The update that could never install, and Pressless's first download

A day early again. This was the busiest week the log has covered: sixteen projects moved and four were quiet, against five and sixteen last week.

A theme ran through it that I did not go looking for. Over and over, the thing that was broken was not the work — it was the wire between the work and the person using it. A settings panel whose sliders reached no code. A measuring tool that never measured. A window manager that never learned where you put your windows. And an update button that, by construction, could never succeed.

Pressless has a download

Pressless — the thing that replaces WordPress with plain files on your own computer — published 0.1.1 and 0.1.2 this week. Those are its first real downloads: one for Windows, one for Linux.

What you can do with it now: set it up against your GitHub account, write in an editor with the finished page shown beside it, and press one button to send an entry to the live site. Double-clicking Pressless opens it in your browser. Your words save themselves a moment after you stop typing.

Two details worth having. A new entry is dated when it is first published, not when you wrote it. And if publishing fails, your files go back to how they were and you are told what to do — Pressless refuses to replace your site with an empty one.

The prediction that came true

Last week I wrote that the Windows half and the automatic release build "have never run anywhere", and that the first release would be their first run.

That is exactly what happened. 0.1.0 was tagged and never published. Its Windows job ran the test suite on Windows for the first time and the tests failed — not the app, the tests. They had been written on Linux and carried Linux assumptions: a folder with no drive letter, a file move that Windows performs as a rename, a permission the app deliberately skips on Windows, and two filenames differing only in capital letters, which Windows treats as the same file.

No application code changed. The tests now hold on both systems, and every push runs them on Windows as well as Linux — so a Windows break is caught when it is pushed rather than at the next release.

Undo

Also built, waiting for the next release: undo the last publish, in one step. It puts your site back the way it was, and leaves your own files agreeing with it. An entry that was not on the site before becomes a draft again rather than being deleted. Where your copy differs from the older version, your copy is kept as a draft beside the one put back, so nothing of yours is lost. It reaches back exactly one publish, and pressing it again puts you back where you started.

Where a first proper release stands: setup, the editor, publishing, importing and undo are all built and two of them are downloadable. What is owed first is a set of checks that only a person can do, which three finished pieces each recorded as never run.

UT Ants: sky, water, fog and a gamepad

Last week UT Ants was a flying camera through a lit map, and I listed what was next: softer light edges, outdoor skies, and fog, light shafts and a flashlight. All three arrived, and a good deal more.

The sky is the sky its author built. In the 1999 game, a sky surface is a window onto a separate room built into the map. UT Ants now draws that room and shows it through every sky surface, so the sky turns with you and never slides. 1,037 of the reference install's 1,436 maps have one.
Fog, light shafts and a flashlight. From the Medium quality setting up, every map draws a light haze that shadowed lights scatter through, so walls cut visible beams through the air. F turns a flashlight on.
Soft shadows in corners and creases, at every quality setting.
A launcher. Type ut-ants at your install and you get a list of every map in it. Type to filter, press Enter, and it builds the map and flies it. Each map has a notes box that saves as you type.
A gamepad works — PlayStation or Xbox. Left stick moves, right stick looks, triggers go up and down, and the Options or Menu button closes a map.

Still nothing to play and nothing to download. No gravity, no player, no weapons, no monsters.

The sea you could see through

On AS-Frigate the sea had vanished, and you could see the ship's hull through it. A map's water is often the very same flat surface that separates the air from the water, and the renderer was throwing every such surface away as an invisible marker. Only the surfaces the original game also hides are dropped now. The sea reads as cyan again, and nothing else in the frame moved.

Torches that were bright pink blocks

AS-Frigate's torch flames drew as flat magenta. The cause: the program found each texture by its name alone, and a fire texture in this game shares its name with its own colour table — so it picked up the table and skipped the flame entirely. 1,924 fire and 55 wave-texture references across the install were being found wrongly.

A fire texture stores no picture at all; the flame is generated. So UT Ants now runs the original game's own fire simulation from its sparks and keeps a still frame of it. Moving flames are still to come.

Brightness, still being measured rather than judged

Last week's brightness work continued the same way — against photographs of the original, not against my eye.

The thin haze in the air had been tuned on one indoor map. On an outdoor map it filled the whole view. It is now a quarter as strong — the strongest setting that costs nothing against the original on all three reference maps.
Light now meets texture the way the original combines the two, rather than in a straight line. AS-Frigate's sky fell from 2.36 times the original's brightness to 1.29.
The final brightness squeeze had been subtracting a little from every colour. The original does no such thing, so every dimly lit surface came out darker here than it should. Removing that step matches the original more closely.

Shadows, and eleven maps nobody could read

One shadow-map dot covered 64 units of the world, so a thin ledge fell between the dots and the wall beneath it stayed lit. Medium and up now use a shadow texture twice as wide, costing about 190 MB more video memory. Measured against a reference eight times finer over 135 views of three maps, the error fell by about a third on each.

And a small one with a big blast radius: a map with an accented letter in a texture name — Telaraña — was copied out byte for byte, which made the whole output file invalid and unreadable. Eleven maps in a 1,441-map install did this, and a strict reader failed on the file before reading anything, losing an entire run over one map. Names are re-encoded properly now.

One last thing, which pleases me more than it should: a new tool can read a map file and work out, from the file alone, whether anything in that map can ever open its exit. Of 1,332 maps with an exit, four can never open theirs — matching an independent survey that had been done the slow way.

Ants Terminal: two releases, and a fix that cost more to number than to make

Ants Terminal 0.7.110 and 0.7.111 both went stable today.

0.7.110 is last week's preview, promoted unchanged — the freeze fixes and the performance pass I described last week. 0.7.111 is a packaging fix and nothing else. Everything written this week waits in the next one.

Here is what happened in between, because it is a better story than the fix.

0.7.110 built everywhere except one Linux distribution, Mageia. A self-check compares the way Ants lowercases an identifier against the way its database does it, and it used accented letters as the example. Most distributions lowercase only English letters there; Mageia's build of the database lowercases accented ones too. So the two disagreed, the check failed, and the package build stopped. Nothing was wrong with the program — the check was asserting something about which copy of a library the distribution happened to ship.

The fix is one line: use only the characters an identifier can actually contain. The cost was everything around it. The hotfix consumed the version number 0.7.111, which pushed the release that was already in flight up to 0.7.112, which left the project's own records carrying two sections with the same version number — and, in the half with no duplicate to give it away, the packaging files describing this cycle's 48 items as the contents of a release that holds one test fix. All of it hand-repaired, none of it caused by the fix. There is now a way to ship a hotfix without shifting the numbers after it.

Of the work waiting in the next release, the one most people would notice: text from Claude Code turning dim and underlined at random. A keyboard instruction it sends was being read as a styling instruction, switching on underline and dim for everything written afterwards. Also: saving a tab's contents no longer happens on the drawing thread, so a big scrollback pauses the window about half as long.

And a genuinely embarrassing pair. A new command for converting an old-style roadmap shipped twice over in an unusable state: first it was left out of the list of commands the tool advertises, so any program that checks that list before asking refused to send it at all; then, once that was fixed, a rule requiring every item to carry a plain-English summary ran during the conversion — and old roadmaps by definition have none, so the command refused on exactly the files it exists to convert.

Rolodex: the update button that could only fail

Rolodex 1.4.0 and 1.5.0 both released, with downloads for Linux, macOS and Windows.

The headline is the one in the title. Rolodex has always checked the signature on a downloaded update before installing it — which is right. But the key it checked against was a deliberate blank placeholder, so no update could ever pass that check. "Update now" was a button that could only fail, and it had been that way since it was written. The real signing key is now in place.

Two more that only bit some people:

The Linux download only started on Ubuntu-like systems. It was missing part of the graphical toolkit and relied on the system happening to supply it. On openSUSE it closed immediately with "Namespace Gtk not available". It now carries everything it needs, and its own self-test checks that it does.
The macOS build had been failing because its self-test calls a command that macOS does not ship. The next release would have gone out with no Mac download at all.

New in those two releases: filter the list by category and search several words at once in any order, so "gmail work" finds "Work Gmail". Rolodex reopens on the entry you last had open. Restore from a backup when your vault will not open — and the damaged file is never deleted, it is kept beside the original with the date added. A warning when your computer's clock is off, because that makes two-factor codes get rejected. And each field type now carries an icon as well as a colour — a padlock for passwords, a clock for dates — because colour alone does not survive greyscale, colourblindness or a screen reader.

Vestige: a settings tab that changed nothing

Vestige, the 3D engine, spent the week on a backlog of things that looked like they worked.

The Controls tab was a set of widgets connected to nothing. Mouse sensitivity, invert-Y and the gamepad deadzones were saved, clamped and driven by live sliders — and reached no code at all, because the part that read them and the part that wrote them used two differently named fields that nothing joined. Worse, rebinding a movement key did nothing either: the camera code asked for the physical W, A, S and D keys directly at fourteen places, so every rebind was ignored and a non-QWERTY keyboard got the wrong keys. And a rebind you did make was discarded the instant you made it. All three are fixed, and there is now an automatic check that the fourteen direct key reads have not come back — it went from fourteen to zero.

The Ruler tool did not measure. The menu item switched the tool on and reported its own state, and no click ever reached it. The read-out existed; only the connection between the two was missing.

Two more of the quiet kind: cutting a door or window into a wall could not be undone — and because the editor decides whether a scene has unsaved work by looking at the undo history, a cut door also left the scene marked as saved, so quitting threw it away without warning. And a painted foliage mask was held by the panel rather than the scene, so it was silently discarded on every save.

A test that passed for the wrong reason

My favourite find of the week. Bright lights and dim ones glowed by exactly the same amount — the glow effect had stopped responding to brightness altogether, because of one line that squashed everything above a threshold to nearly the same value.

That defect had a test sitting over it the whole time, and the test passed. The reason is worth keeping: the test compared the processor's version of the formula against the graphics card's version. But the processor version was written as a deliberate mirror of the other one. So the test bound the two copies to each other and said nothing whatever about whether the shared formula was right — and it agreed with the broken version perfectly.

The new test asserts a property instead: glow must rise strictly across a thousandfold range of brightness, and the gaps must widen rather than flatten. It was proved to fail against the old formula before being kept.

Also found by reading the graphics code by hand, since nothing analyses it automatically: the ground was about three times brighter than every other surface (two halves of the lighting sum were on different scales, and a comment directly above claimed they matched); and on weaker graphics cards, water tilted instead of rippling, because the code read the wrong one of three values and got a near-constant.

One honest demotion: the scripting system was marked done and has been un-ticked. The classes exist and pass their tests, but nothing builds one when the engine runs, so no script can execute in the shipped engine.

DOOM Ants: shipping with the brakes on

No release yet, and everything below waits for one.

The game was being built with the compiler's optimiser switched off — the setting you use for debugging — which looks inherited from the 1997 source code rather than chosen. Switching it on measured about 5% less processor time, and the classic renderer draws pixel-for-pixel the same frames, so nothing about how it plays or looks has moved.

Turning it on was riskier than it sounds, and the related find is the good one. This code deliberately reads the same memory as two different types, which the optimiser is normally allowed to assume never happens. The setting that disables that assumption was arriving on Linux only as an accidental side effect of an unrelated sound library, and the Windows build was getting none of it. Both are now set deliberately.

The rest, briefly:

Keypad and Home/End keys triggered unrelated actions. Keys the game has no name for were being folded onto letters that do. Tapping the keypad's full stop on the automap wiped your marks; keypad 9 acted as "a", Caps Lock as "9", Home as "J". They now do nothing, as in the original release.
DOOM 1's animated between-levels map was static. A check meant to skip the animation for DOOM II tested something that is always true, so the drawing gave up on its first line while the artwork was still loading.
Fog was failing to reach rooms it should light. The search that works out how far outdoor air seeps through a level ran on a fixed-size list; once it filled, it recorded a shorter route to a room but never went back to tell that room's neighbours.
A setting refused as too large on Linux was silently accepted on Windows, because the guard compared against a number twice as wide as the value it was checking. Two other settings accepted "infinity" and "not a number".
A damaged add-on colour table could make the game read past the end of its own data, and a very long pause in a music track threw out the timing of every note after it.

Perch never learned where you put your windows

Perch remembers where your windows go. On KDE Plasma it was not learning anything at all: the small helper script it runs inside the desktop used a timer call that does not exist there, so every single "window moved" and "window resized" notification failed silently. Perch never found out. That is fixed, and the helper's code is now checked by a linter on every push.

Alongside it: the GNOME and Sway versions no longer claim abilities they do not have. On those desktops Perch cannot yet notice windows opening or monitors changing. It now says so rather than claiming it can — behaviour is unchanged, honesty is not.

Also: perch --settings opens the settings window even when your desktop hides tray icons, which is GNOME's default. Starting Perch twice no longer leaves two copies fighting over your windows and the saved-positions file. And Perch now forgets apps you have not used in 90 days, so the saved file does not accumulate.

Short notes

OneUp (system updates) fixed a cluster of confident wrong answers. A request to start an update that was rejected as invalid used to be reported as a clean finish for an update that never ran. A full disk produced an endless stream of warning boxes, several a second, because it warned and immediately retried. And one odd character in an engine message — a superscript digit, say — could stop the window following the rest of the run.

finbreak (finances) fixed a Linux download that crashed on the very first keystroke: it carried its own copy of half a keyboard library while relying on your system for the other half, and the mismatched pair could crash as soon as you typed. Also: a saved PDF report could be named for one month and contain another month's figures, if you had pinned a timezone different from your computer's. And a transaction you copied stayed on the clipboard for good if finbreak locked before the automatic clear was due.

Contact List made every destructive confirmation readable by a screen reader. It used to announce only "Confirm, button" without reading the question — and pressing "n" at a delete prompt navigated away and left the dialog hanging. It is now a proper dialog. Separately, clearing a field never reached Google: emptying an email, phone or note on a synced contact was dropped from the upload, so Google kept its copy and the next sync put it back.

Games Hub — last week I said keyboard play was waiting on one decision I had to make, about what the cursor should look like. I made it. Chess, Reversi, Draughts and Minesweeper can now be played without a mouse, with a gold cursor that thickens under the Large setting and comes back where you left it. Card games are still mouse-only. A soft gold light also settles on whoever's turn it is in five games, fading from one seat to the next — with an outline as well as a glow, so it does not rely on seeing the colour.

demoreel (the tool that records videos of apps) released 0.2.0, with no files attached — it is installed from source, so there is no download to link. Its best fix is in keeping with the week: when its check for a blank recording could not take its sample, it reported "not blank" and the run succeeded. That now fails with the reason. It also catches a recording that is blank halfway through rather than only at the end, and asking for three seconds now gives you about 3.2 rather than about 4.2.

Album Builder found that it read music tags only in the format used by MP3 files, so nine of the twelve formats it supports showed no information at all; and files with no tags reported a duration of zero.

Local Web Server Manager spent the week closing small review findings. Worth one line: a fix was written, then measured, then backed out — the reported cause turned out not to be real, and the reasoning is now a comment so the next person does not file it again.

RetroArch (my fork) and RetroDB both moved only in their documentation and internal records. Nothing a player would see.

Quiet this week: MAME Curator, Snatch, Slipcase and LottoTracker — checked against GitHub, not just my own copies. Rusty PSN has no public repository yet, so there is nothing to read.

What changed on the site

Pressless moved to Beta and now shows downloads for Windows and Linux.

New downloads picked up this week: Ants Terminal 0.7.111, Pressless 0.1.2 and Rolodex 1.5.0.

Two changes to how this site looks after itself. An About page can no longer quietly go stale: each one is now compared against the release history the build has just fetched, so a page still saying "no download yet" for something that has since shipped stops the build rather than going live. And the site now has machinery to publish this post by itself, on a timer, every Wednesday: it gathers the week's facts into one file, writes the post from that file, has a second and independent session check every figure against its source, and publishes only on a pass. This week's post is not that — it was gathered by that machinery but written and published by hand, a day early.

RetroDB's download is still 3.12.0, from June — the project has moved on a great deal since, but nothing newer has been published as a release.