Scrabbalize 1.0

Last weekend my friends and I discovered the Scrabulous application on Facebook. Personally, I am very bad at Scrabble, but my friends insisted that I play. The game was starting to hurt my head and I was getting frustrated, so I wrote a program to do the thinking for me. Enter Scrabbalize.

Scrabbalize is quite simple. You type in all the letters (“tiles”) for your game into the text box as one long string. Press go, and then the program will run through a dictionary, finding all the words that have some or all of your letters. It then sorts the words by length so you can see your best options.

It is written in Cocoa and it requires Mac OS X 10.5 beacuse I wanted to try garbage collection and fast enumeartion. Both of these things make my life significantly easier, so expect all future Mac OS X applications to require 10.5. Of course, the source code is available if you want to take a gander.

MySQL in Leopard

Many people have been reporting issues with MySQL under Leopard with this error:

mysqld: Can't create/write to file '/var/folders/2F/2FtguLeuG1ibx1X9tbDS0E+++TI/-Tmp-/ibYWBjEU' (Errcode: 13)
071204 11:15:48  InnoDB: Error: unable to create temporary file; errno: 13

I have discovered a fix for this particular issue. First, in the Terminal, go into your MySQL root directory (mine is /usr/local/mysql). Then type these commands:

sudo mkdir tmp
sudo chown _mysql:wheel tmp
sudo chmod 755 tmp

This will create a temporary directory that MySQL will use. Now we have to make sure MySQL knows about this new location for temporary information, so open up your my.cnf and add this line:

tmpdir=/usr/local/mysql/tmp

(Where the path after the equals sign is the path to your tmp directory).

After this, restart MySQL and all should run fine.

RGB Converter 2.2 Released

I have just updated RGB Converter to version 2.2. There’s relatively few changes involved. The first is a long-standing request to remove the gradient highlight over the color swatch so that there isn’t confusion over the hue. Secondly, a small drawing issue occurred under Leopard would cause the green RGB triad field to be moved to the next line.

Enjoy.

The Bug Back-Log

If you’ve taken a look at the bug tracker recently, you’ll see quite a few bugs back-logged. I’m not ignoring them (I still check out each individual report when it’s posted or updated), and if the bug is critical I’ll, of course, fix it. But at the moment I’m focusing completely on finishing the rewrite of ISSO. My time is extraordinarily limited so things are taking a lot longer than expected, but I’m really excited to start work on Bugdar 2.0. Before I can get there, though, ISSO needs to be finished. Here’s a little update on what’s left to do for ISSO:

API

The API module is what I’m currently focusing on. The error system is getting an overhaul to use PHP5’s exception system instead of trigger_error(). Furthermore, the validation system is being rewritten to work with the new error system.

Db

Both MySQL and MySQLi modules are done and have complete unit tests. I still need to update the PostgreSQL module, however, because I don’t have Postgres on my laptop yet.

Graph

The graphing module, which has yet to be used in an application, is being removed. Instead, I have started a new project called WebFreeChart to take the place of it.

Pagination

I have yet to unit test and update the pagination module. This will pretty much stay the same, though instead of using templates (whose names are hard-coded), I’ll switch to hooks and callbacks.

Printer

The printer classes are used to generate the green-styled interface for admin control panels and the like. I have already rewritten the classes but I am unhappy with them because they’re so verbose to use. I’m now thinking of ditching it for XML-based (maybe even XSLT) generators. There’d be various XML tags for the existing classes and methods to generate form elements with the proper markup. This would separate the presentation from the logic, while still not having to worry about styling and direct HTML.

I hope to finish these things off soon to get working on Bugdar 2.0, but because my time is so limited, I really can’t give an ETA. I’ll try to keep posting updates so you’re aware of what’s going on.

ViewSVN Prematurely EOL’d

ViewSVN has been end-of-life’d and I will no longer be developing it. This is due simply to the fact that as of noon PDT today, dev.bluestatic.org went offline (and thus my Subversion repository host). In preparation for this, I’ve moved almost all my projects to Git repositories (which do not require any special server to host).

So ViewSVN never made it out of the beta phase, which is a shame because I feel it had a lot of potential. I’ll be converting the repository from SVN to Git (so that the repository history is accessible and open for forking if people desire to do so) and uploading it shortly. However, as I said above, active development of ViewSVN has ceased and will likely not continue, especially with how content with Git I am.