Martin Geisler Online

I’ve rewritten PHP Weather, so that it uses objects. And it actually works, so I think we’re almost done for version 2. You can download it here.

I sent a mail to the maillinglist, but here it is as well:

I’ve also tried to write some documentation for the new version, which is included in the tarball. I used a php-script called PHPDoc. It works by reading comments in the code, and then build HTML-pages with that information.

It’s not finished yet, but I think we’re getting really close now. The main advantages of this structure is:

• It is easy to add support for new database-engines. Basically they just have to support three methods: insert_metar(), update_metar() and get_metar().

  I’ve made a database-engine called ‘none‘ which doesn’t do anything, and one called ‘mysql‘ which is fully working. I hope that someone will write an engine for PostgreSQL, dbm etc.

• The translators are able to override the output-routines, if that is necessary. And at the same time, most languages only need to translate the English language-file, just like old times :-)

  I’ve made an English language-file. It’s probably missing some strings, since I changed the keys in the $strings-array quite a bit while I was coding. When a string is missing, PHP complains about an undefined index. If you get such an error, then please report it to this list.

I know that there’s still some problems with getting it to work under PHP3, which should be solved. We’ll have to try and identify the cause of these problems, and then make a fix.

So, what do you think? Is it any good? Please report any failures and successes you get — thanks.

I’ve now been using Debian for about three weeks. And I like it :-) It’s a little confusing in the beginning, but now I feel that I understand most of it.

The package-management system is just great, after you get used to it. I run the unstable branch, called Woody, and this means that the packages are updated quite often. And when they do, they sometime break! At one point BBDB stopped working in Gnus. It was strange, since I didn’t remember messing with it. But one or two days later a new version appeared, and when I installed it, the problem went away. So with Debian you really get the chance to try out the vary latest software. So far, this has been the only incident of this sort. I hope they watch more carefully before they make a new version of something important, say lilo :-)

I’m also eagerly awaiting a new version of Mozilla. I’m currently using M18, but they’ve already made both a version 0.7 and 0.8. But so far, there hasn’t been made any debs. The same goes for Enlightenment. I haven’t compiled the new E17 yet, because I don’t want to mess-up my new tidy system. But I’ll probably do it after all, when it’s useful for everyday work.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading for Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. I’m going to the LinuxForum 2001 conference, together with Cookie and Tais.

I’m really excited about this, and expect to bring home loads of merchandice: t-shirts badges etc :-) It’ll be great! Apart from this, there’s also some very interesting talks. I recently switched to Debian, so I look forward to hear the talks about this. But there will also be talks about a lot of other interesting subjects.

Cookie told me, that they had spoken to Raster about having him speak at the conference! Judging from the news on his homepage, he would probably have spoken about “his new toy”: Evas. This would have been awesome — to have met this incredible talented guy… Wow. But they found out, that they didn’t have an empty slot for him, so he won’t be there. What a shame!

Yesterday I finally got my soundcard working again, after I switched to Debian. I really didn’t understand what the problem was, because the card was found without problems when I booted. But when I tried to play some sound using XMMS, I was told to check that my sound-card was properly configured etc…

The problem turned up to be that I didn’t have read-write permission to the soundcard. I think it would have been nice, if XMMS would have told me that. In fact, it was only because I was playing with the Open Media System DVD PLayer that I got the idea to look at the permissions. OMS complained to me that it didn’t have permission to access my DVD drive. So I had a look at it, and surely enough:

gimpster:~# ls -l /dev/hda brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   0 Nov 30 16:22 /dev/hda

At the same time I had a look at the permissions for the sound-card. When those were fixed also, I had sound!

OMS works great, if it were not for the poor performance I get on my NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS. The playback isn’t smooth, and you can hear some clicks in the audio. But I’m sure it’ll get better when they make some code for my card, like they’ve done for Matrox cards.

I’ve spend the last few days installing Debian, and it’s been just great! But it’s also been a long process.

I started by making a test-installation on my brand new harddisk. I then kompiled a new kernel, version 2.4.1 with support for ReiserFS. I’ve wanted to try out the new kernel for a long time, so this was the perfect time to try it out. ReiserFS works just beautifully. It’s noticably faster that Ext2fs, especially when doing a diskcheck after a power-loss. And because it’s a journalizing filesystem, it’s much better than Ext2fs at recovering files.

I also spend a lot of time getting used to Debian. The filesystem is organized slightly different than what I was used to from Redhat. I think this is because Debian follows the directions laid out by FHS (The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard).

One thing that’s easy to get used to, is apt-get. This is simply a fantastic program. If you need anything, you just write apt-get install anything as root, and it works. And it’s extra nice to use when you have fast internet-connection like I do :-)