Martin Geisler Online

I’m currently waiting for the Opening Ceremony here at The Party 2002. They’ve just fired a bunch of fireworks (prematurely?) so the air is thick with gun-powder or something like that… The good thing about this is, that it makes the laser beams show up nicely in the air :-) -Martin Geisler

Christmas Eve is coming quick now — just one day to go! I’ve made a lot of wishes this year, including ”The C++ Programming Langauge” by Bjarne Stroustrup; ISBN:0201700735, so that I can learn some C++. I’ve played with C++ before, see my entry for [/2001/10/29/], but it’s never been much. With this book, then there’s no excuse for me not to learn and use the language. And now that the The Party. I’ve been in Aalborg the last two days, but today I went back with my father to [Skejbygård][] in Århus to pick up my computer and Grandma. Everything should be ready for The Party — I have the ticket, my computer, an inflatable madras, and ear-plugs. Now I just need some CocaCola :-) I read on http://www.theparty.dk/ that the visitors consumed over 27.000 litres of Cola last year, and I’m sure that number will increase again this year… -Martin Geisler

!!!Adding redirects

Now that I’ve moved the WikiWikiWeb to a PhpWiki:PrettyWiki (see also [/2002/12/06/]) there was just one small glitch left: the first link on [Google:Martin Geisler] still points to =/phpwiki/index.php/~Martin Geisler=… The problem is, that this URI still works, and so Google wont remove the page from it’s database.

I’ve now made PhpWiki send out a =HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently= header whenever someone tries to access the WikiWeb using the old URL. I’ve simply added these eight lines to the top of =/phpwiki/index.php=:

if (substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 0, 8) == ‘/phpwiki’) {
  /* This skips past ‘/phpwiki’ and possibly also over
   * ‘/index.php’ if it is present: */
  $url = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 19);
  header(’HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently’);
  header(’Location: http://’ . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . ‘/wiki/’ . $url);
  exit;
}

You can read about the HTTP/1.1 standard in RFC:2616. This should ensure that Google updates it’s links the next time it traverses GimpsterDotCom.

I’ve finally managed to get the PhpWiki:PrettyWiki concept to work here at GimpsterDotCom. The idea is, that the URLs used to access the WikiWikiWeb should look like

http://www.gimpster.com/wiki/SomePage/SomeSubPage

instead of

http://www.gimpster.com/phpwiki/index.php/SomePage/SomeSubPage

I’ve been playing with the settings in index.php for some time now, but today I made it work. The necessary changes turned out to be:

ini_set('include_path', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . ‘/phpwiki’);
if (!defined(’SCRIPT_NAME’)) define(’SCRIPT_NAME’, ‘/wiki’);
if (!defined(’DATA_PATH’)) define(’DATA_PATH’, ‘/phpwiki’);
if (!defined(’PHPWIKI_DIR’)) define(’PHPWIKI_DIR’, $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . ‘/phpwiki’);

The file /wiki is then a symbolic link to /phpwiki/index.php. If you discover any problems with this new URL-scheme, then please mail me.

Or something like that :-) I’ve just bought a ticket to The Party 2002, subtitled “The Party of Your Life”. I’ll be going with Thomas Mølhave and a friend of his, Christian. This is the second year in a row that I’ll be at The Party — last year was my first, and I was very impressed by the demos I saw.

The focus of The Party has shifted gradualy through the years from hardcore demo-making to people playing games, simply because there’s so many more gamers out there than sceners. And this year is no exception: the prizes for the scene competitions (compos) are much lower than for the game compos… The first price in scene compos is € 1000, but the first price in the game compos is € 4000. It doesn’t matter much for me, for I wont win either price, but it’s still sad that there’s fewer and fewer people who make demos.

In case you don’t know what a “demo” is, then I would suggest that you download the awesome Back to BASICs WiLD demo from http://www.hybrisNEMESIS.com/. -[Martin Geisler][4]

That is not an ordinary demo, it is a WiLD demo, which basicly has to do with the fact that it is prerendered. If you want to see a real demo try checking http://www.pouet.net/ . The demo “vip2″ listed in the “top 10 prods” bar on the lower left is cool. -Thomas Mølhave

!!!Problems with MySql — a solution is underway

There’s been some problems with the MySql server that holds the data for this WikiWikiWeb lately — some of you have probably seen this error when you tried to access the site:

• DB Error: unknown error

• (LOCK TABLES phpwiki_page WRITE, phpwiki_version WRITE, phpwiki_link WRITE, phpwiki_recent WRITE, phpwiki_nonempty WRITE ~[nativecode=1017 ** Can't find file: './gimpster/phpwiki_page.frm' (errno: 24)])

I’ve just received a mail from NetSite where they tell me that a new server is on it’s way, and that they have found a temporary solution to the problem. And indeed it seams that things are working again now, since I can write this piece of news.

Hohoho! It’s christmas again, and GimpsterDotCom has been dressed up for the event with a snowy background and red colours all around.

It was particularly easy for me to change the background this year, because the little images that make the rounded corners are alpha-blended [PNG][] images. The [PNG][] format is truly great: it supports 8-bit alpha-channels, which makes it possible to have real antialiasing that work on any background. My images blend from white to transparent, not from white to say blue as the old GIF images did. So when I change the background colour, then the antialiasing still works. [PNG][] images also compress better than GIF and the format is open and free of ugly patents, something which cannot be said about GIF images.