Martin Geisler Online

Yesterday I went with the rest of Stéphanie’s family to hear the yearly concert by the Harmonie Stalden. It was good! Hearing music live is always a great experience, but to see 50 people playing together in such a smooth way is fantastic. I’ve never been able to understand exactly how the director controls the music — everything seems to go by itself — but I think he did a good job yesterday.

As did all the sololists! The first sololist was on trumpet, and he was great, but I was most excited about the solo by Stéphanie. She played the heavy footsteps of an elephant with her double bass, going “dum-dum dum-dum”. I know it’s silly to write how music sounds, but try to imagine a big elephant in a circus walking around, and it will make a “dum-dum” like sound :-)

I published my first piece of news on by old site gimpster.com five years ago today. I guess it will only be the true old-timers (of which I can only think of Kristian and my dad) who remembers this :-)

Back then I ran gimpster.com which were supposed to be a cool place with information about the GIMPS project. It since turned out that I had lots of other stuff to write about, and I quickly lost interest in the GIMPS forecast service I had planned.

Instead I keps publishing news about what happened and what interested me in my daily life. I also wrote a little tutorial on PHP one day, a script to get current weather information, and placed other more or less interesting (Danish) things online.

That seemed to work quite nicely — people came to visit and were quite happy I think. Or at least my guestbook told me so.

Of course people also sent me suggestions and told me about problems on my site. Now, being the idealist I am and generally interested in new technologies, I switched my site to a WikiWikiWeb running on [PhpWiki][]. That was really nice, for now I could create new pages very easily, and people could fix my spelling errors when they found them. The PhpWiki project is a very active one, and Reini Urban (the main coder) is very talented. Their parser is without doubt the most advanced parser I’ve seen.

So with such killer-software, why would I then switch to [WordPress][]? Because my PhpWiki installation stopped working without warning sometime between Christmas and New Years Eve 2004. The reason was that my — what would be a nice way of putting it? — progressive webhosting company NETsite decided to upgrade to [PHP][] 5. Now don’t get me wrong, I love PHP 5, it’s a much needed improvement over the mess that is PHP 4. I would just have preferred if NETsite would have given its customers a little warning first instead of just upgrading.

When I call PHP 4 a mess, I’m talking about the lack of a clear object-oriented model using reference assignment as the default. Value assignment (a shallow copy is made, I believe) just doesn’t work — and to enable reference assignment you would have to springle your code with lots of & all over the place, and just hope that you haven’t forgotten one.

With PHP 5 my installation of PhpWiki broke. I believe new versions of PhpWiki will run on PHP 5, but since I had modified my (slightly old…) version a bit here and a bit there I couldn’t just upgrade. A couple of weeks went by until I one day in February decided to try WordPress. Despite some initial complains about parse errors with Markdown and problems with special characters, I stuck with WordPress because of it’s blogging facilities. For even though I had a WikiWikiWeb running on my site, I still mostly used my site for publishing news about my life. So a proper blog seems to be what I need, and especially now that I’m in Switzerland so that I can tell people back home how it is here.

Now when I’ve converted the wiki content I will have a complete coverage of the last five years of my life. It’s not that everything in my life is reflected here online, but a significant part is, I guess. Oh, the nostalgia!

Well — see you guys in five years time!

Browsing the access logs of my site is always fun — you never know what you’re gonna find! For example, it appears that people come to my site looking for information about the Microsoft formula (equation) editor.

How strange, for I haven’t been using this clumsy thing in at least 7 years! These days I wouldn’t consider using anything but [LaTeX][] which gives you vastly superious results when typesetting complex formulae.

The example on the right is taken from my old school paper on Mersenne Primes (in Danish), and it shows that if 2^p − 1 is a prime, then p must be a prime too, for if p = rs then we have just seen that 2^s − 1 divides 2^p − 1! Before you ask or look in the source of this page… the inline math was done by hand using ordinary [XHTML][] entities and tags. No fancy [MathML][] markup here! It’s not that I don’t want to, I just haven’t looked that much at MathML yet.

It’s raining… last week the weather was fantastic here in Switzerland with temperatures of more than 25 °C. That’s real summer weather!

But yesterday and today it has been raining all day here in Buchs. Just take a look at the image on the right — that’s the view from our kitchen.

And what is there to do in Switzerland when it’s raining: eat chocolate! :-) Before coming to Switzerland I knew of course that they made lots of good chocolate, but I must say that I didn’t expect to find it in such large quantities. All malls here have an entire wall covered with just chocolate — just great!

While moving to mgeisler.net I’ve taken the opportunity to clean my site up: I’ve removed some duplicated images, converted GIF images into the much more pleasing PNG format (except for some smilies distributed with WordPress — I didn’t want to mess to much with the installation, it’s only going to give me problems when I update it later…) and created pages for the Danish stuff which I have available for download.

I hope to be able to convert the missing news from the old PhpWiki site some day, but probably not this weekend though — I also have to do a little bit of work for the ETH :-)

For updating my site I’m now using an excellent tool called sitecopy. With this I can easily and very quickly maintain mgeisler.net as a mirror of the files placed locally on my computer. This is of course done in a secure way using SFTP — it’s soo cool to have a SSH login on your webserver, for there are so many things that suddenly becomes much easier and faster.