A lot of dates that come back from XML based web services are in the ISO 8601 form. I found out recently that it isn't straight forward to parse such a date using C functions and have the time come out in the correct timezone. It isn't rocket science but it is a lot more convoluted than higher level languages like Java.
I've been doing a little C programming lately and I have found that if you have a up to date distribution of linux there are a lot of libraries out there that make doing things you do in other languages like java easier.
This has been done before with PHP (AJAX upload progress meter for PHP) etc but I needed something a little different because I wanted to upload a file and then have it loaded into a database. I looked around and found that someone had already made something that used the commons file upload package to do the upload part (AJAX Upload progress monitor for Commons-FileUpload Example). It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it a good start.
Setting up ruby to work with Oracle seems to be a pain for a lot of people. Here are the steps I follow to set it up on a linux box from nothing to Active Record or DBI in 7 steps.
I had someone ask me about fitting more images in a small area and the way flickr does their image scrolling came to mind. I wanted to see how hard it was to do and as it turns out it isn't hard to do at all thanks to script.aculo.us.
I'm making this as simple as I can to illustrate just how nice the new tools like script.aculo.us are.
Step 1. You need a box and some images. You will also need to know the size of the images or at least the size of the largest one. In an attempt to keep this simple I'm going to assume all the images are the same size.