PHP 5.1.0 Released

I know I’m late but anyway, PHP 5.1.0 has been released. The major new features include timezone support (I like it), PDO enabled by default, speed increases and other updates.
Overall this is a great release. I’ve been using it for MachCMS 1.1 development. Too bad MCMS is not yet ready for release as well.

Also ACal 3.0 svn source has support for PHP 5.1’s new timezone support.

Xiph QuickTime Components

As of now, Arek has announced “Xiph.org: QuickTime Components.”

I’ve been using the component for some time now. It works although it’s slower than native formats and some features such as streaming are not yet supported. It will be great once FLAC is supported in the component.

So check it out, it’s been a long time coming!

FGFS 0.9.9 for Mac Out

I said I’d post it here and so I am. FlightGear 0.9.9 for Mac OS X (10.4 or later) has been released to the outside world.
As already posted to MacUpdate, Freshmeat, and soon Apple downloads, changes since 0.9.8 include universal binary, terrasync, and advanced options. Plus much more in the actual flight simulator.

Work continues….

My Base on Google Base

The Google Base entered Beta a short while ago. And so to test it out I posted my locally famous cookie recipe.
Overall I believe Google Base leaves something to be desired. It’s an interesting concept but I doubt it will get further than Google Talk.

On the other hand my laptop’s screen seems to be dead and the sound card has decided to stop working correctly too.
Anybody want to send me a new one?

FlightGear 0.9.9 Released

The source for FlightGear 0.9.9 has been released. A slackware package is available and the Mac OS X package will be available tomorrow if everything goes well. If not it could be awhile because of some Mac bugs.

Watch this blog for updates on when the Mac release is out.

New Windows Experience

The last time I actually really used the Windows OS was a couple of years ago with Windows 98se.

Today I installed Windows XP after I couldn’t find a Linux disto that would fully work with my Crystal 4237B sound card.
The sound card works fine but here’s what I can’t understand. My CardBus network card worked out of the box (or plug-n-play) when using Linux but Windows XP SP2 fails to recognize a network card with drivers available since 2001!

If I had that kind of experience with Apple’s OSX they wouldn’t have my support for long. It’s amazing how much Microsoft can get away with and still be a market leader.

Sourceforge.net get’s a New Look

Check it out. All I can say is that it looks, fresh.

[Update] Looks like they switched back. Oh well.
[Update 2] Since Yesterday evening they once again turned on the new look for good this time.

FlightGear 0.9.9 on the Horizon

I’ve been rather busy lately with trying to get FlightGear on OSX working well before the final is released. A preview is now available from the project.

Major bugs right now include.

• Splash screen don’t work on startup.
• Aircraft that define their own spash screen crash fgfs.
• Segmentation fault when launched from command line.

Meanwhile everything is ported to universal binary. The entire package size is way smaller. It’s much more stable. But these are the major features I plan to add soon once the major bugs are fixed:

• Aircraft/scenery installer.
• Advanced panel you can use to pass custom flags.
• Atlas extension.

Note the Atlas is last on the list now. While it is important FlightGear is the most important. And so it must be taken in perspective. Release is coming near and it’s not ready. Some stuff has to be cut in order to have a stable release.

MacFlightGear Going Universal

With Intel Mac’s coming soon–maybe even in January already, I will do my best to have a universal binary of FlightGear ready before mid-December. It’s not a lot of work but because I have to use lipo and some makefile stuff needs to be converted to Xcode, it might take a little while.

When it’s done I’ll make a test binary available.

MySQL or SQLite?

MachCMS now supports SQLite (default for php5) and MySQL (default for php4). After doing to MySQL implementation I found out a few things.

1. I really don’t like MySQL.
2. I don’t really like MySQL.
3. MySQL really doesn’t like me.

Now it might be fine for those database fanatics but I like pure simple and flexible data storage which is exactly what SQLite provides.

What brought this on? Well I really don’t like the fact that you have to specify the length of varchar in MySQL. And then in some versions it’s actually a byte value. Not my idea of flexible storage.

Other than that, I am currently working on adding security features to MachCMS before do testing and making a PHP4 version.

MachCMS 1.1 – Search Implemented

I have implemented a search API into MachCMS.

There’s a crawl script which you can run in the background. It updates the index every 10 minutes by default although you can change that by passing an option to it.

The index is stored in the database. It contains all the words contained in pages, and time the pages were last updated, and more.

When you search it looks for matches in each page and ranks the pages by how many times the searched string was found in the page.

I did not implement caching because there was no need for it.
And I said when you saved virtual pages the index would be updated at the same time as well but I have not implemented that yet. That will only take a minute though.

Now I will be working on finishing plugins support and working some more on the editor before getting ready for release which includes adding mysql support so it can run with php4.

By the way Firefox 1.5RC1 has been out for awhile.

SourceForge.net: Subversion service

SourceForge.net: Detail: 1341005 – Master RFE: Subversion service

Starting now they are planning deployment. Finally me thinks. (Excuse my grammer please.)