I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox for quite some time now, and it has always performed great! Firefox is quick and robust and has lots of features that I would never want to be without: tabbed browsing is perhaps the best of them, but the quick search functionality comes in as a close second.

Since they have just put out a new Preview Release, (well… actually it happened 10 days ago, and they’ve already reached 2 million downloads!) I’ve decided to help them spread the word, thereby taking part in their big Gmail account give away! It’s not that I’m in a particularly big need for having a mailaccount with a 1 GiB limit, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t mind seeing for myself what it is all about.

So go download Firefox, and help take back the web! -Martin Geisler

I was looking through my AWStats statistics (which are no longer public) and took notice of the large number of strange URLs that people have tried in vain: those that generates a 404 Not Found error.

Lots of them look like they are part of some sort of silly hacking attempt by a script kiddie, while others look like genue URLs for the WikiWikiWeb, just missing the initial wiki/ prefix. So I’ve now setup redirection for those URLs, so that people are directed to the TitleSearch page, showing a search result for the URL they tried.

I hope this helps some people. -Martin Geisler

I came back from my trip to Switzerland a couple of weeks ago. The trip was really great, I finally got so see Stéphanies homeland and I got to meet her family. I felt very welcome in the family and I enjoyed meeting and getting to know everybody. That was the great thing about being away for three weeks: you really get to know the place instead of just being passing through. So now I’m even more excited about my trip next year to ETH Zürich where I’ll be studying for a whole year, beginning in March 2005.

But eventually I had to return from Switzerland, and more importantly, from Stéphanie :-( It was strange to get back and live alone again, but luckily this is only temporary! That helps to keep the mood up.

Work, work, work… (but fun work!)

Another thing that helps on the mood is distraction by work: I have been busy with work ever since I got back to Denmark. I’ve started working for University of Aarhus, where I’ll be developing software for the DAIMI:dIntProg course. This is the very first course that the young future computer scientists get, and now they’ll have to deal with exercises made by me… hehe! :-) No, luckily for them, then it wont be as bad as it sounds, for Michael Caspersen (the lecturer) is looking after me and he will make sure that the exercises don’t get too far fetched :-)

So far it’s been great fun working on these projects — I get to play all day long making small programs. I’ve also worked on some Python code for another project, and so far I find Python to be a very cool language.

Need psychiatric help?

Speaking of working, then my mom has just opened her own website: http://x-psyk.dk/. She is opening a private business where she will be offering psychiatric help in the form of conversations and advice. She has just finished her degree in pedagogical psychology and is now getting ready to work.

That’s it for now… -Martin Geisler

The PHP EXIF Library (PEL) is written in pure PHP and makes it easy to read and write EXIF headers found in JPEG and TIFF images.

Before going to Switzerland I just found time to prepare a new release. Go grab it, and also remember to upgrade to PHP 5, which is now, finally, out as a stable version. Use http://dotdeb.org/ as your source of PHP 5 debs for Debian. -Martin Geisler

Notes

The interface for PelJpeg and PelTiff was changed so that one now can add new content from scratch to JPEG and TIFF images. Bugs in the loading of signed bytes and shorts were fixed, aswell as a bug where timestamps were saved in UTC time, but loaded in local time. The code that turned PelJpeg objects into bytes was fixed, and new test cases were written to test the writing and reading of PelJpeg objects to and from files. New images from Nikon models E950, E5000, and Coolscan IV have been added to the test suite, bringing the total number of tests up to more than 1000.

Changes

• The timestamps were saved as UTC time in PelEntryTime, but loaded as local time in PelEntry. This lead to differences when one tried to load a previously saved timestamp.

• Changed the constructors in PelJpeg, PelExif, PelTiff, and PelIfd so that one can now make new objects without filling them with data immediatly. This makes it possible to add, say, a new APP1 section with EXIF to a JPEG image lacking such information.

• Fixed loading of signed bytes and shorts in PelConvert.

• Renamed the isValidMarker() method into just isValid() in PelJpegMarker, so that it matches the other isValid() methods found in PelJpeg and PelTiff.

• Added test images from Nikon models E950, E5000 and the film scanner Coolscan IV ED, and added tests that would read their contents.

• The shell scripts could only be run from the test directory because of the use of relative paths in the require_once() statements. The scripts can now be run from any directory.

• A stupid bug that prevented PelJpeg objects from being turned into bytes was fixed.

• Fixed the output of PelEntryRationals::getText().

Download PEL

PEL is hosted on SourceForge:

http://prdownloads.sf.net/pel/pel-0.6.tar.bz2?download (1118 KiB)
http://prdownloads.sf.net/pel/pel-0.6.tar.gz?download (1273 KiB)
http://prdownloads.sf.net/pel/pel-0.6.zip?download (1438 KiB)

Stéphanie and I have packed our bags — they are many and heavy! — and are now ready to travel to Switzerland. I’m really looking forward to seeing the country, for I’ve never been close to mountains before. When I’ve shown Stéphanie the “mountains of Mols” she was rolling on the floor, laughing… :-) The highest point in Denmark is way lower than the lowest point in Switzerland.

The trip will take about three weeks for me, then I’ll be back in Denmark — Stéphanie stays in Switzerland for now :-( Don’t expect me to answer many mails in the time to come, both because of the trip and because of my harddisk crash.

I wish everybody a great summer!