The metal shaper man's blog

I’m going to need to start setting about a page of useful reference Links.
The tutorial links to a forum sight… gtkforums.com
I’m trying to stay on target and get a handle on this Gtk+ stuff..

Lets see Introduction.
Discusses pkg-config.   Hmmm.  Interesting stuff there in the man pages about that.
If I understand this correctly it looks up a metadata file (which has a .pc extension) which is named after a particular library.   Ok.. Just tried “locate pkgconfig” in terminal to pull up a list…
This is a little snippet from the man pages:
” pkg-config retrieves information about packages from  special  metadata
files. These files are named after the package, with the extension .pc.
By default, pkg-config looks in the directory prefix/lib/pkgconfig  for
these  files;  it  will  also  look in the colon-separated (on Windows,
semicolon-separated) list of  directories  specified  by  the  PKG_CON‐
FIG_PATH environment variable.”
Below is the contents of ” /usr/lib/pkgconfig/gtk+-2.0.pc”:

This is not what I expected…. I thought it was going to be far more primitive….. Anyway..onwards.

First Programs

Now… if you’ve followed my blog… My Linux experiences have been…. how should I say… somewhat painful…. First example here… fired right up…. I guess this is what you expect since Gtk+ is a integral part of Ubuntu….
I did a quick search on the net to see if I could find some reference documentation on some of these commands that are being used.
Here is a link: http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.14/gtk-General.html

Worked through one chapter in one sitting… Not too bad

Ok.. So the goal at the moment is to play around with Gtk+ enough to the point where I can get the Opencascade makebottle demo to load.  The documentation on what to do, if you’ve never done it before is somewhat lacking.  My suspicion is once I figure it out it will be obvious…

Anyway I found a link to some tutorial information on GTK+.
The one that caught my eye was GTK+ 2.x Tutorial for Beginners.

But first I’m visiting the FAQ.

I ran across a book teach yourself Gtk+ in 21 days…. Ughhhhhh I was hoping this was going to be a quicky…
Hmm… according to the FAQ, most people who use Gtk+ use something called Glade and there are two ways to do it.
Backing up one step, wikipedia defines glade as:”

• Glade (geography), open area in woodland, synonym for “clearing”
  • Glade skiing, skiing amongst trees

Places in the United States

• Glade, Kansas, a city in Phillips County
• Glades County, Florida, in south central Florida
• Glade Township, Pennsylvania, in Warren County,
• The Glades (Florida), in Western Palm Beach County
• The Glades (New Jersey), in southern New Jersey

[edit] Other uses

• Glade (brand), air freshener products
• Glade Interface Designer, a GUI designer for GTK+ and GNOME
• The Glade, an annual electronic dance music festival in England”

Now, I am embarressed that I did not about Glade being an open area in woodland..
I wonder what the etymology of the word is. Well… Lets see: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=glade  So…. probably going back to middle english or old Norse…meaning bright.
Gotta love dem Vikings… Arrg..
But… I guess we’re interested in the Glade Interface Designer,
So… there was glade1, glade2… and now glade3.. which was a a total rewrite…
Saw something about GladeXML where you can fire up Glade using an XML file.

At the bottom for the Wiki was Glade Example Applications. In that link, this caught my eye to check out later: BoardGame Tool –
a boardgame utility with a C++ front-end built with Glade and
a Python back-end.

The link that that first caught my eye. GTK+ 2.x Tutorial for Beginners. seems to be the one to check out. It’a step by step that is at my speed…. Should be good.

It’s been a while.  My free time has been focused on getting through Paul Kunz’s C++ on-line lecture.
I finished the last part yesterday night.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t to run cleanly on my Linux box, so I was using my wife’s Win2k machine…

Anyway, I ran across this link which would display OCC objects in a GDK+ window.  I think for the moment anyway, this might work better for me, that delving too deeply in Qt.   Hear’s a link to both the Gtk+ viewer at the QtViewer. http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/dolbey/

Ok… This is not goo… As I recall,  had results with Qtopencascade in under 5 minutes.  I”ve been looking at this for a half hour and I haven’t got a clue where to  get started with this Gdk stuff.

I’ve been working quite extensively on Paul Kunz’s C++ course.  What an incredible resource.
So… My suspicion is my blog is going to be on the quieter side for a while.
I hosed up my audio trying to install realplayer so it’s a little irritating that I need to watch the lecture on my wife’s win 2k machine..
Let’s see… I’m up to module 10/ 23[?]
Month’s of trying to go through textbooks has been replace by about a week of listening to this course.
Oh… you lovely spammers out there, my blog is moderated so why bother… Sooner or Later I’m going to harden this blog so Hah…..

Alright…. Lets do a quick recap.. I was going through the Qt tutorial and decided I needed some more study in C++.  In doing some research I stumbled on this fantastic on-line resource, which was a on-line course in C++.   I sort of got it working both in windows and Linux but not to its full potential.

In linux, I was trying to determine if I really needed realplayer to run. Is realplayer the only option? (Cern C++ Lecture Series)

I wound up installing Realplayer and hosed up my Mplayer which was tuned up nice. I’ve been having issues with trying to uninstall it. Need help on uninstalling RealPlayer 11 GOLD

I sent a email to University of Michigan with my tales of woe, and they responded to me. Apparently, the link I had was supposed to run detached to work in Linux.

There is a more up to date version of the lecture and  here it is:

http://esmane.physics.lsa.umich.edu/wlap-cwis/SPT–BrowseResources.php?ParentId=215

Also a more up to date link to the lecture archive is at http://atlascollab.umich.edu/archive

(I’m having issues at the moment with my Linux box.  So I don’t know how well it works.)

I’ve been going through the Bruce Ekels Thinking in C++ as well as working through the QT tutorial…
I’m sort between… 7 – One Thing Leads to Another and 8 – Preparing for Battle

I suppose this all makes sense when you understand it….  I’ve actually reread early portions of Thinking in C++ and it’s make more sense than the first time… So I’m know in is getting imprinted on the synapses…. I think I need to tune into a few other sources on C++ classes and see if there’s something more on my wave length…
This looks interesting..
http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/lesson12.html

There is a recommened bucks in ascending skill set order that looks very interesting to me…

I need to go over this with a morning cup of Java.
Ok… I really do need to get to sleep but… I was hoping to find a video tutorial… I wound up jumping around a bit and I think is found pay dirt….
http://www.wlap.org/cern/lectures/tech/c/00/

Ok… One of the distractions I allowed by myself was American Idol.   With that show in the off-season on only equivalent form of entertainment is the US elections (albeit with some serious consequences).
I happened have stumbled on Google blog search site and for fun I put in “Palin” as a search criteria.  At the top of the list was this fascinating link: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com

I wonder if these guys get into American Idol in their off season..

Enough of that for now….  Back to Qt….
I ran across the official Qt Tutorial Site.
So far I’ve worked my way up to 6) Building Blocks Galore!

There is a lot of stuff going on in this Qt.  Very powerful..
So… My game plan at the moment is:

• Work through the Qt tutorial #1(which will give me a basic understanding of Qt)
  • Figure out if I need to go through Qt tutorial #2 also….

• Work through the code in Qtopencascade (which hopefully will get me more into OCC finally)
  • Mess with  around an make my own version of a makebottle.
  • Modeling my Ammco Shaper. (perhaps animated)
  • Figure out how to make an animated gif of the metal shaper.
• Start researching brep file layouts.

While I feel like I’m progressing in increasing my knowledge base, my progress is far slower than I would like.  There is just so much going on in this undertaking of mine that’s totally new for me it makes my brain ache.   I guess on the plus side its on way of prevent brain-rot.