I happened across this classic advertisement from 1984 for the Apple Mac. Now I understand why there are Mac zealots. And there is no denying that Apple knew how to do marketting.

I switched moria.org.uk to use the lighttpd web server at the weekend. Partly so I would have more free memory on my VPS account, but mostly because 'engineers love to change things' :-).

One significant little feature was missing though — an external log splitter like cronolog was only supported for the access log. Personally, I find using something like this easier than log rotation, as it makes it easier to find the logs for a given day; and clearly if you want it for one log, it makes sense to use it for both. So here is a patch.

I had some content hosted on my ISPs webspace, and when it came to move it off, I hit a slight problem: I do not like breaking links, but as Demon run thttpd, with no configuration access for us users, there was no way to redirect a whole directory tree. So I have written a script to create an entire tree of HTML pages with meta-refresh tags redirecting to a new site. Not an elegant solution, but it gets the job done.

Kye version 0.4.0 is now available. This version is mostly a major overhaul of the GUI code, tidying up the menus and dialogs (and moving toward having it working on Windows). I also fixed a bug in the installation, which caused the editor not to work right when installed.

I have switched to using .tar.gz files to store the tile sets: the zipfile module had strange problems on Windows, and using .tar.gz makes them much smaller. I have changed over the alternative image sets on the download page to the new format, so if you downloaded them before then you will have to get them again.

The other significant change is that this version needs gtk 2.6 and pygtk2.4 or better, due to the GUI code updates. Most of the distributions have these now, so I doubt that that is a problem for many people.

Note to self: make sure all equipment in the machine room at work is above floor level. One of the hazards of basement machine rooms…

I was having some problems compiling gtk20 on a FreeBSD 4 box at work today. Having finally sorted it, this note is for Google to find so the next person doesn't have to debug it all over again.

The problem was the configure script failing to detect pango. There was a misleading error message gnome-config not found, which had me chasing three year old Google hits for an hour, until figuring out that gnome-config is only for Gnome version 1. pkg-config falls back to it to keep compatibility.

The library it fails to find is in fact libpangocairo — specifically, this library didn't get built, and so there is no pangocairo.pc for pkg-config to find. cairo was built, so pango must have missed it. It turned out that the test for cairo had failed, because cairo needs threads, but cairo.pc doesn't list libc_r (FreeBSD 4's threading library) as a dependency (probably because I am the only person daft enough to compile something as modern as cairo on such an old system).

So, recompile cairo; interrupt the build and edit cairo.pc, adding -lc_r to the libs; finish the compile, make deinstall reinstall, and rebuild from pango onwards. Solved.

Most of the visible changes with this release are to the level editor. The editor can now add and delete levels from a level set, and set the level names and hints. Also the editor now does all the wall rounding automatically. Plus there are major improvements to the user interface: the dialogs have improved, and the editor does not let you exit without saving. The user interface improvements and cleanups extend to the game itself too, but are mostly behind the scenes there. See the python Kye page.

While testing the editor, I have created another set of levels. I have added SYSTEM.kye to my Kye levels page. Enjoy!

I have just finished moving everything over to a new VPS provider. It is much more civilised to be on Debian and away from Red Hat. Apart from it being Red Hat, Westhost's VPS was never quite to my taste — it was designed for people to add software via their interface, and not very convenient for doing things yourself. I did get a prompt response the only time I needed their tech support, though.

The DNS flipped over at about midnight last night; performance so far seems good:

I have finally got around to finishing the level editor for Kye. It is still rather rough around the edges, but it is usable — much better than using a text editor, anyway. That is the only major change in 0.2.0, which is now available.

I just discovered ubp-build.py today. Given a package name, it downloads the source package, installs all the build dependencies, and compiles a version of the package for your version of Ubuntu. So you can set your deb-src line to dapper, and get Firefox 1.5 compiled and installed for breezy within half an hour. From Ubuntu Forums.