Martin Geisler Online

I’ve added a bunch of XML-RPC services for [WordPress][] to ping when I make new content here. Until now I’ve just been using the default Ping-O-Matic server which sends my pings along to 12 other services — I now have 28 more services on my list to ping!

I wonder how long it’s going to post something now… I’ll be able to tell in a second when I post this :-)

I’ve been playing with E17 lately — the next version of the Enlightenment window manager — and it’s coming along very quickly. A couple of months ago you could compile it and run it, but nothing fancy would happen. Windows could be moved around, they could be minimized and maximized but that was about it.

Things have changed a lot since then — E17 has now reached level of functionality that makes it very usuable and of course it’s looking great! This has always been the one of the unique features of Enlightenment: they make their stuff look good. And now that we have functionality to back the eye-candy we actually have something which isn’t just a tech-demo! :-)

Eh… about the code… Lately we’ve seen the focus policies from E16 being ported and a set of key- and mouse-bindings have been introduced, all changable via IPC. My patch adds three new actions to the list: move_relative, move_absolute, and resize. After binding those to suitable keys you’ll be able to move and resize your windows using the keyboard only.

After I began using Fluxbox some time ago I realized that I couldn’t live without keyboard control over my windows, so now we have it in Enlightenment too. In my setup I’ve bound the actions as follows (this is a shell script):

er=enlightenment_remote
$er -binding-key-add ANY Left  'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '+0 *'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Right 'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '-0 *'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Up    'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '* +0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Down  'SHIFT|CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_absolute' '* -0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Left  'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '-20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Right 'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '+20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Up    'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '0 -20'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Down  'CTRL|ALT' 0 'move_relative' '0 +20'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Left  'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '-20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Right 'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '+20 0'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Up    'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '0 -20'
$er -binding-key-add ANY Down  'SHIFT|ALT' 0 'resize' '0 +20'

This works very well for me, especially the Shift-Control-Alt-⟨dir⟩ key-combo which I use for quickly pushing windows out of the way. The code is now in CVS even, so if you’re living on the bleeding edge, then do a checkout and give it a try!

Oh, just another thing: when I told Stéphanie about my new interest in Enlightenment she simply replied: “Enlightenment is over… it was something that happened back in the 17 hundreds… you’re so old-fashioned!” :-)

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.

If you’re running a [WordPress][] blog, then please go upgrade now to version 1.5.1.3. A serious security vulnerability has been found in version 1.5.1.2 “Strayhorn” which can lead to remote code execution.

Read the official announcement here.

I was browsing through my old reports from way back in primary and high-school. That brought back some memories… I found lots of short stories from my Danish and English classes — it’s very cute to see a two-page summary of some English text which I now don’t even remember reading :-)

There were also bigger reports among my old stuff: a report from a class excursion to Nordjyllandsværket, our local power plant in Aalborg. Our class also made an excursion to Dansk Eternit where we made tests with breaking their fibre-cement roof elements. I might put those online someday if I can get them converted.

The reports and texts from my primary school days were all written in Microsoft Word — I had not yet seen [the light][LaTeX] back then… :-) During high-school I started using [LaTeX][], and now I’m glad I did: the DVI files still exactly like they did those five years ago!

With the Word files things are a bit more difficult: OpenOffice is able to open them all without problem and the text is there with the correct formatting. The embedded images are also there and OLE stuff like Equation Editor objects and vector drawings from the venerable CorelDRAW are generally there too, although some of them looked a little weird.

There’s also the problem that I no longer have programs like CorelDRAW, so I’m no longer able to edit those images — I have basically reached a dead-end in the upgrade path when I switched to Linux. With programs like MetaPost I don’t have to be afraid of that — it’s free so I’ll have access to MetaPost today, tomorrow and in ten years.

If you’re a normal Windows user, then you might be thinking something along the lines of “What about incompatibilities between new and old versions?” Fear not! Stability is a major concern for people in the LaTeX world (and MetaPost is primarily used with LaTeX). I believe this is so because LaTeX is a tool used for serious stuff where one would actually loose huge amounts of money if something “suddenly” changes. A twenty page document written in Word doesn’t count at serious stuff — a 1000 page book in LaTeX does.

There you want to be absolutely certain that everything looks the same as the first edition when you begin preparing a second edition. So TeX itself is now frozen and all changes to LaTeX are made with much care so as to not disturb existing documents.

Despite the grieves over MS Word it was an enjoyable tour through the good old days!