Martin Geisler Online

Now that Christmas is over, I’ve reverted the colors here at gimpster.com to the normal light-blue.

By the way, I’ve made a page with a complete list of all entities defined in HTML 4.01. If your browser doesn’t display all the characters, it simply means that it is somewhat broken. My Netscape 6 shows all the entities, including all the Greek letters, the mathematical symbols and even some of the more weird ones. I must say, that it surprises me a little, since I had no idea, that I had fonts with all these letters and symbols.

It’s been somewhat quiet here at gimpster.com for a while. I haven’t had time to finish the new version of PHP Weather yet, because I’ve been busy doing other things like homework and some paid programming. That’s right — you can actually be paid to program :-) One could arguge that it’s more interesting to program PHP Weather, but it simply pays better to program for other people :-)

The first wave of files were committed to CVS on Friday the 8th of December at 22:52:54 UTC. More will certainly follow in the next couple of weeks and months.

E17 is the next version of Enlightenment. In the last couple of months Raster and Mandrake have been busy making all sorts of new backend-stuff. So far, we’ve only seen the potential of these libraries in glimpses. We’ve seen how evas_test utilized OpenGL to make smooth accelerated graphics, and we’ve seen how Etcher made theme-designing a simple thing. I’ve written more about Etcher and evas_test on my page with screenshots. There you’ll also be able to see a real screenshot of what E17 looks like.

When E17 matures, I’m certain that we’ll see all this power used for something productive. The now gone EFM was such an example of a productive app. It was a test-bed for the new things to come, and by judging from the mails people are sending to the Enlightenment mailling-list, people actually liked it. But it was just a demo! So, when a “simple” demo is so nice, try to imagine how the real thing will be like.

But there is still a long way to go. The big re-write has begun, and when it has finished, we’ll have a perfect mix between Enlightenment and EFM. This beast will be hardware-accelerated and should be able to satisfy everyones need for eye-candy, and still be something you can do work with.

I don’t think that it should be necessary to add, that I’m looking forward to this :-) I don’t have a release-date, because Raster and Mandrake doesn’t want to give any promises. When asked on the maillinglist, they promptly decided to add one week to the release-date, every time someone asked. So when they’re done, they’ll just sit still for a couple of weeks, and then announce the release to the rest of the world. So please don’t ask! It will be finished when it’s done :-)

Since it’s Christmas, I’ve made a little Christmas-screenshot for you. It should help to get everybody into the right mood :-) Go take a look at it here.

I hope you like the new Christmas-look here at Gimpster.com! (If you don’t like it, then don’t worry — Gimpster.com will be back to normal again in the new year. :-)

First I wanted to use an animated gif as a background image. But it simply took too many resources to animate the image! It ran okay on my 900 MHz Athlon, but my fathers 700 MHz didn’t like it. So I just make a static image instead.

The real way to make an animated background would be to use JavaScript, but since I’m not very that good at it, you’ll have to do with the current image.