No, pdr/pdx is not dead. I just moved the web site for internal reasons. The new address is http://muellerto.web.runbox.net/pdrx/index.html
Yesterday Twitter cut off the possibility to retrieve the user timeline in a RSS formatted feed. It just doesn't work anymore. Instead they "will concentrate on JSON only" from now on. Great! So I must again redesign the Twitter access of pdr. I plan to fix this problem in the next pdr/pdx release.
The Poco people announce their 1.5.2 release still for June. This is good news. If this has been done the next pdr/pdx release will follow soon.
Developement with Poco 1.5.x strides ahead.
The next pdr/pdx release will be based on a completly new database schema. This affects especially the performance of pdx calculations - a report with nine diagrams that needed over all about 41s needs now unbelievable 7s (!) which has been achieved by optimizing some database operations.
A second aspect is parallelization: at the moment I'm testing pdx in a multithreaded version, which could bring additional 20 or more percent of performance, depending on the number of processor cores you have.
At the moment I'm testing the already available prerelease of POCO 1.5.0.
This major release will not be source compatible, as all minor releases before have been. This leads to a lot of changes just to restore compilability. Probably this will also end up in some database changes. To get the sources up to date I branched away from the trunk and work on separate sources now.
Probably the next release of pdr/pdx will already be based on POCO 1.5.0.
I published release 1.8.0.
This release brings support for the micro blogging service Identi.ca (like Twitter but open), full SSL support and a lot of internal bug fixes in pdr. pdx got an experimental spline function for the diagrams which can be useful but also astonishing. Try that yourself, the result depends highly on the input data quality.
Note #1: I intensified the build dependencies. Boost 1.5.x and Poco 1.4.4 are mandatory now. You need also the Poco Net and SSL components now.
Note #2: Poco released their 1.5.0 in the last few days. I didn't compile pdr/pdx with this version until now.
In future pdr can read input data from the open source micro blogging platform Identi.ca (very similar to Twitter). All outgoing requests will now use SSL. pdx gets a spline function for diagrams.
I published release 1.7.0 today.
This release adds some new pdx functions, especially for drawing automatic or adaptive axes in diagrams. I think these functions are very useful and have been missing a long time. Additionally both applications can now be started in interactive mode just by "pdri" or "pdxi" (symbolic links) which is less typing.
One reason for this release is the announcement of more or less major changes in the upcoming POCO 1.5 and I wanted to solve some open pdrx issues before switching to a new POCO release which will then probably cause also changes in the database and other complicated things ...
Note: the pdrx sources are now ready for g++ 4.7.0.
pdr/pdx (1.6.0) can be compiled with POCO 1.4.3. No changes have to be done.
In the last days I got several compiler and library updates on my Arch Linux. Unfortunately I also updated Poco manually in this time. So I use now gcc 4.6.2, boost 1.48 and Poco 1.4.2p1. The reason why I mention this is that something is wrong. I could neither compile nor run configure without errors.
gcc seems to handle libraries in a different way than until now. In earlier versions you could have implicite libs, i.g. libs used by other libs didn't have to be mentioned for the linker. Now all used libs have to be explicite.
Another mysterious thing is that boost seems to need the pthread lib, regardless of the use of pthreads. This means we need also to link the pthread lib for exactly one function that is called by boost even though we don't have a multi threaded application at all. - I'm sure this is an error, I'm not sure if it's reason is in the boost sources or in the Arch package of boost.
So I had to extend the configure script according to this. Please run autoconf again to get a clean configure script and then run ./configure to setup your build process.
Release 1.6.0 has been rolled out.
This release brings a new major feature: full Twitter support. If you are interested you can create a Twitter account, protect it and configure a pdr data source to request your Twitter data. This Twitter thing has been a hard piece of work, especially the authentication, because of the miserable and incomplete documented Twitter API. But as I wrote before it runs more elegant than mail.
Another new feature is the new directory for configuration files located in ~/.config/pdrx. You should move your existing configuration files to this place and rename them. You can use "pdr --create-config" which creates the directory and a default pdrxrc file.
Many other changes and bug fixes I made are related to text encodings (codepages 437 and 850 are now supported for the first time), runtime error display and vector graphics. In the result many vector graphics diagrams are much smaller now because of less redundant code inside.
Please note that you will probably need Boost 1.47 from now on because of ASIO. It can happen that you get compiling errors with earlier versions of Boost.
Twitter support in pdr!
Don't be scared - Twitter is almost ideal for our purposes:
1) it stores an endless list of {timestamp, text} tuples,
2) the RSS feed is well structured and very easy to read,
3) the data can be safely protected from the public,
4) it has a wide range of front ends on many platforms.
So the upcoming release 1.6.0 will be able to process data from a personal Twitter RSS feed which could be more handy than the mail way (and even much more elegant).
In the last days I tested the new Poco 1.4.2 release. Actual sources of pdr/pdx (1.5.0) are ready to be compiled immediately using POCO 1.4.2. No changes are needed for this.
Note: you need to specify --use-poco141 in the call of configure.
I published release 1.5.0 today.
This release allows units and verbal purposes to be defined for each collection. You can show these texts on top of the y-axis in diagrams or place them in reports using the new pdx (unit {string}) and (purpose {string}) functions. They will also be visible in "pdr -l".
The new pdx (midight) function should help the user to get better reports and diagrams avoiding these mysterious broken days at the beginning. See the manual for more details.
I published release 1.4.0 today.
This release brings some improvements in the graphics like the stairs function, visible time periods, colored sundays and new vector graphics file formats (.eps and .fig).
I reengineered the Windows build. The Windows binaries will be able to use Cairo from now on, so Windows users can create pixel graphics diagrams (.png), too.
I published release 1.3.0 today.
In this release I cleaned some pdx function definitions for getting more clearness in the function prototypes. It can happen that you have to change some function calls in your diagram definitions. See the ChangeLog for details.
A new feature is that you can have a variable number of bars per day in bar diagrams.
I also corrected some bugs especially in pdr's interactive mode and mail handling.
During the last days I tried the brand new POCO 1.4.0 and could not detect any incompatibilities. pdr/pdx should run very well upon POCO 1.4.0.
I didn't make just a plain binary update of the libs. Rather I suggest to recompile pdr/pdx completely because it's more or less a major update.
First studies show that POCO 1.4.0 is still not capable to handle native SQL database types like DATE, TIME and DATETIME (or TIMESTAMP) correctly. Indeed it throws very silly Not-Found-exceptions requesting tables with such types. So our timestamps in the database will remain just being CHAR(19).
I published release 1.2.0 today.
This is a major release. It brings you
- full IMAP support, improvements in POP3 support,
- descriptions on collections,
- correction of rejected expressions in pdr's interactive mode,
- new samples,
- a restructured documentation,
- build support using the autoconf tools,
- some new functions in pdx.
Thanks to Sebastian Maar for not getting tired to have new interesting ideas and incitations and for doing the autoconf stuff.
Thanks to Monsieur DINH Viet Hoa for kindly support with his libEtPan.
I published release 1.1.3.
This release brings a bugfix handling incorrect expressions in mails which normally have to get into the rejections. But indeed pdr crashed during this operation. That ended up in getting stuck generally in mail processing, only to be solved by manual intervention.
This bug concerned at least all prior 1.1.x releases.
I checked the repository now for inconsistencies because first it seemed that some log entries had disappeared while the sources have always been actual. But indeed everything is still there. I can't remark any contradictions. The project survived the downtime without impairments.
I suggest to refresh all local working copies by doing a new checkout. Refresh also any local log caches. (Some svn clients cache log messages to have faster access.)
I published release 1.1.2.
I made a bugfix exporting XML data containing special characters like " or &. This lead to incorrect and unreadable XML files.
Note: Savannah was down for some days. The source repository seems to be inconsistent at the moment. Some things are there while others are not. I have to correct this during the next days.