Random August News

Another month, another mod_virgule release. With this release, I’ve removed most of the remaining hard-coded, site-specific stuff. It’s now possible to build and install mod_virgule without having to edit the source code to insert the website’s name or the admin’s email address. I’ve moved all that to the site config file where it can be easily changed. There’s still one little clump of HTML used as the header on some internally generated pages that’s hard-coded. It’s getting really close to being usable for real-world websites but there’s still a lot left to do.

When I wasn’t working on mod_virgule, I noticed an interesting new blog. Anyone interested in reading about random Texas nature topics might find The Nature Writers of Texas blog fun. It contains nature writing from dozens of Texas authors including pieces originally published in newspapers, magazines, books.

And when I wasn’t working on mod_virgule or reading blogs this month, I was working on robot stuff. I’m still struggling to get the example files to compile properly for the New Micros Tini 2131 board. It seems the examples were developed by someone using a Windows variant of the GNU gcc tool chain and never tried out on anything else. They have a number of upper/lower case problems where a source file says #include “foo.h” but there is no file named foo.h. There is a file name Foo.h or FOO.H. I thought even Windows could distinguish between upper and lower case letters by now but apparently not. While correcting the case problems, I noticed some of the files had what appeared to be illegal characters in them; probably those old timey IBM graphic characters used as lines and boxes around comments or something. I’ve excised the weird characters and have now gotten down to what appear to be actual coding errors. I hope it won’t be too long now before I have some actual working code.

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