The invisible hand has decorated the statue of Mr. Adam Smith with a traffic cone!

The invisible hand has been mischievous

This year I was a guest in three weddings: in Finland, in Serbia and in Scotland. All of the weddings were beautiful occasions with lovely people, and I remember each of the weddings in different ways. I’ll not discuss the weddings themselves more here, but shall concentrate on the places instead.
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Problem

You need to quickly share images with your friends. Not all of your friends use the same chat programs, social networks, etc.

Solution

kevlarkitten.com runs to the rescue.

It works like this: you upload an image and set an expiration period. You then get a special web address. Before the image expires, it can be seen through this address. After the image expires, it’s gone forever.

It’s very fast, simple to use and 100% hassle-free. You don’t need to login or anything! And only the persons who know the link can see the picture.

History

Many months ago I wanted to learn a web framework, just to learn how it works. Then I just implemented a project I had had in mind. I had a domain which I wasn’t using, so I put it up at kevlarkitten.com and told a few of my friends about it to get some beta testers.

A few days later, another friend was asking me “what’s the best way to just quickly get you guys these pictures of a potential new office space I’m looking at”. I pointed him to the site and he sent us several image links for our amusement. Success!

The site has been up for some time now, so it should be somewhat bug-free. A wider audience is very welcome. If the site makes your life easier, very good.

Note

Huge image sizes are not supported. If you that bothers you, try resizing the image – I think in normal use you won’t get such problems. I might implement support for very huge pictures later, but given that I pay for bandwidth, it’s not a really high priority for me :P

kevlarkitten.com – it purrs

As there was occasional downtime at work, I used that time to teach myself the simply wonderful Qt framework. With kind permission of SonyEricsson Mobile Communications I am allowed to release the source.

Here’s a simple Game of Life simulator program implemented in Qt. Download source.

Some example world configurations (use File/Open): example.gol, slurp2.gol, trash.gol and turbine.gol.

Features

• Toroidal 2-dimensional Conway’s Game of Life
• Moore and von Neumann neighbourhoods
• Trails mode (UI bling)
• Load and save world (XML)
• Edit mode – draw your own pattern
• Different colours e.g. invert mode
• Save image
• Import world from 80×50 black and white PNG image
• Settings menu

Build it

Qt 4.6 is needed.

Unpack, then go to the folder and:

qmake
make


Then run the resulting GameOfLife binary.

It’s been tested under Symbian 9.4, Windows and Linux. Works OK, although in Symbian some of the file dialogs were laid out funnily, it ran “mostly OK” anyway.

Note: The doc/ folder contains an UML diagram of the design/structure. It’s not really anything fancy, but in case you’re wondering about why something is the way it is, it’s probably good to check that first.

License

This source code is placed into public domain. Feel free to use it for learning, poke it and see what happens, change it, extend it, etc. Developing it helped my understanding of Qt, maybe it’ll do the same for you. Have fun!

If you do anything interesting with it, please drop a comment with a link!