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(also, for all you people who want a Palm Pilot version,
I've put a list of excuses at the bottom of this
message ;)
Hey folks,
When I ported ZPlan to Linux and posted to email
me for a copy, I expected about three interested people.
I got over 100 requests, and my fingers are numb from
typing responses - so I added a link on the ZPlan site at www.zplan.com
Please, download it from there. The format of download
file is gnuzipped tar. So you need the gunzip utility
(see the gnu website), and you have to know how to use "tar".
I was quite surprised that there are a couple of UNIX people
out there who didn't know what a tar file is, so here's exactly
how you install the downloaded file.
[from the directory you want it installed in]
% gunzip zplx.tar.gz
% tar xvf zplx.tar
The README file was mistakenly not included in the install,
so if you have operational questions, you can hit the web
page, which includes the README. The Linux version operates
the same as the Win '95/NT version.
Also, I've gotten a couple of questions about which versions
of Linux are supported. I linked the application statically,
so it should work everywhere, but if you find otherwise,
please let me know.
With all the excitement, I guess I'm going to have to
do the Solaris, SunOS, and Solaris x86 ports again.
Also, I've gotten dozens of emails asking about a
Palm Pilot version, so let me address that here.
I'm really busy with other things, but I'll try to get a
version out for the Palm Pilot sometime in the next several
months. If you'd like a little coding insight into the task
at hand, I expect it to be a major PITA, for four reasons:
[1] Pilot Palm OS pretty much insists on a GUI, which means I need to
design and implement the GUI.
[2] ZPlan uses something like 3 Mb of RAM right now,
and much of that is contiguous space, so I have
to segmetize the data structures, which takes time.
Or more probably, get it to run in something more
reasonable, like 128k (big job, total paradigm change
in implementation of the data structures and algorithm).
[3] The Palm Pilot doesn't work like a normal computer
when it comes to memory management. Memory is
a permenant thing, and applications never really
stop, they just go to sleep, which means you have
to be very careful with memory usage.
[4] It is going to be a dog on that platform - I can
tell in advance, so there's going to have to
be a round of performance optimizations, the most
likely of which is to switch from a time-sliced
to instantaneous version of the algorithm, which
is major.
In short, this means an almost total rewrite, which I'm
not looking forward to doing. But the end result will
have an extremely high coolness quotient, so it's worth it.
Regards,
-Will
--------------------------------------------------------
Don't pay! Drop by www.zplan.com for free Nitrox, Trimix,
and Rebreather deco planning software.
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