Havard Eide

Hi everyone!
This is just a note to let you know that I will from now on be blogging and writing ( not just about PHP ) on my eide.org domain. This domain will continue to live, and I might find something else to do with it. For now it will stay up for a while, then I'll shut down the blog.

phpvolcano has been around since 2001 when me and my uni friends created phpvolcano, a CMS, as a project for class., the code for that system is still around somewhere on my HD, not quite sure. After the project was finished I started up a blog here and have written a lot about PHP, especially the PHP5 series I wrote when it was first branched in CVS, after that I have been on and off writing about various stuff here, but lately it has been quiet. I will be taking some of the articles I wrote at wiki.cc and blog about those ( already a couple of them has been ported ) and try to keep a more active presense on that site.

So: welcome to eide.org for more news and writings!

Well, I'm a movie geek, and I love good scotch, so the last couple of weeks has been good to me: the local movie club ( cinemateket ) has been doing some great movies lately. First it was Metropolis(wikipedia entry), the 1927 movie from Fritz Lang, a true master of the old cinema.

What they showed was a version that was restored from several of the earlier versions ( the original version was 210minutes, and now a quarter of this great movie is lost forever ) from 1975 and was silent: absolutely silent, not a single tune was played, which made it a very special experience. I've seen this movie many times ( even the colored version with the rock soundtrack - do not see that one.... ), but seeing in absolute silence gave it another dimension that I haven't experienced before. Worth a try if you ever get to do it.

Next up was Little Caesar (wikipedia entry): the 1931 crime movie that has inspired so many ganster and crime movies over the years. I haven't seen this in 15 years, and this was the first time I've experienced it on the big screen. I really enjoy watching these old classics, real movie is about what you have: the camera, director, actors and the set, nothing else, that's when you can judge the quality of a movie properly (ok: I love the 3D and special effects movies like any other sci-fi geek, but these old ones is the ones I come back to time after time ).
What do you enjoy when it comes to movies? I really have a hard time getting some of my friends to enjoy these good old ones, so if you're ever in Oslo: come by and we'll watch some proper movies

Other mentionable movies lately: "No country for old men" together with my dad that came to town ( brilliant movie, stunning scenery! ), "Blade Runner", again together with my dad when he was in town. And during easter I watched "Total Recall" and "The beautiful country" ( a bit slow at times, but a good storyline )


I mentioned scotch earlier ( why don't I have a scotch category... must do that later ), and last friday we got together some people at my flat and tasted the following:
- Macallan 12yo
Smelled nuts of this one, and tasted like rum and rasins after it was slowly warmed up in my hand
- The Balvenie double wood
Smell: caramel, tasted like marzipan and definently tasted like a rum I had at aku aku tiki bar
- Glenfarclas
dark caramel, tasted like spiced waffles and pepper
- Glenlivit Nadurra
smooth whisky, this is a bottle I want in my collection
- Clynelish 14yo
lots of malt in this one, not very exiting taste, some liquorish and a lot of barley in the aftertaste
- Port Ellen OMC
the best one in my collection for the moment, lots of the islay taste: salt sea and old boats, smooth

A good couple of weeks, next up: the 12th of april Method Man and Redman is going to have the concert of the year at Rockefeller, be there!

Webkit now has a 100/100 score on the acid3 test - the 26th of March apparently was a major fix day for webkit: both fixing the rendering and finding errors in the acid3 test so that it had to be updated. Opera have also achieved 100/100 on the acid3 test, very good to see the engineers in both these companies striving to achieve this goal.

Dmitry Stogov published some speed tests for the upcoming PHP5.3: up to 30% was achived, which is a great speedup for the next version of PHP. Looking at the NEWS file for PHP5.3 there now is a huge lineup of features/additions that will be released:
- the re2c lexer has been added
- Namespaces
- New garbage collector ( Derick demonstrated this on a php.no meeting - very good results )
- zend.ze1_compatibility_mode is now dropped
- New error mode: E_DEPRECATED
- Late Static Binding
- New _DIR_ constant
- Date (check this post) and SPL has been getting a lot of love
- Profiling stylesheets

Be sure to check out the NEWS file and download PHP5.3 to give it a testrun to give the developers some feedback before this very nice release.

Webkit now have support for the selectors api and have implemented querySelector and querySelectorAll in the nightly builds! I see that already some of the Javascript libraries have started to look at using this when the native method is available, and they should: the speedup shown on the benchmarks is very promising for this initial release.