It still amazes and amuses me when I see big companies and establishments running windows xp  (or even windows 2k).

Chrome OS would be perfect for Athens airport internet access booths. Pretty much any linux distro with a fullscreen browser would do the job. Right now they use IE6(!) in full screen mode running on xp or 2K. I really hope people don’t use it to check their mails or do e-banking.

<table>
    <tr>
        <td>item 1</td>
        <td>item 2</td>
        <td>item 3</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>last item</td>
        <td colspan="2"> </td>
    </tr>
</table>

Although the usage of a list will make the lives of the developer and web author easier and produce cleaner code there is a catch. If the height of all the list items is not the same the result is going to be something like this:

You can avoid that by setting the height of the list items and overflow:hidden in css but sometimes all the information is required to be visible.

I came up with a simple solution quite a while ago using just a few lines of jQuery.

Let’s say we have the following list

<ul class="floatinglist">
    <li>some information</li>
    <li>some more information</li>
    . . .
    <li>even more information</li>
</ul>

By adding the following js code to your page the problem is solved

$(document).ready(function(){
	var maxheight = 0;
	$('.floatinglist li').each(function(){
		if (maxheight < $(this).height()) {
			maxheight = $(this).height();
		}
	});
	$('.floatinglist li').height(maxheight);
});

Now all the list items get the height of the biggest one and they float as expected.

A few days ago I decided to use the tram line to go to a nice Vietnamese restaurant for dinner. When I got in the tram wagon, I was astonished by two things. The first one was its amazingly slow speed, and the other one was what I saw in the information screen… windows 2000 boot screen stuck!

The weird thing is that tram line was build just before the Olympic games in Athens (2004), so windows 2000 was dated even then.

After a good meal and about 2 hours, I had to take the tram to go back and the boot screen was still there!

Liquid carousel is a jQuery plugin intended for liquid designs. Every time the container of the carousel gets resized, the number of items in the list change to fit the new width.

You can see how the script works and download it at http://www.nikolakis.net/liquidcarousel/

This script was created in a few hours, on my free time. If you find any bugs or you want to make suggestions, please use the form in the comments section bellow.

ToDo List:

• infinite cycling
• Create a vertical version

Demos

Usage

 <ul id="koalalist">
    <li>
        <div>Item 01</div>
        <img src="images-01.jpg" alt="Image 01" width="150" height="150" />
    </li>
    <li>
        <div>Item 02</div>
        <img src="images-02.jpg" alt="Image 02" width="150" height="150" />
    </li>
    <li>
        <div>Item 03</div>
        <img src="images-03.jpg" alt="Image 03" width="150" height="150" />
    </li>
 </ul>

CSS

    #koalalist li div {
        width: 100%;
        top: 130px;
        height: 20px;
    }

Download

Unfortunately my favorite station (electricFM) is a internet station, so I can’t listen to it while I’m on the road.

I solved that problem by recording the stream for a couple of hours using the following script:

#!/bin/sh

# Set the time you want to record
DURATION="45m"

# Start stream dumping
mplayer -cache 150 -dumpstream "http://www.electricfm.com/stream.pls" -dumpfile ~/electricfm.mp3 -quiet&

# Save process id to file
echo $! >~/.mplayer-pid

# Wait X minutes before killing the process
sleep $DURATION && kill `cat ~/.mplayer-pid`

# Remove the file holding the process id
rm ~/.mplayer-pid

I have set cron to run the script every night, and I upload the mp3 every day to my phone.

If I had my phone connected to my pc I could save the stream directly to it, but I also use my phone as an alarm clock, so I have to do it manually everyday before I brush my teeth :p

I recently bought an asus p7131H pci TV-tuner solely for the purpose of connecting my Wii to the 24″ monitor I have acquired.

After trying for a couple of hours to access the s-video stream from different players (even the over complicated MythTV) I came across the very nice and simple tvtime.

Installing it was a piece of cake with synaptic

sudo apt-get install tvtime

The “tricky” part was to switch to s-video. And by tricky I mean I had to spent 1 minute to read the man page and figure out I had to use the -i switch

tvtime -d /dev/video1 -i 1

That was it. Now I can enjoy Mario Kart on my pc screen

#!/bin/sh

activeFolder='/var/www/vhosts/'
backupFolder='/path/to/backup/'
dbUser="root"
dbPassword="yourpassword"

currentDate=`date '+%Y%m%d'`
mkdir $backupFolder$currentDate

cd $backupFolder$currentDate

for i in `ls "$activeFolder"`; do
	if [ -d $activeFolder$i ]
	then
		echo "zipping: $i"
		tar czf $i.tar.gz $activeFolder$i
	fi
done

# Create mysql backup folder
mkdir MySQL

# Go to backup folder
cd MySQL

# get a list of all databases
databases=`mysql --user=$dbUser --password=$dbPassword -e "SHOW DATABASES;" | tr -d "| " | grep -v Database`

# dump each database in turn
for db in $databases; do
    echo "Dumping database: $db"
    mysqldump --force --opt --user=$dbUser --password=$dbPassword --database $db > "$db.sql"
done

# Go to backup folder
cd $backupFolder$currentDate

# zip sql files
tar czf MySQL.tar.gz MySQL

# remove mysql backup folder
rm MySQL -rf

# Send e-mail notification
mail -s "Backup Is ready $currentDate" your@email.com < /dev/null

If you use this script, I suggest you run it once a week in off peak time (4-5am), and keep backups of your MySQL database daily.

Someone has to tell them about the google chorme frame!

It seems IE 6 is haunting me everywhere!

Flash settings only give one option in the microphone tab, and that is “Linux Microphone”.

Fortunately the solution is easy though not very obvious

install PulseAudio Volume Control

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Then go to

In input devices make sure your webcam is not muted. Then in configuration set your webcams profile as “Analog Mono Input”

That’s it! Your webcams microphone is now working with flash.