Older blog entries for andrei (starting at number 71)

A completely mad day, suitable for a Monday. Dealing with software installs, updates, network, machines going down harder than a White House intern after a slice of pepperoni pizza... And tomorrow seems pretty much the same, only more so. But, better to be busy than bored.

People have really started getting into PHP-GTK: contributing samples, docs, etc. all without my interventino. So wonderful to see the community coming together.

Well, unexpectedly, PHP-GTK announcement found its way to SlashDot. Looking at the log file, I was wondering why so many downloads were being made. The good news is that the php.net network held up well.

Now, onto 0.0.2.

Released PHP-GTK 0.0.1. Hopefully, people will take a clue from such a low version number and not expect everything to work perfectly.

I've got to start reading House of Leaves soon - the reviews have been getting too intriguing.

Created an initial page for PHP-GTK so that people can start playing with it. I haven't encountered any major problems porting testgtk.c to PHP (well, only porting pieces that are currently supported). Kind of exciting to see GUI apps running in PHP.

A friend turned me onto Tom Clancy, so now I'm reading Rainbow Six - he's an engaging writer, but definitely his characterizations leave something to be desired.

Released Smarty 1.3.0 - now featuring built-in caching and a few other things. Time to rest. No, wait, time to keep working on php-gtk...

Went on a trip to New York to a convention we were exhibiting at - got to see a taping of Late Show and also the bar that Coyote Ugly is based on. Wild place. Restaurants visited on this trip include Pastis, Russian Tea Room, and Frutti di Mare - Pastis is especially recommended.

So, what have I been doing since the last diary entry.. Keeping busy for sure. Monte Ohrt and myself have released new PHP template engine, Smarty, that he and I have been working on for a while. I've also been porting our publishing system to use Smarty as its base template engine.

deekayen, you should take a look at Smarty if you need a flexible templating solution.

I've also made excellent progress on php-gtk. More news to come when I finish boxed types support and a few other miscellaneous things.

Well, it's the middle of December and I am finally getting around to putting another diary entry in. So, since exactly a month ago I have really been enjoying my new laptop - it really comes in useful and having it really gave me what I needed to jump start the PHP-gtk bindings project. Which is progressing quite well, thanks to James Henstridge's help. I hope to put up a page for the project as soon as I feel that it is adequate enough for public eyes.

On the personal front, I have pretty much cooled off towards the last girl I was seeing - seems we're not what we're looking for in each other, so we'll just stay in touch for now and so on. But I am sure that someone else will come along shortly.

All the recent movies I've seen have been bad. I don't understand how they are even allowed to come out - I mean, don't they screen them for test audiences first? But, of course, by that time there is so much invested in the movie that they have to try to run the gamble and see how much they can recover. I mean, Sixth Day has so many holes, you can sift flour through it. And Pay It Forward had the most inane and overly dramatized ending in any movie this year, I think. Oh, well, at least Unbreakable and Proof of Life seem to start the positive trend..

I finally broke down and bought myself a new laptop - my old computer is 4 years old and it definitely shows. I got a Dell Inspiron 4000 with DVD drive, now I can even watch movies, woo-hoo!

I'll probably be hanging out at coffee shops a lot more now that I have a laptop - for some reason some of my best thinking happens there, and with laptop, I can even implement it on the spot.

Saw Red Planet tonight - what a horrible movie. What is it with movies about Mars? Last one, Mission to Mars, was no better. This movie was delayed for 6 months? For what? Better effects? Surely not better script.

Today is my birthday. Hurray for me. Who knows what the night will bring..

I started hashing out PHP GTK+ bindings over the last week or so. Currently just building the basic infrastructure that can be used by the code generated from .defs files. For now, I can display a window with a label in it. But a lot of things are happening behind the scenes that make it easy to handle error messages and all that.

Started reading Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - excellent book. I'm savoring the pages.

Most of the criticism targeted at PHP on Slashdot seems to revolve around the issue of PHP not being very well organized - people mention haphazardly named functions, lack of DB abstraction layer, and all that. It's very true - but that's just how PHP has evolved. It wasn't designed from scratch like Python, and it hasn't had quite the evolutionary life like Perl. So, the lack of overarching design shows - whether that's good or bad is for each user to decide for themselves. Personally, I'd like to re-architecture PHP to make it work and look better - but after all that it wouldn't quite be PHP, right? We have to be exceedingly careful not to alienate the huge base of existing users if we want to implement major structural changes, which is very tricky stuff. But, hopefully, common sense on all sides will prevail and we'll have less entropy in this issue.

The development of PHP had been interrupted for several days due to the hardware/software problems with the machine hosting CVS and mailing lists. And I've been fairly busy at day job to be able to contribute much to the development. I do need to get back in with DAV integration, though - that should be very interesting.

A curious bit of trivia: my friend's cousin's brother-in-law married the sister of James King, the famous supermodel. Well, James King is currently dating Kid Rock so he was at the wedding and my friend told me that people who knew him referred to him as 'Bob'. That's just funny, American Badass Bob. :-)

Something that's been bothering me for a while is a lack of really good advanced open source 3D modeling/animation program, similar to 3D Studio MAX or Lightwave or even Maya. Surely there is enough brainpower in the development community to match the commercial companies, but I guess it's really a matter of organizing the project and keeping the people motivated. Lack of time may be another problem, since people would have to work on it on their free time. Not to mention that commercial companies have R&D budgets. I've seen several 3D programs for Linux, and while they are not too bad, I certainly can't say that they match the high-end programs on the market... Just something on my mind.

Read a lot of books since my last diary entry: Selfish Gene, Sparrow, Neverness, Mort, and Engines of Creation. All good.

And, finally, I've started dating again. Pretty happy about that.