Martin Geisler Online

It’s weekend so we’re having a party here at [Skejbygård][], just as we did the week before, and the week before etc… :-)

I’m currently trying to get SørenMarkert to write something here at the WikiWikiWeb — let’s see how it goes.

!!!AERO concert

I’m a fairly big fan of JeanMichelJarre so I was very excited when I head about his plans about having a concert right here in Denmark. The concert (called AERO) was held last Saturday. It was held in the middle of a windmill park and was a tribute to the wind. I wasn’t present at the concert (the 40,000 tickets were sold out when I discovered it…) but the highligths were broadcast on TV2 tonigth so at least I can get an idea about how it must have been to be there.

It looked spetacular on the tv: over five tons of fireworks was lunched during the concert. The songs were remixes of his old hits, he had added some elements of wind to some of them, but you could easily recognize the themes from Equinoxe and Magnetic Fields and others.

But although the concert was meant to be about the wind, it turned out to be about rain also. The Danish weather really showed it’s worst side that day and poured 22 mm of rain down over the concert area. So everything turned into a muddy hell. There was really a lot of rain — I could see how the keyboards were sprinckled with small drops of water, even though Jean Michel Jarre was under a roof. It’s amazing that the equitment could handle all the moisture.

So now that I know about the rain and mud, perhaps it was lucky that I didn’t get a ticket.

Today I saw the first incident of WikiVandalism here at GimpsterDotCom. Some guy couldn’t find anything better to do than delete the contents from the PHP Tutorial and write ”I’m gay” instead.

This is exactly the kind of thing people have been worried about when I’ve told about how my WikiWikiWeb works. They would ask something along the lines of: But wont someone just come and delete your pages? And I would say: ”Probably, but I have backups and they’ll soon discover that it isn’t that much fun to destroy other peoples work when it’s this easy…”. I still believe this to be true because of the reasons that can be seen here: Wiki:WhyWikiWorks.

I just have to figure out how to delete a single revision of a page instead of deleting everything in one go as I just did with the PHP Tutorial page…

I wrote a week ago, that I was at University of Aarhus. But university wasn’t the only thing that started, so did ÅrhusFestuge. We went downtown two times to hear live music: we heard Super Heroes and Loveshop — I didn’t really know the bands, but the music was fairly good. The city was absolutely filled with people, young and old, who enjoyed all the activity.

But there was also lots of activity here at [Skejbygård][], we usually had a party either before or after we had been downtown to hear music. And some evenings we just stayed here at [Skejbygård][], so we had a party almost every night for the last week or so. Night is the proper term here, for the parties lasted until the early morning and sometimes even longer. I usually stopped at around 4:00 in the morning, but others stayed awake even longer…

The parties were fuelled by friends of Christina Strøhl and Jesper Klintø — including Olle Hansen who made a tiny page for himself when I showed him this WikiWikiWeb. Martin Justesen also stopped by a couple of times when he and the others from the party commitee here at [Skejbygård][] came home from the city.

But now were done with partying and getting back to our studies.

I started again today at University of Aarhus after spending the last two months doing nothing. So you can probably imagine how tired I was them my alarm clock started 8:00 this morning… The first lecture was about algebra — we heard about basic stuff like the integers, division with remainder, and congruenses. This lead us to talk about the principles behind the famous RSA cryptosystem which we’ll hear more about later in the course.

After the two hour lecture I had a break for three hours which I used to buy the books I’ll need for this semester. The books cost more than $200 but they look like they’re worth it. Two of the books written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum: ”Modern Operating Systems” and ”Structured Computer Organization”. I also had to buy a book called the BETA programming language — syntax of the language looks really weird but let’s see how it goes… The last two books was ”Database Systems” and ”Concrete Abstract Algebra”. The last one is written by our lecture and pressed here at University of Aarhus so it costed only $15.

After the break I had a lecture about the architecture of modern computers. We heard about the division of the computer into layers with the digital circuits at the bottom and the high-level programming language at the top.

All in all the three courses look very interesting, but I guess that it’ll take a couple of days before I get back into the old study-habit.

Since I sent a mail to the [PHP Weather][] mailing list mailing list, the have poured in with fixes and patches. The patches have now been put into the [PHP Weather][] CVS repository. If you can, then you should try it out.

The patches deal with PHP 4.2 compatibility and also improve the utility functions found in pw_utilities.php so that they’re easier to use. The index.php file has been rewritten by Ondrej Jombik nepto@pobox.sk. The rewrite required a new method in the database backends, get_country_code($icao), so those had to be updated accordingly.