BBC iPlayer greasemonkey script

I use the BBC iPlayer. Every so often. It’s pretty good.

Only problem on my system is that the iPlayer does not like staying fullscreened on one monitor if I need to use the other screen (same issue with all other flash viewers it seems). Next best alternative is to view the video in the pop-out window; unfortunately, the window is rather small. Rather than try to fix the fullscreen issue, I found that adjusting the flash object dimensions manually did the trick. This does get rather tedious, but luckily, I have Greasemonkey installed.

Writing this was quite straightforward: this is a simple script which resizes the pop-out window to a nice size (HD-ready view of 1280×720), and allows you to resize the player by resizing the window (big criticism of the default behaviour).The bulk of the code is along these lines:


player.width = 1280;
player.height = 834;    // 720 + 114px of iPlayer chrome
resizeToPlayer(player);    //window.resizeTo(1286,916)
window.addEventListener('resize', function() { resizeToWindow(player); }, true);

Install Greasemonkey if not already (Firefox only), and install this script from the userscripts.org page.

Random links

Trash in NYC: http://anycoloryoulike.biz/arp

Sticky notes: http://vimeo.com/1700732

New homes in England are smaller than those in Europe (I’d like them to compare these to housing in Hong Kong / Japan though!)

If you’ve not seen this yet – animal battle at Kruger between some lions, buffalo and crocodiles!

Lactose Intolerance by groups – the text after the chart is particularly interesting regarding children’s tolerances. Whilst as babies they can consume milk happily, apparently 85% of Chinese & Japanese children will have lactose intolerance by the age of 10, though most could consume 200ml of milk with no issues. Also for more in-depth reading – The Norm amongst the world’s people.

Rickroll’ed! Antispore (if you’re angry after reading that site, you might want to find out what rickrolling is!)

The mouldy growths of old forgotten forums

One of my client’s servers I have been working on had started to suffer constant drop outs. What normally loads up in a flash now just .. doesn’t. Whilst static pages loaded fine, albeit slower than usual, most PHP pages seemed to just time out. More specifically, the pages that needed to access the database were failing…

Now, experience points that to some large dodgy query or two (or a lot of them) causing issues. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I find out one particular site’s database has 15 locked tables, with the process list showing queries into phpbb_ tables… hmm

I wish I took a screenshot of the forum before I nuked the directory and the related database tables, which incidently was a rather old PHPBB board, heavily spammed with thousands of pages of topics with all your usual penis enl4rg3ment sexy girl cam wording. The mysql process list query reveals many search indexing queries (thanks to the spambots) – the tables responsible for searches alone are at least a gigabyte in size! No wonder why the server decided to jam up and play dead, whilst spam bots play ping pong guitar with this mouldy growth of a rotten board…

Moral of this story? Prune your garden, or expect large weeds to appear!

(incidently, I’ve seen what looked like a mini-garden forest on someone’s plate of what looks like months-old of baked beans. Such fuzzy greenness. In a student house.)