Martin Geisler Online

The [Debian][] release manager Steve Langasek has announced that Sarge is now frozen! The plan is to make the release at the end of this month.

The announcement was titeled “Release update: editorial changes to the testing propagation scripts” — a nice subtle reference to the General Resolution passed last year which had a similarly innocent-looking title: “General Resolution: Editorial amendments to the social contract”. It was in this GR the Debian developers decided that they don’t want to ship files covered by the GNU Free Documentation License since it violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines (the “invariant sections” made possible by the GFDL are part of the problem, see this page for many more arguments). The problem with banning GFDL material is that many manuals are covered by the license, and many import ones that is, for example all the manuals produced by GNU for Emacs, GCC, etc. So for Etch we will probably have to find those manuals in the non-free section — a little odd IMHO, but this is how things look at the moment.

But let’s not dwell on those points now — Sarge will be here soon and that’s reason for celebration!

I’ve been looking on how to convert my legacy news posts from their PhpWiki format into Markdown so that I can re-publish them here in WordPress. Extracting the text of the wiki-pages and turning them into posts in WordPress is not hard — that’s more or less just a matter of selecting them from one table and inserting them into another.

But converting the wiki markup is harder — I guess that the only thing that can really read the PhpWiki wiki markup is PhpWiki itself, which also kind of makes sence… :-) The problem is that the parser in PhpWiki is quite advanced — it’s not just a dumb line-by-line parser — and I don’t know yet if I can easily use it without having to get the whole PhpWiki system going.

In the end I probably end up doing a quick-and-dirty conversion followed by a manual cleanup sweep through the about 100 old posts. You’ll know when the posts are here by the number of archive links to the right — I should really make them into a select box or something like that…

While moving to mgeisler.net I’ve taken the opportunity to clean my site up: I’ve removed some duplicated images, converted GIF images into the much more pleasing PNG format (except for some smilies distributed with WordPress — I didn’t want to mess to much with the installation, it’s only going to give me problems when I update it later…) and created pages for the Danish stuff which I have available for download.

I hope to be able to convert the missing news from the old PhpWiki site some day, but probably not this weekend though — I also have to do a little bit of work for the ETH :-)

For updating my site I’m now using an excellent tool called sitecopy. With this I can easily and very quickly maintain mgeisler.net as a mirror of the files placed locally on my computer. This is of course done in a secure way using SFTP — it’s soo cool to have a SSH login on your webserver, for there are so many things that suddenly becomes much easier and faster.

As part of the migration from gimpster.com I found an old page of mine where I describe some of the books I own. Back then the plan was that people would click on my links to Amazon, in which my referrer code was put so that I would make lots of money! :-) No such plans this time — here’s just what I wrote about my books:

The LaTeX Companion

Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, Alexander Samarin
Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co; ISBN: 0201541998

This is probably the most comprehensive treatment of LaTeX you’ll find. Although it getting slightly old, it’s still the best reference.

Update: The newly published (April 2004) second edition is completely updated and is much larger. I can highly recommend it for anybody who is serious about learning LaTeX. The book covers a huge number of the available packages for LaTeX in addition to describing the basic commands.

Beginning Linux Programming

Richard Stones, Neil Matthew
Wrox Press Ltd; ISBN: 1861002971

This book covers Linux programming — in all it’s variants from simple shell-scripts to real GTK-programs written in C. I bought it because I (obviously) wanted to learn about programming on Linux, but I found out that it’s not a beginners book. You should at least have some experience with C first, or else you won’t be able really enjoy the code.

There’s also some rather lengthy chapters on terminal I/O, which are somewhat boring — but they will probably come in handy if I some day actually need to know those things. The chapter that was of most immediate use for me was the chapter on shell-scripts, which I still use from time to time.

The C Programming Language

Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
Prentice Hall; ISBN: 0131103628

If you want to learn C, then why not learn it from the guys who invented it? This book describes everything that is to be found in the C language (the original version, not newer versions such as C99).

It introduces all the basics, and continues with things like pointers and arrays. Most of the examples deal with text, so it can be a little boring in the end. You are asked to write programs that can count words, sentences etc…

But overall I think it’s a great book, and a true classic text in computer science. And it’s a little book — not like the modern computer books which all have to be these tomes with at least a thousand pages. Being little, the book keeps its focus well and explains you the C language in a plain and consice way.

Internetworking with TCP/IP, Vol 1: Principles, Protocols and Architecture

Douglas Comer
Prentice Hall PTR; ISBN: 0130183806

This book covers TCP/IP and does a really good job. You get to know all the low-level stuff that makes the Internet work, from different types of networks to all the different protocols used.

It’s a nice book because it manages to explain all these things, and yet it’s still a very readable book. (I’ve read the third edition of the book, but I’m sure that the fourth edition is just as good :-)

PHP3: Programming Browser-Based Applications with PHP

Dave Medinets
McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing; ISBN: 0071353429

This book gives you an introduction to PHP3: You start installing PHP, and then moves on to more daunting tasks…

But unfortunately the book is just an introduction. It just scratches subjects such as object-oriented programming (OO) and XML, but the reason for that might be, that these things weren’t as well supported in PHP3 as they are in PHP4. (And now with PHP5 the book is very quickly becoming obsolete…)

I got the book as a gift, as I was starting to learn PHP. But I must say, that it didn’t teach me that much. The ASCII table in the back is handy, though :-)

Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell

Illiad
O’Reilly UK; ISBN: 156592861X

This is one of the greatest comic-books I’ve ever read. The jokes are about computers, Windows etc — some of them are really hairy :-) But that only make even more fun, when you figure out what they’re talking about.

Highly recommended for everybody who deals with computers, especially if they are into Linux and related things.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide

Douglas Adams
Crown Publications; ISBN: 0517149257

Every nerd has to read this one — or at least give it a try. Before you’ve read it, there’s so many things that you’ll not understand, including the Meaning of Life. After you’ve read it, you’ll know that the answer to the Ultimate Question is ‘42′.

I started reading the book, but only managed to read the first 250 of the 800+ pages. The story-line was just too strange for my taste.