We have been on a few overnight trips, day trips, celebrations, etc but with one thing and another we haven’t been away for what I would call a proper vacation. We haven’t really been away for more than a few days at a time. Some of that was pandemic, some of it was moving jobs (the first time), some of it was crazy inflation, some was moving jobs (the seconds time).
I started a new job at a startup called Voltron Data in July of this year! For anyone who follows me you may remember I only just moved jobs in 2020, leaving Kitware to take a position at Brookhaven National Lab. Moving jobs and house during the pandemic was a lot, I went pretty quiet, the pandemic was hard on many of us. Things didn’t work out as I had hoped and I did a lot of soul-searching over the last few years too.
The last time I built a PC was before the pandemic, in upstate, before we moved down to Long Island. Before that it was way back in England before we moved to America. The last PC I built I couldn’t decide how much I would use it, and so I stayed fairly mid-range too, whereas this time I had more of a sense that I would make a lot of use of the machine.
Yesterday we had to say goodbye to Obi, our family pet. He joined us in upstate and has been a big part of our lives since then. Devastated to say he didn’t make it to eight years old, last Friday it became clear that the medication to help with a chronic condition simply was not working. The vet gave him something to help him for a few weeks maybe, but even that only had a moderate effect.
I recently attended a talk about generating user interfaces from Python, I have fought for and against doing this in various projects. I have also seen places where it really helps and other places where it was a huge detriment (at least in my opinion). The talk got me thinking about how many times how many of us have written our interface generation. At times we also talk about reuse and whether it is worth reusing another approach versus writing our own.
Something an old mentor told me to never do is call a thing “Modern …” as you can guarantee someone will be chuckling in 10-20 years. I can neither confirm nor deny that I found myself sitting at my desk at gone 1am immersing myself in what “Modern CMake” was exactly, and what I wanted to apply to the Avogadro build system. It seems to have its nucleation in about 2017 where I find a number of posts, talks, etc.
And now for something completely different - the Phantom of the Opera! Last year we had family over for a few weeks, it was lots of fun and it ended with a few days in New York City. We took them to a lot of the great tourist attractions and I realized our hotel was right next to the Majestic theatre where the Phantom of the Opera was showing. I studied this as a child in school, but our trip to go and see it was canceled.
When we started the Avogadro project we were quite deliberate in what compiler warnings we added, and in keeping them to zero wherever possible. These last few years I have not been as involved, CDash has gone away and the warnings no longer show up on a dashboard with the same visibility. Today I started off wanting to look at some other things but realized that there are too many compiler warnings to notice new ones I might introduce.
Not that I am counting, but this is day six. I thought that there was a good chance I wouldn’t make it today as I had a few other commitments but here we are. When I first designed Avogadro’s build system I made it as modern as I could at the time, and then reluctantly wasn’t as aggressive as I might have liked in pushing the minimum version higher for modern CMake features.
So, day five! I have had a lot rattling around my head these past few years, and I have missed the more informal style of personal blog posts. Today I updated my system and Qt upgraded from 6.4 to 6.5 and the porting I have been working on in Avogadro was completely unaffected! This is one of the things I admire the most about the Qt project, for as long as I can remember (going back to the 3.