The Month That Was Nearly A Week

Well, August just flew by and there was too much going on to write about. Dontcha hate it when reality flaps about that way? It was pretty mixed-up too...

August opened with the week when my mother collapsed and ended up spending several days in the local hospital on a drip, first trying not to remember my father's bad times there (he died of cancer) and then trying not to panic over their MSRA record. Pending full test results, it looks like a one-off scare rather than anything horribly long-term and disabling, but of course none of us knew that at the time - we had an anxious few days while Mum lay there being ill and scared and un-Mum-like.

She came out of hospital and went straight to organising herself some private medical tests so she could get it all behind her before the next school year began. Then she went to Menorca with a friend and relaxed between clinic visits.

Somewhere between the hospital trips and airport runs, Nigel and I headed off to the Austrian Tyrol, where I introduced him to the twin concepts of sleeping in a tent and drinking hot chocolate with a lot of schnapps in it. Then we drove into Italy in an attempt to escape the Alps (you can have too much Alp) and witnessed some bizarre shit going down in a small village high up on some godforsaken Alm, while lightning flashed and thunder smashed all around us & a single mournful church bell never stopped tolling. I still think that bus-stop was stolen, I don't care how many people were sitting waiting next to it - no way was the road wide enough to take a bus. Some of those people were dribbling vacantly and may have been stuck there for years. We struck lucky and found a hotel back near sane old Innsbruck, instead of having to lie awake under wet canvas all night waiting to be murdered by Rupret the Donkey-Boy or whatever Nigel called him.

We ended the holiday in a pleasant Gästhaus in Liechtenstein, which is a very odd little country - an almost completely feudal society, and the locals speak German with an Italian accent. We bumped into the Prince (Hi, Prince!) when Liechtenstein celebrated something Nigel swears translates to 'National Ascension Day'. Uhuh. The fireworks were extremely cool that night, although the beer was a little damper than usual IMHO. Our local contact, Jürgen (say it with at least 5 'R's and you'll have the accent right) somehow managed to justify our hotel bill as a company expense, which came as a nice surprise, especially as we missed our flight home at the end of the week and had to fork out for replacement flights and an extra night camping by the Bodensee.

I came home to over 500 unopened emails on the PHP internals list alone, having been absent for a whole 6 days. Every time I look at that week's buildup I can feel my brain slithering down the back of my neck... I've been summarising it for at least 5 days in total, and it doesn't seem to get any less. It's not easy, folks. Someone mentioned PHP 6 and everyone brought their pet projects out into the open all over again (thank you so much Sara for being one of the few that didn't, or there'd have been nearer a thousand wretched emails there!). Now try and make that into seamless prose that actually conveys what was discussed. See?

Given the resulting writers' block, I concentrated on PHP-GTK 2 for most of last week, with some cheering results. I adapted the win32 build system Wez wrote for PHP, and it works beautifully on my box. Andrei gave me CVS karma for the PHP-GTK source module when I sat up and begged nicely, so the whole thing's in cvs.php.net now, waiting for someone else to be able to make head or tail of it. I did write some instructions, but in retrospect I'm not sure how useful they were - I'd relied fairly heavily on the fact that whoever tries to build the php-gtk2.dll using that system will necessarily have already built PHP 5 on the same machine and in the same way beforehand, but that might have been a little optimistic. Anyway it works, and PHP-GTK 2 looks really promising (faster, smoother, more elegant, extensible from userside, better cross-platform support, and there are even some nicer GTK error messages), but I've just found out how many fiddly little bits and pieces still need writing prior to release.

Some guy named Tom Rogers - who I'm hoping is about to come on board too so we can learn our way around the project codebase together - wrote half a decent override this morning for the colour-grabbing functions in GtkColorSelection, and I wrote the other half. I hadn't realised how much of a kick I'd get out of committing that :) it's a really good feeling to make some minor changes and suddenly something that didn't used to work for anyone, works for everyone. I could fall in love with coding all over again! As it is it's kept me out of trouble - I was up all last night beating the keys, so to speak, so I didn't spend the afternoon as planned getting drunk at Scouse's BikeFest. Which is just as well, 'cos my mother's coming over for a 'special dinner' tonight anyway.

And tomorrow it's back to the horrible long summary (and the ones that need catching up on since then), plus I've been sent two seriously cool articles over the weekend that need to be live this week on zend.com if possible...

Oh and I booked my flights for Israel now. I'm flying out on November 20th :):):)