Dean Vaughan

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.

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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 | 2 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>

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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 | 1 Comment »

Fight Team Rejects

Double shot of eye closed fury.

Sweaty nerd shirt.

Bemused.

Bemused part two.

Eye of the tiger Dean, eye of the tiger.

Pat on the back, or hit after the bell?

 

Posted in Fighting, Me | 1 Comment »

PlayOn – XBMC

I've been trying out the beta of PlayOn on my Xbox for the last few weeks. I like it.

PlayOn is a UPnP server that you install on your PC. It scrapes RSS feeds and then performs some magic so you can watch videos from those feeds on DLNA capable devices. So far it supports YouTube, Netflix, CBS, CNN, ESPN and Hulu.

It works well on my Xbox running XBMC. It's really nice to watch videos from those sites on my TV, so nice that I paid the $30 for the registered version of PlayOn.

It is a beta, and the only problem I have found is a strange one. My first attempt to play a video never works, the second one always does. This means I click play, wait five seconds for it to fail, then click play again. It's hardly even annoying.

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