Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category.
11th June 2004, 11:25 am
I was lying on my couch, taking a nap, when I started
to hear the distinct sound of water pouring down — lots of water pouring
down — outside my window.
I’ve always liked it when it is raining heavily, it’s very cosy to sit
indoor with some hot tea (or hot chocolate… umm!) and look out on the
rain. It’s perfect weather to code in, too!
On the right you’ll see a small crop of a screenshot. I’ve been using
gDesklets for some time now, and I have a great pile of them to the
right on my desktop. They are nice eye-candy and also a little bit
useful. If only Enlightenment would understand that the 12 little
windows should be left out of my tab-list, then I would be really happy.
I hope that DR16.7 has support for the hints sent out by the desklets —
I haven’t tried it yet since it’s still in pre-release and nobody seems to
have packaged it for [Debian][]. I’ve thought about using another window
manager, but I’m very fond of Enlightenment, especially how it chooses to
place new windows: I can predict fairly well where the new window will be
opened because I’ve been using it for so long.
Hmm… I’ve been using Enlightenment from the very first time I installed
GNU/Linux, so I must have been using it for five years now. Wow! That is
one of the greatest things about GNU/Linux: you can keep using your
programs for years because they are reliable — of course there has been
updates to Enlightenment during the years, but basically it has just
worked, just like my favorite program: [Emacs][] which quickly becomes your
reliable, quick, familiar friend. You know that it wont suddenly stop
working, you know that will display your files tomorrow as it did today.
When I see people working in programs like MS Word I often have a hard
time understanding why they put up with it? They want to move some text
around in their huge report — Word decides to change the font during the
move. They want take their finished report with then to their university
department and print it there — Word decides to change the margins (or
is it the papersize?) during the move, making all their efforts in
avoiding poor page breaks irrelevant.
Anyway… enough ranting about the deficiencies of MS Word — I’m of
course using [LaTeX][] which may look strange when you sees it for the
first time, but will later save you huge amounts of time and spare you of
many frustrations, and give your papers a very professional look.
During the storm I saw a funny coincidence: I have the PSI-Weather
desklet running on top of the psi-alt-uptime desklet, and that gives
the funny impression that Tux is being hit by the lightning. I didn’t do
it on purpose — honest!
9th June 2004, 07:51 pm
I’ve released my favorite project — the PHP EXIF Library — once again.
This time the focus is on making PEL speak other languages than
English. The release notes and a summary of the changes follow.
Notes
The infrastructure for internationalisation has been put in place.
Preliminary translations for Danish, German, French, and Spanish is
included. Support for tags with GPS information were disabled due to
conflicts with a number of normal tags.
Changes
Disabled the code that tries to lookup the title and description of the
GPS related tags, since those tags have the same hexadecimal value as a
number of other normal tags. This means that there’s no support for
tags with GPS information.
Marked strings for translation throughout the source code.
Added German, French, and Spanish translations taken from libexif.
The translations were made by Lutz Müller, Fabian Mandelbaum, and
Arnaud Launay, respectively.
Added Danish translation.
Added new static methods Pel::tra() and Pel::fmt() which are used for
interaction with Gettext. The first function simply translates its
argument, the second will in addition function like sprintf() when given
several arguments.
Updated documentation, both the doc comments in the code and the README
and INSTALL files.
25th May 2004, 05:12 pm
The latest version of PEL sports support for TIFF images and lots of
other improvements. Read the announcement below, and go to the project
page to download it.
Notes
Support was added for parsing TIFF images, leading to a mass renaming of
files and classes to cleanup the class hierarchy. The decoding of EXIF
data is now tested against known values (over 400 individual tests), this
lead to the discovery of a couple of subtle bugs. The documentation has
been updated and expanded.
Changes
Renamed all files and classes so that only EXIF specific code is
labeled with Exif. So, for example, PelExifIfd is now PelIfd, since
the IFD structure isn’t specific to EXIF but rather to TIFF images. The
same applies to the former PelExifEntry* classes.
Fixed offset bug in PelDataWindow::getBytes() which caused the method
to return too much data.
Added support for the SCENE_TYPE
tag.
Fixed display of integer version numbers. Version “x.0″ would be
displayed as just version “x” before.
Unit tests for EXIF decoding. PEL is now tested with an image from a
Sony DSC V1 and one from a Canon IXUS II.
Changed all occurrences of include_once()
to require_once()
since
the files are indeed required.
Updated documentation all over.
16th May 2004, 03:18 pm
The PHP EXIF Library (PEL) is getting better and better, and version
0.2 was released today — go grab it if you want to play with it.
Notes
This release brings updated documentation and better support for the EXIF
user comment tag and tags containing version information. The code is now
tested using SimpleTest.
Changes
All PelExifEntry descendant classes now use setValue()
and
getValue()
methods consistently.
Signed and unsigned numbers (bytes, shorts, longs, and rationals) are
now handled correctly.
The SimpleTest (http://sf.net/projects/simpletest) framework is used
for regression testing.
Added new PelExifEntryUserComment class to better support the EXIF
user comment tag.
Added new PelExifEntryVersion class to support the EXIF tags with
version information, namely the EXIF_VERSION
, FLASH_PIX_VERSION
, and
INTEROPERABILITY_VERSION
tags.
Updated doc comments all over.
12th May 2004, 03:14 pm
Although SourceForge is slow with their updates of the statistics on the
PEL project pages, I hope a few people have taken the oppotunity to
download it. And accourding to the Freshmeat PEL page, then there
has indeed been several hundred visits to either the PEL homepage or
one of the files available at SourceForge for download.
I realize that PEL will have a limited audience the first few months, since
it’s written in the yet-to-be-released version 5 of the PHP.
This version is greatly improved, and I can only encourage people to
download it right away and start playing with it — and why not use
PEL which uses a lot of new PHP5 features. Go download PEL and
play!