6th July 2005, 05:45 pm
I’ve just arranged to have mgeisler.net upgraded to use PHP version 5 instead of the old version 4. The site will be moved to a new server, but there shouldn’t be any downtime because of that.
I’m not sure if the new PHP5 installation will have support for the old PHP MySQL extension, and if not, [WordPress][] will stop working for a little while. It shouldn’t be long, though, for as far as I understand it, switching to the improved MySQL extension is just a matter of replacing all the mysql_*() function calls with the corresponding mysqli_*() calls.
The secret aim in this is of course to make a demo site for my little [PHP EXIF Library][pel] — I guess one would expect the author of such a library to be the first to use it, and with PHP5 on my server I’ll finally be able to do that.
A couple of hours later: Hmm… that didn’t hurt at all — mgeisler.net is now running on a server with PHP5 and so far everything seems to work just the same as before!
I must say that I’m constantly impressed by the people at NEXCESS.NET who host mgeisler.net — they have responed within the hour to every single support request, be it a small one like giving IP address SSH access, or a bigger one like going from PHP4 to PHP5. I fully agree with the praise given to Greg Swaney here: I’ve never seen better customer service.
5th July 2005, 05:26 pm
Today I had my last exam in this round: the exam was in ePrivacy and I talked about P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences), DAA (Direct Anonymous Attestation), and probably some other acronyms I cannot remember now. I have yet to receive my grade, but I think it went well — I talked non-stop like always and they smiled and nodded along the way :-)
So this was the first batch of exams — I have done three other courses this year, and so will have another three exams some time in September/October. But for the next two months it’s summer holidays! Yah! :-)
4th July 2005, 07:23 pm
I’ve just been to Zürich in an attempt to print the last of the slides for my exam tomorrow — I came home with three sets of slides printing, still missing two sets!
The printers at the [ETH][] at just so unreliable that it’s a joke! They spend most of their time “processing” jobs whatever that means and very little time actually printing! The printer queues are constantly filled up with jobs that have been waiting not just 10-15 minutes but hours! The three sets of slides that I managed to bring home were submitted for printing last Thursday. When I submitted them I waited half an hour for them to print and then decided to go home — it seems that you have to plan for a delay of at least a day when you want to print something. Maybe they do this on purpose in an attempt to limit our use of paper? It’s happened before ya’ know… I don’t think so, but still…
When I got home at half past six I realized that I couldn’t do any shopping here in Aarau/Buchs for all the shops close at — well… — six thirty. Compared to Denmark, then Switzerland has some really silly opening hours for their shops: they like to close around noon so from 11:30 until 14:00 you’re out of luck. On Sundays everything is closed, even the bakery — in Denmark they make the most money on Sundays for this is when people have time to go buy breakfest, but not in Switzerland.
Hmm… I wonder how the opening hours are in other contries around the world? Please leave a comment on this, it will be really interesting to hear a bit about the systems in other contries!
Oh well… letting some steam out helped :-) Now I’ll go eat my pizza and relax for tomorrow…