bitch-and-moan session to follow.. be warned..
Obviously not being able to afford a Visual C++ compiler (finite number of licenses, and I am not a C++ developer in my company), I hit the Activestate PPM archives to install the GD modules (I wanted GD::Graph, actually).. Found lots of GD stuff, downloaded the packages and prepared to install.. When I actually tried running a sample, it turns out that I require GD::Text::Align.. no worries, run over to Activestate, download the package, try installing.. THEN, I find that GD-TextUtils has 4 supported platforms and Win32 is not one of them.. *scratches head, looks for an alternative*.. Has no one else noticed, am I the only person to try using GD on Win32 ? Looks like it..
Tried out Plucker for PalmOS the other day.. nifty.. I downloaded the XP site and tried it on my Palm.. very nice, all the links work, the links and stuff render in colours that the site had, all in all, pretty good, and a lot lighter than Avantgo..
The biggest work related problem occupying me these days, how to actually give a callback to an application when the query it sends is dynamically modified by the database server.. seems a quite knotty problem, really.. I keep coming back to one of DBMS_Pipe, DBMS_Alert or DBMS_AQ; but none of those seem to do exactly what I want..
Still on the lookout for topics.. Some agent thingie is on the cards.. actually, I had this idea about using Bayesian techniques (the spam filtering method) to actually find useful information on the web.. Only problem is that Bayesian techniques probably require a bit more math than I can handle at this point.. (being a Biology major sucks).. back to the drawing board *sigh*
Re:ActiveState strangeness
jand on 2003-02-27T17:46:51
That "stuff" should only be missing in the 5.8 repository, but not the 5.6 one. We are currently working on fixing the automated repository updater. Once it is running again, we will look into those commonly used packages, that don't build automatically (like GD, or Image-Magick, DBD-mysql etc).
No problems, although binaries for gd on windows and ther related perl modules tended to run a little behind their linux peers.
Have you thought of using Imager instead. It is quite nice.
Re:I used GD on win32
n1vux on 2003-02-27T15:22:56
Me too, works well for me. Haven't upgraded to latest rev of libgd or GD.pm . I only put simple text tags in my maps [site soon to relocate], so haven't tried GD::Text::Util or gd-t-Align, though.
CPAN testers say gd-t-util 0.85 passed on WIN but 0.80 failed on one of two installs.
IMAGER is for 24-bit images, good if you want JPEGs but for the GIF/PNG line/text work, GD is more appropriate. In the particular example linked above, I used a JPEG since the marvelous basemap was a JPEG with too many colors to strip down to PNG nicely, but what was drawn by GD was GIF-like. GD handled it ok, since my layers were line-and-text. When using simpler basemaps, I've used PNG routinely, GD works great.
Map Credits: Basemaps from Color Landform Atlas of the States copyright by and used by special permission of Ray Sterner, JHU/APL. Overlay data processing coded in PERL with Lincoln Stein's GD.pm and the libgd library. (And of course the PNG and JPG libs too.)
Bill / N1VUX
Re:I used GD on win32
tinman on 2003-03-03T07:33:12
Oooh, no; thank you. I didnt know about Imager.. (downloading it as I speak).. I'll give it a whirl.. but actually, with the subsequent reply by n1vux, maybe its not exactly what I need (I need charts, bars and lines), but no rush, I can experiment and see..
Re:I used GD on win32
TeeJay on 2003-03-03T09:06:22
Imager doesn't have graphs last time I checked, but I plan to do some graphing modules using it as an alternative to GD.I already have a radial chart module for GD and have nearly finished porting it to Imager.. then I can port line charts and pie charts. Won't be any time soon though.
Re:I used GD on win32
tinman on 2003-03-03T12:18:33
Unfortunately, when I downloaded it, I had the same problem as with GD::TextUtils.. the supported platforms do not include MSWin32-x86
I think I will go with Jan's suggestion and build it myself using the Visual C cmd-line compiler.. I want to try out Imager at home, though, its been quite a while since I messed with graphics in Perl, which is why I only knew of Image Magick and GD..
Re:Visual C++ compiler
tinman on 2003-03-03T07:42:20
Ah, ok.. neat. So, the command line compiler is compatible with the Visual C++ you use to build 5.6 ? (havent upgraded to 5.8 yet)
I'll try it out, thanks.. (have the
.NET redistributable on my machine, didnt know about the cmd-line compiler)
Bayesian techniques (the spam filtering method)
I can remember when Bayesian techniques were good for more than just spam. Wonder if that makes me old.
