Martin Geisler Online

Today we had the anual election for the board here at [Skejbygård][]. I’ve only been to one of these meetings before, but it’s usually fun because we get to discuss the daily life here at [Skejbygård][]. Last year we had a big discussion about whether our janitar BjarneBørresen should use salt or sand to keep the snow away from our sidewalks. We argued back and forth until someone finally gave up…

This year I had decided to run for election — I’m now the treasurer! We’re an almost entirely new board, it’s only Martin Justesen who survived the election. The chairman is Svenne, and then we have Mette Bukhave and Tine. I’ve never tried to be in a board before, so I’m pretty excited. But I know that both Svenne and Martin Justesen has tried it before, so I’m in good hands.

Today I was skating together with Torben Classen, Jesper Klintø, Camilla Johnsen, Nina Ratenburg, Mette Bukhave, Søren, Hilmar Magnusson, and Sif, all of Skejbygård]] fame :-)

This was the first time I’ve been skating in a couple of years, so I had almost forgot how it worked. The nice thing about ice skating is, that you can move slowly in your own pace to keep the balance, and then take on more speed as your confidence grows. The people who don’t know how to brake (like me!) are generally moving slowly, and the people the people who run around the ice rink playing catch know how to both brake and turn :-) So everybody gets along without problems.

I managed to stay on my feet the whole time, although I almost fell a couple of times, including one where Mette Bukhave thought she could grab my arm for support — that almost made me loose my balance. But by bashing my arms wildly around and probably also making some scared noises, I avoided it :-)

[Jesper and [Torben were rather good at skating: I saw them move backward (controlled that is) at one time. When I moved backward, then it was with panic written all over my face...

What a long title, and what a long movie! I’ve just bought this wonderful movie on DVD in extended edition. I haven’t seen it yet, I’ve just had a sneakpeak to see some of the new scenes — what I’ve seen already looks very promising. This version is 30 minutes longer than the one shown in the movie theaters and comes on no less than four DVDs. The movie itself is split onto the first two disks and then there’s two disks with about six hours of documentary footage about the film, the books, the characters, etc…

I don’t know why they’ve devided the movie over two disks, from what I’ve read, then it should be possible to fit four hours of video onto a single-sided double-layered DVD. But perhaps it’s because of the four audio tracks… Anyways, it’s a good oppotunity to go to the bathroom when the disks are switched, just when the Fellowship is leaving Rivendell.

The extra scenes are beautiful! They add much more depth to the film, because you get to hear more details about the history and characters. The beginning of the film has been changed, so that you now hear Bilbo talking to himself as he writes the foreword (”Concerning Hobbits”) for his book ”There and Back Again”. This should make it easier for people who haven’t read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings to understand the Hobbits. You also see more to the friendship between Legolas and Gimli, you see the presents given to the Fellowship in Lothlorien. This was probably the weakest part of the original film, the scenes in Lothlorien were much to short.

All in all, I think they’ve done a great job with the extended version and I’ll recommend it to everybody who liked the film in it’s standard version.

I’ve ported the good old theme from http://www.gimpster.com/ to work with PhpWiki, see GimpsterTheme.

I’ve found a way to stop the warnings that started to appear two weeks ago — see my post on the 18th. The problem was, that file_exists suddenly started to give a warning when you used it on a file that you didn’t have access to, because [PHP][] is running in ”Safe Mode”. This started when NetSite upgraded to PHP 4.2.3.

The fix was simple, I just added a @ infront of file_exists to suppress the warnings. [PhpWiki][] provides all the PEAR files is need, so things still work. Here comes the patched function:

function _search_path ($file) {
    foreach ($this->_path as $dir) {
        // ensure we use the same pathsep
        if ($this->_pathsep != '/') {
            $dir = $this->slashifyPath($dir);
            $file = $this->slashifyPath($file);
            if (file_exists($dir . $this->_pathsep . $file))
                return $dir;
        } elseif (@file_exists("$dir/$file"))
            return $dir;
    }
    return false;
}

Where exactly do you change this? (What file?)

I found it… pretty obvious since the path to the file is given in the errors… lib/FileFinder.php.

-LaForce