Is it solid enough?
I finally started pursuing my long-awaited desire to learn KDE libraries. As a matter of fact, I learned Qt because I wanted to code for KDE. But hey, here I am, kind of doing it after 1 year. Anyhow, let’s get straight to the point, I wanted to talk about Solid a little bit. If you don’t know what Solid is, take a look at http://solid.kde.org. In a nutshell, it’s a library which let’s you interact with the hardware. For example, with Solid you can find out if the system has webcam or not, if it has storage drives, and if it does, what kind are they, and plus, if you find the right hardware, you can do ’stuff’ with it, like in case of storage drives, you can mount it and unmount it.
So, enough with the introduction. What I really want to talk about is how awesome Solid is. I will give you an example. Last night, I started reading the Solid documentation from techbase.kde.org and I looked at the tutorials. I started reading them at about 7pm and finished at around 8. As soon as I finished reading the tutorials I was able to write a simple app which looks and finds the memory stick that is attached to the computer. It was absolute mind-blowing for me! I never thought I could do that kind of stuff! But today, I sat down (literally for hours and hours) and wrote a backup app, and I called it KBackedUp. For the actual backing up, it uses a script (http://code.google.com/p/backed-up) as its backend, so it doesn’t do the actual backing up, but it doesn’t the rest.
In the mean time, I also learned about QProcess and KDEUI libraries (KXmlGuiWindow is plain awesome) which I might talk about later. But for now,
Happy holidays! 
And here present, Tic-Tac-Toe 0.4!!
I has been sitting there in the svn for a few days now, but I didn’t have the time (school?) to pack it into a tarball (.tar.gz archives) and blog about it. So here it is, ummm among the (rather few) improvement, is a counter which keeps track of your scores for you! Also there are three more options for saving states of the game and the window and whether you want the counter to be shown on startup or not! And also I had to fix some layout issues for the counter. It’s mostly about the counter.
And I’m displeased to announce that I can no longer think about how to improve this game (I wish I could still work on it). So PLEASE (note the capital letters) if you can think of ANYTHING that would improve this game, post a comment or email me or report a bug/wish. It would be really appreciated! 
and as always, the download link:
http://code.google.com/p/onlinetictactoe/downloads/list
P.S. By the way, I’m going to talk about SVN and how to use googlecode’s svn repository in the next post!!
Tic-Tac-Toe 0.1 released
Last night I squashed some little bugs here and there (including the one I mentioned in the previous post) and just an hour ago I added a player checking feature, that is when you are playing online with someone else, and if you are player X, you can’t put O on the board, BUT you have to wait till the other person finishes his/her move.
Other than that, I added some files and organized the folder a little bit putting sources in a src folder and added some files, COPYING, which contains the license (GPLv3), INSTALL, the compilation instructions and a Changelog.
That’s all for now, and here’s the project link. For some name conflicts with another project I had to change the project name to onlinetictactoe rather than the simple tictactoe.
http://code.google.com/p/onlinetictactoe/
And as always, report bugs you can report bugs directly from the project website (above link) in the issue section!
happy Tic-Tac-Toe-ing!
Online Tic-Tac-Toe game
I’ve been very silent for a week or two now. But I have a good reason for it I’ve been working on a Tic-Tac-Toe game. At first, it was supposed to be a I-learn-something-with-it type of program, now, it’s much more than that. Please note that the idea of making it multiplayer rather than single player came from one of my friends and was not my own idea!! But, as a matter of fact he’s on last-off-days vacation.
Anyway, no news is complete without screenshots
Tic-Tac-Toe main window
this is the main window.
Joining a game
This is how you would join a game. You should know the IP address of the server and what port it is using to create the game.
Creating server
And this is how you make a server (and then others join 
). Quite simple, just specify a port, and if you don’t know anything about ports, just put a 0, it will find an appropriate port for you! When you create a server, the port you’re using is shown on the status bar and remains there until someone joins your game. You can give that port to the other person (he needs it to join your game).
And that was mostly what I was up to! The funny thing is, only 9 months ago, writing something like this was just a distant dream!
And I didn’t forget to tell you where the source is, I didn’t yet upload it. Why? because it has some VERY visible bugs I should fix before releasing it. One of the most annoying ones being that when starting a new game (pressing the ‘new game’ button on tool bar), both players have to start a new game for it to work. Anyway, I don’t really know where the problem is (or do I?) but I will try to fix it hopefully by tomorrow and by tomorrow night (canada eastern time) I will have the sources uploaded somewhere, most probably google code.
And it’s worth to note that this will run on all platforms that support Qt (Mac, Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc.)
P.S. the whole thing is 1628 lines of code including headers distributed in 15 files. It’s released under GPLv3, so if you want the source now, leave a comment!
P.P.S. to download it, go to http://code.google.com/p/onlinetictactoe/ and download tictactoe-o.1.tar.gz
