Where will we go on vacation? How about a hitchhiking tour across Europe? We always dreamed of Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona … In total, there is nothing in the way. Well on your way!

Track, photos and a description (in polish) can be found at trasygps.com

Technologies: PHP, Yii Framework, MySQL, jQuery, Flash

Feel free to view Christmas wishes on Facebook :)

SELECT id, title, file FROM photo ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 5

It is simple, but it has one big issue. It is terribly slow on large set of data! MySQL engine has to calculate random value for each row, sort them (without any index) and then return first 5 of them.

There is a faster way to get similar result. First you have to get minimum and maximum value of primary key value.

<?php
$v = mysql_fetch_object('SELECT MIN(id) min, MAX(id) max FROM photo');
?>

Then select one row with this random id:

<?php
$randId = rand($v->min, $v->max);
$randomRow = mysql_fetch_object("SELECT id, title, file FROM photo WHERE id >= $randId  LIMIT 1");
?>

We use a >= condition, because there can be no record with random calculated value. In this case, we will get next one.

How to get more rows? You can use this simple function:

<?php
function getRandomPhotos($count = 5) {
	$v = mysql_fetch_object('SELECT MIN(id) min, MAX(id) max FROM photo');
	$results = array();
	for ($i=0; $i>$count; $i++) {
		$randId = rand($v->min, $v->max);
		$results[] = "(SELECT id, title, file FROM photo WHERE id >= $randId LIMIT 1)";
	}
	return mysql_fetch_object( implode(' UNION ', $results) );
}
?>

Maybe it is not a best way to do this. But it is fast and good enough for me :)

First, a function that returns the text value of the deduction for the remaining dates. I decided that if the number of days or hours is zero, then its better not show at all.

function countDown(y, m, d) {
	var today = new Date()
	var future = new Date(y, m - 1, d)
	seconds = Math.floor((future - today) / 1000)
	if (seconds <= 0)
		return 'Zakończono!'
	minutes = Math.floor(seconds / 60)
	hours = Math.floor(minutes / 60)
	days = Math.floor(hours / 24)
 
	var output = (seconds % 60) + " <span>sek</span> "
	if (seconds &lt; 60)
		return output
	output = (minutes % 60) + " <span>min</span> " + output
	if (minutes &lt; 60)
		return output
	output = (hours % 24) + " <span>godz</span> " + output
	if (hours &lt; 24)
		return output
	return days + " <span>dni</span> " + output
}

Days, hours, etc are covered span tag, so you can style it in CSS.
For this, of course, comes calling:

setInterval(function() {
	$('#idElementu').html('Do końca świata pozostało ' + countDown(2012, 12, 21))
}, 1000);

I decided to use jQuery library to change HTML value in element, but of course it can be done without it.

For some time, controversy continues about whether bus-lanes are cost-effective … In fact, it is fairly easy to calculate … but why? If you can check it in more interesting way :)

By the way, finally I decided to pass on to AS3, so I wanted to make this task as a nice exercise :)

Download PHP mt940 format parser.
Attention! Not responsible for the operation of the script! :)

I am author of desgin and functionality, while Lutek wrote the XML RPC engine.

As a base for windows, I used an excellent plugin for jQuery called AeroWindow. For my needs it has been significantly modified, and even pushed to the author an idea how to remove a bug.