Background As part of an ongoing effort to keep Cartographica up to date with recent changes in libraries that we compile from source, notably GDAL and Proj, I'm in the midst of a refresh of those subtrees in the frameworks that I build from them. Over the past few years …

My previous post about proj floating point investigation discussed an issue that I'd tracked down to the OS level. However, it's clear that this relates to an underlying change to code compiled by Xcode (and/or the LLVM toolchain that it is built upon). Based on a post about Xcode …

As part of digging through my various problems with Xcode 14.3 (Feedback FB12154691, FB12154887, and some test case issues involving floating point math), I needed to install Xcode 14.2 to move my buildfarm backwards. Although this didn't enitrely fix the problem, it was an essential element of the …

TL;DR MacOS 13.3 or 13.3.1 incorporated a change that is affecting calculations in proj for applications running on those versions of the OS. The change appears to be relatviely subtle, only affecting a single test in a single projection and only on x86_64, not arm, but …

Seemingly appropriate for the week after Easter, I've gone through some old draft posts and decided to publish them. A couple that were mostly ready and I decided to push out: Slathering Xcode Variants Test without building and SPM And one that I did a bunch of additional work and …

Another day, another set of testing issues. As mentioned in my previous post, Slathering Xcode Variants, I've been making some use of Xcode's capability to build a test package and separately run that test package on a different machine, possibly with a different version of macOS or even a different …

I've been doing quite a bit of experimentation with recent features in Xcode lately, especially as regards trying to efficiently run my GitLab-powered Mac Mini build farm. Recently, as I've been doing some work on CartoMobile, I've been updating the testing code there and stole some ideas from the Cartographica …

I last bought a MacBook Pro from Apple in November of 2019, in the midst of a bout of travel that was about to come to an end. In point of fact, I haven't used my trusty MacBook Pro much in the last 19 months, since the COVID-19 pandemic started …

I put this up in hopes that somebody runs across it more quickly than I did... This weekend, as a "break", I decided to do some work updating an ancient (2003-vintage) piece of code that I wrote when I was doing extensive blogging. I'm not certain it'll ever leave my …

There's been a lot of discussion about the 2019 Mac Pro and various assertions that it's over-designed, overpriced, or underpowered. Since I decided to replace my venerable 2013 Mac Pro[1] with a 2019 Mac Pro, I figured I'd write up my experience with the device as a developer. The …

Jenkins For years, I've been using Jenkins as a CI environment at ClueTrust. For those unfamiliar with Jenkins, it's a long-running open-source project built in Java for doing Continuous Integration. It'll work on just about any platform that can run Java (although it's most at home on Unix machines) and …

I have a version of Cartographica that I need to push out before the end of the year, due to a certificate expiration on one of my long-term servers. As a bulwark against problems occurring just at the turn of the year and to make sure that users can use …

Well, Apple made for a lively Thursday this week by announcing the software roadmap (although not the hardware roadmap) for the iPhone. There was a lot to take in, and it took forever to download the SDK (ok, in reality, it took only a few hours, but Apple clearly wasn't …

What's new in programming--Cocoa A lot has changed since the last time I seriously sat down to write Macintosh software. At that time, we were still using System 7 (I think...) and the Mac was dominated by the now-deprecated and renamed Carbon API. It was a good programmatic API, but …

The XCode 2.1 developer tools is a very large package (pushing well over .5GB), and now you have one CD and want to install it on a fleet of machines. Note: this can help with installing almost anything... I was just about to use one of my favorite tools …

For those geeks out there who sometimes have to program things other than Macintoshes, here's an article that describes using Apple's XCode on OS X to develop code that runs on embedded systems.