Older blog entries for andrei (starting at number 78)

Decided to finish reading The Rise of Endymion. God, I just love that series. I need to buy all 4 books and re-read them again sometime.

After much discussion we are approaching a consensus on the namespaces implementation in PHP. That should be a good way to structure packages and PEAR especially.

Frank Kromann and I are giving a talk on PHP-GTK at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference next week. I can't hope to attend all the interesting talks that are scheduled but I will make sure to steal cool ideas from at least a couple. ;-) Oh, and I've never been to San Diego before and I'm going to have one day all to myself, so I need to figure out how to best spend it.

12 Jul 2001 (updated 12 Jul 2001 at 19:32 UTC) »

A month later, to a day, and it hasn't gone by aimlessly. I've successfully resurrected lxr.php.net and the daily changelog/news updater on the new PHP machine. The only remaning thorn is bonsai.php.net since it needs some help from qmail and I need some help from sascha due to my woefully inadequate knowledge of anything qmail related.

Inbetween work, job, employment, and profession, the new build system for PHP-GTK got finished and committed. It was shamelessly stolen from PHP itself and mutated a bit -- the end result is that PHP-GTK can support configurable extensions based on GtkObject, such as GtkHtml, gdk-pixbuf, and others. The only two currently bundled ones are (surprise) gtk+ and libglade.

Nedit has always been a good editor to me, so I contacted the current developers to inquire whether they've considered making it into a Gtk+ widget. No response so far -- either they are busily hacking away on it, or they are all in intensive care after having busted their guts laughing at my amusing email.

Ihe PHP-GTK manual structure was finished, thanks to the defs-to-docbook generator, and I've put up the initial version online at gtk.php.net/manual. There are only a couple of documented classes so far, but this should make it easier to get contributors to concentrate on the content instead of the XML tags.

Biking 25 miles every weekend has been an enjoyable affair, but still not as easy as I hoped it would be. The next goal is to do 40 miles by the end of the summer.

Every week I get an urge to make myself a simple homepage with a couple of tools to keep track of my booklist and other stuff, but somehow that urge keeps getting transmogrified into something else a couple of days later. Any tips on making myself do it?

Having joined language-dev list and hoping to impress everyone with my erudition, I now have to fess up my lack therof and ask, what are computed jumps?

On a less cheerful note, lately every day seems to be just like the last one. It's making me afraid that I'm starting to lose the imagination and energy necessary to make each day unique. I would guess that I'm not the only one who's run into this, so what's the scoop? How do you get out of the rut?

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

12 Jun 2001 (updated 12 Jun 2001 at 20:13 UTC) »

The machine hosting PHP CVS and mailing lists was taken offline after the attack on VA SourceForge since they were hosting it. So, now we have cvs.php.net on a temporary machine and are working on setting up a permanent replacement.

I took advantage of this to start restructuring the build system of PHP-GTK once again to more closely resemble that of PHP itself. With the new system, it'll be easy to write extensions to support different GtkObject derived libraries such as GtkHtml, Bonobo, and so on. Funny, extensions for a PHP extension.

We've also split out PHP-GTK docs into its own repository as it's getting quite large. I've written and James Moore modified a tool that generates DocBook files directly from the .defs files that describe GTK+ API, so all that needs to be done is just filling in the content -- piece of cake, right? James is doing further work on XSL stylesheets and the final result should be really nice.

I've also started work on new Python-like argument parsing routines for Zend API. It should now be quite easy for extension authors to parse parameters passed from PHP.

I was glad to have a chance to do some boating & fishing over the Memorial Day weekend. Beautiful views, nice weather, everything turned out just perfectly. I'll have to go back to South Dakota again some time.

Okay, PHP-GTK v0.0.4 is released and now I can have my well-deserved rest and a book to read. Methinks it's going to be one on investment and one by Tom Clancy.

Now that our state is finally getting a clue that it's almost summer, I've had my bike tuned-up - it's going to be great taking a few longish trips on the trails.

30 Apr 2001 (updated 30 Apr 2001 at 21:53 UTC) »

Zend engine's object overloading system seem to have been designed strictly for classes that overload everything, like COM and Java extensions do, for example. In PHP-GTK, I overload only get handlers and even then it's impossible to have a non-overloaded object in the chain. So I ended up pretending that I overload everything and then walking along the chain manually and doing what Zend should have been doing all along - checking the type and overloading support of each part and doing things based on that. Seems to work fine and it will be a nice polished chrome crutch until Zend engine comes to its senses.

Once that's done, I'll probably do the next release. After that, the next big task will be reworking the build system again to allow easy drop-in of new modules based on GTK+, e.g. GAL, GtkHtml, and so on. That will definitely task my autoconf/makefile/shell skills, but a nice challenge nonetheless.

My eventual goal is to make PHP-GTK the best Gtk+ bindings of any scripting language, and if that sounds arrogant to you, go sit on a stick and twirl. ;-)

Kudos to Dennis Tito, the first space tourist. I'd love to be in his place, looking out the window and seeing the blue-white Earth in all its heart-stopping beauty.

As a sidenote, hotornot.com is kind of addictive.

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.

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