Martin Geisler Online

I just stumbled upon something called Ogg Vorbis the other day. Ogg Vorbis is a new audio encoding format similar to mp3. The advantage of Ogg Vorbis is that it’s opensource, without the patent-problems that plague mp3 and free. It’s also slightly better that mp3, which means that the files are smaller.

So I’ve started to re-rip all my Cd’s and encode them in Ogg Vorbis. I use Grip to automate the task of ripping and encoding the Cd’s. Grip first asks freedb for information about the disc, it then uses cdparanoia to do the ripping and then starts oggenc to do the encoding. A pretty cool program.

I’m still waiting for my 10 Cd’s to arrive, but with a little luck I’ll get them tonight. Then I can start the ripping :-)

Last night a mosquito kept me awake for three hours, until I finally managed to smack it at 3:18 in the morning! The summer is finally here in Denmark, so it’s getting hot. So, before I went to bed, I opened my windows to let some cold air in. The cold air went in, together with the mosquito…

Today I ordered a pile of new CDs — 10 CDs in total! It all started when I discovered that Karl Jenkins had made more than one album with Adiemus. In fact he’s made four of them — I had only listened to the first one Adiemus — Songs Of Sanctuary. So I when downtown to look for the remaining three albums. But I could only find one of them, so I went searching on the web. I found two Danish stores that had the albums: www.gufmusik.dk and www.cdskiven.dk. The first shop was the cheapest, but they also had fewer titles than the second shop. At first I thought that would be a problem, but they told me that they had all the titles that I wanted in stock, even thought they hadn’t updated their webpages.

Now that I was searching for good music I also remembered that I’d heard some Era. Their music sound a bit like Enya / Enigma / Adiemus which means that it’s good :-) So I also bought their first album.

I searched further, and found some CDs by Jean-Michel Jarre. My dad has his album In Concert Houston & Lyon which I’ve heard a lot. It’s a live recording where he plays some of his best songs. But now I’ll get a chance to hear all the songs of his CDs, since I’ve bought six of them :-)

So now I’m looking forward to receiving the Cd’s. According to www.gufmusik.dk they will be shipped next Monday.

I’m done with the gymnasium — I had my final exam two days ago. It was in mathematics and I got 11. All-in-all I must say, that I’m very pleased with the exams. My average grade is 10.5 which means that I have access to whatever study I would like to try. But it really doesn’t matter, since there isn’t any limits on Computer Science. Everybody that wants to give it a try is let in, because there’s too few applicants.

But I now have two months of spare time before I’ll start at the Department of Computer Science in Aarhus (DAIMI). It’s just so great to be able to relax after the last four weeks.

Now that I have all this spare time, I hope to make a release of the new and improved PHP Weather version 2.x. You can try the snapshot or the latest code directly from CVS. And if you haven’t noticed yet, then I’ve moved the tarballs and zip-files to SourceForge, so you should go here if you want to download it.

You’ll also find that the stable version of PHP Weather has jumped to 1.55. The only new feature is support for proxyservers. So if you’ve been needing that, be sure to upgrade. You’ll have to set three variables at the top of phpweather.inc to enable the support.

Yesterday was an exciting day. I went to my exam, and my mom and dad bought a new car. We had a Citroën BX before, but now we have a C5 :-)

As you can see on the pictures at the right, it’s a really nice car — our model is also silver-gray. I’ve tried it already, and I must say that it’s very silent and comfortable to drive. It runs on diesel instead of gasoline, so the engine has a different feel to it. It’s also equipped with servo-steering, so it’s easy to maneuver.

Compared to our old car, it has a lot of fancy features like central locking. This is controlled by a remote control, which can also be used to close the electric windows. Very nifty :-)

They bought a new car, mainly because the old one was getting — well old… It’s about ten years old now. But we’re also planning to drive to Eastern Europe this summer and have our vacation there. And with the new car it’s much more pleasant to travel by road.