My hobbyist coding updates and releases as the mysterious "Mr. Tines"

Saturday 27 December 2003

PassiveFTP 1.3.1456

PassiveFTP 1.3 — PassiveFTP version 1.3.1456.17123 — now builds on Linux with gcc. Otherwise, apart from a couple of places where feeding an FXString& to a formatting '...' would have caused garbage, unchanged from previous version. Updated Win32 build with the new code base, Makefile etc.

From the Windows page.

Saturday 20 December 2003

PassiveFTP 1.3

PassiveFTP 1.3 — Not built or tested on anything but Win32 — has improved file icon display for files on the client, and the facility to localize all the messages through text files. Gives patches to add localization for recent Fox 1.1 versions (diffs taken against 1.1.41).

See the Windows page.

Thursday 6 November 2003

Installation problems for CTCjava -- workround

Having had problems with the ZeroG free version installer for CTCjava on Win XP and current Java releases, here are instructions for how to work around any failures on that platform.

If the installer fails to run (I've had this happen under WinXP Home, where even a copy of the installed system executable will not run, but not WinXP Pro), then you have to fall back to a variant of the Linux strategy below. Download the Linux cj_setup.zip archive and the CTClib 2.3.1 patch dll archive. Extract the .jar file from the former, and the dll from the latter, and put them in the same folder. Now create a ctcjava.bat file that has commands to change to the partition and then cd to the folder where you have placed these files, and then executes

wjview /cp:p ctcjava.jar com.ravnaandtines.ctcjava.CTC ctcjava.ini

to use the Microsoft VM, which is what I needed to use to get it working at all, or

javaw -cp ctcjava.jar com.ravnaandtines.ctcjava.CTC ctcjava.ini

(with the javaw for the JDK or equivalent jrew command for the JRE preceeded by the path to the Java installation's \bin folder if it's not on the path) to use a Sun JRE if that works for you.

Put a shortcut to this on your desktop with an icon as desired.

Sunday 26 October 2003

CSS Validator resources

Uploaded the pre-built resource files for the VS.NET build of the CSS Validator.

Monday 4 August 2003

Geocities site cleanup

Well, as freecrypto.org has bit the big one, nuke the last (animated) .gif — rather than .mng it.

Saturday 21 June 2003

Validator Updates

Both the XHTML validator programs now support

  • whole folder validation, and
  • respecting file declared DOCTYPE (if it's one of the three XHTML DTDs, 1.0 Transition, 1.0 Strict or 1.1, defaulting to 1.0 Strict).

Versions are now 2.1.1263.35260 for .NET and 1.2 for Java. The Java version is noisier than the .NET version, in emitting redefinition warnings; but the W3C validator agrees with the .NET version where I have done comparisons.

Fixed bug in the Java build of the CSS2 parser that didn't handle relative file:// URLs properly, so failed on @import url() statements; this is something long ago fixed in the J# version - just forgot I needed to port it back.

Tweaked style sheets so that Konqueror 3.0 doesn't merge the print style into the screen presentation and hide the site-map links.

Saturday 31 May 2003

Saturday 24 May 2003

Geocities site cleanup

Late spring holiday weekend, and another spring-clean. The brushed-metal look was too oppressive as it stood, so I've toned it down, and added a dash of colour. Page layout is now done with CSS on modern browsers - thanks to the CSS gurus at alistapart.com, bluerobot.com, and thenoodleincident.com for the hints, tips, worked examples and design philosophy.
FWIW all pages are now XHTML 1.1, at least until the hosting service's scripts start.

Friday 23 May 2003

Validator Updates

More fixes to work around places where J# is not a perfect Java-alike in v2.0.1238 and supporting DLL.

Tuesday 20 May 2003

Validator Updates

Minor updates uploaded to both validators, mainly to tidy up output formats, but also to echo the DOCTYPE actually declared in the document being checked, if it has one. Versions are now 2.0.1234.35151 for .NET and 1.1-02 for Java.

Sunday 18 May 2003

Validator/.Net 1.2 -- CSS2 support

There's now a CSS2 validator build for the .NET validator - it uses J# to build the CSS validator, so you'll need the J# redistributables from Microsoft as well as the .NET framework. Version 1.1 is still available for those who don't want or don't have J# support.

Remember these are only helpers; for definitive checks, always go to validator.w3.org.

Saturday 17 May 2003

JXHTML -- Validator/Java + CSS2 support

There's now a CSS2 validator build for the Java validator, and a new version 1.1 of both validators also checks for the non-SGML charactersthat often find their way onto pages from Windows applications.

Tuesday 6 May 2003

JXHTML -- Validator/Java

Now a Java version of an offline XHTML validator that will check a document against 1.0 Transitional, 1.0 Strict and 1.1, all without needing to edit your DOCTYPE. Useful for polishing before uploading for sending to the W3C validator. Requires the Apache Xerces-J XML library (I used version 2.4.0, you will need some version 2.x, but I haven't tested other versions). If you have a copy of the Java-based CSS validator from the W3C, then it can use it to perform CSS validation after a clean XHTML validation too. Tweaked the C# version a bit - but that doesn't have the CSS validation, of course.

From the Java page.

Sunday 4 May 2003

Validator.NET

My first .NET project release - an offline XHTML validator that will check a document against 1.0 Transitional, 1.0 Strict and 1.1, all without needing to edit your DOCTYPE. Useful for polishing before sending to the W3C validator.

From the Windows page.

Wednesday 30 April 2003

Geocities site cleanup

Haven't been able to get browsers other than IE, Gecko (Mozilla, Galeon, and recent Netscape), and NN4.5 to work with object tags for Java applets. In particular, Konqueror resisted, and presumably that means Safari would too. So I've added some more Javascript fu to put in an applet tag as a fallback. Netscape/Gecko users will get their page first, all the rest will have to wait for the whole script loading and execution, I'm, afraid.

Monday 28 April 2003

Geocities site cleanup

With a little bit of JavaScript tinkering, I've managed to get applets to work for NN7 and 4.5 as well as IE6. Intermediate NN versions and some earlier IE versions may work; the two families require completely different sets of attributes on an <object> tag - what works on IE drops through to the included text on NN, and what works on NN leaves an applet sized blank in the IE rendering.

I've also adjusted the other bits of script in an attempt to get closer to XHTML1.0 strict validation - but since the redirection service for pointing ravnaandtines.com at the GeoCities URL uses frames, I'm stuck with the non-compliant target=_top" attribute on links. That being the case, I'm not going to roll out the last little tweaks until I've got more content to upload - just on an as-updated basis. The Yahoo-supplied script addenda, with their preceding set of "close everything" tags will still make a page invalid according to the validator at validator.w3.org, so there's another limit to how much I can achieve.

Oh, and while I was at it, I nuked all the gifs, apart from the one animated logo on this page, in favour of pngs.

Saturday 26 April 2003

(No) Progress

No progress on any s/ware projects since last update. The CTClib-C++ port is not going well - there's not enough internal encapsulation around keyrings and packets, so it's turning into a rewrite rather than a refactor. So I paused to commission a new PC, and haven't picked up again, and now the little spring-time window as the longer days perk up my energies, but before the weather is warm enough to attract me outside, is closing.

Geocities site cleanup : Spring cleaning and mega redesign

This site went black many years ago as part of a one-day protest event (which might have been something to do with the American CDA), and stayed that way out of inertia. Now I felt it was a suitable season for a redesign, and have done one with an eye to handling small format devices (for mobile internet) for which a 150-200 pixel navigation bar at the left becomes a screen-wide thing, often rendered above the page body; in any case the real above-the-fold content is hidden offscreen to the right or below of the first screenful. To combat this all navigation is moved into a narrow band, with links top and bottom to a site map; and in the more functional browsers, the whole thing is a clickable link.

The new look is a brushed-metal version of the original Mosaic/Netscape black text on grey ground.

Putting style information into a separate CSS has had the advantage of letting old browsers like NN4.5 pick some of them up, which the in-line ones weren't being, so the site should be looking better there too.
Downside - as I'm going for XHTML 1.0 strict, I'm using <object> rather than <applet>, which currently means I've only got applets working on IE6 - but I'm working on it.

Monday 24 February 2003

Passive FTP 1.2

New version (1.2) of PassiveFTP. It loses the Java Metal skinning and gains HTTP proxy support.

From the Windows page.

Sunday 9 February 2003

Pegwit/Java withdrawn

I have withdrawn the deprecated Pegwit/Java and redirected my key hyperlink to (moribund) Yahoo group.

Tuesday 7 January 2003

Tines' Dice 1.1 + IconPatch

One negative of Plua for the PalmOS platform is that it leaves you with a default Plua-powered large icon and the PalmOS default list icon. And there aren't any obvious (to Google) freeware icon patching utilities out there. So I wrote one. It assumes you use PilRC (or TealPoint Software's BMP2AIB) program to compile the tAIB03e8.bin and tAIB03e9.bin files (names aren't important, but you must supply both of them), and it patches the .prc file. Note that BMP2AIB does require you get the colour palette right whereas PilRC uses a best-match approach. The archive contains an example that shows how I patched Tines' Dice 1.1 to have a more obviously dice-oriented logo (2d6), with PilRC .rcp file, all the .BMP files and the resulting .prc file.

Second download from the RPG page.