24th September 2003, 12:58 am
Some of you may have noticed that GimpsterDotCom were down for some hours
yesterday — it wasn’t my fault this time :-)
The problem was a complete lack of power in the eastern part of Denmark
including the southern of Sweden. The blackout started with a Swedish
powerplant and then spread to all of southern Sweden. The two major Danish
islands Fyn and Sjælland are connected to a Nordic electrical grid so when
the voltage droppen in Sweden, then it also affected those parts of
Denmark. GimpsterDotCom is hosted by NetSite which is located in Brøndby
on Sjælland so my server went down together with everything else over
there — I live in Århus in Jutland which weren’t affected.
12th September 2003, 01:39 am
The WikiWikiWeb section of GimpsterDotCom were offline yesterday and part
of today because of a stupid typo somewhere in the code that I couldn’t
find. I know that some people looked for my PHP Tutorial in vain —
sorry, but it’s back now.
I was trying to patch my already patched version of PhpWiki with a bit of
code made by Janus Tøndering which should give me a simple file based
user authorization system. The patch applied fine, no problem there and
everything worked on my local system.
But when I uploaded the changes, then something went wrong, I don’t know
exactly what. I tried to remove the patch and restore the code to working
order, but the error just wouldn’t go away!
So I’ve now checked out a fresh copy of PhpWiki from CVS and applied my own
patches and fixes as needed plus the patch from Janus. Everything
seams to be working now, except that the authentification system won’t
validate the users I’ve created — I’ll have to look at it some more for
it’s rather simple and should work. When I get it working, then you’ll be
able to get an account here at GimpsterDotCom so that you can edit the
pages, just let me know.
8th September 2003, 11:37 pm
Things are back to normal after my long warm summer
break, I’m having lectures and classes as usual… except that our
assignments are pretty easy right now because we’ve just started with
Standard ML of New Jersey which is a pretty cool language. You can
see me reading in our fine textbook Elements of ML Programming on the
right.
The image is one of the better images I’ve taken with my new Sony DSC-V1
camera. I took it using the self-timer on a bright summer morning a couple
of weeks ago. As one can tell, then there wasn’t a single cloud on the sky
— I ate my breakfest outside and played a little with the camera before
I headed for DAIMI.
I’ve already taken over 800 images in the three weeks I’ve had it, but I’ve
“only” kept 280 of them for the rest were either boring (lots of test shots
of my room), badly shaken because I’ve experimented with slow shutter
speeds in low-light conditions or out of focus. But I believe I’m getting
better as I practice more and more. The huge amount of images has made me
think of making a program that can be used categorize the image. The
program should be able to parse the EXIF headers that my camery
embeds in the JPEG images and also be able to associate arbitrary keywords
with each image. The program should probably also be able to do the copying
of the images from the camery to the harddisk, for it’s important that the
program gets to the images before they’re rotated or altered with other
programs. The problem is that programs like the GIMP and feh
remove the headers when they re-save the image. This is kind of annoying
for the headers contain a lot of information about the shot, most
importantly the date and time that could be used to sort the images nicely
into monthly folders.
I guess that I’ll have to make some sort of image gallery here at
GimpsterDotCom, but the images are huge — 2 MiB JPEG from the camera. I
can probably bring them down to between 50-100 KiB by resizing them to
800×600 pixels (from the huge 2592×1944 pixel image the camera delivers)
and compressing them harder, but that’s still between 10 and 20 MiB with
200 images! I’ve only got 15 MiB left of my quota here at GimpsterDotCom
(where did the other 85 MiB go?) so I’ll have to clean up first or put the
images somewhere else, such as DAIMI or something like that.