Star Chess & Tektosyne Guides Revised

Uploaded revised & reformatted editions of two PDF documents: Computer Player Documentation for my ancient Star Chess game Tektosyne User’s Guide for my current Tektosyne Library Why these two? Well, the old Star Chess documentation was still written in LaTeX, so I used it for refining the LaTeX document style that I intend to use … Continue reading “Star Chess & Tektosyne Guides Revised”

Tektosyne 5.6.3 Released

Uploaded Tektosyne 5.6.3 with some new rectangle functions for relative point locations. The User’s Guide got a minor update as well, for the new RectLocation enumeration. Speaking of which, this enumeration calls the edge coordinates StartX/Y and EndX/Y as in LineD/F/I, rather than Left/Right/Top/Bottom as in RectD/F/I. The LRTB model originally seemed like a good … Continue reading “Tektosyne 5.6.3 Released”

RNG Range Projection

RNG Range Projection is a new page discussing the pitfalls of projecting the output of a pseudo-random number generator with a small native range (specifically, the rand() function of MS Visual C++) into an arbitrary target range. This page essentially replicates the contents of a plain text file that used to be included with my … Continue reading “RNG Range Projection”

Uncontested Lock Performance

Recently I wondered about the performance cost of preemptively putting monitor locks on small library methods that might conceivably be called from multiple threads. That’s a great subject for a micro-benchmark, so I wrote a few tests in C# and Java and posted the results in Uncontested Lock Performance. As it turns out, standard locking … Continue reading “Uncontested Lock Performance”

More on DITA Typesetting with FOP, OT & Oxygen

Just completed my planned additions to DITA Typesetting with Oxygen XML Editor. This article now covers the following aspects of creating PDF output using Oxygen and its included open-source packages, Apache FOP and DITA Open Toolkit: Support for bookmap metadata, or lack thereof Using OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines Incorporating PDF files as images in … Continue reading “More on DITA Typesetting with FOP, OT & Oxygen”

Correction on FOP/DITA font-base path

In DITA Typesetting with Oxygen XML Editor, I had specified font-base as a relative path, trusting that Oxygen would always run its transformations from the same directory. Turns out that is not the case, and suddenly my transformations couldn’t find their custom fonts anymore. Changing font-base to an absolute path fixes this issue. Also retitled … Continue reading “Correction on FOP/DITA font-base path”

Check .NET Version is Public Domain

A few days ago I was asked to clarify the licensing of my Check .NET Version script for Inno Setup, so I wanted to confirm that it’s indeed public domain. Generally speaking, all the small code snippets on my website are in the public domain unless otherwise noted, and that’s probably how everyone treats small … Continue reading “Check .NET Version is Public Domain”