Martin Geisler Online

Tonight we’re having a netparty at Aalborghus. People are shooting each other to pieces in games like Half-Life Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament.

I’ve been showing off Linux with Enlightenment and EFM — after I upgraded my computer, things look more beautiful than ever. 900 MHz makes life sweet :-)

My upgrade is finally completed, take a look at my new system here. The new 900 MHz AMD Athlon is running like a dream. Linux just booted with the new processor on the new motherboard, and then everything worked. Windows (yes, I have a Windows partition — I use it for watching DVD movies on my 201P10) used about 3 minutes to find all the motherboard resources. Then I had to restart… :-) Linux just ran without a restart.

Now that my system is quite powerful, the only thing I’ll need to make it complete, is a NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra. I’m just not sure that I want to shell out the money. The card costs more that my CPU!

After the enormous success I’ve had with my announcement of PHP Weather, I decided to make a Freshmeat announcement of PHP Shell as well.

So, if you need a shell wrapped in a PHP script, then download PHP Shell at once.

PHP Weather has been improved again. New features include:

• You can now choose between using a DBM database, a MySQL database or not at all for your METARs. This was added by Jeffrey Y. Sue.

• The pretty_print_metar() functions now reports all available cloud layers.

• If the current weather-conditions are reported by the station, then that information will show up in the pretty_print_metar() function. I have learned a new thing because of that: it actually rains in Honolulu, Hawaii. But not as often as where I live, in Aalborg, Denmark :-)

  Also, if the station reports that there was a “trace” of precipitation, it will be part of the output.

• There is also a bug-fix that prevented PHP Weather from running on PHP3. I had used the new array_shift() function, but it is only available in PHP4. So i rewrote that piece of code using functions also present in PHP3.

• Fix for some broken reports that miss the time-part. If it’s not present we add the current time to the metar. It might not be the time the report was made, but the report was broken anyway :-)

You should really upgrade — it wont break things, just make them work a little better :-)

My AMD Athlon 900 MHz has arrived and so has the Asus A7V motherboard complete with 128 MB PC133 RAM. I decided that it would be better not to buy 256 MB RAM after the prices suddenly sky-rocketed. About a month ago the prices rose about 125$ for 256 MB. But fortunately the Athlons dropped in price, so now I can afford a 900 MHz instead of a 850 MHz.

That’s all very nice, but after I had replaced the old motherboard and CPU, the machine wouldn’t boot. It crashed mysteriously every time. Then I looked though the BIOS — everything looked fine, it had detected the correct processor, RAM, etc. But when I looked at the “Hardware Monitor” section I found the culprit. The processor was getting hotter and hotter every second! The temperature rose with about 1 degree Celsius per second. And this was when the computer was completely idle. I watched the temperature go from 35 to 75 degrees Celsius (from 95 to 167 degrees Fahrenheit) in a very short time. Not a pleasant sight. So now I’ve ordered a new cooler for the Athlon, a “Titan Socket A Cooler (Golden Orb)” from Thermaltake. So lets hope that can keep it cool.