Michael's Weblog

Last weekend I spent a couple of days on the yacht Hebridean as part of an RYA sail cruising day skipper course. This was the second half, as we were aboard before last month but had to cancel due to the weather. This time, we combined the course with delivering the yacht to Oban Marina on Kerrera where it will spend the winter. I'm happy to say I passed, so theoretically at least I could be able to charter a yacht for a trip at some stage. I might investigate that for one summer, but I'll want a bit more mileage and experience first. I also noticed that the local college were running a Coastal Skipper theory course, so I'm on that now too.

I'm considering going to FOSDEM in Belgium in February. I missed LugRadio Live this year so I'm thinking of it as a sort of substitute. Also considering PHP London, but we'll see.

I finally decided to get around to doing something about my site, so I've made a front page for it which is better than a straight redirect onto the blog. Hopefully it's reasonable.

I've been learning a bit more recently about the internals of PHP, and how to write extensions for it. I've been practicing by doing a bit of work on a Cairo wrapper that was started in the Google Summer of Code last year and until now has been mainly looked after by Elizabeth Marie Smith. She's put up with many, many newbie questions from me and so I've learned a lot while doing it. It's now at the stage where it'll run the eZ Components Graph component without too much complaining. It has a dual procedural and object-oriented API, so it should manage to run most things that use the existing cairo_wrapper extension. Thanks to all the regulars on #php.pecl and #php.doc on EFNet, and #php-gtk on Freenode for putting up with me while doing this. I've also written a quick wrapper for Tokyo Cabinet for the DBA extension in PHP which with a bit of luck will get committed to PHP6 some time soon.

In other news, I've been occasionally helping in the maintenance of Jubilee and An Sulaire, the two Sgoth Niseach boats I go sailing on occasionally. Hopefully they'll be going back in the water soon and we can get some sailing done. I'm looking forward to it.