I am playing with SQLite3, which is now the default db engine in RB 2005, thanks to the good work of SQLabs. Of course, sqlite hasn’t been retrofitted to RB 5.5, so I am trying to see what it would take to make a poor man’s sqlite solution for RB 5.5. The problem is integrating C structures into RB, which is not always easy. I am obliged to cheat a little, but I managed to do a SELECT command on an existing sqlite database and display the results correctly. So far so good…

I have been using RB since version 2.2. I am a “Pro” user [at least in terms of the license I bought] since version 3.something. I have paid for every single upgrade that came out. A faithful customer is an accurate description, I think…

Now, something I wasn’t too aware of, is that RS [RealSoftware] forces European customers to buy RB from European distributors, who are supposed to provide localized versions and manuals, justifying the extra expense. It is even the case for countries like Australia, where there is definitely no need for a localization.

Now, at least in France, the successive official distributors haven’t done anything so far regarding promoting the product, much less about localizing it. So they just get money for being French. And we are supposed to pay them extra just because we live in the same country? Twenty-first century, the age of Internet shopping? How retarded is that?!? Somebody said that all users from a country [he meant Germany, but anyway] should pay the extra bit – and you’ll see below that the extra bit is kind of large – in order to finance the translation of the software… Like a tax or something!?! If the market is not large enough, well, it just doesn’t happen. But locking all [potential] customers in one country or area to a distributor in order to make sure this distributor makes enough money, and produces a localized version even some may not want, doesn’t this smell reek of 20th Century East-Block communism?

As you can see here a new “Pro” license costs $399.95 (that’s 325.5€). As opposed to here, where I am supposed to shop, 441.32 € (that’s $542.26). Do the math. That’s 142 bucks more, for the same product, a whopping 35% margin! To buy the US version, to boot [and I wouldn’t buy a French version even if it existed]. It’s like Amazon.com forcing me to buy a US book, in English, from their French site, at a markup, because they have a French site… Wait. Isn’t this eaxctly what Apple forces us to do, too? Hmmm…

Moreover, I am not a new client, so I don’t need to buy a new license, I just need an upgrade. $199.95 on RS’s online store. Unknown on Alsyd’s store, since they don’t even carry it! So the service is not even there. Denial of service is usually a good enough reason to drop a provider. RS is dangling their online store at me, daring me to purchase from them, like the Gum department store in Soviet Moscow. So I have two options: cheat on the online store, say I am based in a country where RS has no distributor, and buy direct from them. PayPal, Visa card, whatever. Or I can pester them until they accept my purchase. Why should I plead a company to accept my money and sell me a product, especially one which is one step forward and two steps backwards [repeat after me: buggy as hell! I should know, I have all the beta versions, being a member of their closed beta list]?

So I am taking option 3: not “upgrading” until A/ I can purchase a license # on their online store, and B/ the product is more stable.

Arguably of little worth for the moment, but still: fp.Histogram(values(),colours()) gets you that. Under 0.4 second, too. The rest you can hack, I s’pose, mmm’kay?

I have partial PNG support in fPic (since I am writing the code from scratch, I still consider this as a success ). 8-bit PNGs with a colour palette seem to be the easiest to process. At least, without interlacing. *That* is going to be interesting… Adam7 me arse, right…

Added TIFF support via libtiff, which was easy enough. Is it just me, or TIFF is a dang bizarre format? Not only the byte order is way up the yahzoo scale (ABGR, wdf?), but in the end I had to rot180 and hMirror the image buffer in order to get a correct image… Damn weird. Lucky I had those fast square-angle rotation routines up and running already!

(lib)PNG is still escaping me, I am down now to producing my own. Grrr.