November 2005

Today I found some really stupid bugs in GeoMint. For example I used a wrong function to split up my result string I get from HostIP.info. So every country with two seperated names (United Kingdom, United States) got wrong or no coordinates.

And I also have some problems with cURL. Dreamhost doesn’t allow the http protocol in fopen() so I had to find another way (-> cURL). The only problem is that the one and only result I get is ‘1′, simply one. At least I now know why I didn’t have any visitors from the US plotted on my map ;-)

Anyway, programming php is a lot more fun than anyting else at the moment (actually I should learn computer techniques, actually). And SciTE got my favourite editor for everything. Its code highlighting features are great.

GeoMint 0.2 is out, as you may have already heard. It is working as expected and is even a bit faster because I’ve kicked the fopen implementation and now use curl instead. And I added a timeout control, because it ain’t funny when HostIP.info is down and you can’t access Mint. So this is fixed now :-)

I’m very happy with the response I’ve got till now. Received serveral emails of people who wanted to thank me for developing this pepper and some also wanted to have an older version of GeoMint because they don’t want to update Mint to version 1.23. Strange thing, but I can understand them. We all knew that the new pepper API would be there and Shaun actually published the docs, which he did, at least I think, so that developers can change their pepper before the new Mint version is ready for download.

Anything to add? No, I don’t think so, at least for the moment. Oh, well, some future plans for GeoMint from my secret drawer: - Manage the Google Map to refresh correctly - Provide a way to only look at specific points (period of time, country,…) - Add some grouping functions (same referer, same region, same time,…)

Have a nice afternoon, I’m going to watch C.S.I. to relax and prepare myself for six ultimate hours of Math tomorrow ;-)

“Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.”
(J. B. Priestley)

College is pretty time consuming at the moment but not because it’s so hard for me to keep up with our progress in the programming lectures, math does the thing.

No, there’s another thing I will talk with about today. Well, actually I will talk and you will listen (or read), so no chance for you to interrupt me (you could close your browser but you won’t do that, won’t you?).

So I will start with my little fairy tale. A long, long time ago, there was a boy who started programming (guess, yes, that’s me). I learned Delphi because it was the tool my father used at that time and so it was pretty easy to get it and write my very first programs. I was a real astronomy-fan and so I played around with a neat Access database with about 37.000 rows and my little Delphi program. I wrote lines and lines of code and finally I had an application which was cabable of drawing selected stars on the form, calculating the day of easter for the next ten thousand years and some other things.

Then I started doing DirectX with Delphi which was actually the time when I learnt most about programming. Juggling around with pointers, making my new desktop wallpaper the blue screen of death. The fact that nearly every line of free available source code was written in C/C++ was pretty annoying at that time but now I really benefit. It makes understanding C# a lot easier.

But now to the main topic, C#. In my eyes, it’s a mixture between C/C++ (guess why), Java and Delphi. There are some new language features and possibilities of the IDE which I’ve seen in Delphi before, some of them already from version 5 on (I’m using VS.Net 2003 now). One reason for this could be that Anders Hejlsberg, ex chief engineer at Borland and co-creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, moved to Microsoft and is now one of the co-founders of the C# programming language and the .Net-Framework.

It’s sad to hear that Richard Burns, a great person and rally-driver, passed away on Friday. He fought up to the end but finally lost his last race against a brain tumor.

You are gone but never forgotten.

Have you heard of The Million Dollar Homepage? I’m sure you have. It’s the story of Alex Tew, a 21 year old student who tried to find a way to finance his college life. And I can tell you, he find one.

Alex sells pixels on his webpage. In total he offers 1.000.000 million pixels to square of 100×100. So the minimum sum you have to pay is $100. So far he sold over 680.000 pixels. 680.000 bucks! That’s awesome. He started at the end of August and til the mid of October he earned more than 500.000 dollars. Congratulations go to Alex, this is just an ingenious idea.

I just update GeoMint to work with Shaun Inman’s new Mint 1.2x. It now also lists the last 20 locations (ip, country, city) on a seperate data panel.

One thing I have to say about the new Mint version is that I’m actually quite unhappy with it. Shaun changed a lot in the Pepper API (not onInstall and onUninstall functions) and also in the database design. This is actually not bad, but some steps are not clear. For example using an signed int(10) for an ip address and writing own functions (ip2long, long2ip). MySQL has built in functionality for this!

…for another week.

So I will finally have some time to go out, meet some nice people and drink some glogg. hicks. No, not you, Jon. But hey, by the way, I really like Riff. Nice idea although I think it’s a little bit too fancy. There are some many colours, shadows and little details. A way too much. Another thing which I’m sad about is that he doesn’t use Rails to work on it. In my eyes Rails would be the perfect framework (or actually is) for a social community. Maybe there will be another person who will release a thing like Riff (for the german-speaking countries)…

Nevertheless, I will work on two little projects this weekend. One will be a Rally-fansite and another one is a website for a cultural society. And I will think about modifying my site too. Maybe use some nice colors. It’s so cold outside at the moment, there should be at least one regular thing you do each day which is nice to look at.

Seems that I will have some problems updating my GeoMint Pepper to work with Shaun’s Mint version 1.22. There are some changes in the API which, I think, I can’t handle. I’m waiting for Shaun’s answer in the Mint Forum but working with the new data object won’t be as powerful as writing an SQL-query. I will keep your up-to-date.

Writer’s block? Ha, here’s the thing which helped me to come over it:

Microsoft (I repeat: Microsoft) has released a nice piece of software under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. You don’t believe me? Then read it.

But the license type is not the best thing on the story. The whole thing is about the Simple Sharing Extension (SSE) which will make it possible to, for example, publish an rss feed of your scheduler but make it work in two directions. So you (or your wife,…) are not only able to read your dates, your can also change them, or add another one,… Ain’t that cool?

For example it would be also possible to post a (Wordpress, of course) blog entry with practically the same piece of software you are managing your time table.