Johannes Schlüter

After reading Moishe Lettvin's blog entry about the development of the Vista shutdown menu I don't wonder anymore why Windows users need to click on "start" to shutdown the system

(via Joel on Software "Choices  = Headaches", "How many Microsofties does it take to implement the Off menu")

Once again a youtube video, and yes it's oooold....

I recently wrote about using assembler for extending PHP, which certainly never makes sense. Writing that made me remember that Johann once showed me another possibility: Use Borland's Delphi for creating PHP extensions using PHP4Delphi. According to their CVS there isn't much work done for it recently but back in the days Johann used it, it seemed to work. I never used it myself but it might be worth a look if you know Pascal/Delphi and want to extend PHP. That makes way more sense than using assembler - I'm sure, but still I think C is the best choice for that.

Which File Extension are You?

While going through some old backups I found some funny stuff I did back in the times when I was a bit bored (or maybe just frustrated?) A PHP extension written using mostly Assembler instead of C.

If you are interested in scary and useless stuff you can fetch the code and try it. There is some C code in it to create two required structures (which makes no sense doing in assembler imo - while this doesn't mean that thing makes any sense) but all functions and everything else is done using Assembler in the nasm syntax for 32bit x86 machines. If you really want to try t you need nasm and a PHP built environment. After running phpize and configure, just as for any other extension, you might need to edit the Makefile holding two rules for the .s file (remove the one using gas as assembler)

The extension exports a single function confirm_asmext_compiled() which prints some stuff using PHP's output mechanism and returns an integer, which is a bit tricky using Assembler since from the C perspective the return value is returned using some zval * structure passed by reference (making it a zval **) to the function so you need to dereference it and need to check/find out how the C compiler arranges the zval structure...

Yes for doing such a thing you have to be real bored (or maybe just extremly frustrated....) I'm happy this being a few years ago but I wanted to archive it somewhere

The Simpons are getting there own movie which will be releases at July 2007, meanwhile there's a trailer. I hope the guys around Matt Groening do good work - 23 minutes have been a good length for Simpson episodes....

Aus gegebenem Anlass mal ein Klassiker:

Und nicht vergessen: Es kommt auf den Charakter an!

Der Artikel von Heise über die Reorganisation von GEZ-Gegnern erinnert mich dran, dass ich noch eine Beobachtung bloggen wollte: Ich habe mich jetzt ja zum zweitenmal in meinem Leben an der FH München immatrikuliert, beide male kam kurz danach Post von der GEZ, ob ich mich nicht anmeden will. Zufall? - Muss mich unbedingt mal umhören ob ich der einzige bin.

Wie Heise berichtet gibt es einen neuen Entwurf zur Regelung der Telekommunikationsbeobachtung aus dem Hause Zypries. Laut Entwurf sollen E-Mail-Postfächer nurnoch für Personen eingerichtet werden dürfen, die sich vom Anbieter identifizieren lassen. Zudem sollen sich die protokollierten Kommunikationsdaten in Echtzeit abfragen lassen. Eine Schwachsinnigere Sache gab es schon lange nichtmehr. Für jemanden, der etwas illegales machen will ist das kein Hindernis - der bekommt leicht ein Postfach im Ausland und kann im Zweifel zudem Verschlüsselung verwenden - Eine solche Regelung führt nur zu einer Stärkeren Überwachung rechtschaffender Bürger und zu einer schleichenden Einführung eiens Überwachungsstaates. Unglaublich. Ich bin ja dafür einfach alle Bürger in Sicherheitsverwahrung zu nehmen und in Einzelzellen festzuketten - da muss der Staat nurnoch gegen Gedankenverbrechen vorgehen.

Since I some weeks I'm running Linux on my current workstation. I've been a KDE user for some time but since I like liferea (I understand the code!) as my feed reader and I wanted to see whether GNOME's better than KDE I set it up as my desktop environment. Now I was missing an music player. I knew KDE has the great amaroK, being on a GNOME desktop I searched something similar. The best I found was Banshee a Mono-based player written in C#. After getting the first experience I missed an feature: Automatic playlists for each album. So I set down and developed it, you can see a screenshot of the results on the top of the post and the code here. (I compile it by executing "gmcs -out:ArtistList.dll -target:library -rbanshee -r:System.Data.dll ArtistList.cs") What it does is generating the list you see on the left of the screenshot. It's far away from being stable (see comments in the code) but works for me

Since Wednesday I'm back from this year's PHP Cofnerence at Frnakfurt. As always it was great fun and it's time to write a short recap. Read More

Vor meiner Abfahrt nach Frankfurt war ich als ordentlicher Student noch in meiener Buchführungsvorlesung. Der Dozent schloss die Vorlesung, die zwischendrin über die geringe Qualität der aktuellen Radio-Musik ging, mit einigen Regelungen (§§961 ff BGB) ab, ich erlaube die hier mal zu zitieren: Read More

Ist das Srafgesetzbuch ein Fall für das Allgemeine Gleichbehandlungsgesetz oder ist §183 StGB nur ein Zeichen, dass der Gesetzgeber weiß, dass exhibitionistische Frauen nicht belästigend seien können? (ja, §183 I StGB spricht explizit von Männern, für Frauen greift dieser Paragraph nicht)

In my last blog entry I talked about old games, but I also played new games. The newest game I played was the free version of the sequel to Sam'n'Max: Hit the road, the fresh released Sam'n'Max Culture Shock. Since Firefox terminated while typing the first revision of this article I just put a few screenshos from the old game (using ScumVM to run it) and the new version. Have fun. Read More

I don't play many games, usually,, but recently I couldn't stop playing and played quite a lot games, the games I played most are the ones I last played years ago, aka old games. One of my favorites is Railroad Tycoon which I ran using dosbox on my Linux box.

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