Cavor News

See the home page for the latest news.

5 October 2008

Hard drive crash. Managed to recover it all from backup tapes, but it's annoying.

22 October 2006

Test compiled in 64-bit mode on the new AMD system. A few kinks to resolve with library issues but mostly working well.

October 2006

Upgrading my primary development system to an AMD-64. Also upgrading the OS (SUSE 10) to the 64-bit version. I'm investigating whether I can dual-boot this in both 32- and 64-bit modes, but I may just use a different box for 32-bit testing.

March 2006

Development on hold for a while during house-hunting. Looking for a place closer to the kids' schools. Server should still be available except for a couple of days downtime during the move, but you can always check SourceForge.

May 2004

Starting looking at Qt as the primary widget set for GUIs, it turns out to have a lot of advantages. Some minor architectural changes were needed but in many respects these are improvements. A Qt version of CAVORView (Cavor Vector Viewer) has a lot of added functionality. To be released shortly -- still undergoing some testing to ensure that the old Qt-free version works.

December, 2003

Cavor 0.3.0 in pre-release. The CVS repository has been revised, many filenames changed (mostly to a consistent .cpp extension for C++ files, vs the odd mix of .cpp, .C, and so on before). The build system is now based around autoconf so a "./configure; make" should work (although it needs fine-tuning for non-Linux systems, some testing has been done on FreeBSD and Solaris x86). A 0.3 tarball should be available shortly, still a few details to finish up.

02 September 2003

GUI updates and new screenshot. The Motif-based GUI interface is being overhauled to make coding easier and provide a more modern "look and feel". Check out the screenshots. What the screenshot can't show is the dynamic but subtle highlighting of widgets as the mouse pointer passes over them. This will be in Sourceforge CVS shortly. 24 August 2003

Support for ESRI shapefiles is being added. Currently cvv, Cavor Vector Viewer, can now read ESRI .shp files. Support for loading them (and the attribute .dbf files) into a Cavor database, and for writing shapefiles, is in progress.

06 August 2003

Cavor is currently in the midst of a major code overhaul/refactoring. Some of the old stuff broke with recent versions of the GCC compilers, and in any case was based on pre-standard C++. A lot of this, particularly the display list code, is revised to take advantage of the Standard Library. There have been a couple of minor tweaks to the database schema to better accomodate different RDBMSs. PostgreSQL remains the primary development DB but it also works with Oracle. Many code file names have also been changed, primarily for consistency.

None of this is in CVS yet, there are enough changes that it will be a major version level change and the whole CVS tree will change -- probably later this month.

October 2002

The past few months have seen some minor code improvements and changes, but no radically new subsystems. See the CHANGELOG in CVS for specific details. Other projects have been occupying the available time.

08 May 2001

The Symbol Editor (symEdit and symedit.tcl) has been revamped, the graphic display is now embedded within the Tk canvas widget to make the whole GUI a single window. Writes the symbol files, lets you created multiple symbols in a single session (with a 'new' button), etc. (It still requires 'switcher' to be running, I need a way to detect that and start it if it isn't.)

03 May 2001

Lots of progress on the symbology front! The CDL (and CDLI) has been extended to allow it to directly load a symbol file (simplified format for now), see 'test7' and 'sopsign.syl' in src/cdl/tests). There's also a symbol editor (symEdit in src/dli, with the GUI in symedit.tcl). The latter lets you draw symbols made up of lines and circles. (Not quite complete -- the graphic entry, including 'undo', works but it doesn't yet write the symbol file. That should be fixed in a day or so.)

If you're wondering what a symbol file is for, take a look at the Symbology Language document.

30 April 2001

There are several new documents on the Docs pages, covering the schema, scripting language and symbology language. Earlier copies of these have been available on CVS for a while, but they've been recently updated to go along with further work on the two language processors.

Crash!19 April 2001

The hard drive on one of my development machines (the one with the CVS shadow and high-speed connection) crashed yesterday -- I should have expected it, the drive is about three weeks past its three-year warranty. Fortunately the data is all recoverable from one place or another, but I've got a couple of days of downtime while I put in a new drive and reinstall everything.

Sigh.

15 April 2001

CVV (Cavor Vector Viewer) now supports .fig files. It will read and display files created by xfig or any other program that supports the .fig format. Tested with FIG 3.2 files but it incorporates TransFig code so should handle anything it can. (Minor to-be-fixed details: rounded corner rectangles display with square corners, and text uses the CDL built-in font but with the desired color and size. Font handling is next on the enhancement list.)

This has prompted several improvements to other components of Cavor, mainly CDL, including polygon and filled polygon handling, better color handling, etc.

05 April 2001

Announcing cvv, the Cavor Vector Viewer. (Screenshot here.). This provides a tool to quickly view files in different vector graphics format. The screenshot was made using the same data I've been testing all along with, but development of a reader for ".fig" (as in xfig, transfig) files is nearly complete.

More work has also been done on the database interface code, we should be able to read/write between the display and the DB soon. (Although spatial queries and graphic editing are further off.)

29 March 2001

Progress begins again after a few-month break.

Some of the documents here have been updated, and more code has been checked into the CVS tree at SourceForge. The latter includes some preliminary work for the symbology language processor and for the database interface. There's also a sample program that displays from the database and responds to queries based on selected features on the display. (This last is a prototype, it doesn't use the full Cavor schema or DBI.)

23 October 2000

Tcl/Tk interface to Cavor.

I created a simple Tcl command which allows Tcl/Tk programs (eg, GUIs) to send commands to Cavor. This let me build a simple set of pushbuttons to manipulate the graphics display, I'll upload a screenshot soon. The code is in the CVS repository on SourceForge.

17 October 2000

Source now available!

I've uploaded a tarball of the source and directory tree to the project file area at SourceForge. There's also a local copy here. This will build various libraries and demo/test programs such as produced the sample screenshots here.

(There are some pieces of other components that I've developed so far that are missing from the tarball. I'll be cleaning those up and adding them after I get the CVS repository at SourceForge set up.)

15 October 2000

Display from a database now works! Created a quick'n'dirty Postgres database and loaded the map data, and modified one of the test/demo programs to access that (via embedded SQL) and display the results. Selecting a feature will cause its name to be looked up in the DB and displayed. So, all (well most) the parts are in place.

I'll upload a tarball of the whole mess in the next day or two, and get the CVS at SourceForge loaded up.

11 October 2000

I've set up CAVOR as a project hosted at SourceForge. It's in the setup stage at the moment, but it will allow CVS access to the source tree as well as a robust server for file downloads, discussion forums (fora?) bug reporting, etc. For now the home page will remain here but that may change.
-- Oct 11, 2000

25 September 2000

Posted a few more screenshots now that a couple of the nastier bugs are fixed. Started looking at PostgreSQL as a possible back-end database, and it looks like a good bet for the first DBMS I'll be releasing code for. For "official release 0.1" I'd like to have things sufficiently working that a map can be drawn from the database and that an item selected from the map will display attribute info -- all at a very simple-minded proof-of-concept level. Soon.

11 September 2000:

Posted a couple of screen shots. These are just quick grabs during testing the Display List Manager. (Note that the display window could be reparented to something with control widgets, the pictures here are just a plain window.) (Source will be up Real Soon Now.)

Early September 2000:

Some delays as I rebuild my main computer (with dual P-III 550 MHz CPUs :) after I put the old motherboard in my wife's machine after hers got fried by a lightning-induced surge on the modem line. (And yes, we now have surge protectors on the phone lines, too.) -- AJWM

25 August 2000:

A brief overview of the CAVOR Display List Manager is now available. The code for this component should be ready to post in a few days. (Hardly bugfree, mind, but at least it does something more or less useful.)

August 2000:

Progress on bringing the Display List code up to a releasable state. (This means that it compiles/links reasonably cleanly, actually does some significant subset of what it's supposed to, and that appropriate GPL and copyright notices are in the source files and that the makefile works.) Real Soon Now.

June 2000:

Slight (!) interruption as we buy a new house and move everything.

31 March 2000:

Started preparing the web site for launch. Various bits and pieces of code are done (and even work) but it isn't quite there yet.