Martin Geisler Online

I’ll be attending The Party for the first time this year together with thoooms. I’m really looking forward to it — thoooms has told me so many exiting things about it.

I’m thinking about reinstalling my Debian system — they have a local mirror of all major Linux distributions… I also look forward to the many conferences. I’ll let you know how it went when I get home again the 29th December.

I’ve just uploaded my dIntProg-Browser — complete with color-coded sourcecode, Javadoc, and Danish documentation (the Javadoc is in English, and so are the other comments, so you should have a good chance of understand what’s going on.)

I’ve spend three weeks on it, and I’m very pleased with the result. The basic concept in the browser is a box. Some boxes, called flexible boxes, can contain other boxes, whereas some boxes, rigid boxes can’t. But regardless of the type, each box has the responsibility of drawing itself and any child-boxes. That system turned out to work very well. You can actually see the boxes if you run the browser like this:

$ java Browser -d

The flag -d turns debugging on, which makes some of the boxes draw their outline.

I hope someone finds this interesting — it was very interesting for me to try and make a webbrowser, as I’ve worked with HTML for several years now. This time I was the one who had to render the pages, not just design them…

I’ve been making a browser in Java as my final, big assignment in dIntProg — the introductory course in programming we’ve had this first semester. Today we had to demonstrate that we could make simple changes in the source. It wasn’t a real exam, but we had to pass to be allowed to go to the real exam in January.

There was five questions — I made all of them :-) They were all very easy, as the idea with the test is to check that people haven’t cheated and “borrowed” someone else’s source for the browser. If you had written the browser yourself, then they were easy, but if you didn’t know what was going on, the questions would be tricky.

Although it isn’t useful as a general browser, someone might find it interesting, so I’ll release it under the GPL when I’ve packaged it.

I installed Emacs 21 today — when using Debian it’s particularly easy, you just do apt-get install emacs21 :-) I was pleased to find out that Emacs 21 can coexist with Emacs 20. All my setting worked in the new version, and I could even read my mail and news without any problems.

The new Emacs looks different from earlier version — quite different in my opinion. The new version has a toolbar with little images you can click on, it has tooltips all over the place, and it supports inline images and proportional-width fonts. The menus have changed and they are now organized logically that before.

I don’t like the toolbar that much, and I’m tempted to turn off those tooltips. I saw that there is an option, that makes them appear in the minibuffer window instead. I have only used it for a day or so, but I haven’t found any bugs or missing features. Instead I’ve found a lot of new functionality and a lot of new exciting packages.

After waiting for more than two months, I’ve finally on the Internet again — most of the time, that is… The connection is pretty fast when it works, but I’ve had a lot of problems talking to the DHCP server. This has been a general problem for everybody here at Skejbygaard Kollegiet, so it’s not my computer that’s to blame.

But I’ve now downloaded about 2250 emails from my inbox — most of them were from maillinglists. But there were some personal mails amoung them — I’ll answer everything as quickly as possible. I’m sorry that I disappeared from the face of the Internet without a warning. Two months is a long time, and I have several projects that need some attention now (PHP Weather for one…)

That’s it for now!