This Day in Tech
This is a set of scripts and console applications that dump text entries from Tom Merritt's Chronology of Tech History book for the current day.

https://merrittbooks.squarespace.com/2012/10/17/chronology-of-tech-history

It's a nice bit of geeky fun. The idea of this scripts was to be able to use it in Message of the Day type setups.

Download

The binaries are available from http://kinggeek.co.uk/download in the tdit folder.
The source from http://kinggeek.co.uk/source

Installation
There are console versions that can be/are compiled for Linux, OSX, and Windows. 

It uses an sqlite3 database for it's storage so you need probably need this installed on your system if it isn't already. A Windows DLL is included with the windows binary which should take care of this. On OSX it should work out of the box. On linux you might need to install sqlite3. On Redhat type distros something like

yum install sqlite 

should do the job. On Debian style distros something like

apt-get install sqlite3

Should do the trick.

Command line usages options for the console program:-
You can copy the database to /etc for linux distros, or you can specify where to find the db with the -d command line option. The help from the console app:-

This Day in Tech
Based on Tom Merritt's Chronology of Tech History
Usage: tdit [-d databasefile] [-r] [--help]

-d databasefile : specify the database file to use.
                  Will try /etc/tdit.db or ./tdit.db if
                  not specified or found.
-r              : print a single random entry for the day
                 (otherwise print all entries)
--help          : print this help

Plain ol' PHP

There is a plain PHP version which can be used by including the edit_functions.php file and calling the tdit() function:-

function tdit($action)

  returns a string with This Day in Tech Quote(s).
 
Specify the strings 'all' or 'random' as the $action parameter to print all entries for today, or just a single random one respectively.

function tdit_dm($action,$day,$month)

Does as above but lets you specify a day and month. There is also test script which dumps the whole book.

Joomla Plugins

There is a Joomla 2.5 and a Joomla 1.5> version. 

Tested with only  Joomla 3.0 and Joomla 1.5 because that is what I had access to.

Install the plugin in the normal way. You need sqlite3 php support on your server (usually built in to PHP5+). To use the plugin, in your content insert

{tdit}single{/tdit}

or 

{tdit}all{/tdit}

and the text above will be replaced in an article with the either a single event for the day or all the events for the day as a unordered list with the css class tdit_list.

NB: If you get no output for an entry check the tdit/tdit_functions.php  file in the joomla plugin install. The htmlentities function was causing output to disappear on one server I tried it on. YMMV.

Building the console programs from source

Download the source code from here. Extract the archive somewhere. I've built successfully so far for 32 bit linux, 64 bit linux, 32 bit OSX and for 32 bit Windows (on 64 bit windows).

For windows you need a MinGW/msys setup. Though it should build easily enough with any C complier. 

It just seemed to work on OSX. On linux you need the usual gcc GNU make etc.

To build:-

cd into the extracted directory.

Just type:-

make -f nameofthemakefilefortheplatformyouron 

e.g. 

make -f Makefile.linux

And it should all build. 

NB: The Makefile.linux32 makefile is to build a 32bit binary on a 64bit linux system.

Follow the installation instructions to install. 

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License as is Tom's original work.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Thanks to Tom Merritt for a great project.