Rui CarmoCaught these in my RSS stream while trying to shake off work stress:
- iCal 1.5.5 is available via Software Update. Nothing too fancy to report.
- X-Plane was updated, and there's a freeware space game from them, too.
- GnomeMeeting seems to be shaping up nicely, and the next release is scheduled to support SIP.
- Vendors seem to be in a huff this week:
- Siemens considers selling their mobile phone unit.
- Motorola finishes restructuring.
- Sony and Samsung will start sharing patents
- More merger options. The sentence "One Ring To Rule Them All" suddenly takes on a whole new meaning... Or maybe not:)
- Bruce Schneier on safe personal computing.
- Skype 0.12.0.8 is out, but it still doesn't support Bluetooth headsets properly on Mac OS X - I've revived mine, to no avail.
Since a lot of people were asking about the site header photos, I did some minor tweaks to banner rotation: you now get a Xmas banner first (there's a different one for morning, noon, afternoon and evening), then a semi-random selection of photos valid for 24 hours.
It turns out that rotating all of the nearly 200 headers bumps up my traffic something awful, so by limiting the number of photos in rotation every day I hope to take advantage of client-side caching and reach a kind of compromise.
Here's the (rather simplified) bit of PHP code that does the semi-random selection, in case you happen to need something similar:
$aFiles = array(); // contains all the photos
// pick today's 16 headers by unpacking the md5 string as an integer array
$aHeaders = unpack("S16", md5(strftime("%Y%m%d")));
$nCount = count($aFiles);
foreach($aHeaders as $dummy => $nOffset) {
// use modulus to keep inside the $aFiles array
$aRotation[] = $aFiles[$nOffset % $nCount];
}