Yesterday I was thinking about looking for something in my Quassel logs, and I didn't really feel like trying to scroll through the last 2 weeks' worth of backlog to find it. Also, at this stage Quassel unfortunately doesn't have a search feature either (Quassel devs, count that as a feature request ).

So I hauled out my latest trusty tool: Python.

Like a lot of other folks, I use Eric4 for my PyQt4 development. It's a nice IDE that makes programming your PyQt4 application a little easier, mostly thanks to it's quick links to Qt4 tools.

One of the potentially cool features of Eric4 is it's ability to add extra API's to the code completion. However, as nice as Eric4 is, it doesn't come with an API for PyQt4.

This morning I was working on my open source lyrics projection program, openlp.org, and I was struggling to work out how to remove an item from a QListWidget in PyQt4.

It's fairly simple in Qt4 and C++, you simply fetch the item, and then delete it using the C++ delete keyword:

QListWidgetItem item = ui->listWidget->currentItem();
delete item;

However, I couldn't figure out how to do it in Python. Initially I tried the del keyword, but that didn't work.

After seeing my last post, Michael Gorven pointed me to a couple of articles discussing RubyGem and Debian's policy. I did a bit of googling after reading those articles and some others around Ruby and package management systems, and found an article on using easy_install with Debian.

Perl has CPAN, Ubuntu and Debian have apt/debs, Gentoo has portage. These are all various distribution or packaging systems, which allow you to download and install packages from the various systems fairly easily. Of course Python also has it's own system.

So after my last attempt to compile Qt4 on my Mac, and getting the same error repeatedly, I decided to submit a bug report. One of the guys at Trolltech replied to my bug report, and asked me a number of questions, including "Have you completely removed your previous installation of Qt4?"

Of course I have, I thought, but I decided to go and double check everywhere. Lo and behold I found some files I'd forgotten about. So then I decided to recompile Qt4 again, and was very glad to see that it worked! A make and sudo make install later, I had Qt4 installed.

Development of the next version of openlp.org, "my" open source lyrics projection application, is underway and gaining speed. We're wanting to make it cross-platform, and so we've decided to use Python and Qt4 (by way of PyQt4).

Since openlp.org 2.x is to be cross-platform, what better way to test it out than to install Qt4 on my Mac at work? Unfortunately this proved more work than I thought.

Oh look, I got a reply to my e-mail:

Dear Raoul Snyman

The real problem is that this has turned into a campaign and not an honest concern about our difficulties, such that it is trivializing the problems we are having.

Do yourself a favour look beyond appearance, understand the problem and stop the pretence. Your 5 minutes solution is naïve to say the least.

Dear Mr Maphanga,

Thank you for your reply to my earlier e-mail. I was a bit concerned, however, with your reply, because it showed me a lack of knowledge of the situation. I would like to offer some insight on how you could address the situation, both in the short term, and in the long term.

As Tectonic has reported, the IEC's website locks out anyone not using Internet Explorer. E-mails to "webmaster@elections.org.za" disappear into thin air, and recently a human rights complaint has been lodged against the IEC.