In less than 3 months - on August 8th, 2008 - PHP4 reaches end of life. If you still haven’t updated, it’s damn well time to get migration started. PHP5 far better than the previous versions, and if it’s good enough for Yahoo, Facebook and many other huge sites, it’ll probably be a joyride for you too.

It seems I don’t find time to do too many stories to the site currently. I do however twitter occasionally. As a convenience I’ve added the latests twitters on the site too…

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I have a VoIP phone on my desk. It’s part of the Corporate VoIP solution, and in most cases it works pretty well. One of my favorite features is the ability to act as a meeting phone with the speaker on. It usually works great, but there is one thing with the speaker feature, which just feels wrong – to turn off the speaker, you press the hangup buttom. Please fix this issue in a future firmware update, and allow the speaker buttom to act as a toggle that can turn the speak both on and off.

I’ve been playing a bit with the Google App Engine the past few nights. It’s one of the newest toys out of Google, and it could very well be a very important piece of infrastructure to many web developers trying to create a dotcom adventure.

Google App Engine (once they let you in) allows you to run web applications of google’s server infrastructure. With the Google App Engine you can write applications (and run these of your local machine (Mac, Linux or Windows) and even use data storage in your applications. Currently applications can only be written in Python, but Google promises support for other languages later. Once approved by Google and your application is ready for prime time, you simple deploy it, and it runs of Googles Servers.

Changing files from one format to another is quite easy with a little bit of Magick. In the example below a JPG image (test.jpg) is converted into a GIF-image (test.gif). To output in a different (ImageMagick supported) format, just change the “image->Set” line.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Image::Magick;

my $image = Image::Magick->new();

# To explicitly set image format use this instead:
# my $image = Image::Magick->new(magick=>'JPEG');

my $x = $image->Read('test.jpg');

$x = $image->Set(magick => 'GIF');
$x = $image->Write('test.gif');

exit();