Older blog entries for andrei (starting at number 73)

Got back from ApacheCon, with cold, but great experiences and memories. Met lots of cool people and saw some very interesting sessions. Jon "maddog" Hall's keynote was great - humorous and to the point. I also got inducted into the Apache Software Foundation and had to sit on the stage with other members during the closing plenary.

Well, PHP-GTK is up to version 0.0.3 and is starting to gain momentum. Makes me happy.

I'm going to be at the ApacheCon this year, maybe I'll meet some of ya there...

Finished reading Only Forward by Michael Marshal Smith - really engaging and funny SF book. Recommended.

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.