Archive for February, 2009
Woot.com Item of the Day on your Desktop
The first thing I check in my browser everyday is what’s for sale on woot.com. Its a site that features one deal per day and charges 5 bucks for shipping no matter what the product is.
This morning I decided to write a script to stick the deal in my conky. Having it sit on my desktop means one less thing to manually check in my browser 
If you don’t know what conky is here’s my conky tutorial
I used the same method as I do in the rest of my scripts…set flags around our data, extract the info between the flags and shoot it out to conky.
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PHP Login System Tutorial – Part 3
This will be the last part of the tutorial. Below are links to the previous 2 parts. Sorry for the lack of whitespace use, I’m trying to save you from scrolling horizontally
Link to part 1
Link to part 2
So far, we can register and log in. Now we want to be able to update our profile and add pictures. We’ll need to add another table in our database to store references of the users pictures.
If we were to store the actual picture into the database it could become very big, especially if you decide to allow your users to upload videos too. A better option would be to upload the picture into a directory on the web server and keep a reference to the picture in our database.
So first lets add our table. I added size and type to explain how to retrieve those values but I won’t be using them in my version of the site.
CREATE TABLE `db`.`user_photos` ( `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY , `profile_id` INT NOT NULL , `title` VARCHAR( 128 ) NOT NULL , `size` INT NOT NULL , `type` VARCHAR( 128 ) NOT NULL , `reference` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ) ENGINE = MYISAM
The first 2 parts of the login system set everything up but the output looks terrible. We’ll add some css to make the site somewhat presentable. Give the sections a background and align the form elements with css.
style.css
.formElm { margin-bottom:5px; } .formElm label { float:left; width:120px; } div.divider { width:450px; margin:20px auto; background-color:#C1f0f6; border:4px #0ebfe9 double; padding:10px; }
Now we’re ready to make our profile control panel. At the top of our profilecp.php we need to start our session to see if the user is authenticated. So we start our session and include our database info.
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NHL Scoreboard Right On Your Desktop!
I LOVE the Philadelphia Flyers. Any time they play, I need to know the score at least every two minutes. If I’m somewhere without a TV, clicking the refresh button for the scoreboard every two minutes is just too much work. So I made python do the work for me.
The script goes to the Flyers (or any other NHL team) website, pulls out the scoreboard and prints it to the screen. Once you add it to conky you’ll have a scoreboard on your desktop. No need for a browser or clicking that refresh button. When the game is in progress the script will update the score automatically, when it’s not in progress it’ll show the date and time of the next game.
The basic idea of the script is:
Set two flags (one before the scoreboard and one after)
Store the substring between the flags into a variable
Break this substring into tokens (Team name, date, time, etc…)
Each token is displayed as the scoreboard
Side Note:
The bad thing about this script is it’ll break anytime the NHL changes their scoreboards HTML. I’ll try to keep it as updated as possible. If they change the HTML i’ll fix it and upload another version. I doubt they’ll be changing it often though. Also, Im using Python version 2.5.2. I havent tested with any other version
If you don’t know what conky is check out my Conky Tutorial
Theres two things you need to add to your .conkyrc file after you download this script.
1. This should go into the TEXT section of the .conkyrc
120 is the interval in seconds for it to update (so every 2 minutes)
Call python and then your scripts location and your teams name as an argument
${execi 120 python /path/to/your/script.py flyers}2. This needs to go in the parameter section before TEXT.
If you leave this out the script output will look cut off in conky.
text_buffer_size 512Awesome System Monitoring with Conky
We’re going to make our Linux desktop look awesome with a tool called Conky. It’s a lightweight system monitor that you can customize to fit with your desktop theme. You can configure how it looks and also what it displays. It can tell you almost anything about your computer (OS,Kernel Version, IP addresses, Fan speeds, CPU Temperature and much much more).
It’s a nice and simple install on Ubuntu. Just run this command in terminal.
sudo apt-get install conky
If you’re running a different Linux you can see installation notes here.
Alright, to start it up hit ALT+F2, type in conky and hit enter. This is what it looks like with the default config…we can make it look a whole lot better. The configuration file is kept in the home folder and it’s called .conkyrc (hit CTRL+H in your home folder to view hidden files and you should see it). If for some reason it isn’t there you can just create your own and save it as .conkyrc. You can also copy mine and change to your liking rather than starting from scratch. This way you’ll have the default structure of the config file.
The config file has two sections, the top is the config parameters and under that is where you tell conky what you want to output. You can set how fast conky updates the info here.
# Update interval in seconds update_interval 1.0
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