Martin Geisler Online

My babybrother turned 14 today, which means that he’s no longer that little after all :-) He’ll get his confirmation later this year, so then we have to arrange yet another party for him… but that’s fine — I like these kinds of parties :-)

I’ve decided to move PHP Weather to SourceForge. You can find it here. This should give us a lot of nice features. One of the best features is the CVS repository. By using CVS, you can ensure that you’re always up-to-date with the latest development — you no longer has to wait until I release a new tarball.

I’ve set up two maillinglists: PHPWeather-devel and PHPWeather-checkins, which you should use instead of the old list here at gimpster.com. The first list is for discussions and questions. When something is committed to CVS a mail is sent to the second list. Go to this page to subscribe.

People who would like to have write-access to the CVS repository should send their SourceForge usernames to me, together with an explanation.

I’ll update phpweather.sourceforge.net just as soon as I get the time.

The newest beta of PHP Weather is out, take a look here. It fixes some small problems with some missing strings.

I’ve rewritten PHP Weather, so that it uses objects. And it actually works, so I think we’re almost done for version 2. You can download it here.

I sent a mail to the maillinglist, but here it is as well:

I’ve also tried to write some documentation for the new version, which is included in the tarball. I used a php-script called PHPDoc. It works by reading comments in the code, and then build HTML-pages with that information.

It’s not finished yet, but I think we’re getting really close now. The main advantages of this structure is:

• It is easy to add support for new database-engines. Basically they just have to support three methods: insert_metar(), update_metar() and get_metar().

  I’ve made a database-engine called ‘none‘ which doesn’t do anything, and one called ‘mysql‘ which is fully working. I hope that someone will write an engine for PostgreSQL, dbm etc.

• The translators are able to override the output-routines, if that is necessary. And at the same time, most languages only need to translate the English language-file, just like old times :-)

  I’ve made an English language-file. It’s probably missing some strings, since I changed the keys in the $strings-array quite a bit while I was coding. When a string is missing, PHP complains about an undefined index. If you get such an error, then please report it to this list.

I know that there’s still some problems with getting it to work under PHP3, which should be solved. We’ll have to try and identify the cause of these problems, and then make a fix.

So, what do you think? Is it any good? Please report any failures and successes you get — thanks.

I’ve now been using Debian for about three weeks. And I like it :-) It’s a little confusing in the beginning, but now I feel that I understand most of it.

The package-management system is just great, after you get used to it. I run the unstable branch, called Woody, and this means that the packages are updated quite often. And when they do, they sometime break! At one point BBDB stopped working in Gnus. It was strange, since I didn’t remember messing with it. But one or two days later a new version appeared, and when I installed it, the problem went away. So with Debian you really get the chance to try out the vary latest software. So far, this has been the only incident of this sort. I hope they watch more carefully before they make a new version of something important, say lilo :-)

I’m also eagerly awaiting a new version of Mozilla. I’m currently using M18, but they’ve already made both a version 0.7 and 0.8. But so far, there hasn’t been made any debs. The same goes for Enlightenment. I haven’t compiled the new E17 yet, because I don’t want to mess-up my new tidy system. But I’ll probably do it after all, when it’s useful for everyday work.