Martin Geisler Online

My news-system is working beautifully! But I’ll soon have to hack it, so it only displays the most recent news. And I have the time now, that I’ve had my last day in school.

Today, my father finally gave up his resistance, and we installed Redhat 6.2 on part of his harddisk. He had got some extra room on the disk, after we upgraded the machine, because Windows 2000 suddenly wouldn’t boot.

It was also about time, my father tried Linux — now I’ve run Linux af my primary OS for over a year, and I’m not thinking of going back to Windows. But based on his reacktiosn, after his first attemps to do simple things, like mounting the windows partition, I’m not sure, that he will throw the Windows partition away just now.

If Corel and Borland can come up with a good distribution and some good development tool, respectively, then I’m sure my father will switch to Linux — together with many others.

More exams are coming up. Tomorrow I have to sit and write a Danish essay. There has been put five hours aside for the task, but I doesn’t expect it take that long.

The only thing that could be a problem, would be if my computer crash in the middle of everything :-( I’m writing on my fathers notebook, a fine HP Omnibook 4150, but there is only installed Win98 SE and Word on it.

But, as this is just a Danish essay, I wont have to insert any of those nasty Equation Editor-objects. In my experience — and I have written many reports for both physics and chemistry in Word — those objects seem to crash Word every time you insert more that about 10 or so. It’s sad, but true.

Today I’m having my first exam this year. Todays test isn’t really an exam, it is just training for the real thing next year. The subject is mathematics, so I’ll properly do fine.

The only “real” exam this year is in German :-( I would have liked it better if it had been geography instead.

I’ve finally solved the problems with the database — I’ve stopped using it for the news. I had all kinds of problems when I tried to save text into the database, that contained a '. The database thought that it was the end of the string, so I had to escape all the 's.

But then I found out that my local server at home, and the server at Netsite differed. My server couldn’t handle the 's, while the other coped with them fine. So far I’ve been able to test my pages at home, and then upload them — if there were a difference, I would have to build extra tests into my scripts… Thats not a good thing :-)

But now the news lies in normal text-files, made by Emacs. That is another good thing about this new way of storing the news: I don’t have to sit and type them in, in Netscape.