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?

When you spend most of your life in Canada, you tend to forget that it’s kind of weird that our milk comes in plastic bags (via Cynical-C). To us it’s no weirder than picking up a jug or a carton full of milk.

It also never really seemed wrong to be leaving the bag open in the fridge. I guess it’s probably not safe if as long as you’re not performing some sort of science experiment.

The current Conform Project series just ended, so I decided to try a different process while I work on a new backend for the site. I’d like to take this moment and introduce you to the new Conform Project group on Flickr. The group is open to anyone who wants to participate (you can get a free account with 10mb of upload/month).

To take part, grab a conform image from the Flickr group (or the conform tag) or one of the first series images from the Conform Project site. Use that image as a base for the new one that you create. Upload it to Flickr, give the image the tag *conform* and add it to the group pool. Use your description or comments to link to the original image that you used as a base and/or add a comment to the original piece.

The Oscar nominations were released today.
Jamie Foxx is nominated for best actor and best supporting actor. As far as best pic goes, The Aviator is a bit too frantic to win, Clint Eastwood is depressing, I’m assuming Ray is a character piece, if the voters are in a sappier mood they’ll go with the feel-good Finding Neverland, otherwise they’re likely going through a midlife crisis and will go with the lighter Sideways.