Martin Geisler Online

Now there’s only little over 10 minutes left of the old year — soon our calendars will read 2001. Here in Aalborg, Denmark, the sky is beginning to be filled with fireworks. I have an excellent view over the city from my room, so it’s sure to be a magnificent display at 12 o’clock!

I hope you have had a good year, and wish all the best for you in the year to come. Happy New Year!

It’s finally Christmas Eve.

Here in Denmark we usually spend the day preparing for the big Christmas-meal tonight. We’ll have a goose tonight, although it’s also common to eat duck og roast pork. We’ll eat both plain and caramelled potatoes to the goose. I’m looking forward to it :-)

After we’ve eaten, we’ll do the dishes (the boring part :-) and then dance around the Christmas tree, while we sing some Christmas hymns. After that we’ll open our presents. I know that you first get the presents on Christmas Day (tomorrow) in England and the US, but here in Denmark we can’t wait that long :-)

Enjoy the holidays — I will for sure :-)

It’s been somewhat quiet here at gimpster.com for a while. I haven’t had time to finish the new version of PHP Weather yet, because I’ve been busy doing other things like homework and some paid programming. That’s right — you can actually be paid to program :-) One could arguge that it’s more interesting to program PHP Weather, but it simply pays better to program for other people :-)

The first wave of files were committed to CVS on Friday the 8th of December at 22:52:54 UTC. More will certainly follow in the next couple of weeks and months.

E17 is the next version of Enlightenment. In the last couple of months Raster and Mandrake have been busy making all sorts of new backend-stuff. So far, we’ve only seen the potential of these libraries in glimpses. We’ve seen how evas_test utilized OpenGL to make smooth accelerated graphics, and we’ve seen how Etcher made theme-designing a simple thing. I’ve written more about Etcher and evas_test on my page with screenshots. There you’ll also be able to see a real screenshot of what E17 looks like.

When E17 matures, I’m certain that we’ll see all this power used for something productive. The now gone EFM was such an example of a productive app. It was a test-bed for the new things to come, and by judging from the mails people are sending to the Enlightenment mailling-list, people actually liked it. But it was just a demo! So, when a “simple” demo is so nice, try to imagine how the real thing will be like.

But there is still a long way to go. The big re-write has begun, and when it has finished, we’ll have a perfect mix between Enlightenment and EFM. This beast will be hardware-accelerated and should be able to satisfy everyones need for eye-candy, and still be something you can do work with.

I don’t think that it should be necessary to add, that I’m looking forward to this :-) I don’t have a release-date, because Raster and Mandrake doesn’t want to give any promises. When asked on the maillinglist, they promptly decided to add one week to the release-date, every time someone asked. So when they’re done, they’ll just sit still for a couple of weeks, and then announce the release to the rest of the world. So please don’t ask! It will be finished when it’s done :-)

Since it’s Christmas, I’ve made a little Christmas-screenshot for you. It should help to get everybody into the right mood :-) Go take a look at it here.