Martin Geisler Online

Finally, a new version of PEL — get it before your neighbor! Pick your favorite:

• pel-0.9.1.tar.bz2 (299 KiB),
• pel-0.9.1.tar.gz (442 KiB), or
• pel-0.9.1.zip (612 KiB).

The release notes follow:

Added setExif(), getExif(), and clearExif() methods as a convenient and recommended way of manipulating the Exif data in a PelJpeg object. Improved PelEntryTime to deal with timestamps in the full range from year 0 to year 9999. Removed PelTag::getDescription() because the descriptions were out of context. A new example demonstrates how to resize images while keeping the Exif data intact. Added a Japanese and updated the French and Danish translations.

That was the executive summary, there’s a bit more detail about the changes below:

• The constructors of PelJpeg and PelTiff can now take an argument which is used for initialization. This can be a filename (equivalent to calling loadFromFile()), a PelDataWindow (equivalent to load()). The PelJpeg constructor will also accept an image resource.

• Added PelJpeg::setExif(). This method should always be used in preference to PelJpeg::insertSection() and PelJpeg::appendSection(). One should actually not be using appendSection() unless one is very sure that the image has not been ended by a EOI marker.

• Added PelJpeg::getExif(). This method is the new preferred way of obtaining the PelExif object from a PelJpeg object. Updated the examples and code to make use of it.

• An example of how to resize images while keeping the Exif data intact is given in resize.php.

• The PelTag::getDescription() method is no more. The descriptions were taken directly from the Exif specification and they were often impossible to translate in a meaningful out of context because they had references to figures and tables from said specification.

• Fixed bug in edit-description.php which still called the constructor of PelIfd in the old pre-0.9 way.

• Updated documentation of PelIfd to make it clearer that it can be used as an array because it implements the ArrayAccess SPL (Standard PHP Library) interface.

• Added Japanese translation by Tadashi Jokagi.

• Update by David Lesieur of the French translation.

• Rewrote entry for version 0.9 in NEWS to highlight the API incompatible changes made from version 0.8.

• Renamed test.php to run-tests.php and implemented a simple search functionality for finding the SimpleTest installation.

• Rewrote make-release.sh script to work with Subversion.

Finally, if you insist, then go read the full ChangeLog, there’s lots of good stuff in this release :-)

Yes, we got the answer today: we can move to a 90 m² big apartment in Sabro on the first of March 2007. The 34 m² we have now is simply too small for two people with a lot of stuff — there’s no place to put the damn things! So we’re both looking so much forward to moving to a bigger place… :-)

Things we can now finally buy since we have the space for them:

• A dish washer! I’m really tired of washing up all the time, and so it Stéphanie

• A full-height refrigerator/freezer. Right now we only have a half-height refrigerator with a small box for some ice cream.

• Dance Dance Revolution pads to play StepMania :-) Out in Sabro there’s no one living below us, so we can jump up and down as much as we want…

• More things to come as we think of them :-)

Thomas recently compiled Firefox 2 here on DAIMI, so I gave it a go. My impressions so far have been good overall: switching between tabs is significantly faster than before as is scrolling through, say, The Planet. The machines here only have 512 MiB of RAM, and Firefox 2 seems to handle that better than before. The built-in spell checker is also very nice, but why did we have to wait until 2006 (almost 2007) before browsers shipped with a spell checker by default? That’s just ridiculous!

There is one change in Firefox 2 which I don’t like at all — they changed the close buttons on the tabs. Now there are individual close buttons on each tab. This is apparently a great achievement, they even mention is as one of the new great features of Firefox?! I find it truly annoying to have to search for the button I want to push when I want to close a tab. With Firefox 1.5 the button was always in the same spot so I could click it several times in a row to close several tabs quickly. With Firefox 2 I have to move the mouse around when closing multiple tabs.

Luckily it’s easy to change: open the URL about:config and find the setting browser.tabs.closeButtons. Change the value to 3 and you’re back to the sane pre-Firefox 2 setting.