From the Workroom

Waiting for Cheetah3D 5.0

Les — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:55:31 +0000

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been so busy for the last two years that I haven’t posted anything here.

Now I’m excited about the upcoming release of Cheetah3D 5.0 and I feel that I finally understand how to use version 4!

Cheetah3D 4.0 released

leslie — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:46:40 +0000

When I first saw this program I fell in love with it and began using it as much as I could. I still have the files for a cardboard, paint-stir-stick, and carpet-tube “Big Comfy Couch Mailbox” that I designed and put together for Sara when she was only two. The total material cost was $3.00 and the Cheetah3D software was $49.00.

Version 4 of this amazing Mac OS X 3D software adds powerful animation features like a joint based character animation system and morph targets.

read more | digg story

Building PRC-Tools for Mac OS X Tiger

Les — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 18:32:46 +0000

As part of my 2006 spring cleaning, I decided to upgrade icequake (my 1.2MHz G4 iBook) to OS X Tiger, but first I had to deal with one outstanding issue.

All of the PalmOS development work that I do uses PRC-Tools with Xcode 1.2 on MacOS Panther. I’d been reluctant to tinker with such a stable development environment, and hadn’t done any experiments to see whether it was possible to get the same tools working with Tiger. After one failed attempt at installing Greg Clayton and Zeno Crivelli’s discontinued PRC-Tools for MacOS X at http://www.zenonez.com/prctoolsx/index.html, I decided to continue using Panther on the iBook. Until today.

I’m tired of not being able to install useful new software on icequake because it requires the new features of Tiger, and there’s a bit of spare tinkering time just now so…

Following the directions found at the SourceForge PRC-Tools: GCC for Palm OS page, I created a prctools directory in my user directory, and downloaded the current release file prc-tools-2.3.tar.gz from prc-tools.sourceforge.net

I then used ftp to get the required GNU source tarballs from a site listed on the GNU FTP Mirror List.

ftp://anonymous@mirrors.kernel.org//gnu/gdb/gdb-5.3.tar.gz
ftp://anonymous@mirrors.kernel.org//gnu/gcc/gcc-3.3.1.tar.gz
ftp://anonymous@mirrors.kernel.org//gnu/gcc/gcc-2.95.3.tar.gz
ftp://anonymous@mirrors.kernel.org//gnu/binutils/binutils-2.14.tar.gz

The highest version of gcc which can be used to build these packages is 3.3 and Xcode 2.2.1 is set to use gcc 4.0.1 which will not work. Fortunately, gcc 3.3 is also provided with Xcode, as is a tool named gcc_select which sets the current compiler.
To make sure that the correct compiler would be used to build the toolset, I used the gcc_select tool as follows.

First, I checked for the available compilers:

iq:~ lrt$ gcc_select --list Available compiler versions: 3.3 3.3-fast 4.0

and then the current compiler setting:

iq:~ lrt$ gcc_select Current default compiler: gcc version 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5250)

The sudo gcc_select 4.0 command will be used to restore the default compiler setting later. I selected the 3.3 compiler before continuing.

iq:~/prctools lrt$ sudo gcc_select 3.3 Password: Default compiler has been set to: gcc version 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1819)

I then checked to make sure that the location of my PalmOS SDK was /opt/palmdev/sdk-5/ as required in the standard configuration.

iq:~ lrt$ ls -l /opt/palmdev total 0 drwxr-xr-x 5 lrtitze admin 170 Aug 7 2005 Palm_One drwxrwxr-x 9 root admin 306 Aug 11 2005 sdk-5

Now the sources had to be unpacked, and the patches applied:

iq:~ lrt$ cd prctools iq:~/prctools lrt$ tar xfz prc-tools-2.3.tar.gz iq:~/prctools lrt$ tar xfz binutils-2.14.tar.gz iq:~/prctools lrt$ tar xfz gdb-5.3.tar.gz iq:~/prctools lrt$ tar xfz gcc-2.95.3.tar.gz iq:~/prctools lrt$ tar xfz gcc-3.3.1.tar.gz iq:~/prctools lrt$ cat prc-tools-2.3/*.palmos.diff | patch -p0 patching file binutils-2.14/ChangeLogs.palmos patching file binutils-2.14/Makefile.in patching file binutils-2.14/bfd/Makefile.am snip... patching file gdb-5.3/gdb/remote-palmos.c patching file gdb-5.3/gdb/stack.c patching file gdb-5.3/gdb/symfile.c patching file gdb-5.3/libiberty/fnmatch.c

Finally, some symlinks were required to make the GNU packages available to the prc-tools configure script and the top-level Makefile so that building all the packages would be integrated into just one build:

iq:~/prctools lrt$ cd prc-tools-2.3 iq:~/prctools/prc-tools-2.3 lrt$ ln -s ../binutils-2.14 binutils iq:~/prctools/prc-tools-2.3 lrt$ ln -s ../gdb-5.3 gdb iq:~/prctools/prc-tools-2.3 lrt$ ln -s ../gcc-2.95.3 gcc295 iq:~/prctools/prc-tools-2.3 lrt$ ln -s ../gcc-3.3.1 gcc iq:~/prctools/prc-tools-2.3 lrt$ cd ..

Following the sourceforge recommendations, these packages were configured in a seperate directory from their source trees:

iq:~/prctools lrt$ mkdir builds iq:~/prctools lrt$ cd builds iq:~/prctools/builds lrt$ mkdir empty iq:~/prctools/builds lrt$ ../prc-tools-2.3/configure \ --target=m68k-palmos --enable-languages=c,c++ \ --with-headers=`pwd`/empty creating cache ./config.cache checking host system type... powerpc-apple-darwin8.5.0 checking target system type... m68k-unknown-palmos checking build system type... powerpc-apple-darwin8.5.0 checking for gcc... gcc checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works... yes snip... checking build system type... powerpc-apple-darwin8.5.0 creating ./config.status creating Makefile

To build and install the tools, I prepared myself for a lengthy break and set things in motion with:

iq:~/prctools/builds lrt$ sudo make

and finally:

iq:~/prctools/builds lrt$ sudo make install

With the basic toolset in place, all that remained was to download, unpack, configure, make, and install pilrc-3.2, the PalmOS “Pilot Resource Compiler” tool.

From the project pages of pilrc.sourceforge.net found at SourceForge.net: PilRC I downloaded the latest pilrc-3.2.tar.gz to the prctools directory and unpacked it.

iq:~ lrt$ cd ~/prctools iq:~/prctools lrt$ tar xfz pilrc-3.2.tar.gz

Based on its instructions, I configured it,

iq:~/prctools lrt$ cd pilrc-3.2 iq:~/prctools/pilrc-3.2 lrt$ unix/configure checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes snip... configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating Makefile config.status: executing depfiles commands

then (again prepared for a long watch):

iq:~/prctools/pilrc-3.2 lrt$ sudo make

and finally:

iq:~/prctools/pilrc-3.2 lrt$ sudo make install test -z "/usr/local/bin" || /bin/sh unix/mkinstalldirs "/usr/local/bin" /usr/bin/install -c 'pilrc' '/usr/local/bin/pilrc' test -z "/usr/local/share/pilrc" || /bin/sh unix/mkinstalldirs "/usr/local/share/pilrc" /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'ppmquant/palette-02.pbm' '/usr/local/share/pilrc/palette-02.pbm' /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'ppmquant/palette-04.pgm' '/usr/local/share/pilrc/palette-04.pgm' /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'ppmquant/palette-16.pgm' '/usr/local/share/pilrc/palette-16.pgm' /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 'ppmquant/palette-256.ppm' '/usr/local/share/pilrc/palette-256.ppm'

All of the required compilation was complete, so I switched back to gcc 4.0.1 while I was still in a state of mind to remember.

iq:~/prctools/pilrc-3.2 lrt$ cd ~/ iq:~ lrt$ sudo gcc_select 4.0 Default compiler has been set to: gcc version 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5250)

With the Palm SDK and the toolset installed in their default locations, it was simple to let PRC-Tools set up its own configuration so that it was ready to use.

iq:~ lrt$ sudo palmdev-prep Password: Checking SDKs in /opt/palmdev sdk-5 headers in 'include', libraries in 'lib'


When GCC is given no -palmos options, SDK '5' will be used by default

Writing SDK details to configuration files... ...done iq:~ lrt$

Now whenever I use an external-build Xcode project, I simply make sure that the makefile has:

PREFIX = /usr/local/bin/ CC = ${PREFIX}m68k-palmos-gcc PILRC = ${PREFIX}pilrc BUILDPRC = ${PREFIX}build-prc PRC2BIN = ${PREFIX}prc2bin

After an afternoon of tinkering and another few hours documenting the process so that you could follow it, I’m ready to update icequake.

Technorati Tags: MacOS, PRC-Tools, PalmOS

Smooth sailing (revisited)

Les — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:27:36 +0000

NOTE: This is a post from my original blog (September 20th, 2005) being transferred from MarsEdit via NetNewsWire.

Smooth sailing

Well, I decided to install MySQL from the MySQL development downloads page. With that in place, it became easier to set up the rest of my system.
This little laptop is finally running with a harmony consisting of:

Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther)
Xcode 1.2
PRC-Tools v.2.3
PilRC 3.2
MySQL 4.1.13
Apache 2.0.54
mod_fastcgi 2.4.2
mod_ruby 1.2.4
Ruby 1.8.2
Ruby Gems 0.8.11
rb-fcgi 0.8.6
Rails 1.8.2
Typo 2.5.5
PHP 5.0.5
phpMyAdmin 2.6.1
Joomla! 1.0

The final tricky step for me was the configuration script for PHP5 but I got it:

cd ~mysrc/php5

sudo ./configure -prefix=/opt/local/php5 \

''-with-config-file-path=/usr/local/php5/etc \

''-enable-calendar -with-iconv=/opt/local \

''-enable-exif -enable-ftp -enable-wddx \

''-with-zlib=/opt/local -with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \

''-with-libxml-dir=/opt/local -with-gettext=/opt/local \

''-with-libxml-dir=/opt/local -with-xml \

''-with-expat-dir=/opt/local -with-xmlrpc \

''-enable-filepro -enable-bcmath -enable-trans-sid \

''-enable-mbstring -enable-dbx -with-openssl=/opt/local \

''-with-mhash=/opt/local -with-mcrypt=/opt/local \

''-with-tidy=/opt/local -with-xsl=/opt/local \

''-with-imap=/opt/local -with-imap-ssl=/opt/local \

''-with-curl=/opt/local -enable-sqlite-utf8 \

''-with-kerberos=/usr -with-iodbc=/usr \

''-with-apxs2=/opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs

sudo make

sudo make install

Now that all of the components are working, maybe I can do some actual software development.

Technorati Tags: MacOS, MySQL, Rails

(Via From the Workroom.)

Second viJournal test

Les — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 06:24:47 +0000

Well, there’s definitely a problem with using the Blogger protocol. There was no title with that last post until I manually edited it.

I’m inside a daily entry in the main viJournal window now to test formatting and other stuff.

Well, It’ll be interesting to see whether this works as well as a dedicated blog editor such as MarsEdit or ecto.

Anyway, this appears to be an interesting alternative to MacJournal and will be fun to play with for a while.

First viJournal test

Les — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 06:06:33 +0000

It’ll be interesting to see whether viJournal works as well as a dedicated blog editor such as MarsEdit or ecto.

It appears to be an interesting alternative to MacJournal and will be fun to play with for a while.

My Hello world from WordPress!

Les — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 21:57:45 +0000

Welcome to WordPress. As an experiment, I’m moving everything from my Typo blog over to WordPress to see how well it translates.

Testing This Again

LeslieT — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 19:52:42 +0000

At this point, I want to see whether there’s any use keeping my TextPattern blog alive, or whether I should just bite the bullet and switch to WordPress.

Back in toronto

Les — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 20:35:31 +0000

Here we are!
It still feels like home but…

The trip

LeslieT — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 18:27:00 +0000

Well, I’m in Toronto now. It’s very lonely without the kids but I think I’ll be able to take care of a bit of business here so the trip will be worth while.

The drive down went well and I’m putting some photos into my Flickr collection documenting a few stops along the way. Here is a thumbnail of one of the photos.

That was a very interesting spot along the way! It seems like we were just heading along Hwy17 one afternoon and decided to stop and take a photo.