Over the last couple of weeks, I've been working on a bit of the VERA project to do with 3D visualisation of archaeological data. Now, I'm no stranger to 3D graphics, but it's been a while since I really did any, and there's been several advances^* in the intervening time. There are a number of requirements for this work, but one is for some degree of platform-independence. I won't go into the details, but I'm working on the principle that Java is probably the thing to use. However, if it is the right thing to use, it's being distinctly uncooperative.

I found this site the other day: http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/index.html. It's an archive of autoconf macro definitions for detecting any number of different languages, libraries, and system features. It's useful for those occasions when you want to detect comething in your autoconf script, but the author of the library didn't write one (and didn't supply a pkg-config .pc file).