pyToddler 0.3

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:39:00 -0600

I would like to announce the release of pyToddler 0.3. Huge thanks to Michael Greb for the inspiration and some code for the new activity selection menu. Rush out to the Official pyToddler Website and grab yourself a copy.

CC Licensed Guitar Plans

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:04:00 -0600

Today I stumbled upon a real gem while searching for information on building acoustic bass guitars. Liutaio Mottola provides a wealth of information about lutherie. I'm most excited about the collection of Creative Commons licensed guitar plans. I hope many more artisans will follow in sharing their detailed designs without cost and under a license that allows the whole online lutherie community to be enriched. Huge thanks to Liutaio Mottola.

Little Gem

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:02:00 -0600

The Little Gem Amplifier is plastered all over the internet. I was beginning to feel like I was the only guitarist on earth who hadn't built one. No longer! Here's the proof:

Official pyToddler Website

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 21:32:00 -0500

A quick Google search has confirmed my suspicion: there are 4 people in the world using pyToddler. I would like to celebrate this milestone by announcing the Official pyToddler Website. If you are reading this and you are between the ages of 2 and 4, please rush out and download the latest version (0.2). (Yes, we have regressed since the first release which was mistakenly tagged 1.0 rather than 0.1.)

git with MinGW

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:47:00 -0600

I compiled git with MinGW today. I got a little bit (read "a whole lot") of help from Johannes Schindelin. Thanks Johannes!

If git were ever to be a viable alternative for Inkscape we'd need a clear path to supporting our win32 bound developers. So I started looking into the issue. The git wiki lists four possible alternatives.

via cygwin
port with mingw
an eclipse plugin in pure java
shell integration ala TortoiseSVN with a libgit.dll

So far I've only found evidence that the first two exist.

I had my doubts at first, but cygwin might indeed be a workable option. It could be especially nice if someone would build a unified git-cygwin installer package in the same convenient way that has been done for OpenSSH for Windows. I've even found one claim by Martin Langhoff that git via cygwin is faster than svn or cvs native:

Note: At the time of writing, GIT does not run natively on MSWindows platforms. Several projects are underway to port GIT to Windows but they are not complete yet. It is possible to use git on Win32 via Cygwin, but with slightly worse performance (note: v1.4.5 has several performance enhancements on Cygwin) though even on Cygwin GIT is much faster than CVS or SVN. If you are bound to the W32 platform and cygwin doesn't work for you, Mercurial may be an alternative.

I haven't taken the time to try git via cygwin yet.

The mingw port of git lives on repo.or.cz. I downloaded a tarball from one of the "snapshot" links with firefox and stood aghast when 7zip wouldn't open it. It was named mingw*.tar.gz but really didn't look like a gzipped file in a hex editor. It was also 5 times larger than the tarball I pulled down with wget. Turns out firefox ungzipped it for me. IE7 ungzipped it for me too but named it mingw*.tar.tar. Renamed to *.tar, 7zip still didn't like it. There is some sort of posix header on the front of it. Command line tar unarchived it but not without complaining.

The README lists all the necessary deps. I had a pain in the neck finding regex-0.12.tar.gz until somebody offered me a version they had locally. The README could better cater to newbies, like myself, if it explicitly listed the commands necessary for compiling libregex. I commented out the subdirs line from the Makefile to skip building docs and tests, and stumbled upon `ar rcs libregex.a regex.o`. I think that works. I've uploaded a 7z of all of the deps. If you want to skip the dep chasing step unpack it to c:\mingw4git.

The compile and install went smoothly after I was instructed to add two dots to the Makefile, one on line 636 and one on line 882.

$ diff Makefile Makefile.dots 
636c636
<       $(foreach p,$(patsubst %$X,%,$(filter %$X,$(ALL_PROGRAMS) $(BUILT_INS) git$X)), rm -f '$p';)
---
>       $(foreach p,$(patsubst %$X,%.,$(filter %$X,$(ALL_PROGRAMS) $(BUILT_INS) git$X)), rm -f '$p';)
882c882
<       $(foreach p,$(patsubst %$X,%,$(filter %$X,$(ALL_PROGRAMS) $(BUILT_INS) git$X)), rm -f '$(DESTDIR_SQ)$(gitexecdir_SQ)/$p';)
---
>       $(foreach p,$(patsubst %$X,%.,$(filter %$X,$(ALL_PROGRAMS) $(BUILT_INS) git$X)), rm -f '$(DESTDIR_SQ)$(gitexecdir_SQ)/$p';)

Next step? I guess I'll have to try using it to see if any of this actually worked. :-)

Aaron's Weblog

pyToddler 0.3

CC Licensed Guitar Plans

Little Gem

Official pyToddler Website

git with MinGW