Martin Geisler Online

Having just read the very interesting and throughout explaination by Michel Fortin of his problems with the WordPress filters when trying to get [PHP Markdown][] right, I think it’s amazing that it works at all!

His experience together with the recent discussion started by Denis de Bernardy about the plugin system (and specifically the hooks offered to plugins) seems to suggest that the whole system could use some rethinking. (And when doing so, then please document it! :-)

I’ve installed a couple of cool plugins for WordPress on my site:

• The Subscribe to Comments plugin lets you do exactly that: subscribe to new comments on specific posts. It’s enabled by default — but you of course have the choice to opt-out at any moment. Please let me know if you find the notifications helpful or not, or if you would rather see an opt-in solution instead.

• A simple Permalink Redirect plugin that will enforce the structure of my permalinks. Right now it only handles the permalinks of posts, but I hope to see it updated to support pages as well.

• Finally a little funny plugin: WP-GoogleStats keeps track of when the Googlebot pays my humble site a visit. You can see the time of the last visit at the bottom of each page.

Tell me what you think of the new plugins!

A little late, but still: I finally got to see Star Wars Episode III last friday — it was dark and it was good.

We finally get to see the fall of Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader — which is driven by love and fear of loss. Even though one sees how he strugles with the choice between the Light and the Dark Side, then the outer transition was a little quick for my taste: at one moment Anikin is in dispair, and in the next he pledges his loyalty to the Dark Side.

Seeing the film was a bit strange, for even though there were some twists and turns in the plot that surprised me, it was somewhat constrained by the three following films — there was a lot of things that just had to happen. For example, you knew that Anikin Skywalker had to become Darth Vader, that Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia had to be born, and lots of other things, including the rise of the Empire towards the end when things go really bad.

I liked the style of the film, and I really enjoyed how the design of the space ships and the uniforms changed to become more like what we see in the fourth episode, “A New Hope”. It was a nice feeling of déjà vu. The other clues and small comments shattered throughout the film were also a nice touch.

All-in-all I will say that the seing the film is a must for anybody who has seen the other films. With it the final piece of the story has been filled in and the saga is complete.

Yesterday I committed some documentation updates for the [PEL][], my little pet project for reading and writing EXIF metadata using PHP.

Even though the project has been living a quiet life the last three months, people seem to download it and hopefully also use it. Please let me know (leave a comment here for example…) if you are using PEL so that I can make a link from http://pel.sf.net/ to your project.

I spend much of my time and energy running around today… of course I didn’t just do it for the fun of it: I tried to catch trains.

It started in the morning when I left a little late. I still imagined that I would have time to run over to the bus stop — but no — the bus had left when I got there. At that point I was rather exhausted, but still I wanted to catch my train. It takes about 15 minutes to go from either my apartment or the bus stop to the train station. But having wasted some minutes running to the bus stop I was now seriously running out of time.

Half running, half walking, and feeling very dead I finally got to the train station, and finally found the right train after having been on a wrong platform at first. Stéphanie had left a little after me and had gone the direct way to the train, and luckily she was there to greet me when I entered the train.

During the ~30 minutes it takes for the train to reach Zürich I slowly regained my breath…

Then on my way home I wanted to print something, but the printer was just sitting there doing nothing (again)… Eventually I decided to leave it alone and head for the train station.

Running all the way it takes a little more than five minutes from IFW building of the [ETH][] to the station. I was lucky with the traffic lights, they turned green just as I got to the sidewalk, so I had a free run all the way. When I finally arrived at the platform (choosing the right one this time) I saw the train… it was leaving! It was a matter of mere seconds — I was so close to making it.

I went shopping in half hour I had to kill, before I finally got on the train, heading back to Aarau. What a day!