Tuesday, 30 July 2002
Not much interesting going on in my life; making slow but steady progress on research. Yesterday I discovered the generically-named and free Calendar. It offered exactly what I was looking for: a small, unobtrusive, customizable calendar. It provides rudimentary event support (which I don't use). As a bonus, it displays the date in the Dock. Here's my setup:
No progress on switching away from UserLand's Community Server over the weekend, though I spent the best part of Sunday morning updating my parents' PowerBooks for the first time in months, and fixed a longstanding issue with Retrospect not sending emails when it finishes backing up.
I'm continuing in my exploration of Subversion; currently I am reading the Handbook. RapidSVN is an under-development wxWindows-based Subversion client. It compiled painlessly on Mac OS X, and wxWindows has a Mac OS X port, but the native GUI implementation appears unfinished. Compare the appearance of RapidSVN on Windows with this screenshot from Mac OS X to see how far it's got to go:
A major impediment to my hacking on Subversion is GNU libtool's incredible slowness on OS X. According to Justin Erenkrantz, who's been working on this issue, the problem is that the 'source' command in the bash/zsh shells on OS X is incredibly slow: it takes a significant fraction of a second per execution, and since libtool is just a shell script which uses 'source' a lot…big problem. He's writing a libtool replacement in C currently, and hopes to finish it by the end of the week. That should dramatically improve Subversion build time, and I can start working on patches for Subversion bugs, such as the build scripts' incompatibility with Encap.
12:22 AM
