Dave Kellam

Do you belong to a special group at Flickr? Want to display that group’s photos on your website? Well now you can! For four easy payments of $4.44 you can own a GPL’d string of characters that plays nicely with PHP and integrates a feed of your group pool into your website.

First thing you need to do is grab MagpieRSS, you could probably do it with lastRSS too. Then you want to grab flickrgroup.php (a slightly modified version of this tag script). Change the grouptag and num_items variables to suit your needs. You’ll probably also want to hack up how the html is displayed too.

I used this to integrate the group pool into the Conform Project site. Although, I still have a bit of tweaking to do, because I don’t think the spacing will be right between the images (there’s only one in the pool right now).

Update: The script has been updated to support local caching of the images.

Treasure Box is an online game/piece of artwork. It’s also part logic puzzle game, but of the variety that are solvable by waving your mouse around (or trackpad for a frustrating experience).

Dreamhost says they keep regular backups of your files, but I always assumed that it meant there was some mythical backup temple that tech support could get at. Hidden away in their Knowledge Base is this little piece of information: there’s a .snapshot folder in your home directory. They don’t really advertise it.

Even if you think it’s not there (ls -a), it is. Go to that directory and you shall find hourly, daily and weekly snapshots of your files, for backupy goodness. I wish I had known this a few weeks ago.

A state senator from Texas wants to send Body Mass Index information home on student report cards. Senator Van dePutte is proposing a state law requiring schools to weigh students, compute their body mass index, and send that information home on their report cards.

Sounds like it would do wonders for the kids. We have this stereotypical vision of Texans, courtesy of television, the movies and the president but I honsestly can’t see parents being so dumb they don’t realize their kid is fat.

But, it can’t hurt to look at a potential scenario one year from now:

Billy Ray Jr: Lookee pa, it says I’ma passin the fourth grade!
Billy Ray Sr: Holdup son, this number here says you’re fat.
Billy Ray Sr: Move o’er in the light here a bit.
Billy Ray Jr: But Ma says I’s justa little husky.
Billy Ray Sr: Sweet Lord in Heaven boy, you’re big as a prime steer!
Billy Ray Sr: You’re a goin’ on the Atkins.

Honestly, do they need to give the teacher’s something else to do? Can someone tell me that there aren’t other areas in education that woud benefit from the time spent weighing each child in the class, computing a bmi and adding it to the child’s permanent records?