blog.s11n.net

Lib manual ported to OpenDocument :)

As proof that the internet works…

Pete Harlow happened to read a previous blog entry and took on the task of porting the lib manual to OpenDocument format. His results are exactly what i was hoping for. Many, many thanks to you, Pete!

The new doc will be released along with 1.2.1 (no release timeline yet).

:)

sqlite3 and s11nlite

Last week i finally got around to taking a close look at a little piece of software called sqlite (more specifically, sqlite3). After tinkering around for a few hours we now have an s11nlite add-on which uses sqlite databases as the backend.

Of course, there’s a caveat or two:

• Since it is database-oriented, the stream-based load()/save() functions do not (cannot) use sqlite functionality. The stream-oriented API operates just as in the default s11nlite API.
• Because of the way s11n’s dynamic dispatching via magic cookies works, we cannot currently auto-dispatch load() requests to an sqlite handler. Because of this, the handler was created as an s11nlite add-on instead of as a Serializer subclass.

To make s11nlite aware of the support is trivial:

::s11n::io::sqlite3::s11nlite_api liteapi;
s11nlite::instance( &liteapi );


And then we use s11nlite’s API as normal, with the minor caveat that we need to pay attention to whether we’re using stream- or string-based load() and save() calls.

i don’t currently plan to add this support to the s11n core distribution, but will make it available as an add-on package.

Platform-generic source tree as of 1.2

Inspired by Aaron Dalton, who reported getting s11n built on a BSD box [after a couple minor hacks to the build tools :/]…

Tonight i put together with a script to generate a source tree which “should” be buildable on any platform with a recent C++ compiler. The intention is to provide a source tree which might not be buildable right out of the box, but only for lack of a build environment. It should be buildable with minimal work by using your preferred build environment (MSVC, Makefiles, Autotools, or whatever). The provided Makefile only builds object files, no libraries or anything platform-specific like that.

The main advantages of these “pre-generated” source trees are that files which are:

• Files normally generated by the build process are provided pre-generated.
• The header-file/symlink trickery which goes on in the standard tree doesn’t happen here.
• To simplify life for projects wanting to fork s11n directly into their project trees.

The trade-off is, though, that some features which might be possible on your platform (loading DLLs) are disabled by default, and adding them requires manual changes to the Makefile and *_config.hpp.

Starting with the release of 1.2.0, these “bare” trees will start shipping alongside with the standard releases.

Help wanted: porting s11n docs to OpenDocument

Since s11n’s earliest days, the documentation has been written using my favourite documentation tool, Lyx. Lyx is a powerful tool based upon the TeX document language, and has proven its worth to me again and again over the years. As libs11n has settled down into a stable, mature library, however, i would like the documentation to be editable by a wider audience than Lyx allows for.

The obvious choice would be OpenDocument Text format (ODT), a recently standardized format supported by OpenOffice, StarOffice, and KOffice. Despite Microsoft’s firm statements that it will not support ODT in their upcoming Office 2007 products, i firmly believe that market pressures will eventually force them to end up supporting it (read “eventually” as “by the time Office 2007 officially hits the shelves”).

The problem in porting the documentation is not the amount of text (which is not small - currently just over 120 pages), but in a) the section numbering and b) intra-document cross-reference links. The problems in those are more problems of ignorance than of logistics: i simply have little clue how to do them in OpenOffice (my word processor of choice, behind Lyx). My initial attempts at creating OO documents numbered in ways that i like them have turned out to be exercises in pain. That is, the UIs for doing this in editors like OpenOffice and MS Office are confusing and literally painful to use. Lyx, on the other hand, takes care of this type of stuff automatically (it sells itself as a “What You See Is What You Mean” editor, as opposed to WYSIWIG, and that is indeed what i love about it). You can see what i mean by “painful” in this OpenDocument file, where i attempted to get started on porting the manual to ODT.

So… if anyone out there would like to help contribute to libs11n in a non-programming manner, this particular task is at the top of the list.

:)

Why not Windows?

i’m not the traditional Microsoft-hater: i am not at all anti-Microsoft. However, i honestly do find Windows painful to use because it’s so dumbed-down, making life for a power-user far more difficult than it needs to be. Aside from that, i can’t afford to buy all the software needed to make Windows usable (which it is not, out of the box) and refuse, on grounds of principal, to use an operating system composed of 80% cracked versions of commercial software (which is the alternative to buying MS Office, MS Dev Studio, decent CD burning software, etc.).

So… i use Open Source operating systems whenever possible, primarily Suse’s distribution of [GNU/]Linux.

1.1.3 and Win32

So far we have no Win32 port of libs11n 1.1.3. What we need is… A WINDOWS USER TO DO IT. i don’t own a copy of Windows, refuse to pay lots of money for their development tools, and refuse to use illegal copies to publish Win32 ports of my software.

So… if you’re a Windows user and an s11n user, and willing to commit to 1-2 hours of work, i would be happy to walk you through the necessary steps of porting. Alternately, provide the s11n.net project with legal copies of the required tools (e.g., Windows XP, MS Dev Studio 7.1+, and a hard drive to put them on), and i will personally commit to the port.

Hello (again), world.

Trying out a different blog software:
wordpress. This one allows arbitrary users
to sign up, so i don’t have to manage the accounts. Have at it…