Monthly archive: March, 2009

The McDonald’s Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator

The McDonald’s Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator can roughly determine the best location to fly to to get access to the McDonald’s breakfast menu, based on flight time and whether it will be breakfast time once you arrive.

It is perhaps better explained with an example: it’s 1700h (5 PM) in Tokyo, and you want a McMuffin, but the breakfast menu isn’t going to open for another 13 hours. You can’t afford to wait that long, but where else can you go? The answer, as this tool will tell you, is Honolulu. You’ll arrive around 0616 local time, ready to stride into a McDonald’s and get breakfast. In Tokyo, it’s only 0116, and you would have had to wait hours longer for your McMuffin.

The code is very simple, and the time zone calculations don’t account for DST (since they don’t use the date at all). Flight times are calculated based on latitude and longitude coordinates, a distance formula I got from Wikipedia, and an estimated average flight speed. You can use this tool for times other than breakfast, but it will get confused if midnight lies between the start and finish times.

Categories: Programming » PHP and Projects » Web applications » The McDonald's Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator
The McDonald's Breakfast At Any Cost Calculator is a tool for roughly determining the best location to fly to to get access to the McDonald’s breakfast menu, based on flight times and time zones.

Avocado, an online image gallery application

Written in PHP and tailored to my needs, Avocado is a free lightweight personal online image gallery application I have been working on.

I’ll be using it for my own gallery, so you can see it in action there. This first release of Avocado is a beta version, 0.5, and it’s not going to get promoted out of beta until (among other things) it has better search and editing capabilities. Still, it’s perfectly usable as-is, although the documentation is highly incomplete.

It goes without saying that the source isn’t an amazing example of good coding. It’s not too bad, considering the scope of the application, and I certainly learnt some things along the way. Speaking of the source: zip (37.7 KB) or tar.gz (31.8 KB). Aside from compression formats, the downloads are identical.

Categories: Projects » Web applications » Avocado and Programming » PHP
Avocado is a free lightweight personal online image gallery application.