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.