Lyrics of the song “Zaydi, zaydi yasno Slance” Performed by young Bulgarian singer Iva Davidova

Go down, go down, bright sunshine. And you, bright moonlight, Go down, drown yourself in darkness.

Weep, forest, weep, my sister, Let`s weep together - me and you, You - for your leaves, me - for my youth.

Your leaves, forest, my sister, Will come back to you. My youth, forest, my sister, Will never return to me.

I’m a Gmail convert. Althou, I must say, the idea of Google “managing” my email still makes me a little queasy since it’s essentially a realtime record of all my life online. Anyway, moving along..

I recently wanted to check out these new emoticons that they’ve released via Gmail Labs.  In case you don’t already know, Gmail Labs is the playground for all sorts of addons which allow you to personalize and customize Gmail to your preferences.  Don’t get me wrong, I think Labs is a great addition to gmail but having to wade your way thru this awful looking mess of a page just to find the addon you’re looking for, is crazy! Just look at how ridiculous this page looks!

Since labs effectively builds itself, isn’t it about time that the Gmail folks open their eyes and realise that this is an area which is going to only get bigger?

So, rant number 1, for Google is: Please clean up labs, it’s a mess. Add a search and categorize the damn thing. You are the mighty google, with all your resources it should look and function at least every little bit like the firefox addons site.

After a week:

Please, put more effort in your work …

AFTER A MONTH:

I SAID “MORE EFFORT” !!!!

AFTER A QUARTERLY REPORT.

DID YOU HEAR ME? MORE EFFORT!!!

Seeing as the BBC Iplayer has taken off so well, no doubt RTE felt they were being left behind.

I have to say, this beta on demand TV player from RTE looks very promising! Well done RTE!

The “six inches in front of your face”, that’s where we Live. It’s the choices you make in that place that ultimately defines you, and, over time, the course of your life, until the end.

So many of us have grand plans for “Out There” or “The Future”, but never really focus on what’s right in front of us, right now.

Now… What are you gonna do?

I manage a number of PHPBB bulletin boards and one such board receives quite alot of image uploads from users who let’s say aren’t the most tech saavy. Some of the users know nothing about image file sizes and resolution and they end up uploading enormous images. Rather than instruct each user how they can resize images I figured it would be better if PHPBB would just resize the image on the fly so that the dimensions ensure better file sizes and don’t break the layout of the site. I checked the PHPBB administration control panel and it seems that this simple requirement’s not possible out of the box. Googling a little for it didn’t show up much so I dived in to the source..

How to get PHPBB to automatically resize uploaded images?

I applied this mod to PHPBB3, it would not surprise me thou if this also applied cleanly to a PHPBB2 installation. Open ./includes/functions_posting.php and locate the following line (~ line 434):

1

$file->move_file($config['upload_path'], false, $no_image);

Insert the following code BEFORE this line:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65

  // Modify these params accordingly to suit your installation
  $nMaxWidth = 690;
  $nMaxHeight = 800;
  $nJPEGCompression = 90;

  // You may want to modify this "if this attachment an image" check.. at the moment I'm using this:

  if (strpos($file->get('mimetype'), 'image/') === 0) {
    $sImgSourceFilename = $file->get('filename');
    if ($arrImageData = @getimagesize($sImgSourceFilename)) {

      $nImageType = $arrImageData[2];

      switch ($nImageType) {
        case IMG_GIF:
          $imgSource = @imagecreatefromgif($sImgSourceFilename);
          break;
        case IMG_JPG:
          $imgSource = @imagecreatefromjpeg($sImgSourceFilename);
          break;
        case IMG_PNG:
          $imgSource = @imagecreatefrompng($sImgSourceFilename);
          break;
        case IMG_WBMP:
          $imgSource = @imagecreatefromwbmp($sImgSourceFilename);
          break;
        default:
          $imgSource = null;
          break;
      }

      // Assuming we managed to read in the image OK..
      if ($imgSource) {
        $nImgWidth = $arrImageData[0];
        $nImgHeight = $arrImageData[1];

        $doResize = false;
        if ($nImgHeight < $nMaxHeight && $nImgWidth < $nMaxWidth) {
          $nRatio = (int)($nImgHeight / $nImgWidth);
        } else {
          $doResize = true;
          // otherwise image width and/or height exceed our max dimensions
          // work out the new widht/height for downward proportional resampling:
          if ($nImgHeight > $nMaxHeight) {
            $nRatio = (int)($nImgWidth / $nImgHeight);
            $nImgHeight = $nMaxHeight;
            $nImgWidth = round($nMaxHeight * $nRatio);
          }
          if ($nImgWidth > $nMaxWidth) {
            $nRatio = (int)($nImgHeight / $nImgWidth);
            $nImgWidth = $nMaxWidth;
            $nImgHeight = round($nMaxWidth * $nRatio);
          }
        }

        if ($doResize) {
          $imgScaled = ImageCreateTrueColor($nImgWidth, $nImgHeight);
          if (imagecopyresampled($imgScaled, $imgSource, 0, 0, 0, 0, $nImgWidth, $nImgHeight, $arrImageData[0], $arrImageData[1]))
            imagejpeg($imgScaled, $sImgSourceFilename, $nJPEGCompression);
          imageDestroy($imgScaled);
        }
        imageDestroy($imgSource);
      }
    }
  }

Success! This patch worked a treat; no more oversized images!