I feel like posting the picture below.

It's from a very rainy Friday in September 2000. I had a meeting around noon that day. Directly afterwards, I went for a weekend in the mountains with two friends, and I felt just like that.

About an hour after the picture was taken, over dinner, I explained my mood. Unless things change, I expect I'll leave in a few months. A good forecast: I gave notice four months later, ten minutes after another depressing meeting.

I didn't forecast Nokia's recent rampage, though.

Qdoc misses many features Javadoc has. This is intentional — well, mostly. Here's a braindump of the features I dropped or decided against adding.

@author is one thing Qt had, but I dropped it due to two problems. First, it misled users who used it to answer the question who should I ask about this problem?. The problem was typically about some recent change to the file, and the original author of the file was the wrong person to ask. Second, there was some reluctance within the team about editing someone else's code, which delayed bugfixes. (more…)

The origin of udoc goes a long way back, to when I still was a student at the University of Trondheim, the world's first and only Quasar Toolkit user, and about to start working at Trolltech, which at the time was called Quasar Technologies (Hi Haavard) and occupied a room and a half overlooking a busy street in a rather unfashionable part of Oslo.

I wasn't very happy with the Qt documentation, which was then written using LaTeX macros and already obsolete. I was also an opinionated asshole and far too sure of myself, and I'd just learned about Donald Knuth's literate programming techniques, but I hadn't read his book. Naturally I looked at the existing litprog tools (there were quite a few) before discarding them all to write something good. (more…)

For a long time udoc was called qdoc. Because Trolltech might want to release its qdoc (abbreviated from qt doc tool for no particularly good reason), it seemed sensible to rename this one before release. A simple matter — just step along to the next letter, I thought. But then there turned out to be something called rdoc already. And two programs called sdoc. tdoc was taken too. A few quick searches showed that there are more than 26 programs like udoc.

You can understand why I considered naming it fdoc.