January 18th, 2001:

Home.

Hung out with Brad for a while. Ran into Amber and Erin at Bellbottoms. Brad’s friend Gwen came out to Bellbottoms after a while. Then the three of us headed to IHOP.

My cell phone broke. Finally. The antenna busted. Which means I get no reception. I will buy a new one tomorrow. I wanted a new one anyway… so this is a blessing in disguise. The unfortunate thing is that not of the accessories are compatible with other phones. So… now I have to either buy the same phone (Nokia 6185) which is no longer offered for my service provider, or buy all new accessories, which includes a car charge, headset, wall charger, and a leather case. Grrr. Stupid cell phone companies.

I went over my funds a bit this evening. It looks like I am not going to be able to afford New Orleans. That’s okay because no one but Tom could come anyway.

I am very likely going to drive to Austin next weekend with Brad to sleep on the street and get cheap tickets to Rent that morning. They have a “starving artist” price ($20) for the first two rows of the theater that are sold on a first come first serve basis the morning of the show.

I need sleep. More in the morning.

Going to Bellbottoms with Brad.

Xalan is turning out to be something other than I originally thought. At first glance, I thought it was an Apache Server module. However, this now seems to be incorrect. As best as I can tell, it is a library (in either C++, or Java) that allows one to transform XML into HTML using an XSL style sheet.

In my initial thoughts, it was an actual Apache Server Module that allowed for direct URL access to Transformed documents via the use of Apache’s AddHandler directive or something similar.

If anyone (steve? brad? other brad?) knows anything about this, please do me a favor and let me know if I am on the right track with my line of thought here.

I am considering going to New Orleans for this weekend. I will leave Friday afternoon around 3:00pm. I will get there around 12:00am Saturday morning. I will then leave New Orleans on Sunday afternoon around 3:00pm, and will return here by 12:00am Monday morning. Just enough time to go to bed and be up for work the next morning.

I invited Ashley to come along, but since she took yesterday off in order to take care of her dog, she feels she should work Friday night, meaning she cannot come. Whatever.

Anyone else want to come with or meet there? It will be a short trip, and I am going to keep it as cheap as possible. If things go as planned, I will spend more money on alcohol then I will on transportation or sleeping accommodations.

I had a dream last night. I laid down to bed at almost exactly midnight.

I was talking on the phone to Jaclyn. All of a sudden, I hear a weird buzzing noise that starts out VERY loud and gets quieter and quieter. At the same time the buzzing noise started, the electricity in my apartment went out. I kept calling to Jaclyn on the phone, but she wouldn’t answer me. Over and over I called to her. As I was doing this, I was trying to walk through my apartment and find a flashlight. It was very very dark. I noticed, as I was walking and calling to her over the phone, that I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. And almost immediately after noticing this, I noticed that my head was touching the ceiling. I was floating. Moments later I realized I had been electrocuted, and that the reason the lights were out, and that Jaclyn was not answering was because I was dead. The me that I saw, was actually my spirit, trying to float out of my apartment, but for some reason, was held back by the ceiling above my head. Then a very interesting thing happened. While dreaming, I realized I was dreaming. I was scared, and I didn’t want to be dead, and I knew the only way to end it was to wake up. I kept jerking my body, hoping that the jerking would wake me from my sleep. Eventually it worked and I awoke startled. After taking a few deep breaths, I looked at my clock and saw that it was only 12:15am.

I am not sure if it is possible that I feel asleep, dreamt all that, and woke up in a 15 minute period. but it must be. I know for a fact that it was 12:00am when I went to bed… because the power in my apartment had gone out earlier that day, and right before I went to bed, I reset my clock. I used my cell phone to tell what time it was. 12:00am exactly. So… to set my clock, I just unplugged it, plugged it back in, and then increased the time to 12:01am so the clock would stop blinking. So the only piece of information that might be inaccurate is the time on the clock when I woke up. It is possible that I was so sleepy that I misread the clock… but I highly doubt it.

Anyone out there care to interpret all this?

It looks like PHPLIB is making some drastic changes. First… they are going to become PEAR compliant. Then, they will begin being distributed as part of PEAR. In addition, IT and IT[X] (the PHPLIB Template engines) are being removed and all PHPLIB users are being encouraged to use XML/XSLT equivalents within PHP.

I don’t really use PHPLIB any more…. but I am sad to see it take this route. Not the PEAR route, but the removal of their template engine. I think PEAR is a good idea. And the template system in PHPLIB is not that great. But I hate to think that NEW PHP developers are going to be forced (basically) into not only learning PHP, but learning XML and XSLT. Sure.. this stuff is the wave of the future, but there are some instances where this is just overkill.

We’ll see what happens. In the interim, I am installing sablotron and the sablotron extensions for PHP4 in order to get a better understanding of how all of this works in PHP. Maybe it will end up not being so bad after all.

Unfortunately, the PHP4 Debian package maintainer has done something wrong with the PHP4 packages rendering using phpize and php-config to build dynamically extensible PHP modules impossible. For some reason, and I do not even pretend to understand linkers (ld and family), the sablot.so built via these tools generates a shared object library that PHP believes in not a true PHP library.

Maybe I’ll just have to build the whole thing by hand.

Brad (aka sn0w-cr4sh), no not bradfitz, is the mutha-fuckin-pimp-daddy!