Setting up qt4 with visual studio 2005 and 2008

It is not clear (or wasn't to me) how to use QT4 with Visual Studio. The key to the problem is that you need to re-compile QT4 for Visual Studio. If you are not using MingGW at all then you can do all this in the original QT directory. Otherwise copy the entire c:\qt\2009.03 directory to something like c:\qt\2009.03_vs2008

Open a VS command line prompt so that all the env vars are set up.

Run the configure script, my suggestion is:
C:\Qt\2009.03\qt>configure -no-qt3support -no-opengl -platform win32-msvc2005 -no-libtiff -no-dbus -no-phonon -no-phonon-backend -opensource -debug-and-release

Let it do it's thing

Then type nmake to build the VS libraries

Notes:
Use nmake confclean to clean the directory before running a new configure cmd

Setting up PostgresSQL on Ubuntu

Most of my database use has been with MySQL to date as I have LAMP installations for websites but I was looking for a DB to use with a new desktop application of ours. It seems that Postgres may be a better option. Below are the steps I needed to get a Postgres server running on my laptop.

1) Install the packages
# sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client pgadmin3

This will install the latest versions, which for ubuntu 9.04 at this time is 8.3 if an older version installs then change the references to directories below as appropriate.

2) Change the admin passwords

# sudo -u postgres psql template1
This will start up the command line admin tool and select the template1 db which seems to be where postgre stores user credentials

# ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'new password';
and quit by typing \q

3) Change the ubuntu postgres user password. This is a conveinence step as all the conf files are created with postgres user and group. You could add or edit them as root with sudo and then make sure they are all chown to postgres:postgres

# sudo passwd -d postgres
Will delete the current postgres password (needed otherwise you are asked for it in the next step)
# sudo su postgres -c passwd
Enter a new password. For simplicity use the same password as the admin user above, but can be anything so long as you remember it

Restart the server with
# sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 restart

You can now use the pgAdmin tool to connect to the DB

Additions to the Surgical Tutorials

I have been making some additions to the Surgical Tutorials section of the website. Four topics added are:

• Meckel's Diverticulum
• Bed Sores
• Airway and Ventilatory Management
• Thyroid Malignancy

The Airway and Ventilatory Management is part of a new ATLS notes section and hopefully the other tutorials will also provide for useful revision notes.

EWTD 48 hour opt out survey

We have been running a short EWTD survey on the Surgeons Net site about the 48 hour EWTD week and opting out. If you haven't completed the survey then please contribute. But do note that ASiT and BOTA are going to be conducting a more detailed, longer survey in September.

If you are interested in the results then they are available live on line too.

Target Google AdSense even more by rating your content

There is a nice article on AdSense published recently on DevShed. For my own note I had no idea you could direct what content you wanted Google to concentrate on for displaying relevant ads.

Put the main content inside these comment tags:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

And things you want ignored inside:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->