Using libgearman in C++ and Qt plus several Questions about Gearman

Hello Gearman-Team,

I hope this is the right place for my question.
I'm a media engineering student from Germany. Me and my team are considering using Gearman for our "Blender Renderfarm" project, but struggle a little bit in using it for our needs. That's why I have some questions:

1.) Is there any IRC, Forum, MailingList or social community website where people can exchange their questions, code and such about Gearman?

2.) There is very little documentation available about using Gearman with C++. Are there any helpful ressources out there we haven't looked at? Up until now, we have been working with http://gearman.info/ and the examples bundeled with Gearman (along with a japanese OpenCV website: http://shokai.org/blog/archives/5254 :) ).

3.) Now a bit more technical stuff: We are using Gearman with QT 5.1.1 (C++) on Ubuntu 13.10. I am responsible for the worker part. The client is basically sending a string (char* from "QByteArray.data()") which I need to reconstruct to a QByteArray again. Unfortunately this doesn't work, since there is some kind of escape character (I believe) cutting of the rest after some 3 to 17 Bytes. What is the best way to put a custom data type (in our case the QByteArray) into gearman on the client side and receive it on the worker side? Are there some "Best Practice" advices?

Thank you for taking the time to read through my post. And if there are developers of Gearman out here: Thank you for your great effort. We would love to contribute some documentation from our project if we get Gearman running on our side.

Also, if you need some code, better explanation or info, feel free to tell me.

Looking forward to your answers.

Sincerely, Adam