Dean Vaughan

Backyard Wildlife 03-09

It's almost spring in the Ozarks, lots of brown, but a touch of green here and there.

Meadow Lark

Dark-Eyed Junco

 

Cow Birds

Dark-Eyed Junco

Box Cat

Meadow Larks

Camo

Rusty Capped Sparrow

Bradford Pear

White Crowned Sparrow

Female Northern Cardinal

Female Northern Cardinal

Dark-Eyed Junco

Dark-Eyed Junco

 

Posted in Random | No Comments »

Keeping Busy…

Not my thigh, but it is my handy work.

Posted in Random | No Comments »

PHP Log Tail Revisitied

The brilliance of programming...

Last year I needed to tail a file in PHP. I whipped this out.

Today I needed to do it and came up with this:

$output = `tail -n 150 /var/log/messages`;
$tail_str = "<pre>$output</pre>";

Weee... don't know what the hell I was thinking last time.

Posted in Code | No Comments »

Free Online PDF to JPG Converter

I had the need to convert a PDF to a JPG today. I searched around on Google and everything was pay to play. This is pure exploitation since this sort of conversion is a one liner for most Linux systems.

I wrote my own.

Depending on your connection speed, this may take a while.

If you provide a single page PDF you will get a JPG back. If you provide a multi-page PDF you will get a zip file back, inside of the zip file will be a JPG of each page of the PDF.

Click Here to Download the Source

Posted in Code | No Comments »

PHP Image/Ad Rotator

Simply reads a directory of images and rotates through them randomly. What makes it cool is the script is called from and HTML IMG tag. Neato.

Download Source!

Once downloaded, open the file and change $ad_dir to the path (not url) of your images. Then upload it to your web host. Call the script from an IMG tag: <img src=ad_rotator.php>

Posted in Random | No Comments »

Eagle Butte 2009

I took another trip to Eagle Butte. Twelve hours there, work for two days, and then twelve hours back. This trip was a lot better than the last one. I think because the weather was 'nice'. No real snow and temps in the 4s-30s. Brisk, baby. I expected it to be -20 and for there to be snow over my head.

Also, last time I stayed a whole week and I either got frostbite or cauliflower ear.

As a joke I left the baggage tag from my Hawaii trip on my bag. The box contains MREs. Eagle Butte doesn't really have any resturants. There is a Taco John's that is the town's running joke.

My first view of snow was in Bentonville, AR.

Giant beer cans on the Missouri border.

Somewhere in Iowa there was more snow... I have a thing for snow.

Yeah.

Nothing.

The motel in Eagle Butte used to be a Super 8, they lost the franchise. The pillows in the rooms are like soccer balls. I'm referring to the shape. Oddest and most uncomfortable thing ever.

It snowed over night in Eagle Butte.

Across the street from the motel is the town's only bank, which resides in a double wide trailer.

 

This was by no means an exciting trip, but in this case that is good.

Posted in Me | No Comments »