Last week we had the pleasure of meeting Friedrich Kossebau at our Berlin office and he accepted my offer to work for Openismus, starting at the beginning of May. Friedrich contacted me because we need more Qt expertise. His long KDE involvement fills that requirement perfectly and I think he has the temperament and attention to detail that we value. Unusually, we must send him right off to Helsinki, so we can’t immediately enjoy his company in Berlin. But I think he likes the adventure.

This means we are still looking for an extra Qt developer to work in our Berlin office, so please do email me.

Openismus is looking for experienced C++ and Qt developers to join our team creating quality and fighting entropy. It’s a chance to work on serious projects with (sometimes uncompromising) colleagues at Openismus who care about getting things done properly.

Please email me if you are looking for work and can show me some public involvement. I like having URIs for blogs, ohloh, git/svn, mailing lists, etc, to see your personal sense of code quality and your ability to communicate. We ideally need people who can work in Germany, probably moving to Berlin.

(We do GTK+, gtkmm, and Qt development, and we like really knowing them all. These days Maemo/Meego developers need a wide range of experience.)

After our successful year of training at Openismus, I thought I’d publish the rough bullet-point list that we used. Whoever we choose for the following year will repeat much the same process, with in-depth critique and a dose of reality.

A little over a year ago, we hired our first batch of Openismus trainees. After an intensive year gaining knowledge and experience, I’m proud to say that David King and Michael Hasselmann have now graduated to regular work on customer projects. They’ve become solid developers in whom we have confidence, thanks to mentoring from all our other employees. Personally, creating these new development careers is one of the most worthwhile things I’ve done in my career.

So we need some more people to repeat our success. Here’s the text from the first time:

If you are smart and enthusiastic but you lack experience then we can provide the opportunity. You would work mostly on existing open source projects instead of customer projects, just to get experience with C, C++, GTK+ and Qt. Our developers would provide technical guidance and encourage you to work and communicate in a structured way, creating software that’s actually usable and useful.

This is also a great opportunity to move to Berlin – a wonderful city for young people. Munich may also be a possibility if necessary.

I’d also like to point out that we are very much an equal-opportunities employer. We get almost no applications from women or minority groups and that’s not good enough. We are a small company so every new person can make the place more like themselves.

Please send us an email telling us about yourself. Show enthusiasm and show us anything you’ve done in the open source world already. As before, I will filter out the least suitable candidates by expecting you to find the appropriate email address yourself. Unfortunately, as before, it’s unlikely that we’ll want to deal with visa paperwork if you are not already working in the EU.

Update: We think we have chosen our new trainees already. Stay tuned. Do bug me if I have not replied to you.

Liam says “broombroom soon Stinky Mama Papa mit”.

That means that we will be flying in an airplane on Friday to Helsinki. I’ll be around for work stuff on Monday and Tuesday too. Most afternoons are planned out already, and evenings are generally difficult with a child, but I hope to see random Nokia/Maemo people, maybe at lunch. I shall be pinging you.

We are looking forward to seeing old friends who we don’t get a chance to see often enough.

Kat, David, Mathias, and Daniel will be around too.

I’m pleased to say that Peter Penz will become an Openismus employee at the start of February. I’ve known and liked Peter since I worked with him six years ago in Linz, Austria on a proprietary C++ mobile phone platform. Back then I was impressed with his skill and temperament so I’ve watched with interest as he has become a core KDE maintainer via the Dolphin file manager.

Obviously Peter will help Openismus as we gain experience with Qt for Maemo 6 (Harmattan) in addition to our continued use of GTK+ and gtkmm.

Peter will work from home in Linz, occasionally visiting the office in Berlin. I like the idea of another office in Linz though.

Valgrind’s massif tool tracks how much memory an application uses over time, allowing you to see leaks. Previous versions produced pretty graphs. For instance, see the graph in this out-dated GNOME tutorial about massif.

However, massif’s behaviour has changed and those graphs are no longer generally appropriate. But they were nice. So I hacked a copy of the current ms_print perl code, producing massif_grapher. Forgive me for my perl code.

I used perl’s GD::Graph module. It worked but it’s a little eccentric. The image size is hard-coded and needs to be increased in the code when Gd::Graph complains that the vertical or horizontal space is too small, if you have too many data points.

massif_grapher.pl outputs a massif_pretty.png file:

• There’s a simple graph (the default) that just shows the stack and heap allocations, splitting the heap up into useful and extra (allocated as an optimization) . It doesn’t mention any functions. See this example.
• And there’s a detailed graph (via –detailed) that tries to show the old-style cumulative graph, with color for each allocating function. See this example. I won’t put it directly in my blog because their’s some obviously weird stuff happening at the top. Also, the legend needs to be reversed so it’s easier to associate the functions with the blocks on the graph. Patches welcome. You’ll get weird results if you don’t specify–detailed-freq=1 to massif.

Time will tell if this is useful.

Other useful massif tools:

• Eclipse Linux Tools’ valgrind support: Scroll down to see the video for their massif support. This allows you to jump right to the code. Useful if you are using Eclipse.
• massiftool: A Qt-based application for navigating massif snapshot data.

Until this week I was not familiar with qmake and CMake because I am a fairly satisfied user of autotools. I have not forgotten how strange it was when I first learned it, when there was no decent documentation, but things are much better now. I feel at home with it and I like how other systems and distros expect the standard “configure;make all install” steps. I am definitely biased against the use of other build systems.

As expected, my Glom talk at the Maemo summit was rather under-attended while people went to the security talk next door. I had still hoped to do an entertaining talk for the video cameras, but my mind when blank and it was a bit of a shambles. The slides (or with notes that I forgot) should give you an idea of what I was trying to achieve.

Since then I have made some more simple improvements to the Maemo 5 port of Glom, as you can see in this new video (youtube or .ogv on my site), again using the Sqlite version of the simple Music Collection example.

These are the visible improvements:

• Details views now have “Add Related *” buttons in the AppMenu so you can actually add related records. Again, this uses an extra window.
• The Table name is mentioned on the title of the Details window.
  These last two required me to add the ability for the designer to specify the singular form of table and relationship titles. For instance, “Album” instead of “Albums”. Actually, I guess that’s still not enough for some translations, so we may need to allow designers to specify actual phrases.
• Details views now use HildonPickerButtons for ID fields instead of combo boxes. So they open a separate window to actually choose the value.
• The scrollbar is against the right edge.
• The widget spacing is more correct for Maemo 5, though there’s lots more to do, and it could be made much prettier by aligning widgets even when they are in different groups, particular because the group titles are hidden in the Maemo port.

I will stop coding on this for a while, but I think I’ve shown what’s possible. And I think I’ve shown that Glom is already (or could be) the best base for a simple database-driven application on Maemo – far preferrable to writing code and SQL.

The current code will be packaged in extras-devel soon.

I use Qt again these days in addition to gtkmm and the rest of the GNOME stuff. Things have improved lots since I last used it seriously, though it’s still a little eccentric.