Martin Geisler Online

My 21″ Philips monitor, a 201P10 Brilliance, has just arrived. Wow — I expected it to be big, but not this big! It comes in a box, which measures roughly 1 meter (3 feet) at all sides. My dad and I could barely get it through the door into my room :-)

First thing to do after placing it onto my desk was to see how everything looked at a resolution of 1600×1200. It simply looks perfect. It can be used at resolutions as high as 2048×1536. I tried this under Windows, thanks to my Matrox G400. I could run it as high as 67 Hz, but at this extreme resolution everything is kind of small. Now I run it at 1600×1200, which is the ideal resolution for this monitor. It has a horizontal aperture-grill width of 0.24 mm (0.00945″) and display-area is 16″ wide, which means that is can resolve up to 16″/(0.00945″/pixel) = 1693 pixels. And it can handle a vertical refresh-rate of up to 97Hz in this resolution.

The on-screen-display is functional and contains many settings. You can adjust the purity in the corners individually. If the top left corner has a slight red tint, you can adjust it so it is pure white. You can also adjust both the vertical and horizontal convergence. The convergence is the alignment of the three electron-beams (one for each of the three primary colors: red, green and blue), so if you have a checkerboard-pattern, and all the black tiles is a little blue on side, it means that the three beams isn’t aligned probably. Finally you can adjust for moiré.

All in all, I would say that I’m very impressed by this monitor. After trying a 21″ monitor, you’ll never want to go back to a 17″.

I’ve just made some fine error-documents for my site. This means that if the server can’t find the document you ask for, you’ll get an “nice” error-message instead of the standard from Apache.

I’ve put up a tutorial on PHP. It’s not quite finished, but I hope that you’ll be able to use what is already there.

I plan to expand it later — please mail me if you find anything that needs to be explained, corrections etc…

I’ve just finished reading The Halloween Documents, found at OpenSource.Org. Although they are almost two years old, I haven’t read them before now — what a mistake. They provides a deep insight into the (sinister) way Microsoft thinks.

They are also somewhat funny, because by describing all the virtues of Linux, they have a really hard time of defending Windows. I found the story “Halloween IV: When Software Things Were Rotten“ to be very funny, you really ought to read it!

I’m upgrading my computer to a 800 MHz AMD Athlon. This fine processor will run on an Asus A7V motherboard equipped with 256 MB PC133 RAM.

I know… it’s going to be a monster machine :-) And it gets even better when my new 21″ monitor arrives… It will be perfect for Photo-Paint 9, which takes up a lot of system resources. But it will also give GIMPS an extra boost.