Kynosarges

Welcome to the gymnasion! This is the personal website of Christoph Nahr. Use the following overview links or the table of contents in the sidebar to show content pages.

• Development tools and information.
• Miscellaneous software and information.
• My Projects with source code for download.
• Visitor Counts if you’re really curious.
• Note on ZIP Archives and Windows Explorer.

This website is accessible through two domains, www.kynosarges.org and www.kynosarges.de. Both point to the same files and can be used interchangeably.

Latest News

Subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed to keep up with the latest news.

Visitor Counts (2012-02-21)

For your amusement and edification, I added a ranking of all pages on this website by visitor counts since 2011. The list will be updated sporadically.

Social Media Revolution! (2012-02-19)

Observe the astounding new Twitter button at the bottom of each page! You can use it to tweet the current page to your followers. (Don’t blame me if all your followers leave you, though.) I also added my Twitter page to the sidebar, but there isn’t really anything there yet since I’m not actively using the service.

By the way, there’s only a Twitter button and no Facebook, Google+ etc. button because Twitter is apparently the only social media service that doesn’t force a remote server access just to display its button. I really hate that kind of intrusive nonsense, so I used a passive link with a locally hosted image that only contacts Twitter if you actually click on it.

Another FrameMaker Bug (2012-02-19)

Another FrameMaker bug: when roundtripping XML files, FrameMaker likes to complain about missing fonts that aren’t needed and that nobody requested. – Since the Structured Documents page was getting rather bloated with all that FrameMaker stuff, I broke them apart into two separate pages.

Website Update (2012-02-13)

Added a batch of new links that have accumulated in recent weeks, and cleaned up existing links on the affected pages.

Microsoft Links: Added Visual Studio Code Snippets for VS2010, and XAML/HTML Converter for conversion between HTML and XAML FlowDocument markup.

Miscellaneous Links: Added Yossi Kreinin’s C++ FQA (Frequently Questioned Answers) for C++ haters. Please also note that the Interactive Fiction Archive and Mainframe Games for DOS have new URLs.

Miscellaneous Software: Added Calibre, a free e-book manager that converts Amazon’s proprietary Kindle format into standard formats for other e-book readers.

Subscriptions: Added AllThingsD and TechRadar, two professional websites (owned by Dow Jones and Future Publishing, respectively) covering technology and media. Also finally added Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, and Windows PowerShell Blog.

Not Switching Website Hosts At All (2012-02-09)

Two weeks after my order and two days after their own deadline has expired, Deutsche Telekom has neither actually accepted my order nor even replied to my inquiries. Apparently they don’t want any customers, so I cancelled the transfer and will keep this website with 1&1.

Not Really Switching Website Hosts (2012-02-07)

So apparently the date of 7th February that I was informed of refers to the date when Deutsche Telekom intends to begin contemplating working on preparing the switch, rather than the switch itself. Looks like it’s going to take a while longer. I’ll post another update when I know anything.

Switching Website Hosts (2012-01-30)

I’m planning to switch my ISP, and by extension my website host, within the next week. Looks like the transition is currently planned for 7th February but I’m not sure yet how that will work out. Worst case this website might go dark for a couple of days, so please consider this an advance warning.

Icon/Cursor Format Support for Paint.NET (2012-01-24)

Miscellaneous Software: Good software for creating Windows .ico/.cur files is hard to find, but fortunately Evan Old has made an excellent Icon/Cursor Format Support plugin for Paint.NET. Evan’s website also offers many other utilities for image editing and other purposes.

New FrameMaker Documentation (2012-01-14)

FrameMaker Links: Adobe’s team blog has posted a summary of FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and TCS documentation, and the FrameMaker Developer Center was updated with numerous links to ExtendScript documentation, including a new Scripting Guide for Adobe FrameMaker 10 (PDF).

Tektosyne 5.5.6 Released (2012-01-09)

Uploaded Tektosyne 5.5.6 with more helper methods to extract informational assembly attributes, and an updated User’s Guide.

In unrelated news, check out NASA’s open source repository if you need some image processing or satellite tracking software.

C/C++ 11 Standards & Drafts (2012-01-02)

Developer Links: The new C 11 standard (document 9899:2011) has joined the C++ 11 standard (document 14882:2011) on the ISO and ANSI stores, but also only in the overpriced “colon edition” for US$387. However, Open Standards still provides free downloads of the final public drafts, C 11 N1539 and C++ 11 N3242.

Struct Performance: Firefox 9 (2011-12-22)

Mozilla has just released Firefox 9 whose JavaScript optimizer boasts a new type inference technology. The effects on my little Struct Performance benchmark were quite dramatic: a 30–250% speedup that catapults FF9 to the top of the JS field, bringing it fairly close to Mono performance. I also retested with Mono 2.10.8 and Chrome 16 but found no significant changes. The download package StructTest.zip was updated for the new Mono version.

Website Update (2011-12-18)

A few updates have accumulated over the past months. First, the ANSI web store now sells the new C++ 11 standard (document 14882:2011) but unfortunately only in the expensive “colon” edition for a whopping $403. Older C++ standards are available in a much cheaper “hyphen” edition (“-” instead of “:” in the document number) but not yet this one; I’ll post another update if and when that happens.

On the .NET Struct Performance page, I added a link to Joel Webber’s Box2D as a Measure of Runtime Performance which tests the computational performance of various C++, Java, and JavaScript implementations. His results are reassuringly similar to those of my own little special-case benchmark: C++ is a few times faster than Java, and a few tens of times faster than JavaScript.

On the Subscriptions page, I finally added a link to John C. Dvorak’s MarketWatch troll, I mean column, and also to 1UP’s Games, Dammit! podcast which relaunched with a few impressive single-topic episodes.

Lastly, if anyone is still waiting for the new continuous-time wargame I had announced on the Hexkit page, I’m sorry to say that I won’t quite make it this year. I made good progress but then I took an arrow in the knee. However, initial testing showed that a simulation of tens of thousands of mobile units with 2D collision physics should be feasible in C#, as long as the graphics are simple and abstract, so I’m currently building the framework for a proper historical simulation. Thanks for your patience, I hope to have something to release in a few months!

Ian Nowland Spotted (2011-11-18)

Andrew Lighten just informed me of a rare Ian Nowland sighting. Turns out the creator of Comment Reflower did not drop off the face of the earth but merely switched platforms, and therefore stopped updating the program for newer Visual Studio versions. As mentioned last week, Sebastian Schuberth should now handle future updates.

Comment Reflower News (2011-11-11)

Sebastian Schuberth has created a GitHub page for CommentReflower. Right now it holds the original Ian Nowland release but Sebastian plans to add my updates, and eventually to recreate proper installers for modern Visual Studio versions.

Looking over my own files when Sebastian informed me of his plans, I discovered that I had accidentally overwritten Ian’s original AssemblyInfo.cs file for the main assembly with a blank Visual Studio template. I fixed the source code and VS2010 packages to include the original file, with its proper copyright notice and assembly attributes.

Tektosyne and Metro Apps (2011-11-02)

Pontus Wittenmark tried to add the Tektosyne.Core library to a Metro app and was very surprised at the number of errors he got. So was I when he let me know. As it turns out, the current Windows 8 preview removes many basic types & methods that are part of the Portable Class Library definition, and even some that are required by .NET design guidelines (namely for exception serialization). The changes run so deep that I cannot currently do anything but add a warning to the System Requirements section, and hope that the final release of Windows 8 will be less hostile towards existing .NET code.

Tektosyne 5.5.5 Released (2011-10-22)

Uploaded Tektosyne 5.5.5 with two new Geometry.Angle methods that compute the distance between two normalized angles, in degrees or radians. The distance is signed to indicate its rotational direction.

Internet Explorer 9 (2011-10-09)

Added two items related to Internet Explorer 9 to the Microsoft page. One is the updated list of keyboard shortcuts, the other is a bizarre crippling bug that strikes users of Adobe Type 1 fonts. Please read the entry for details.

Website Update (2011-09-30)

Two new Subscriptions I found while looking for Microsoft BUILD coverage: I Programmer is quite useful for keeping abreast with new software and book publications, and Tim Anderson’s ITWriting provides some excellent commentary on a broad range of development platforms.

Nuclear Weapons in Civilization 5 (2011-09-12)

Added a note regarding Nuclear Bombs & Missiles to the Civilization 5 Manual Addenda. Unlike Civ4 these weapons cannot be intercepted or mitigated, and using them has no downsides whatsoever. This is rather unfortunate because it turns possession of nuclear weapons into an “instant win” button.

Tektosyne 5.5.4 Released (2011-09-12)

Uploaded Tektosyne 5.5.4 with a quadtree bugfix. The depth probe algorithm for large tree searches was mathematically correct but could still fail due to floating-point inaccuracies. I added an extra bounds check to avoid possible search failures.

C++ vs. C# Performance (2011-09-05)

Kate Gregory recently linked to Head-to-head benchmark: C++ vs .NET, an interesting article by “Qwertie” on Code Project that compares the optimizers of Visual C++ and various .NET platforms. Qwertie’s results are more favorable towards Visual C# than my little Struct Performance benchmark because he didn’t specifically test the notoriously problematic method inlining. People who are not yet discouraged from using .NET for performance-sensitive computing should definitely take a look.

Historical Note

The Κυνοσαργες (Kynosarges) was an ancient Greek gymnasion dedicated to Hercules, situated in the demos Diomeia outside the walls of Athens. It was the place of education for those Athenian boys who did not enjoy full citizenship. Antisthenes (445–360 BC), student of Socrates and founder of the cynic school of philosophy, taught at the Kynosarges. The most famous cynic was Diogenes of Sinope (412–323 BC), allegedly residing in an empty barrel and subject of countless anecdotes.

Addendum 1 June 2004: I am pleased to discover that Kynosarges was also the title of a short-lived literary magazine whose only issue was published in Berlin anno 1802. Otherwise the name appears to have seen little use since ancient times, at least with the “K” spelling.

This page was last updated on 21 February 2012. Current version available at http://www.kynosarges.org/