Category: News

Site Update 2018

Well, I finally finished another site overhaul/conversion. This time from Dokuwiki to WordPress. I kept the design the same as much as I could (I like it, even though it’s not as modern as some would like).

Download links are all the same. Blog posts are (will be eventually) all converted, but links have all changed (though they are similar). Most page links are the same, unless it ends with “/index”, these just need “index” dropped to work, I may work out some rewrite magic to take care of that.

BUT, there are some pages that I have dropped and/or simplified. I don’t know if I’ll convert the build notes section, it’s way out of date and I don’t plan to maintain it.

Now that I have this (mostly) done, I can work on catching up with software…

Site Changes

Well, the all-wiki idea is moving along. I got all the Geeklog stories, and old news, converted into a wiki blog.

I left it wrapped in Geeklog for now, until I can convert the Gallery (shouldn’t be too hard), and work out the menus (left menus should be simple, but I really like my top menu and that will be customization work).

Currently the main (Geeklog) page is redirected to the main wiki page. When the GL shell is sloughed off, all external links will change, by dropping the “wiki/” prefix, but I’ll leave redirects behind so links don’t break.

There is a new news feed link also: www.kyngchaos.com/feed.php. This will catch all wiki page updates, including the blog. I will try to work out a blog-only feed. The GL feed shows the wiki updates, but the URL redirect doesn’t seem to work.

Site Updates

Just a few site updates:

  • Updated to latest GeekLog.
  • Smaller font sizes – I know this will make text a bit small for those MacBook users/dense monitors.
  • Print view button on the wiki pages.
  • Some wiki page editing improvements for me.

P.S. I’m considering a wiki formatting plugin/hack for Geeklog stories, or moving the whole bloomin site into the wiki (that would make layout more consistent), since almost all content is there anyways.

P.P.S. That was easy – Geeklog had a wiki formatting built in, based on pear:text:wiki, which has a doku parser. Doesn’t have access to dokuwiki format plugins, but I just need the basics for stories. This story was reformatted to use wikitext! I may still move everything to the wiki anyways.

Site Updates

I updated the site software to Geeklog 1.5.0 (finally). There may still be some dust from the update.

The most notable change is that the wiki is now integrated in the Geeklog layout. Mostly. I need to make some CSS adjustments to the design.

Coming soon: new menus.

Site is iPhone-Ready

Something a little different today. I tweaked the CSS so the site is viewable on the iPhone without [too much] zooming. It may be viewable on other mobile devices – I got the tags in there – but I don’t have any other mobile device to test it.

Site Updated

Site update is complete. And I finally reorganized the menu so it’s a little less confusing.

Coming soon: wiki pages. I found a lightweight wiki a while back, and implemented it at my workplace intranet. Not quite fully integrated with Geeklog yet, but maybe someday… I’ll then move the software build instruction pages (and update them – oooohhh) and the rest to the wiki. I’ll keep Geeklog for the blog/news side of operations.

I’m pondering the idea of allowing user registration, mainly to let others help in the porting docs. But it’ll probably be by invitation only, or by request if someone thinks they can help.

64bits & Leopard Prep

I’m starting think about Leopard. Not much I can do with the builds yet – I only have the free developer membership, so I can’t get any Leopard prerelease developer software. Working on ideas and and 64bit stuff I can do in Tiger.

This is my rough plan.

  • Drop Panther compatibility (very probable) – between patches, library incompatibilities, and extra features in Tiger, building for Panther compatibility is a hassle. Sure, Leopard/Tiger compatibility may have similar issues, but the fewer the better.
  • Revert to system libraries where possible – part of the Panther compatibility required building some libraries that were available in the system myself. These include curl, bzip2, readline and sqlite3. Since I do Sqlite as a framework, I will probably keep doing that.
  • 64 bit builds.

I did some initial work on 64bit builds in Tiger. Tiger supports 64bit compilation (a separate thing from 64bit file sizes, which is supported back to at least Panther). BUT, only in the system library. This means mainly number-crunching stuff that runs from the command line – no networking, no GUI, no devices…

I was able to build 64bit Tiger for UnixImageIO (except the Xpm library which needs a 64bit X11 library), GEOS, PROJ and FreeType.

Xerces needs Carbon frameworks for some Mac services (file IO and char encoding features), instead of using similar unix-level services. That eliminates a 64bit Tiger GDAL right there. Python will definitely need Leopard, with all the stuff it covers (especially wxPyhon), so not even GDAL python tools will be possible, if the minor Xerces issue is ignored.

Of course, all the applications (GRASS, Qgis, …) and server apps (Postgres, MapServer) will not be possible 64bit on Tiger.

This leaves a split build for the future. Looks like I will do Tiger-only 32bit universal builds and Leopard-only 64bit builds. It’s likely that the 32bit Tiger builds will also work on Leopard, to allow compatibility for old software on Leopard that doesn’t get rebuilt for 64bit Leopard (at all, or in a timely fasion), so I could make the installers quad-arch universal, and just strip out the 64bit parts when installed on Tiger.

downtime (today’s MacBook adventure)

Well, I won’t be getting much done in the next few days – Sumomo, my MacBook, developed a nasty, and spectacular, screen flicker overnight, and is now in the shop for repair. The old PowerBook I’m using now doesn’t have space for the dev tools, and I’m limping along with webmail.

For kicks I recorded a video – notice that it’s fine when the mouse is on the right, and is really messed up when it reaches the left edge. Just a download link, I didn’t take the time to figure out the embedding tags:

Screen flicker video

Vacation!

I’m leaving this morning for a 2 week vacation. I will have some internet access, but don’t expect software updates during this time. Maybe some blogging.