thumphper.php is the first version of the half of my attempt at replicating the basic functionality of Photobucket:
This script generates PNG images and thumbnails from files uploaded to my home directory and stores them in a separate, web accessible directory. It’s run from crontab every few minutes, it’s not event based.
I just added a page for my K’Nex contraption the Carousel of Blondes, which is a small gadget that spins a pair of collector cards around.
There are pictures of my builds, and they will be added as soon as I can piece together a little WP plug-in to display them properly.
A new section for Builds has been added. This will display my projects using construction toys. A good chunk of these will be LEGO, K’Nex, and Fisher-Price TRIO, as these are my favorite types, but other systems will show up from time to time.
Right now there are only two entries on the page, but more will be added soon, as I collect up pictures from my home computers and sort them out.
For future reference, the gear on the bottom of GeoTrax trains that drives it on the tracks fits K’Nex gears but not LEGO gears.
I’m posting this here because I spend so much time with PHP at work, I forget the Perl way of checking if files exist. Hopefully this will speed up my search time, maybe even ingrain it in my memory.
File exists: -e
File size: -s
Is directory: -d
Sometimes I feel a bit silly being as enthusiastic as I am about simple kids toys like TRIO and Duplo. John Robb’s post on Drone Bonjwas got me thinking, though. If you take as a given that drone swarms have a future, why do you have to limit it only to combat? What if drones have just as much a future as construction equipment, as these Quadrotor Teams show. If your job in the field is controlling swarms of drones, building towers and such out of basic, modlar parts, then maybe having experience and adaptability with Duplo-like parts could be an asset.
I thought I could use WordPress as a client-cum-archive for LiveJournal, but it was too much of a hassle. Therefore, from now on, blog.andrewburton.biz will redirect here.
resetNics.vbs is a simple VBScript that resets a NIC on Roxy, my Windows2000 machine. The adapter freezes, requires a restart, and I got tired of manually doing it all he time. It’s a VERY derivative script; Google the first Dim line and you’ll find a dozen similar scripts. It’s posted here as a backup to being on my local network.
collaginator.php is a PHP script I’ve been working off-and-on with for a couple of weeks. I got an older version working easily enough using global variables, but I decided to clean it up today with pointers. It made the whole thing not only look nicer but also usable as a library, with few modifications.
It uses SimplePie, which makes handling feeds much easier, which means it should either be installed or the library should be in the same directory as the PHP script. Also, Collaginator was designed to be run as a commandline script, and will likely timeout if used as a web script.