Martin Geisler Online

I’ve just recieved a new harddisk — a 45 GB from IBM. I’ll install Debian on this, so I might be offline the next few days. If I don’t reply on your mail, you know why.

Since I’ve started my machine for the second time today, you’ll have to read yet another piece of news… When new-news.sh (the script responsible for making new news) is run, it’s kind of hard for me to cancel the news. This is both good and bad: it forces me to write something, but I may not write something interesting :-)

The same applies for the news-system here at gimpster.com. Originally it was supposed to always show a certain number of news on a page. I should be able to say something like “Give me the news from the past 14 days. If there is no news, then give me the last five pieces of news.”. But I never got to that part, so again this forces me to write something at least once every 14 days.

Why is it that people try to grap gimpster.com with MS FrontPage? (I went to www.microsoft.com to try and find a direct link, but their search-form didn’t work. Lame…) It just won’t work — I use PHP exclusively :-) When people request a missing document, I get a mail like this:

Gimpster.com encountered a 404 Not Found!
$REQUEST_URI: /_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc
$HTTP_REFERER: $REMOTE_ADDR: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
$QUERY_STRING:
$HTTP_USER_AGENT: MSFrontPage/4.0 

The mail is generated by my “404 — Not Found” page. Every time someone makes an invalid request, I recieve a mail. It’s mostly spiders sent out from search-engines, that try to follow old links, who trigger this.

I’ve decided to try and make these updates more often. So I’ve added this command to my ~/.xinitrc-file:

sleep 45 && $HOME/html/gimpster.com/include/news/new-news.sh &

What is does is this: first it sleeps for 45 seconds. After that, it opens Emacs for me — ready to write some news. Let’s hope it works :-)

I’ve just printed a physics-report written in MS Word. It was a group-assignment, so we wrote it in Word, instead of LaTeX, because the other half of the group only use Word.

Not only did Word freeze at least once, but the math produced by the Equation-editor just looks somewhat odd compared to the output produced by LaTeX. The worst thing is probably the spacing. It’s simply wrong in many places. I hope that I won’t have to struggle with Word again for some time :-)