SaVi profiled

SaVi is covered in an interview on the SourceForge Community Blog.

I released SaVi 1.4.3 today; just a six-monthly minor update staying current with distributions, and checked to work on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Fedora 12, and Ubuntu 9.10.

Sourceforge's admin interface has changed a lot since my last update, and not necessarily for the better. Figuring out the file release widget took some doing.

SaVi

As I'm now finding myself with free time, I played a little with my SaVi satellite visualization software to bring it uptodate with compilers and platforms, and pushed out a SaVi development update.

In doing this, it was interesting to discover that:

• the Mac OS X menu breakage in 10.5 Leopard's Tk 8.4.7 is fixed in 10.6 Snow Leopard and Tk 8.5.7. SaVi finally has the look and feel of a bona fide Mac app, albeit one that requires XCode, being compiled, and being launched from the command line. Tk's infinite looping when listboxes are too large is fixed too. Should I somehow specialcase for 10.5?
• Installing Ubuntu 9.10 under VirtualBox is really slick and easy (though its packaging of Tcl and Tk seems a little odd.) If you're on Windows, I think it's now preferable to Cygwin, which is less good than it used to be.
• Installing FreeBSD 7.2 under VirtualBox is not slick or easy. Attempting to set it up on a Mac, of all things, just feels wrong, and that's before you get to selecting partition sizes in the 80s DOS character window of yore. I gave up.
• Ubuntu's gcc 4.4 really is pedantic. Every conversion from unsigned to signed or from non-const to const gets mentioned. And just when I thought I had fairly clean code…

Also interesting to note a recent unheralded SaVi rendering appearance in a post by Mark 'Robert X. Cringely' Stephens. Requests for an attribution were ignored and deleted. Charming. Interestingly, it's the same SaVi Teledesic rendering that was reused without proper attribution in a rather poor 2000 IEEE Communications Surveys paper; they took it down, and rethought their editorial policies and such. Not Cringely. Cringely's Wikipedia page told me all I needed to know.

Double-plus ungood

My ++ungood; T-shirt design turns up as part of the London Word Festival in Karen McCarthy's "My T-shirt says" installation.

Alas, the meandering musing on the meaning of the shirt by its wearer completely misses any Orwellian or programming subtexts. I much prefer the original official NTK T-shirt installation, even if that did have to explain everything.

In other less-than-good news, I'm being laid off, and seeking interesting employment, possibly involving satellites.

I nominated SaVi to the Sourceforge community choice awards in the 'Best project for academia' category, despite the chances of SaVi winning or being nominated by anyone else being roughly zero. Prove me wrong.

I'm ever the optimist.