Category Archives: Code & Development

There is a myth. The myth goes “Windows is complicated. Macs are really easy – they just work.”

Like most myths this may have started from an original truth, but is now a lie. I am it’s latest, but I suspect far from only, victim.

Let me explain. For over a year now I have been developing a plugin for the RAW developer Bibble and it’s recent successor, Corel AfterShot. These plugins are developed using c++ and the Nokia QT framework, which theoretically allows the same code and user interface design to compile and run on Windows, Linux and Mac.

As a died in the wool Windows developer, that’s where I started. There’s a QT add-in to Visual Studio, so with a bit of juggling I managed to get one of the examples to load into VS, build, and run using Bibble as the target executable, and I was off. I was on a fairly steep learning curve in respect of the programming model, but I had very few problems compiling and running things.

When it got to the stage that I had something to share with the Bibble community I published the Windows version, and another member of the community kindly cross- compiled for the other platforms. There was another learning curve to make sure my code compiled cleanly on the other platforms, but nothing too drastic. For over a year I sent code updates to Jonathan, and got compiled Linux and Mac libraries back.

Although Jonathan still provides a very helpful service, it became apparent that if I wanted to have full control over the application versions I support, and be able to verify my plugin’s portability, I needed the ability to compile and run each version myself. I wasn’t prepared to buy and carry extra hardware around, but maybe VM technology would work.

I started with Linux. I had a couple of false starts but quickly found a site which has pre-built VMs for most Linux distributions (http://www.trendsigma.net/vmware/), and homed in on Lubuntu – based on Ubuntu but with a quite Windows-like shell. I downloaded and installed AfterShot and QT Creator, loaded up a copy of my code, and clicked “build”. And it worked first time! Getting a completely slick solution took a bit more effort, but it works so well I don’t now even copy the Windows code, I just open the same directory from my Linux VM and run the Linux builds in place.

So far so good. Now for the Mac. What could go wrong?

Continue reading →

A recent post on The Online Photographer (More Planned Obsolescence: Evil Lion) really chimed with me. Apple’s implacable opposition to virtualisation is a significant opportunity lost.

I’m a Windows user, spending much of the working week away from home. I get a vast amount of value from virtualisation. It allows me to carry just one PC with multiple “client specific” images, and enables me to keep running legacy software almost indefinitely. My main client uses the same technology to provide legacy support for essential software, which in long-cycle engineering businesses can easily be 20-30 years old, as physical assets in such businesses age many times more slowly than the computing equipment around them.

I also develop plugins for the Bibble RAW processor. The same code should work on Windows, Mac and Linux, but you have to compile and test on each platform to confirm this. I’ve recently added a Linux Virtual Machine to my kit. This was remarkably painless, just a few hours work, and I can now rapidly cross-compile and test my Windows-based developments under Linux. If there’s an issue which means having to support more than one flavour or version of Linux adding it would be trivial.

I just can’t do this for the Mac. I don’t want to buy and carry another laptop (which would be useless for any other purpose), and you can’t get virtualised OSX, either as a VM or as a service, through any legal and “safe” route. The result: as far as I am concerned OSX is a “third-class” OS, almost a “technical ghetto”, and I have to rely on the good offices of other developers to deliver my plugins for it.

People will put up with a lot in the name of love. Maybe Mac users “love” their computers enough to tolerate this behaviour. But looking in from outside I find Apple’s attitude perplexing and very annoying.

<rant>Apologies if the title is a bit strong, but I think it’s the nearest I can get to the opposite of “In Praise of PHP”

I’ve just spent a week-end migrating my website to a new hosting server. As part of that process, I had to rewrite all my old ASP code using PHP. Here’s what I learned:

1. The Apache/Linux community have misleadingly changed the meaning of “ASP”. If you bought a Linux-based hosting service 5+ years ago with “ASP”, it meant a *nix port of Active Server Pages. That worked for me, as I could develop it on Windows. Now, if you buy a Linux hosting service with “ASP” it means “Apache Server Pages”, and the embedded language is Perl. Useless!
2. PHP has positively the worst combination of features for a language:
   • A c-based language’s sensitivity to case, ending semicolons and curly bracket counts,
   • None of the protections against errors in the latter that a C++/Java (or VB) language gives you, like strong typing and forced variable declaration,
   • No single-step debugging. Now I accept that this may not be 100% true, so don’t all write in with the names of all the debuggers I didn’t find in a quick search for tools on Sunday morning, but certainly I don’t have one at the moment,
   • It runs differently on Windows and Linux, and in a way I haven’t yet understood 100%, so I can only test by uploading to my live website.

That said, I’ve still got it! I’ve managed to convert my blog and my book reviews, and I’ve actually improved on my old code for the latter. Just please let me have VB.NET back for my next major project.

OK. </rant>

The brain-dead backup function of Windows Vista is enormously annoying. There are known ways to get good old ntbackup working, but they have their limitations. Read this article about my attempts to get round some of those limitations.

My blog is now fully live. My Thoughts on the World, and the articles in
AgileArchitect.org, are now available via an RSS feed.

For the technically inclined, I’ve built my blog using a combination of VB.NET, Active Server Pages, and a bit of XSLT. This allows me to develop my site using FrontPage and IIS, and run it under Apache. If anyone’s interested I’ll write a technical note on it.