Both the AmigaOS and Windows versions of GfxBench2D have been updated to add an icon. This is something that I always wanted to add, but lacked the time (and I'm not a graphic artist). Anyway, thanks to Thomas Blatt - who created the icon - this is now a reality.

The Windows version of GfxBench2D has received another update. This version includes a workaround for an issue with buggy graphics drivers. On a small number of computers it would hang at the WritePixelArray test. This was due to a driver bug affecting the CopySubresource() function. It would allow the source-buffer to be locked for writing before copying of data from that buffer to the graphics card had completed, potentially enabling the old data to be overwritten before it had been used. Fortunately, there was a different method to wait until the operation was done, which waits for the GPU to be idle. This same method is used prior to each test to ensure the most accurate results.

A minor update to GfxBench2D has been released for both AmigaOS (now at version 2.2) and Windows (now at version 2.5). This is a purely cosmetic update, and does not affect the benchmarking process in any way.

I have been using Silverstripe's newsletter module for years now, and it works well. It includes the ability to use templates, which is great. Use an HTML template, however, and complications arise. The problem is that Silverstripe is built around using HTML and CSS, whereas CSS support in email clients varies wildly.

Yesterday I decided to do a full upgrade of my Debian server (apt-get dist-upgrade), and ended up regretting it. After it was finished, the machine would no longer boot. It would stop with the following message:

A while ago I mentioned the RadeonHD_RM.resource, and said that I'd give more details later. Several posts to this development log have come since, without a mention about this resource. Today, I'm going to deliver those details, and provide a glimpse of what is still to come.

A new section of this website is finally complete. It provides instructions on how to set up and use a Trac and SubVersioN (SVN) server. Trac and SVN are incredibly useful tools for software development. In my opinion, these tools are indispensable tools for any software project. Of course there are alternative products available, but these are the ones that I am familiar with, and they are free. Trac is a minimalist software project management too, providing methods of tracking bugs, enhancement requests and overall progress from start to finish. SVN is a source-code version control system that tracks changes made to the source-code.

This month has seen significant additions to this website, as can be seen with an increase from 112 to 132 pages. I have had much more time to spend on this site than usual, due in part to not having my Amiga one and, thus, being unable to work on the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4 project. There as also been more free time in general.

While wxWidgets provides an extensive amount of classes and widgets, one area where it did not meet my needs was printing. Sure, wxWidgets contains everything needed to print, but it is designed to use the Operating System's (OS') built-in print and page setup dialogs. These dialogs were inadequate for my needs. So, I set out to create a custom dialog. I quickly discovered that wxWidgets did not provide a means to get the information necessary to build such a dialog. Functionality for simple things such as getting a list of all printers, and the page sizes supported by a printer were not available. So, I decided to create a custom print module to address this short-coming. Rather than creating a new dialog class, this toolkit provides an API to obtain the necessary information and functionality for a developer to create their own dialog class. In my opinion, this provides the greatest flexibility.