A week ago today I moved from Siegburg, Germany to Skien, Norway. I took a plane from Cologne/Bonn Airport to Oslo Gardermoen and from there a train to Skien. The final leg of this trip, from Larvik to Skien, was by bus.



I am currently living in an appartment provided by eZ systems AS, my employer. The appartment is conveniently located right next to where Derick lives (so I can use his WLAN access) and about a five minutes walk away from the office.



The first week I spent with literature review and looking at various Workflow Management systems for my diploma thesis. I will continue this work next week and then start working on the specification of the Workflow Management component that I will be developing for eZ publish 4 as part of my diploma thesis.

The slides from the talk I had at LinuxTAG are now available.

During the session I also took some pictures of the crowd to use in the demonstration. Here are some of the guys sitting on the front row.

eZ publish 3.7.6 is the latest update for the 3.7 branch of the eZ publish Content Management System. It is a maintenance release containing various bug-fixes.

eZ publish 3.6.8 is the latest update for the 3.6 branch of the eZ publish Content Management System. It is a maintenance release containing various bug-fixes.

eZ publish 3.5.11 is the latest update for the 3.5 branch of the eZ publish Content Management System. It is a maintenance release containing various bug-fixes. Note: Because eZ publish version 3.8 has been released, version 3.5.11 is the last update for the eZ publish 3.5 branch. Version 3.5.x will no longer be supported.

I've been testing eZXHTML yesterday on 3.8. For all I can tell after my admittedly short test, it does work (I couldn't test the image insertion as 3.8 keeps crashing when I try to upload images, no matter if eZXHTML active  or not). This would mean that the current XHTML parser could be used with 3.8. However, there's been a total rewrite of the whole ezsimplified ezxml  parser which should likely be reviewed by us and see if we should instead base our code on it. A Short glance over it suggests it is complex as usual. It is implementing a few new features like but I'm not so sure how important that really is.

The IBM developerWorks site has started a new series of articles today with the posting of this new tutorial focusing on the creation of Web 2.0 applications with the help of PHP and DHTML.

The buzzword of 2006 is Web 2.0. What that means is hotly debated, but it appears to refer to cool dynamic Web applications. Those Web applications -- often developed in PHP -- use dynamic HTML (DHTML) to create pages that move and change without having to go back to the server for a refresh. Author Jack Herrington explains how to get started in this "Devise Web 2.0 applications with PHP and DHTML" series.

Though the term DHTML is becoming a bit more scarce than it once was (being replaced by phrases like "dynamic pages with Javascript" or "javascript DOM manipulation"), it's still a powerful ally when combined with a flexible backend like PHP. They provide a few examples of applications that can be built with this combination including popup ad boxes, general popups, spinners (show/hide blocks of HTML), and tabs.

For each of the items, they give both the HTML and PHP code to get the job done, making it a simple matter of grabbing the code and pasting it into your favorite editor to get started. The next part of the article series will cover the creation of dynamic graphs and the creation of new HTML elements with the help of Javascript.

The PHPMac.com site has posted a new tutorial with a quick look at the installation of Apache 2.2.2 and PHP 5.1.3 (or 5.1.4) on Mac OS X 10.4.6.

For anyone that has been wishing to switch to Apache 2 on their Mac, this is the time to do it. PHP 5 has also recently been updated to 5.1.3 and this tutorial describes in detail, the best method to both build and install these programmes on your Mac.

As usual, they've provided all of the configure statements for you to cut and paste (or tailor to your needs) and some of the configuration options for the Apache installation. Under the frequently asked question(s) for this edition, there's mention of an issue with building and installing libxml2.

It's been 2 weeks since the stripping of EXIF data was put into place on the willow site. Last friday a redesign up uploaded and as part of this update I added the EXIF stripping to all the images on the site.

The following table shows how these changes have effected the size of downloads:

Week / Action	Bytes Transfered	Sessions	Bytes / Session
Week 1 - no image changes	2.50 GB	6,969.00	376.45 KB
Week 2 - striping EXIF data from thumbnails	1.81 GB	7,459.00	254.95 KB
Week 3 - striping EXIF data from all site images (minor design changes)	992.98 MB	8,459.00	120.20 KB

As the number of sessions has increased over the period I've used the Bytes/ Session to calculate that stripping the EXIF data from all images has resulted in a saving of approximately 30% (this figure is likely to be effected by the new lighter site design).

These changes have resulted in the site loading much quicker, especially the collection pages that contain a lot of thumbnails.

Those looking for others reason to strip EXIF data should read about this "incident", that resulted in this advisory.

Have been working on a refresh of the willow site and could not work out why the majority of thumbnail images were 20K yet others were 2K. I stumbled on the issue when a bug with the handling on EXIF data presented itself.

When ImageMagick scales images it will copy any EXIF data unless told not to. The images on the willow site contained approximately 18K of EXIF data and this was being copied into the thumbnail variations.

eZ publish makes it easy to add filters for image variations. Simply add the following line to image.ini.append.php in your siteaccess file:

[ImageMagick]
Filters[]=strip=+profile "*" +comment

[small]
Filters[]=strip=

This will strip EXIF information for "small" image variations and can be added to others by simply adding the Filters[] line to the variations definition.

Newer versions of ImageMagick have a -strip flag that will also remove EXIF data. To use this replace the [ImageMagick] section with:

[ImageMagick]
Filters[]=strip=-strip

This will work on all versions of eZ publish 3 that are using ImageMagick to create image variations.

This has reduced the page size of some of the willow collection pages from 856 kb to 168 kb !