Martin Geisler Online

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.

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.

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.