Overhead! overhead

The next tuma mingw should be a big one, really... a bloated one! thanks to the fairly long period after 0.6x the last release, it's now really turned to a distro of console based apps inside ConEmu box. I got miktex and whatever tex (asymptote, dblatex, jade, etc) integrated, along with dozens of additional tools. But I have big problem: clean-up

The cleanup turn out really overkill, I have done it almost every weekend since the end of december and still not finished yet. The total size expectedly grow almost exponentially. The number of apps? sheesh I've lost count of it, one thing for sure all of them are OSS and not even freeware can be included (maybe one grey area exception).

My msys folder has been accumulated to the level that executable lookup (those in PATH environment) is slowed down to a noticeable 1 second. But then wasn't it is the same condition for a fully installed cygwin too? dunno but it's really annoying.

I think it needs renaming too, something like Crossblaw: Console oRiented OSS between Linux and Windows. Afterall it's not about my gcc build anymore... Now now the name get bloated too lol

I hope it could benefit many Windows users (especially newbie) who want to taste the best that generic Linux has offered, powerful loads of console apps. Because I know that the GUI part of Linux is still no match for the undead XP. Vice versa of course.

Final problem: How I supposed to upload this monster (if it ever done)? too bad I'm living in a country with medieval internet infrastructure.

Gotta sleep now

Wis rak iso maneh, mbobol indosatm2

Awet 26? Desember kae "bolonge" indosatm2 kethoke wis ditembel :) mbiyen (wis rong taun luwih) aku iso entuk akun broadband CDMA, IP publik (enak nggo P2P), lan quota unlimited gratis tjuk, lumayan tho cuma modal kertu perdana limang ewu thok iso ngenet taunan.

Jane aku jek ngarep-arep yen ki mung sementara, kan iso uga ono sing didandani apane ngono. Yo wis lah matur suwun kaliyan indosat aku wis pikantuk ilmu kathah saking internet. Donlod'ane wis tekan 200 DVD! Suwun sanget!

Saiki wis bener2 1 RUIM = 1 akun tenan. hehe, yen nyoba mbobol akun pascabayar bakal ntuk error 718 (biasane 691).

Indosat2 bolong koyo ngene kok kudu ngenteni telung taun (luwih ya'e) lagi diprenahke! network admine mangan gaji buta kwi, ha ha.

Ki aku lagi jajal smartfren, kethoke unlimited sing paling murah yo? namung sakdurunge, meh jajal nembak superwifi lokal ah.

Irssi for MSYS

Previously I tried to port finch which failed and have been looking at centerim too which nowhere easier. Now I'm back to focus on just the IRC part and let pidgin do YM task, the choice is clear: Irssi it also the most promising one to port than the two before. Irssi however is dull without perl just like all irc client supposed to be but adding perl would be too big, too many files.

I decide go with Msys setup which should be straightforward and it is, except how the plugins works. There is no libirrsi.dll or such thing so how it could load dll? note that the plugins isn't loadable module, it does depends/linked to Irssi (which has to be irssi.exe itself in windows unless it linked to irssi wholly). I learned about C Perl embedding too from this which involved joining dynaloader.o file in final linking.

irssi + twirssi in action

As you can see with perl, Irssi could be used as twitter client too although the popular way is using bitlbee gateway, unfortunately bitlbee is not work well with windows and the port is unmaintained. Msys version of Irssi has its quirks too, the obvious one is due to msys' limitation jabber plugin unlikely work but most important ones such as OTR and SILC may work. Because of limited nix functionality I'm stuck with DateTime::TimeZone perl module, which assume Msys as unix rather than Win32 for this particular issue, where perl should look up windows' registry to find local timezone thus modifying local.pm needed by aliasing 'msys' as 'Win32'. Also msys file permission is not entirely nix style which lead unexpected behavior.

BTW installing twirssi on vanilla msys-perl can be troublesome, there are dozens of modules from CPAN will be installed/updated which in the end still not completely satisfy its dependencies. Careful

irssi-0.8.15_msys.7z

A Peek at MyPaint on Windows...

Not exactly what I want to write, but I have skipped the whole month now. Last weekend I tried latest mypaint and things are out of my reach. I couldn't build it normally at all and quite lost in the scons scripts but nonetheless I managed to made it. Still http://gna.org/bugs/?19948 (I'd personally call this release blocker for Windows) is here to stay. I try read the commits which trigger this windows specific bug but it seems to be a part of larger internal changes in mypaint.

So guys it would be nice if someone step up and fix this annoying bug, your help is greatly appreciated!

mypaint

Sorry about the lame void in the shot (gosh that's XP still living?), I have made some nice technical sketches but when I hit F10 (resize to fir) all my drawing has lost in space. Current MyPaint get basic pseudo-vector ability which great for prototyping, symmetry mode and more supported colorspace. Actually there is several performance-related experimental features that can be enabled but I'm not getting there at the moment.

About the future of MyPaint well this is just an opinion, a speculation from experience. With MyPaint migrate to gtk-3 thus using pygi (and possibly python-3), It would be most tedious migration I've ever seen before for Windows platform, I meant where is PyGI now? Not even a release yet... and GTK-3? usable but not ready. Lets just hope Windows get some priority in the upstream sooner.

The dreaded question is how gtk-3 handle tablet this time? with gtk-2 there are many users complaining about their tablet which likely gdk<->wintab issue and since gtk is a gnome project (a dominant linux GUI), priority for other platform is somewhat lower than other cross-platform GUI. In the past decent releases has been fewer too. From interface point of view, last time I checked (gtk 3.4.4), it's already native themed but I can't made it work with mypaint since my experimental pygi build can't deal with gtkbuilder (maybe because I use 64bit off_t and time_t which is ABI breaking?). Anyway it still a bit early for pygi in windows...

This build here is a manual build and unlikely I will maintain that build environment anymore.

MyPaint_011212git.7z

Test and report bugs! your reports are very valuable in the release process, I believe the lag bug is workaround-able.

Visual BASIC 6 GPL?

Long time ago I've heard  (from digg/slashdot, I forgot which)  a plan to release VB6 as open source which later denied by MS staff. But now I found this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvb6

It is a real full GUI VB6 (by microsoft) with "about" dialog still showing serial number (lol) but mention new license under GPL-3 (hmm.. they usually using their own Public License). Suspicious sources also available (more like a decompilation though) and as expected it's 32 bit only, not that there is a free 64bit compiler anyway.

The installer also bundling unregistered version of Bytessence InstallMaker and famous Angus' Resource Hacker.

The project already generate thousands download/week since 10/10/2012

Curious?

finch in windows (failed)

This weekend I want a little chat client like irrsi but want YM support (quite common here) too. Finch (part of pidgin) seems fit to this. I got libpurple compiled and appear to work. Finch however is a bit unix (even its glib stuff), so i try to strip most that hurdle compiling and able to get it linked (static build mingw).

Problem is somehow pressing two sequence keystrokes will register as exit signal or sort of, making it impossible to even configure a pidgin account.

here is what it looks like:

version 2.10.6 in CMD fitted window

and the failed build
finch.exe 1.43MB

meh, what am i doing posting a failed attempt :-(

NTFSLink 64bit version

NTFSLink has been around for quite long time, but no 64bit binary found (at least by me), sometime I had to use 64bit windows which I use Link Shell Extension as NTFSLink replacement. But I prefer much NTFSLink for its simplistic (smart) context menu and how it show the origin of a junction.

ntfslink64.7z source is from https://github.com/miracle2k/ntfslink

To install use the included ntfslink.inf (right click, install), I wrote that cause I'm too lazy to make an installer, sorry.

Notes:
- NTFSLink do not support symlink (native in Vista/7 or later), so using XP64 is more preferable (which also my case)
- This is not compiled by me but a friend (here it's far easier to find pascal/delphi programmer than C/C++, lol), I've asked why was the dll size was too big and explained that the old version may be compiled with much older borland.

POV Ray 3.7rc3 Console Edition

Sometime at work, colleague start discussing about the new renderman (v17) and the would it be fit for architectural pipeline musing, it's been a while since I tested PRMan (pirated edition of course :), that time I already accustomed with V-Ray's "one click render" way and thus feeling upset with what PRMan produce by default (speed and quality).

It's only when I found pov-ray (again not used in architectural) that I finally realized the power behind both renderers, their scene description language: RI and RSL for Renderman and SDL for POV-Ray. Sure they are two different thing just about how both are different too. But comparing any of the two with the rest (older V-Ray, KT, LuxRender, Yafaray, etc) is even bigger mistake and obviously unfair. But people usually only care the result and leaving the "how" question subjective to user's skill.

Revisiting povray site is a little worrying, I think it was 2008 the first time povray support multi-threading (v3.7) and yet final version still not arrived. However considering their novel idea behind povray it maybe not as easy to accomplish than other renderers (which usually already multi-core aware since inception). I mean imagine how those procedural models, CSGs and all different exotic primitives blend in the threads? they aren't plain meshes, even Maya use post rendering for PFX.

So there I go try dig more about SDL (still personally not much interested) using Scite which has pov api/syntax support and try to find non interactive way to do batch rendering, yeah using python I could do stealth subprocess, but I want a pure one :). If I'm not mistaken povray for linux is a console app, so I tried to build that one from its unix source (which somehow more updated than windows' source) but failed when using mingw... continuing with VS2008 express way and surprisingly there is a project called "console" which turned out the one I'm looking for.

povconsole32.exe

notes:
- exr support is disabled, I can build static openexr 1.7.1 with VS (need a little change) and completing its tests but somehow with povray, it crashed during writing.
- this is just the renderer, standard libraries (includes) files still needed (point that in POVINC environment) but no installation required (portable), no registry nor settings files.

Ultimate++ Library Edition

This weekend I'm evaluating several GUI Libraries which have very liberal license such as new BSD or MIT. and found only IUP which is C based. There are some GUI libraries come as part of framework, they use different configuration and often have their own build tool: VCF and U++. Both C++ based and was meant to be work together with the sources instead of available in usual binary distribution such as GTK, considering their license which developer given total freedom to modify the library itself. I tried to package it into distribution friendly way. Let's try U++!

Overall from its examples U++ was intended to compete with Qt or Wx though with current situation Qt is the most advanced. U++ use BLITZ for a fast compilation (SCU), sort of what GHC did which a bit confusing to packaged as they're combined objects. Binary size is reasonably small at minimal setup but as usual mingw build is always significantly larger than VS especially with C++.

U++ has a quirk to make it available as package, while we can choose not using BLITZ and rebuild all *.a (except theIDE related) to monolithic archive there is an exception: files *.icpp which determined and called by "uses" in .upp file that compiled and appended during linking process. This create problem for generic packaging as they are conditional requirement. The (ignorant) easy workaround is to link the whole *.icpp objects (can be done in pkg-config's libs option too). This however create up to 700KB larger binary as some objects aren't actually needed but will works with generic compilation way.

Here is binary as library for both 32bit and 64bit
http://osspack32.googlecode.com/files/upp4193_32_64.7z
http://osspack32.googlecode.com/files/upp4193_mingw32.7z (only for MinGW32 dwarf2)

note: it's MinGW-W64 SJLJ based and if using with vanilla G++ you'll need to append -lpthread during linking and naturally TheIDE still needed for GUI craft. When using postgres/ssl plugin then openssl and postgres client library required. 

Currently I had side project related to postgres and need BSD licensed GUI with built-in support, but after some trials I found myself lost... this weird(unique) C++ approach is too high for me to boot :-(

Windows backward evolution tree

I was born mid '80 that time nature is my playground, mud on hand, dirt all over shirt, everything is fun. I did got my first PC experience, I think that time I use DOS 3.x playing digger, pango and once in a while have a dig at GW-BASIC making  pictures with CAD-like commands. Isn't DOS a simple experience? it was, although I had to type at least I don't (need to) care about the OS itself. That time when real-world application starved for hardware revolution, it wait until established commodity become sufficiently capable. Developer wrote PC software the way apps for embedded devices written nowadays, because there just no room for bloatness.

I'd consider a decade ago as the time when hardware being on par with software need, complex apps such as 3D become more accessible by PC. Now put that "PC" aside (unlike what MS said in their current campaign), what is a PC? Sorry if I had to call a phone a PC that's just rude. But tablets is the future is it? agreed in some way. The form factor revolution is at least remain in linear line except when the two different product blend in. Maybe PC will become the next mainframe, you know not dead but become niche. Say you won't play the next GTA on tablet anytime soon (using 3d glasses) or doing NLE, 3D modeling on it too. Still users probably could do more things on their tablet sooner (thanks to internet and Windows 8).

Following the hardware (CPU) revolution there is a period when it was no longer speed (MHz) race instead it was an energy-efficient race lately, multi-core race previously. I think the desktop market hasn't shrinking that much, it's just that the internet is so fascinating that it demand a simplistic way to be reached by more non-technical people, a hand-held device. For phone goes to tablet is a revolution but from PC into phone? Are you kidding me? I even call netbook as too restricted computer. When both worlds meet together my a** But hold on, it is still indeed a revolution from majority people point of view! jeez I just realized how minority I am. Soon (if MS succeed) people who used to *work* with computer but not a programmer/developer with also become a minority too ;-)

From a PC user to adopt tablet form-factor device I'd say:
- damn that little dinky screen rape my eyes
- the OSD keyboard is so unreal!
at least...

So what if OS for phone/tablet run on PC? I'd say "A crippled UI for an uncrippled sane device"

Remember that Metro is what an UI would be should developer face device limitation such size constrains, physical peripheral inaccessibility and non-technical minded person. OK the latter is where the money come from so there you go. But that's just interface, the core itself is still the real thing right?

Lets see, hey even OSX is still a desktop OS (although they did incorporate several iOS feature into OSX)! so only MS is gambling their long term future this time? Not really, they have Windows 7 in reserve and is in very good shape for prolonged desktop domination if Windows 8 failed but if they really can bridge and then attract the big mass of non-technical audience into the "new PC" world then big kudos for MS. I do believe that Windows (or whatever OS) should have same interface in all devices. I mean, you know the one we see in the movies, when people talk to PC, a non physical screen, a genius or at lest self-learning OS. Therefor unless PC play catch up with our intelligence and intuition, there will always a way/device which users can properly express/interrupt/assert to achieve what intended to be.

Back to Windows 8, it's not just UI, there is WinRT that chained to AppStore policy. How cool was that? how they seems try to disconnect Win32 API and how this affect open source world is to be revealed by the end of 2012. When MS had enough time for evaluating users input. Damn I must eat my own word for saying I will skip Vista and 7 altogether to jump in 8, yet this is what I will get? Time to visit Linux to see if they finally "become" XP.

Now I wonder what's the "actual" future after tablet era then?  back to "PC"? Unlikely
So I ask my sister whom most used device is tablet. What she get most from it (Android). She said, the internet and games, see it's not a revolution at all. Keep in mind that she had never interested in games nor internet (via PC) before buying an Android. So the devices itself is a magnet! it did bridge more people in reachable way just the way I'm interested in DOS games and eventually learn how to "magically" draw pictures via keyboard (not even mouse exists). MS is doing milk money for what they have recognized as and redefine an approachable "PC" definition for the fresh market. For users all of these is just the matter of POV.