It has been suggested that this blog does not contain enough personal content.

This Christmas I visited my parents in Seefeld in Austria, am now in the UK with my parents and Christina and will be going to Paris for New Years. You can see the progress of this voyage on the following Maptales story. It contains locations, text and photos.

Installing this into Firefox (takes < 1 minute and doesn’t require a download) allows you to check for the availability of domain names straight from the browser.

It was created by my colleague, who works with me at easyname.eu, but it was his idea, and I genuinely think it’s a cool feature!

There is the option “php -l” which checks the validity of a source file. Obviously it doesn’t do a wonderful job as it doesn’t detect misspelt variable or method names; but I suppose it’s better than nothing.

So I apply this recursively to all the files under a certain directory. For reasons I won’t go into here there are Postscript fonts checked into the source directory. To this files, “php -l” outputs:

No syntax errors detected in ./pdflib/fonts/php_Times-Italic.afm

I assert “php -l” is not very useful.

If one defines a class with the member variable:

protected static $bytes = 12582912;

then that’s fine. However if one defines it as:

protected static $bytes  = 12*1024*1024; // 12 MB

then that gives a compile error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '*', expecting ',' or ';'

I know of no other language that I’ve ever programmed (i.e. including BASIC, and C) where you can write a value, but you can’t write an expression.

How broken is that!

Putting spaces around the *, or adding brackets around the whole expression, does not help.

(PHP 5.2.0)

My Austrian mobile phone works again.

1. Originally I asked them to send the new SIM card to Macau, they didn’t want to do that. Thankfully I am not the sort of business person who relies heavily on their phone while also travelling a lot. If you are that sort of person, probably better not choose Telering.
2. Then they said they would send the new SIM card to Vienna. 1.5 months later when I arrived back from Macau, it wasn’t there with my post.
3. I went to my normal Telering shop at Stephansplatz, it was closed.
4. So I went into a different shop today, and they gave me a new SIM card. The girl was quite confused by the fact that there was a “lock” on my account (presumably from when I rang up and told them I’d lost the phone?). But her colleague told her to ignore that. The SIM card she gave me didn’t work.
5. Just now I rang up, and they told me “it doesn’t work because your account is locked”. They unlocked that now, and now it works.

Christina and I have a cool HDD/DVD recorder in Macau. One can set up timed programs and it records them from the TV when one is away. You can even copy them to removable media (DVD).

I wish I had something similar in Vienna! Ah yes I do, I realize, I own a VHS recorder :)

To set up a timed program, I have to first the device date/time. I'd never done that (Blinking "–:–" situation). I took a look at the instructions, and there was the "Beispiel" (example) of setting the clock to December 1998. Ah yes, I remember I bought the device in the summer of 1999.

And only today, 2nd December 2007, for the first time, do I set the clock and create my first timed recording :)

P.S. The summer of 1999 is so far away in the past, when I bought the recorder I was seriously stumped by the fact the manual was only in German and I didn't speak German back then.

I am at Hong Kong airport right now preparing for the journey home to Vienna. I shall be in Vienna tomorrow (Sunday) and will be working for the next two weeks.

I have my Macau mobile with me but that doesn’t roam to Vienna. I lost my Vienna mobile and they wouldn’t send me the replacement SIM card abroad (to Macau), so I won’t have that working before I’ve got to my post, which should be Sunday. So the best way to reach me henceforth is email or Skype.