Angus Thinks

Month: October 2006

  • SQLEditor 1.3b9 Released

    I just made the latest version of SQLEditor (1.3b9) available on the website for download [2.8MB dmg].

    The new version has a collection of improvements. Particularly in stability. Chris submitted a test case which broke the parser and the save file functionality in really interesting ways, which are now fixed; SQLite support is a bit better, with a new user interface in the JDBC panel and there is better handling of the display preferences (including a new preference pane so you can set defaults).

    I also fixed some user interface bugs, like a really stupid one involving import and progress bars. The progress bar would display if you used file->import, but not if you dragged an sql file directly to the application icon. The reason was that there were two different paths depending on which action you took. This got refactored, which means that they both now show progress bars.

    I also have started to look at the file loading performance. Too much time is being taken up loading files. I’ve been working on some ideas for optimization and I’m hopeful for the next release.

    Unfortunately this isn’t the final candidate that I was hoping to release. But I think the improvements are definitely worth delaying the final build.

    Hopefully if there aren’t any reported bugs then the release version will be out within the next few weeks.

  • MalcolmHardie Solutions Weblog

    About the new MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog.

    The new weblog will contain posts about SQLEditor and other products.

    If you already reading Angus Thinks you probably don’t need to read the MalcolmHardie weblog as well because all the posts on the MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog will appear on Angus Thinks.

    This mirroring is done using the xmlrpc api and code from the blogger api plugin for wordpress

  • static link library to replace dylib in mac os x

    This post on the xcode-users list explains a neat trick on how to get xcode to link a static library instead of a dynamic library.

    Imagine the circumstance: you want to use a particular non-standard version of a native library which is already part of the system; perhaps you want to use an old version with better compatibility, or a newer version with more features. The obvious thing to do is to take a static build of the library and add it your xcode project.

    However this typically won’t work. The linker will choose the system version instead because by default it looks in all possible locations for a dynamic library first before looking through the same list of locations for a static library. If there is a dynamic library in any of the search locations it will always get chosen. There are some good reasons for this, but what if you really want to include your own statically linked version?

    The answer is to add the -Wl,-search_paths_first flag to the other link flags option (under linking in target settings).

    When this is set each possible location for a library is inspected first for a dynamic library and then for a static library. This means that the static library will get linked correctly.

    It’s not exactly something that will be needed frequently though.

    Edit: Apple have a technical Q&A article (1393) on this very subject which appeared a couple of days back and which I somehow missed.
    It offers this exact method. [Link]

  • New Bujold book

    The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold [Amazon] is coming out this week hopefully. (My order’s already in with Amazon)

    The good news is that there are now some sample chapters up.

    Bujold of course is better known for the Vorkosigan series of booksand the Chalion series.