Martin Geisler Online

I’ve been working on a new library for PHP which will allow you to edit the EXIF headers found in most JPEG images produced by modern digital cameras. And I’m proud to present the result: PEL.

PEL is a library written in 100% PHP 5, and it can currently parse JPEG files and parse any EXIF headers found within the file. The EXIF headers can be changed at will, and they can be turned back into a byte stream, which can be saved as a valid JPEG image.

As far as I know, then this is the first library besides libexif to feature full read/write support for EXIF. Version 0.1 features most of the intended functionality, but the API is still subject to change. Interested parties should go to the development mailinglist and discuss the API, suggestions are very welcome! Also, remember to use the SourceForge trackers found on the project page to report problems.

It’s been really quiet around here at GimpsterDotCom lately… or at least I haven’t updated the site. Some other people have spend some time fooling around, but there’s also a new entry to the RecentChanges page, so it’s not all bad. I hope I’ve cleaned up the site, but if I’ve missed something, then please tell me or remove the cruft yourself. The latter will be very much appreciated, just edit the page, and remove whatever nonsense the WikiVandal has put in.

Today is birthday of my littlebrother Kristoffer — congratulations! He’s turning 17… only one year left until he can get a drivers license and other fun things, and, if he’s unlucky, military service.

And on a totally unrelated note: somebody stole an hour of my time today! I woke up, and at some point during the day I noticed that my computer clock was an hour ahead of my wrist-watch clock. “Strange” I thought… my computer should be synchronized using NTP against some Danish timeservers. So it should be accurate to within ±15 ms of UTC time.

(If your computer isn’t already doing so, then it ought to start using NTP right away. Install a NTP client and make it synchronize against pool.ntp.org. That DNS name will resolve into one of over a hundred different public timeservers from all over the world, see http://www.pool.ntp.org/.)

And indeed my compter was right: we’ve just switched to summertime in Denmark (and probably the rest of the EU if I’m not mistaken) and therefore we all have to live with a Sunday with only 23 hours.

Sorry about the lack of news lately… I’ve had my mind on so many other things. The most important thing in my life now is Stéphanie — my girlfriend. We’ve just spend two wonderful days in Aalborg with my mom and dad and in general we just try to spend as much time together as possible!

I’m having holidays right now — no less than two weeks off! This is because of the new quarter system they’ve made for the natural sciences department where we’re going to have a break in the middle of the semester for our quarter exams. But I’m still having the good old semester courses, so I don’t have any exams now, and hence I have two weeks with nothing to do except enjoying myself!

[][Debian] Right now I’m about to install [Debian][] on Stéphanies laptop — she’s already using SuSE but, frankly, I cannot figure out how their package system works… it looks very similar to the RPM-thing RedHat uses, with the same dependency problems. That’s what I like most about Debian: you don’t have to dig around on the web to find the right packages to satisfy the dependencies, for all the packages that depend on each other are usually right there next to each other on the same server and so APT can figure it out automagically. I know that there’s similar things for RPM packages, but I don’t want to use a lot of time to figure it out, I want something I’m familiar with.

That’s it for now — see you all later!

-Unknown, seen at the blackboard infront of the toilets at DAIMI.