David Nash

Very occasionally I’ll use an empty DIV for decoration, and in CSS use height: 1px.

In IE6 to make this work you need to put comments inside the DIV, otherwise it’ll display at the height of the font you’re using.

<div class=”line”></div>

becomes

<div class=”line”><!– –></div>

You don’t need any line-height fixes in the CSS. Yes, it’ll add to your markup a bit, but you should probably be explaining why you’re using meaningless, empty DIVs anyway.

I like sIFR, but it really bugs me that I have to read through an entire tutorial to get something really basic up and running. This is a simple sIFR3 demo, using the basic cochin.swf file and an almost minimal amount of code to see it in action.

Download my minimal sIFR3 demo here.

I believe you’ll need to upload it to a webserver to run it, you won’t just be able to open the index.html file to see it working.

Open a terminal window or shell (who needs a GUI!?)
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
cd image_folder
mkdir resized
for f in *jpg
do
convert -resize 30% $f resized/$f
done

Easier than Photoshop, I reckon!

I needed this today for some photos I was uploading. Photos from recent cameras are huge and Australian bandwidth doesn’t cut it. So this really helps.

Obviously you only need to do the first line once. I found this in the Ubuntu forums but it took me a while to find the right combination of keywords in Google. View the original thread.

I needed to change jpg to JPG, because the camera used uppercase and Linux is case-sensitive. 30% was good for me but you may need to change that.

If you don’t understand this, ask me, I’m happy to help!

If there are ^M at the end of every line when you view them in vim, you can do this:
:%s/^M//g
To get the “^M” bit, hit ctrl-v and then ctrl-m.

Find all files (not directories) and remove the eXecutable bit. I don’t know what the characters on the end do:
find . -type f -exec chmod a-x {} \;

Make all directories executable to user, read/writable to groups others (good for when the web server is in ‘others’):
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Make all files read/write/executable for user, readable for the group and others:
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

A quick one today. I was working on a mysql database that used unix timestamp produced by PHP’s time() function.

I needed to be able to quickly convert this time to a human-readable format. In bash,

date -d @timestamp

is a quick way to convert.

In a terminal shell eg:

# date -d @1224992980
Sun Oct 26 14:49:40 EST 2008

In a MySQL client, you could also use

select date(from_unixtime(column_name)) from table_name;

Or if you want a little more flexibility in the output, for example outputting 27/02/09, you could do:

select date_format(from_unixtime(column_name), ‘%d/%m/%y’) from table_name;

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