Recent blog entries for andrei

Almost two months since the last entry.. Time flies quickly when you are busy. Since then I have made a move to Boston and started working for Fast Search & Transfer, mainly on the AllTheWeb.com project. I also managed to squeeze in O'Reilly convention where I gave a couple of talks with Sterling Hughes on Smarty and advanced PHP.

I found a pretty nice apartment in Newton Corner, and will probably stay there for a while. But being new to the area, I have no idea where all the cool spots are.. So, if you are in Boston, send me an email and let me know.

Time to get back to work.

Time to close one chapter of my life and begin another. I have resigned from my position at ispi and accepted a job offer with a certain company in Boston (can't really disclose which one yet). After living 10 years in one place, moving to a new city is both exciting and frightening at the same time. And calling this summer interesting would be an understatement. Fresh sushi, here I come!

<much joy>
Tomorrow I'm going to Brazil, to speak at the International Free Software Forum 2002. Speak about what? PHP-GTK, of course. There will be a 90 minute presentation, and then a 3 hour workshop the next day. rasmus says Brazil is a nice place so I'm really looking forward to spending a few days there. Bring on the fun!
</much joy>

Posting this from my quickly hacked together tool called PHAD (PHP Advogato Diary), written in PHP-GTK and using the nicely provided XMLRPC services of advogato.org.

After owning the gravitonic.com domain for over a year, I finally got around to setting up my site there. Put up the resume, some info, and moved all the 3ds max plugins I kept at the old Terralux SDG site over to this one. The next step would be to add a list of projects that I'm working on, including patches for extended/cleaned-up PHP functionality, explorations of various areas of computer science, some older code that I have lying around. The real problem is what to do with the front page - making it into a weblog does not really appeal since I won't be making entries every day, but I don't want to leave it empty either.

Hopefully my Brazil visa will be ready next week and then I'm off to International Free Software Forum 2002. Yay!

test of my xmlrpc client
updates should work

...

Great, SlashDot's crowd is happily tearing into yet another moronic "what language fits all the buzzwords" question. What a waste of mental energy.

Keeping off the daily buzz of php development lists has seriously improved the quality of my life. It's all working on well enough, considering I can still read them via news.php.net when I so desire.

Meanwhile, I decided to kick PHP-GTK up a notch and call the newly released version 0.5.0, since it is a fairly mature product at this point. Alan keeps doing cool stuff with it (but Alan, fix up the page so that other browsers can view it too). More and more translations of the doc are being done, and the doc itself is getting better.

ssb checked my tokenizer extension into the PHP repository for me. Hopefully it'll find a good use.

I've also been working on a set of functions to perform runtime object aggregation -- dynamically adding to/removing from an object methods and member variables from a certain class.

I've finished reading The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers - what an excellent book. Must check out other books by him. Ripped through Dust by Charles Pellegrino in about a day; interesting premise, science, bad characters. Blondie 24 by David Fogel is very good, even though it lacks any code behind the project. I've always been fascinated by neural networks, AI, etc. Slowly making my way through Pratchett's The Wyrd Sisters, don't know why, but reading the previous ones seemed to go much faster. Up next, The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll and probably Lenin's Tomb. Some days I will have to find time to re-read the good books I've already read.

I've been on a strict mass-preserving/fat-burning workout diet for the last 2 weeks: 300g of protein/60g of fiber a day, very few complex carbs. Also added flaxseed oil to my menu. Consuming prodigious amounts of whey protein, glutamine, and creatine and using fitday.com to manage all that. Workouts 4 times a week. Ugg, I hurt now.

I've been looking at Sony Cybershot DSC-S75 digital camera - $519 is the cheapest I can find. Maybe someone will be nice and give me a present.

Another year has come and gone. What transpired within this pretty much arbitrarily delimited period of time that matters to me? In no particular order:

• Monte and I released Smarty template engine.
• September 11 and subsequent events made me feel that living in this country is less secure that I previously thought.
• I turned 25 and started feeling my priorities and outlook on life change. So many things that used to seem important now appear trivial and vice versa.
• PHP-GTK was released.
• Uzbekistan is suddenly USA's best friend and I don't have to explain where it's located
• I made new friends (mostly local Russian students) and kept almost all the old ones.
• Having lived in the same place for 9 years and worked in the same company (that I keep growing disillusioned with) for almost 6 years, it is only natural that I have been entertaining thoughts about making a change.
• I still haven't met the one.

I am finishing the year unsubscribed from all the PHP mailing lists and keeping my distance from it and the related projects for a while because I am feeling somewhat tired and burned out, and all the bulls**t going on in the community doesn't help. I hope to return to it after some time off.

I hope.. no, I know the New Year will bring all of us something wonderful, something that makes your soul tingle just thinking about it. May all your dreams come true. All I wish for is peace, love, and understanding. The rest will naturally flow out of this foundation. Happy New Year!

rasmus, congratulations to you and Christine on the upcoming release.

On PHP-GTK front, I've implemented support for compiling extensions into shared libraries and loading them dynamically which will prove useful in a few areas. Alan checked in his gtkhtml extension, and I added gdk-pixbuf stuff after hacking the code generator repeatedly. The stuff Alan has been doing with PHP-GTK is amazing.

After a poke from ssb, I made the 'overload' PHP extension support proxied method calls via internal __call() method. Stig says he has cool and immediate need for this.

I'll be visiting Vegas next week, for the first time ever.