Slashdot Mirror

At the Ohio LinuxFest yesterday, two Linux geeks were married — or had their projects merged into a single trunk, as the officiant, Lord Drachenblut, put it. The wedding of Randy Noseworthy (proprietor of the Juiced Penguin) and Janet Edmonson was announced last week and was live-tweeted by at least one attendee — here's his photo of the happy couple. There's also a video of the ceremony, at which Jon "Maddog" Hall offered a blessing via pre-recorded audio.
Update: 09/26 20:03 GMT by KD : In the comments, anyaristow notes that this wasn't the first such wedding; Rob Landly and Fade were married at Penguicon in 2007, with Steve Jackson officiating and Eric Raymond as best man.

polar_bear writes, "The fourth annual Ohio LinuxFest is just around the corner, and this year's LinuxFest is set to be the best one yet. The lineup will feature Jeff Waugh of Ubuntu and GNOME, Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, Jorge Castro, MySQL's Jay Pipes, Michael Johnson, a panel on virtualization, and many more excellent speakers. The OhioLinuxFest will take place on Saturday, September 30 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. Registration is free."

polar_bear writes, "The fourth annual Ohio LinuxFest is just around the corner, and this year's LinuxFest is set to be the best one yet. The lineup will feature Jeff Waugh of Ubuntu and GNOME, Linux International's Jon 'maddog' Hall, Jorge Castro, MySQL's Jay Pipes, Michael Johnson, a panel on virtualization, and many more excellent speakers. The OhioLinuxFest will take place on Saturday, September 30 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. Registration is free."

corso64 writes "Ohio Linux Fest 2005, a free conference/event for Linux and OSS enthusiasts, looks to be every bit as good, if not better than Ohio Linux Fest 2004. Last year, IBM, Novell, Apache, Beowulf, Mozilla, along with Jon "Maddog" Hall made Ohio Linux Festival 2004 a huge success along with tons of swag, freebies, and door prizes (including a Linus-autographed cdrom of the original source release of Linux). This year IBM, Novell, Apache, Digium, KDE and others will be doing sessions on Asterisk, KDE, Digital Forensics,Unified Threat Management, Ubuntu, Server Farms and lots of other topics. Check it out this October 1st!"

Damin writes "The Ohio LinuxFest is a free event, open to all interested on a first-come, first-serve basis. Aside from the impressive lineup of speakers, what makes this event so cool is that it is organized entirely by volunteers from all of the Ohio LUGS. Last year, people travelled from nine states to participate. The event will be hosted at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday, October 2nd, from 10:00AM until 6:00PM. While this is a free event, registration is required. Full details & registration information can be found at the event's website."

Damin writes "The Ohio LinuxFest is a free event, open to all interested on a first-come, first-serve basis. Aside from the impressive lineup of speakers, what makes this event so cool is that it is organized entirely by volunteers from all of the Ohio LUGS. Last year, people travelled from nine states to participate. The event will be hosted at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday, October 2nd, from 10:00AM until 6:00PM. While this is a free event, registration is required. Full details & registration information can be found at the event's website."

rmohr02 writes "Registration for the Ohio LinuxFest is now open." Small shows are always the most fun.

william_lorenz writes: "With the recent release of KDE 3.2 and KDevelop 3.0, and with the forming of the KDE Quality team as mentioned on Slashdot just days ago, it was an opportune time to read my newest book, C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3. (Qt is of course TrollTech's multi-platform windowing toolkit -- Win32, Linux, UNIX, and the embedded space with Qt/Embedded -- upon which KDE is built. There's a free version licensed under the GPL for non-commercial use and also a commercial version.)" Read on for the rest of Lorenz' review. C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 author Jasmin Blanchette, Mark Summerfield pages 464 publisher Prentice Hall rating 9 reviewer Bill Lorenz ISBN 0131240722 summary A smooth introduction to best practices for Qt 3 application development.

I didn't have to force myself to read this one: the book grabbed my interest from the beginning. It's filled with just enough technical details to whet my technical curiosity, keep me turning pages, and provide the important information, clearly and concisely. I don't have much Qt development experience (none at all yet), although I am experienced in other windowing toolkits. The book quickly provided me with everything I need to know to get up and developing an application, and now I know where to quickly start.

Who's it for? I am of course a novice Qt developer, yet one with a fair amount of IT experience, specifically with other windowing toolkits. I found this book not only a great introduction for those who want to get started with Qt, but it's also a trove of information for somewhat intermediate Qt developers. It's not for people who work for Trolltech or have already been developing feature-rich KDE applications; however, besides providing a great point of entry for new Qt developers, the book does touch on some more advanced topics. Technical books tend to age quickly, but I should note that the book is written by some of the people who brought us Qt 3 and are working on bringing us Qt 4, so this book should have a degree of forward compatibility. What can I expect to learn?

The book is divided into two sections: "Basic Qt" and "Intermediate Qt" development.

The basic Qt section covers everything that someone new to Qt would probably want to learn, beginning with a simple application and an explanation of signals and slots (signals and slots work much the same way as windowing events in Java, for example, and can help to tell when a button or key is pressed). Signals and slots help make the sample application functional. This section also introduces the Qt reference documentation, available online as a reference during development, and Qt Designer, for those who want to use a graphical user interface to create components such as dialog boxes. A quick overview of some of the available widgets is next (widgets are graphical elements such as dialog boxes and buttons), which helps to give someone brand new to Qt development a feel for some of the components that come ready-to-build-upon. This is all covered in the first 38 pages of the book.

I should point out that I think that knowledge of the C++ programming language is essential if one is to learn good things from this book (I'm a big proponent of learning through experience, and you'll need to play with C++ code), but learning Qt and C++ development at the same time might help one come up with some interesting project ideas for learning!

After a quick introduction to creating custom widgets and double buffering (used in some cases to prevent screen flicker), the intermediate section starts by hopping right into layout managers, intended to make graphical forms and components beautiful (and more usable), just like tables helped to make HTML beautiful before CSS came around; layout managers help do for graphical application components what the font and alignment settings do for a word processor. The managers included are very similar to those used in Java's JFC/Swing stuff, and they work well. Also covered are methods for creating 2D and 3D graphics, drag-and-drop, and event processing. Compared to signals and slots, event processing gives the developer more control, and becomes important when writing custom widgets or changing the way an existing widget behaves.

Following this are sections on internationalization, providing online help within an application, multithreading for responsive applications, and Qt's platform-specific features. Qt works with Microsoft's ActiveX, for example, although this apparently requires the Qt/Windows Enterprise Edition as opposed to the free edition of Qt. It's important to point out that Qt implements its own threading capabilities, and the section on threads covers this in depth.

Conclusion

This is a great book for those interested in Qt and KDE development, cross-platform C++ graphical application development, and just making beautiful, functional applications. The book provides information that can't be had from the Qt API alone, and it does so in a way that kept me turning pages. Blanchette and Summerfield organized their text well, with logical chapters that make finding tips for that first application possible. This book gets twelve thumbs up from me.

Bill Lorenz is Vice-President of the Linux Users Group of Cleveland and is helping to organize the Ohio LinuxFest, 2004 edition (call for submissions now in the wild!). You can purchase C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

william_lorenz writes "Photos and highlights from the Ohio LinuxFest are finally online! The next event will be coming up soon, and people interested in speaking are asked to answer the Call for Presentations before May 15, 2004. The event will be hosted in October of 2004 this year, and there's even a T-shirt design contest for all the artists out there. More than 10 Linux users groups from Ohio alone were involved this past year, and people came from all over the Mid-West."

william_lorenz writes "Photos and highlights from the Ohio LinuxFest are finally online! The next event will be coming up soon, and people interested in speaking are asked to answer the Call for Presentations before May 15, 2004. The event will be hosted in October of 2004 this year, and there's even a T-shirt design contest for all the artists out there. More than 10 Linux users groups from Ohio alone were involved this past year, and people came from all over the Mid-West."

william_lorenz writes "Photos and highlights from the Ohio LinuxFest are finally online! The next event will be coming up soon, and people interested in speaking are asked to answer the Call for Presentations before May 15, 2004. The event will be hosted in October of 2004 this year, and there's even a T-shirt design contest for all the artists out there. More than 10 Linux users groups from Ohio alone were involved this past year, and people came from all over the Mid-West."

william_lorenz writes "Photos and highlights from the Ohio LinuxFest are finally online! The next event will be coming up soon, and people interested in speaking are asked to answer the Call for Presentations before May 15, 2004. The event will be hosted in October of 2004 this year, and there's even a T-shirt design contest for all the artists out there. More than 10 Linux users groups from Ohio alone were involved this past year, and people came from all over the Mid-West."