Martin Geisler Online

I arrived in Switzerland late in the evening yesterday — today was spent buying a table and a shelf in IKEA and unpacking some of my stuff. That’s it for now, I’m terribly tired…

I’ve begun cleaning my room so that I can move out Monday morning. And I must say that I’ve been into some dark corners in my bathroom, corners I didn’t even know I had! But apparently the spiders and general cruft knew about them… :-)

The plan is to pack up the rest of my stuff and clean my room today and tomorrow. Monday morning I’ll hand over the keys to Bjarne, the janitor, and then Stéphanie and I will drive to Aalborg to my parents house. There we will pack the car with the stuff that I want to bring with me to Switzerland, and the next morning we will begin the adventure.

My dad has voluntered to drive me and Stéphanie back, and by driving all day we hope to be able to make it to Aarau late in the evening.

I don’t know how long it will take before I get back online, but don’t expect too much in the first couple of weeks. I’ll be doing an intensive German couse the first ten days, and after that I start at ETH Zürich.

So this is finally it — I’m going to Switzerland! It has been planned now for many months, but it is only now that I’m beginning to realize that I’ll be going away real soon now. It’s nice that I’m finally going, for the last couple of months have had a sort of “temporary” feel to them. I look forward to spending an entire year in Switzerland — that’s pretty long time, long enough to become settled and get a daily life.

Of course Stéphanie and I will have to solve the “international puzzle” again after the year is over, but right now I just cannot wait for my new life to start!

I just took the time to read what Mikkel actually writes on his little corner of Cyberspace:

• Analysis 1 (Real, unreal and surreal analysis)

There are some real gems hidden on that page… :-)

So, Kristian also decided to move his blog to WordPress: http://zianet.dk/blog/ — the link in the sidebar is updated! He has his old posts there too, pretty cool.

Having gone from a simple home-made system based on HTML fragments, to a system with Wiki markup, and now to a dedicated blogging system using Markdown markup I now have posts in three formats. No two, since I’ve converted the HTML fragments.

I think we need a simple format to store posts in to avoid such stupid situations. This format could very well be an XML dialect, but that’s not the important part, the important part is to have a single format for blog posts. Posts could then be translated into whatever format your favorite blog requires, be it XHTML, Markdown or a Wiki markup format.

If this common format is an XML dialect it would be easy to parse, but tedious to edit — XML is not meant to be edited by humans. (Not that it’s impossible, using the nxml-mode for Emacs it’s not that bad.) So to make it efficient to we need to be able to map back and forth between the canonical XML format and a Wiki-like (or Markdown, call it what you want) variant.

Given such a format and solid conversion tools I hope that we can avoid parse errors like those I’ve written about before. And we would have a more versatile tool than what we have with XHTML, Markdown, Wiki, and all the other markup languages separated.

Hehe — I suddenly have 240 posts in my blog! They are old news, actually the very first “news items” I put on my site back in May 2000 long before there was anything called “blogs” around. Or at least before I knew anything about them.

All the new old posts are categorized as “uncategorized” until I look them through and fix any missing cruft and assign a category to them.

I was my good friend Kristian who got me started with using Linux, programming in PHP and HTML back when we both was in gymnasiet (high-school). It was an exciting and enormous world that opened itself to me. Since then my computer has been my favorite toy!