azazil.net

Gah, sorry about downtime.

I have been trying to get arch to mirror from my laptop to the new server, and had fiddled with the permissions of the ViewARCH pages so that the webserver would hand them out, and also give my laptop permission to push local changes to the mirror. Seems I hosed the Blosxom page permissions in the meantime.

The new dedicated server is almost fully working now, and even has a spanking new version of ViewARCH. I just need to port Roundup, and configure it to watch the lists for bug reports and I’ll be done.

Libtool-2.0 and M4-2.0 are first priority at the moment though…

It’s been almost a year and a half since Rob released libtool 1.5, and the code has changed massively in the interrim. Things are so different in fact, that I have decided that we should call the next stable branch libtool-2.0! The macro interface has changed, the build system has changed, ltmain.in has been partly rewritten, libtoolize has been completely rewritten from scratch, and libltdl has been massively refactored. We need to make that stable branch asap… porting patches between branch-1-5 and HEAD is no joke!

I am itching to release a whole new m4, and it has been almost ready for ages now, but for a lack of advanced runtime dynamic library loading support in libtool… which has been my focus for the last couple of months. The coolest new feature in libtool-2.0 (IMHO) is being able to dlopen and dlpreopen modules from a library. This allows libm4.la to preload the modules it needs for the intrinsic m4 builtins, and then use libltdl to open those and user dynamic modules from the same interface. Not that earth shattering on the grand scale of things, until you remember that libtool has to do that on all the platforms it supports (except the ones that can’t do dynamic linking, obviously).

Libtool now has all the features that the next m4 requires, so I have released libtool-1.9b. I dare say that another week of platform testing and fixing, and maybe another alpha, and we will be able to draw a line under libtool-2.0 :-). I’m going to try and put an m4 alpha out this week too…

The screen adaptation of the second of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Trilogy novels starts at Palolem beach, in one of my favourite places in the world, Goa. It also shows a brief glimpse of the capital, Panaji, which I actually visited last year :-). Furthermore, there are also some scenes in Amsterdam, another city I visited last year.

The film is just as fast paced as the first, and if anything the cinematography accentuates the frenetic speed that the fights and chases are happening at. It is difficult to say too much without spoiling the plot, but there are a few unexpected twists, and plenty of action to keep you rivetted.

I think I preferred the Bourne Identity, simply because of the added intrigue of Bourne having no idea about his past for the bulk of that film made it even more engaging than this one. More of Bourne’s past is unravelled in the Bourne Supremacy though, so it is a minor nit really.

Definitely one to watch.

Thanks to the electric storms across Britain last week, I didn’t dare to leave any of my hardware plugged in and unattended, which put a bit of a dent in my plans to migrate this site to a dedicated server.

Anyway, needless to say, if you are reading this I have moved the bulk of the site over… except Roundup, which I’ll try to do next week. The Arch tab needs a bit of tweaking too. Although, ViewArch is running correctly, and all of my code is in the archive on the new server, I need to configure mirroring so that my laptop is still the primary archive, but pushes to a mirror on the server when it is on the network.

Enough rambling, Airport crashes and acts of God aside, the site will no longer be subject to its previous Monday evening downtime when I take my laptop to band practice :-)