Archive for December 2002

Happy New Year!

We’re just about to begin making the food for the big New Year party here at [Skejbygård][]. It will be a party of special magnificence, much larger than our normal parties: there will be about 47 people at the dinner.

We’ve all paid 100 Danish Kroner (about 15 USD) so there was plenty of money to shop for when the food was bought yesterday. So there will be all sorts of delicious dishes to choose from: tuna mousse, roast beef, lamb, spiced potatoes (that’s what I’ll be preparing together with Jesper Klintø and Hanne Enemark, his girlfriend), Curly Kale (that’s ”grønlangkål” in Danish), caramelised potatoes, smoked ham, and much more that I’ve forgot about again. I’m really looking forward to it!

As tradition bids, we’ll also have some fireworks for tonight. The Board decided to help the party tonight, so I’ve just been in Føtex with SvenneRasmussen to buy a massive battery called ”Miracle of Fire”. It costs 350 Kroner (about 50 USD) and it’s rather heavy. I’ve never had such expensive fireworks before in my life — I really hope it goes off as planned tonight!

The weather forecast says that we’ll get perfect weather for tonight: a clear sky without much wind. But that also means that it’ll be freezing cold, we’ll get temperatures around -10 °C (about 10 °F) so most people will probably prefer to stay indoor and watch the fireworks from there. [Skejbygård][] is eight stories high so we have a really nice view in over Århus from the seventh floor.

I would like to wish everybody here a very Happy New Year, see you next year! –Martin Geisler

End of TheParty

It was very nice to get some sleep — I needed it! We’re now waiting for the Closing Ceremony to begin and after that we’ll disassemble our computers and head home. I’ll be picked up by my father who will drive me back to [Skejbygård][]. –Martin Geisler

!!!Day Three at The Party

It feels like it’s still Day Two, but that’s only because I haven’t been in bed yet — it’s now 4:55 in the morning… I’m going to bed Real Soon Now ™ but I’ll write about the Demo competition first.

It was a nice change to see something else than Counter-Strike — the demos were generally good. The problem was, that there were too few of them, so few that the original three competitions (WiLD, Demo, and Intro) were combined into a single competition with only nine entries!

Screenshot from Graphical
Intentions by O.D.S So the tiny introes (this is a demo with a maximum size of only 64 KB) were mixed with the huge WiLD demos and inbetween you had the normal demos. Thoooms and Paaske made it with their demo, but it ran way too fast :-( Because they had been in such a rush to finish the demo, they hadn’t had time to implement a framerate, limiter and the machine used to run the demos for the bigscreen is pretty fast, much faster than the machine Thoooms used to develop the demo on… You can see a full-size version of the screenshot at /images/pq_torus.jpg and you can download the demo from one of the mirrors listed at scene.org.

It’s clear from the entries in the demo-related competitions this year, that the Scene is moving away from The Party. I’ll probably not go to The Party next year, instead we talking about going to Compusphere in Sweden. It’s held on the same dates at The Party, but it’s only for Sceners, so there will be no Counter-Strike competitions stealing the bigscreens… And it’ll also be cheaper for us, even after we’ve bought tickets for the ferry.

That all for now — I’ll go get some sleep now! –Martin Geisler

TheParty Day Two

I’m still at The Party, and ready for another day! We decided to go to the nearby school to get some sleep last night, The Party has arranged for the school to stay open at night so that we can have a quiet place to sleep. When we got up, we discovered that half of Jutland was without power! Luckily it only took a couple of hours before the power was back up — you cannot run The Party without power…

PHP Weather logo I’ve had time to work a lot on GimpsterDotCom and on [PHP Weather][]. I’ve just released version 2.1.0 — if I gave the releases codenames, it should be called “Release TP-2002″ :-)

This release adds five new translations and fixes a number of bugs, so I urge you to upgrade if you’re using an older version now. You can download it here.

Thoooms and Paaske is currently working hard on their demo for the competition at 18 O’clock. This is the first time they have an entry for the competition — it’s gonna be exciting to see how it is received. We haven’t seen or heard much from the other demogroups this year. There’s a couple of guys from hybrisNEMESIS and that’s about it — everybody seams to be playing Counter-Strike or something like that :-/ It’s a real shame that The Party has degenerated into this. Last year they were able to open all three halls, but not this year: the big hall 3 is closed because there’s too few people here. So hall 1 where I sit with Thoooms and Paaske is filled with gamers. There’s a constant noise from people blowing eachother up, the noise used to come from people playing scene-music.

But then again — let’s not judge this party before it’s over. We still haven’t seen this years demos, so we might still be surprised.

No support for transparent PNG images?

A PNG image with alpha While being in Aalborg I’ve had the chance to see what GimpsterDotCom looks like in browsers other than Mozilla. In particular Internet Explorer… It turns out, that GimpsterDotCom looks somewhat funny in that browser because it doesn’t support transparent PNG images. I’m talking about the black edges around the rounded corners — Internet Explorer blends the images agains a black background when it should have used the red backgroundimage instead.

I’ve put an image that illustrate this on the right. If the browser supports PNG images with antialiasing, then you should see a blue square with a Greek alpha in it. The image is very blurred and this blur is transparent so that you can see the (white) background through.

This is ridiculous! All major browsers except Internet Explorer can handle alpha-blended PNG images — my father uses the Opera browser and it displays the pages without any problems. The PNG format is a well-established, open standard but Microsoft cannot be bothered to implement support for it, it seams… The strange thing is, that the version of Internet Explorer for Machintosh fully supports PNG images. It handles gamma correction and transparency beautifully. Perhaps the guys responsible for the Windows version of Internet Explorer should talks some more with the Machintosh division…

You can read more about the PNG image format at the PNG homepage and at W3C. –Martin Geisler

Nice, Christmas presents…

I got a lot of nice presents yesterday: books, a good salt- and peberset, a sweater, and a headset for my telephone. Two of the books were by Leif Davidsen and contains five of his best stories. I haven’t read anything by this author yet, but my mom tells me that he is good, so I’m sure there’ll be a spot for the books in my collection of GoodBooks. I didn’t get the [book][2] I wrote about a couple of days ago, but then I’ll have to buy it myself or hope that I’ll get for my birthday which is just four weeks away…

I haven’t tried the headset for my phone yet, but I’ll give it a go as soon as I get back to [Skejbygård][] again. The problem is that I cannot use my keyboard when I talk with my dad — it’s very annoying to sit and type with only one hand! With the headset I should have total freedom to roam my room when talking with people, I’ll be able to do the dishes while talking :-)

Now that I’ve got a beautiful salt- and pebberset from Rosendahl I’ll be able to throw away my old set. The old set was just a cheap plastic set and you had to be very careful not to pull off the top when using it — Jesper Klintø will be delighted when he hears that he wont have to use the set again :-) –Martin Geisler

[2]: [ISBN:0201700735 | http://isbn.nu/0201700735