My first GIMP job, Gnomealicious!
Although I’ve been using Linux for eight years I have never really used GIMP since I’m brought up with Photoshop. But lately I’ve started using it to make a few layout elements for various web projects and although It’s quite frustrating when you all the time hit Photoshop shortcuts and end up with the wrong tools and what not, GIMP really isn’t that awful when you start to get grip of it.
Anyway, I did a re-install of Ubuntu the other day and found a theme for Gnome that I really liked but I had no desktop wallpaper that fitted so I though I’d better make my own. And so I did!
Screenshot
The wallpaper, 1680×1050
So I’m about to become better friends with GIMP!
Peace out!
Better late than never
It’s amazing that I havn’t posted an entry here for more than six months! I’ve had so much to do at work so I havn’t had the driving force to bother! We’re about to release a redesign of www.tekniskaverken.se which have taken quite much time. We’re also about to update both the server hardware and software. We’re going to use Roxen replication and load balancing which means we’re going from one standalone server to three servers!
I’ve also been busy developing “My Pages” at Tekniska Verken where our customers can log on and view consumption statistics for water, district heating, electricity and waste and much more. The statistics part has existed for years but the functionality has been rewritten from scratch where webservices SOAP) for our business system has been developed and the overall functionality has been extended and improved.
The fun thing is that I have written the SOAP clients in Java – since Pike (the language used in Roxen) doesn’t have a SOAP implementation yet but do talk to Java quite nicely – which I’ve never touched before. Java is a nice language but the Classpath thing drives you crazy! Anyway, with WSDL and Eclipse there has been no problems. There’s currently 13 webservices available and I don’t think I’ve even written 2000 lines of Java to implement them. SOAP is really nice I must say! So now I also can add Java to my CV 
Hopefully the new www.tekniskaverken.se will be released within a month or so!
PLib, the Poppa PHP Library
Other than working my ass off at work I just lately took a real approach on my secretly sleeping project PLib. PLib is my own PHP framework with functions and classes to ease my everyday PHP programming.
To give you an idea of what PLib is all about let me give you an example:
18 lines of PHP
- <?php
- require_once '/path/to/PLib.php';
- //! Lets create thumbnails of all JPEG images in a directory
- PLib::Import('Graphics.Image');
- //! The Dir class is included in Image so I don't explicitly need to
- //! include it
- $dir = new Dir('/path/to/jpegs/');
- $mw = 150; // Max width of thumb
- $mh = 90; // Max height of thumb
- while ($file = $dir->Emit('*.jpg')) {
- $img = new Image($file->path);
- $img = $img->Copy($file->path.'/thumb-'.$file->name)->Scale($mw, $mh);
- wbr($img->Path()); // The full path to the thumbnail
- }
- ?>
Rather easy I think!
AutoDoc
Another cool feature (if I may say so) is the auto documentation. If you quickly want a list of all available classes and functions just type PLib::Info() and you will get the list. Each class and function is then clickable and will lead you to the documentation for which ever class or function you clicked.
If you want the documentation for a specific class just type PLib::Info() and there you have the documentation.
The third way to use the autodoc is to pass an instance of a class as argument like PLib::Info().
And if you wan’t a full documentation site just type PLib::Info() and you will get the same documentation as available at the PLib site.
The site
Anyway, PLib has its site of it’s own where anyone curious can download the latest version of PLib and find out more about the project.
