Martin Geisler Online

I would like to wish everybody who visit my site a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The last four months have been pretty busy for me: I’ve started at university and moved away from my parents at the same time. But they have also been some of the best months in my life: I’ve met new friends and I like my study very much.

But now I’m going to relax for a couple of days — until The Party starts the 27th :-)

I’ve finally made a Printer-friendly Version of my PHP Tutorial. I’m sure, that some would say that it was about time :-) The page is build from the actual pages that make up the tutorial, so it will always stay current — it’s actually pretty cool.

I’ll be attending The Party for the first time this year together with thoooms. I’m really looking forward to it — thoooms has told me so many exiting things about it.

I’m thinking about reinstalling my Debian system — they have a local mirror of all major Linux distributions… I also look forward to the many conferences. I’ll let you know how it went when I get home again the 29th December.

I’ve just uploaded my dIntProg-Browser — complete with color-coded sourcecode, Javadoc, and Danish documentation (the Javadoc is in English, and so are the other comments, so you should have a good chance of understand what’s going on.)

I’ve spend three weeks on it, and I’m very pleased with the result. The basic concept in the browser is a box. Some boxes, called flexible boxes, can contain other boxes, whereas some boxes, rigid boxes can’t. But regardless of the type, each box has the responsibility of drawing itself and any child-boxes. That system turned out to work very well. You can actually see the boxes if you run the browser like this:

$ java Browser -d

The flag -d turns debugging on, which makes some of the boxes draw their outline.

I hope someone finds this interesting — it was very interesting for me to try and make a webbrowser, as I’ve worked with HTML for several years now. This time I was the one who had to render the pages, not just design them…

I’ve been making a browser in Java as my final, big assignment in dIntProg — the introductory course in programming we’ve had this first semester. Today we had to demonstrate that we could make simple changes in the source. It wasn’t a real exam, but we had to pass to be allowed to go to the real exam in January.

There was five questions — I made all of them :-) They were all very easy, as the idea with the test is to check that people haven’t cheated and “borrowed” someone else’s source for the browser. If you had written the browser yourself, then they were easy, but if you didn’t know what was going on, the questions would be tricky.

Although it isn’t useful as a general browser, someone might find it interesting, so I’ll release it under the GPL when I’ve packaged it.