Remember what I said about the tedious job of maintaining software projects? This time, it even struck me twice: Just two days after the release of MPUI 1.1.1, I received a batch of bug reports and other suggestions, so I did another rework of MPUI yesterday. Next to half a dozen minor bugfixes, I finally implemented a »clip info« feature that relieves the user from the task of parsing the (sometimes cryptic) MPlayer output.

This morning, even before I left my bed, a good friend …erm… persuaded me to add a new feature to CENSORED: He is preparing a presentation to be held at the university. The problem is, the computer where he’s going to show the slides is not his, and it’s equipped with an ancient GhostScript installation. The 7.x versions of GS have some serious issues with rendering PDF files generated by pdf(La)TeX. For example, hypens (‘-’) are shown at completely wrong places. To overcome this, I added an option to »render« a PDF into a directory with one PNG file per page, thus allowing to generate images on one computer (that is equipped with a decent version of GhostScript) and presenting them on another one.

I’m proud to present the new, custom-build page theme. It’s quite similar to the old theme, but somewhat refreshed in some areas. Moreover, I ditched those enervating saturated (and blue) colors – the new color scheme is much more consistent. (Just in case someone feels like asking: No, I’m not a regular Ubuntu user :)
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Today, I briefly tried some Python IDEs (not thoroughly, I just installed them and started them once). One that caught my attention (in a negative sense) is Eric3:

I remember having seen screenshots like this from KDevelop and MS Word, but these were »artificial« ones, generated by deliberately activating every toolbar and dock window available. This is the first program I’ve seen that provides this kind of experience »out of the box«, without any configuration, at the first start.

I love coding, but to the same extent I hate project maintenance. This is a problem I share with most other coders, I guess – but well, sometimes it just has to be done. And today it was MPUI‘s turn to get some fixes.
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As promised, I’m going to move (almost) all content from my old homepage to the new one. Today, I started by copying the whole old public_html directory to a local hard disk. While browsing through the resulting directory dump, it suddenly became clear to me why the disk quota was so tight on the old site: There was a 30 MB log file! I added a simple textfile-based access logging facility to the code and, well, I simply forgot about it.

Now such a file isn’t something I would simply delete. No. This is some kind of treasure, so I imported it into a database to obtain some fancy statistics.
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During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always produce 16 bit signed output, but 8 bit unsigned image data is needed), a raw image file will result of this whole process, ready to be displayed with an arbitrary image viewer. Sounds simple, eh? :)
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OK, here it is, my new page. Originally, I wanted to write my own blog system, capable of fancy stuff like multilanguage support (because I wanted to write in English and German), multiple categories per post and integrated handling of associated files. But then I sat down, a text editor window with some PHP code in front of me, and was once again overwhelmed by the lack of fascination that web development has to offer :( So I decided to ditch the whole thing and use some »off-the-shelf« weblog system.
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