However, since I have clients and projects I needed a way to keep track of al the information, create invoices, and see how much I earned and spent. I have looked for a nice application that fits my needs but since I’m running Linux it’s hard to find something decent. Basically all applications I’ve seen so far suck big time. The problem is that they are all ugly, lack features, or have way to much features. And I don’t want to waste a lot of money on some application I will only use for 10% of the capabilities.

This is the reason why I started my own project. So here I present you my first QT/C++ application. Since I use QT for the user interface and SQLITE as database I will be able to build the application for all platforms (Linux, Windows and Mac). It’s far from finished yet butI already finished the user interface and made a few features work.  The things that don’t work yet: Create invoices, make a list of tasks for each project, the list of stuff I bought for my company, and the statistics.

Here are a few screenshots of the very first version. Ignore the version number, it’s still pre-alpha.

I hope you like it so far. When I have a first version ready I will let you know. It will be released under the GPL licence.

The animation is work in progress but I already have a character I’d like to show you.

I tried to create this character with clay but I really suck at that. So this is the result so far:

It still needs a little bit tweaked but I’m getting there.

And here a first render of the 3D version of mij character. This one looks a lot better than my non-digital version. Wil be animated soon. Hope you like it.

In the past I saw a few people starting a 365 days project. Simple explained, 1 photo each day for 365 days. Today I came across the website mostly365.com and I decided to join in ! Yes, I’m going to shoot 1 photo each day. Not really original but who cares. You can watch my photo of the day in the sidebar.

I’m not a professional photographer nor do I have an expansive dSLR camera so don’t expect high quality. I’m going to use my HTC Desire with the Camera Zoom FX application. Check my first Photos to see the quality you can get with this phone, it’s not that bad. You’re just a little bit  limited. No optical zoom, no long exposure photos, no high ISO values and only presets for white balancing.  I wish I had the money for a real camera. But this is a chance for me to practice a little bit with photography.  If I have enough cool pictures next year I can think about buying a real dSRL camera.

If you’d like to watch all the photos I took go to this page.

Yes, I created a new design for my blog ! I didn’t like my old design anymore, so time for change. I decided to go for simple this time. Nothing fancy but I like it. I even started using a bit of HTML5 this time so it could be possible my blog doesn’t look good in all browsers. I still have to fix some IE issues.. :+ If you’re still using IE download Chrome or Firefox to see how my website should look like. And than keep using that browser.

Hope you like it because this is the way my website is going to look like for a while.

For the people who have never seen my old blog, here is a screenshot of how it looked like:

I’d like to wish everybody a happy new year ! Be safe with fireworks, or just watch my beautifull, with Actionscript 3 created fireworks I did last year. I really wanted to create a Merry Xmas/happy new year flash thing as well this year but didn’t find the time. I’m sorry guys and girls.. Maybe at the end of 2011.

I’ll be drinking champagne and lots of beer tonight.  So in the morning we’ll meet Mr. Hangover again Aah wel, it’s worth it.

This years first school project was awsome. We had to create an application for a touchscreen device. Not a mobile phone btw, a computer with a resolution of 1280*1024. Me and my projectteam decided to create a twitter application as ‘screensaver’ and a findit game. There are still a few bugs to fix though..

In the twitter application you can watch realtime what people say on twitter about a specific topic.  You can switch the subject by pressing a button at the top of the screen. At the bottom there is a button to start the findit game. This is a simple game with 2 almost identical pictures. The goal is to found the differences.

You can find the end result on this page: http://media.monkeyminds.nl/projecttest/twitterFindIt.swf

The cool thing is that the school is actualy going to use all the applications created by all project groups.  So maybe in a few weeks I walk into my school and see my own application running on the touchscreen computers standing there.. But first I have to fix a few glitches and add credits this weekend.

After less than an hour playing around I got myself this little funny result:

[kml_flashembed publishmethod="static" fversion="8.0.0" useexpressinstall="true" movie="/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/particles.swf" width="400" height="400" targetclass="flashmovie" quality="best"]

[/kml_flashembed]

Finally, Starcraft 2 is released ! I couldn’t wait to play it but yesterday the game arrived at my doorstep.  Ofcourse I’m a Linux user so this game HAS to run in Linux. But all Blizzard games run fine with wine so Starcraft 2 will do the same. The only problem is that Blizzard did some strange things to the installation DVD. By default the only thing that’s visible is the Installer.exe file and without mounted correctly the installation files don’t even exist on the DVD…

I thought I’d write a little howto for all Linux using Starcraft fans.

1. Mounting the DVD

Before we can start the installation the DVD needs to be mounted with the unhide flag. This makes the installation files visible on the disc. An example:

# mount -o ro,unhide,uid=WernerL /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

2. Installation

From this point you can run ‘wine Installer.exe’ from within the DVD folder. However, at a lot of people (including me) this gives some errors. I don’t know what’s going wrong though.. You can fix this by copying all data to your harddrive and run the Installer from there.

This is basically all you have to know to run it. After the installation just log in with your battle.net account and have fun. And don’t forget to connect your Starcraft2 licence key to your battle.net account.

3. Fix the sound

After the installation is done and you want to run the game you properly will not have sound.  To fix this type ‘winecfg’ in  a terminal, go to the library tab and override mmdevapi to native.

4. Improve performance

To improve the performance you can run the game with the -opengl flag. This works for all Blizzard games BTW. But Starcraft2 still throws some DirectX calls in the logs but it already improves the performance.

See Frash in action:

As for many people I love Apple products. They really know how to create the best user experience. But I also love Adobe who provides me with great tools I like to work with. But what really bothers me is the bitchfight between those 2 companies that’s already going on way too long.

Well… let’s do what I suggest in the title of this blog. Let’s get Flash on this bitch. Not that I have an Iphone, but I know a lot of people who love to see Flash on their phone. So, go this amazing site called Let’s get some flash on this bitch.com.

Because we don’t want to go back in history with HTML5, do we? On this webpage you can see why HTML5 isn’t more than what Flash was 8 years ago.  http://www.flashlab.com/html5/