Big World Map template for free

I made big Cahill-Keyes projection template map here:
https://archive.org/details/bmng_1px2500m_worldmap (10MB, 16000x6277 RGBA webp)
rev1 https://archive.org/details/bmng-ck-16k-1px2700m (15MB, 16000x7524 RGBA webp / RGB jpg)
rev2 https://archive.org/details/megamap (58MB Megamap, 68MB Wegamap Jpeg only, PNG is too big)

It may not be suitable for printing at all considering how dark it is, though the original BMNG was even darker but hey thats how our earth looks like. It is intended to be the biggest relatively proportional (globe-like) map viewable by 32-bit image viewer on computer :) and you can start ask yourself where is ukraine?

Anyone could use it as background and start laid textual information over it, and then export it to pdf. The free MS expression design can do that nicely, but the image need to be converted to png first.

Big thanks to https://github.com/jkunimune15/Map-Projections for providing CK map generator! back then it was tedious process to generate one using perl script.

EDIT:

First revision released:
- typo of scale, 21600/16000 * 2000 = 2700 duh
- add antarctica bedrock map at 0m (sea level) in grey shade
- make population shade more visible
- fix bathy error due to blending mode
- add land attachment for Antarctica Greenland, Russia, Iceland, Solomon and Kerguelen per keyes' megamap spec but not for closely separated land

Second revision released:
- target 1px=1000000 hence "mega"-map now, sadly it getting harder to open the file on 32-bit Windows.
- redo relief bump and shadow with more exaggerated downsampled 15-arcsecond SRTM dataset
- use SEDAC 2020 30 arc-second dataset for population density
- added river "hint" in glowing green
- redo more accurate sealevel bedrock map of antarctica (it may not bigger than australia)

Tools used:
gdal, paintdotnet (and many of plugins), expression design and vips.

Resuming XPitory

In the past, I made promise about blogging more but deliver none. This time, I'm deliver some before blog it...

20 years after XP released, it still my main windows OS and without a doubt the greatest 32-bit OS of all time.

Now with everyone start ignoring its existence, it's a good time to officially call XP the center of 32-bit retrocomputing.
A time when 2GB ought to be enough memory for anything, a time when entire OS fits in a CD and a time when people care much about making lean and mean software.

Xpitory used to be a place where I put few port for XP years ago. Now I have new goal, this would host lots of opensource software for XP. It will start by providing development toolchain first.

The plan goes like this:

1) Toolchain (compiler, VCS, make-tools)
-- Clang/LLVM 10 + GCC 10 (done, GCC still uder testing)
-- Git 2.34.1/SVN 1.14.1 (done)
-- cmake 3.20, ninja 1.9, msbuild ??, meson ?? (cmake and ninja: done, newer meson need python 3.5: done, newer msbuild need mono 6.12: not started)

2) Command-line software. Nowadays the most powerful software to tackle modern task usually available from CMD box, they are more portable and easier to port to XP.
-- FFMPEG
-- VIPS + IM
-- more

3) GUI Software. This is the harder one, framework like Qt, GTK and WX are increasingly getting away from XP, especially when they put effort on HiDPI, touch awareness and fixes for Windows 10. Other such as the lame Electron should be ignored.
There has been significant growth on Qt5-based software, so putting a working Qt 5.15 on XP is priority. QtWebEngine dependency will be avoided while QtWebkit still possible. Few software still use Qt4, putting on version 4.8.7 with all unofficial fixes and add webp support to it would be nice.
GTK 3.x will be avoided. it's slow and it is the one that technically getting farthermost away from Windows. Focus will be on porting GTK2 software instead.
WxWidgets supposedly the most windows friendly, but I'm not familiar.. will see about it.
MFC: should be no problem, as long as < VS2019 16.8
FPC/Delphi: FPC still support XP, Delphi software known to use lots of delay-load dll to check compatibility.

SWFDec Windows

Not to be confused with SWFDec = SWF Decompiler, this one is decoder http://swfdec.freedesktop.org. And it is not that I interested in the player itself (Flash will soon die) but rather the fact that it use cairo canvas so it can export its rendered scene to SVG/PDF easily.

Swfdec itself need little patch for Windows because of its local file URI mangling. This tool is the inverse of svg2swf and based on existing swfdec-thumbnailer (swfdec-gnome). It still ongoing, I want to make it more like rsvg-convert plus ability to set particular timeline to snap but at moment it just convert flash movie up to version 7 (version 8 or 9 may crashed) into pdf, ps, png or svg. The final version would be included in the Converter homepage here.

Command: swfdec-convert [-s minimum width/height] input output
Download: swfdec-convert.exe 1.6 Mb

Windows version of djvudigital

Long time no write.. didn't meant I'm not around. This post is yet another prove that I'm a faithful Windows user :-). Admittedly I have using Windows 8.1 for months now, and damn what a buggy explorer!

You probably heard about djvu format about 5 years ago. But it kinda failed to gain momentum against the venerable PDF. Despite its rather simple (or rather "sufficient") feature, it meant to be less malice format than PDF.

Djvudigital has been around with no cmd batch port... its Ghostscript driver also a bit controversial (for linux zealot). But in this windows world anything is good as long as it apparently works. duh

This batch of djvudigital is converted into exe for convenience and will act just like batch file (aka it *need* cmd) see "BAT to EXE" page for info. It not complete port of bash version but parameters is the same as linux one, note:  it doesn't do sanity check of the Ghostscript executable whether it support djvu or not.

Requirements:
- Ghostscript with djvusep device
- Csepdjvu (part of djvulibre)
- and off course working CMD
- optionally gzip or 7za/7z

Installation:
Put all executables above in the same directory as djvudigital, you may put it in your PATH environment so you can called it anywhere. Type djvudigital --help for manual

Download:
djvudigital.exe 83 Kb

I've been using/abusing online-convert.com for a while for on-the-fly 'downversion' stuff from the internet, but no djvu there.

The Moluccas 0.8

Version 0.8 is here. I now called it Moluccas (not to be confused as some kind of mollusca).  It can be grabbed at https://sourceforge.net/projects/tumagcc/files/0.8/

The installer is M08.exe and you can pick up which 7z packages to install (categorized) but at least "base" is mandatory. Put all in the same folder and you're ready to install. There is brief overview of what's inside in each package at the link above. It still lack of documentation though only man included.

Enjoy my biggest OSS Collection with build environment!
All suggestions are welcome.

Main changelog:

- Fixes many typos and silly mistakes when tested in Windows 7
- All executable flagged with LAA
- Simplified startup: run conemu to start (old mode console, no longer supported though possible)
- Isolation: this version use ReactOS's cmd completely so it can be run independently of Windows' cmd.
- Installation speedup: Installer will use all cores (1 core/package)
- Explorer integration is disabled to provide zero host modification during startup (can be enabled by invoke molumenu). But many gui apps still write registry entries especially MFC based one.
- Fix integration with MSVS 2010 or (later?)
- Lots of manual tweaking in GUI apps to make it tight and blend in
- Small fixes in mingw headers and xtraposix libraries

A Simple BAT to EXE Wrapper

I'm looking for a straightforward way to execute bat file inside bash and vice versa (execute shellscript in cmd box). At first I thinking about an encrypter that store content of batch file as string that later feed into shell invocation. But that's appear to be daunting to me right now :-D

I look around sourceforge and codeplex for existing solution, as expected there are several project based on 7z sfx but all of them (sorry if I missed) popped up new cmd window and can't work when called from PATH environment (aka different Curernt Directory).

So I decide to take 7zip SFX source code and apply some patches:

- To have 3 predefined environment variables replacement at RunProgram:
   %%T=temp directory where bat file extracted (supplied by oficial 7zip)
   %%S=path where sfx module located that is the exe file (similar to 7zsfxmod)
   %%W=path of current directory where sfx called (this is what I need)
- Assign CreateProcess's ApplicationName as COMSPEC environment
- Disabling progress bar, thus no need to set Progress="no"
- Redirect IO and prevent popped up windows as described in SO question here
- Finally, Change the sfx's submodule from gui to console using editbin or postw32 (of freepascal)

And it works :) (for my case)

Here you go:
http://osspack32.googlecode.com/files/7zSDcon.sfx

the patched main.cpp of SFXsetup (CPP) and the example converted bat (my old app Cabit, a Cabinet archiver):
http://osspack32.googlecode.com/files/cabit.exe
it use config file:

;!@Install@!UTF-8!
RunProgram="/c cd /d %%W && %%T\\cabit.bat "
;!@InstallEnd@!

Meaning after extraction run cabit.bat under the corrected working directory. Also note the extra space after the bat filename is important otherwise argument will not passed.
Then as usual do copy /b  7zSDcon.sfx+config.7z+cabit.7z cabit.exe

Unfortunately Igor Pavlov haven't publish the source code of his super small sfx (only 27kb) otherwise it would be neater.

I might gonna make sfxmaker or sort of with PE resource/icon insertion ability. Should be easy using wrc and linkres2exe tools.

CabIt : A Re-Interface of Makecab and Expand

Recently during updating my unattended Windows XP CD, I create a small utility (eek written in batch) called CabIt. That time I try to achieved a much compressed DRIVER.CAB for the CD and find out that cabtool (an opensource utility) didn't satisfied me.

Later I'm puzzling with makecab.exe a builtin tool in Windows to create Cabinet file. No luck.. it always generate *.??_ file :(  only after googling a while I found Cabinet SDK from M$ that dated way back in 1997!

But guess what I found? Cabinet format indeed support "solid archiving" at that time! "Solid" which is a (marketing) term that popularized by WinRAR and followed by 7Zip is what M$ called (an ambiguous term) "folder" to explain the same functionality (Compressing a set of files as a union). Also I found out detailed info how to make a DDF file that needed by makecab.exe to properly produce .cab file. So CabIt is born, basically as an automatic DDF generator.