Blue Planet applet update

More tidying, with bug-fixing the XHTML and the Blue Planet applet (fixing UI problems and allowing for collisions between moons).

From the RPG page.

Geocities site cleanup

Purged release news and bug reports that have been superceded by later releases of various projects. Also purged other stale (a year or so old) news, and dusted off most of the other pages, deleting ones with well old bug-fix notes and the like.

See the wayback machine for more.

Tines' Dice 1.0

New freeware program, a PalmOS (3.5 or later) die rolling aid using the PLua runtime, details on the RPG page. You can roll pretty much any sort of dice (23d31, anyone?)

CTClib++ port

CTClib - I've decided that I'm not masochist enough to keep this as pure 'C', even though I could. The things you have to do emulate interface polymorphism are cumbersome, and just got in the way, especially when you don't want to have to separate out definition and declaration for a helper class internal to a single file.

The changes are currently limited to all of folders ctckey and ctcpka, plus ctc.c has become a ctc.cpp, and the version is currently pre-3.0 - how much more will change in the slow progress to v3.0 I'm not sure.

The current 'C' based interfaces will stay fixed, so the library will continue to be call-compatible with 2.x releases.

Angerona suspended

Might as well state that I'm as sure as I can be that the Angerona (Java 1.1/Swing port of CTClib) project is dead. If anyone wants to take it on, be my guest.

CTClib 2.3.1044.27931 interim release

1. I recently received a GnuPG 1.0.7 message that went into an infinite loop while decompressing. Investigation showed that the problem was incomplete support for the OpenPGP indefinite length packets in the code.
2. In trying to diagnose this, going to use the "Extract session key" feature in CTCjava to keep from having to enter my passphrase, I find that there is something up in the JNI layer for this which faults, rendering the feature inoperative. JNI is sufficiently brittle that I don't think this will be fixed. I will now declare CTCjava as having had its last full release.

I have made changes that accomodate the former issue, though this is by way of a stop-gap, copying into a separate buffer the multiple sections of a packet that is of that format, rather than the proper fix, which would be to put an extra abstraction layer of packet reading on top of the file being read. I have produced updated source including fixes for the 30-May-01 and 9-Jun-02 issues, and a replacement dll (version 1.2.1044.27931) for Windows users.

The former is a source archive and a signature inside a zip. Unshell, verify, then unpack over the CTClib 2.3 code, and build. It contains VS.NET and C++ Builder projects, and the CTClib 2.3 makefile should also work - though I've not verified this. The latter is the dll (debug build from VC++.NET) and a signature. Save the old dll, verify the signature on the new one, and drop it in place. Keeping the old dll (and swapping by renaming) allows you to revert if you come across new bugs.

In order to fix the packet length bug properly, I really need to start a full refactoring of CTClib, the end result of which would be a CTClib 3.0, with new, but stable interfaces, and a major revision into C++. What is likely to happen is a series of 2.4 releases (but don't hold your breath) which may change some of the interfaces at each step. Meanwhile there may be a number of 2.3-compatibility interim releases (with later CTCjlib 1.2 version dlls) to patch up serious bugs in the core still being accessed by the Java-based GUI.

In the meantime, there is a FOX-1.1.19 compatible start of a GUI in the source drop, which can do the unpicking of session keys, for those who really need that feature - but you have to build it yourself.