuts work. I think this behavior can be confusing for the users.
- If I call the setFocusPolicy() on the QwtPlot, I receive FocusIn/FocusOut events for the QwtPlot widget only if I click outside the canvas area, but it does not work if I click on the canvas.

Workaround:
- What I must do to make everything work, call:

setFocus(); // set focus on QwtPlot widget -> makes focus in/out events work for QwtPlot
canvas()->setFocus(); // set focus on composite canvas -> keyboard shortcuts work even if the click happened outside the canvas area

... when I receive a mouse press/wheel or other related events on the QwtPlot widget.

I hope it helps for others.