Continuously play all mp3 files in a directory in Linux

I was working a project to play background music in a restaurant on the cheap.  So I put together this small script to continuously play all the mp3 files in a directory in Linux. This was written and tested on Ubuntu 10.04, but should work as long as mpg123 is installed. Any old box you have laying around that can run Ubuntu should have no problems running this script. The tricky part was getting the script to work when there are spaces in the file names. The `read file` command was the solution to the space in the mp3 filenames issue.

Put the script below into a file, make it executable, and pass the directory with the mp3s you want to play on the command line.


#!/bin/bash

while sleep 1; do
  find "$1" -type f |grep .mp3$ |while read file; do
    mpg123 "$file"
  done
done

New Employee Desired Hours with Deviation Alerts

You can now enter a desired number of hours for each employee on the Edit Employee Schedule form. Then in the Scheduler Properties area you can enter the number of hours employee's actually scheduled hours can deviate before an alert on the manager view schedule displays.

If an employee has the Desired Hours value set, and their actual hours falls outside the allowable range, the background color of the employee's hours for the week will change and the desired hours will display below the actual hours. The desired hours are indicated with a dh:.

To make it easy to see who wants more or less hours, those above the desired hours are red, while those below the desired number of hours are tan.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

Easier Employee Schedule Editing

To speed up editing of employee schedules, you can now put your cursor over a cell, and if it turns grey like you see below, click it and it will take you to the employee's edit form and automatically scroll down to the day you clicked on.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

Convenience Features to Look Out For in Employee Scheduler

Now when you send an employee a schedule viewer link, we record the time the link was sent and e-mail address sent to. This should be helpful to know if you have sent a link, or if the e-mail address the link was sent to was invalid.

To make big printed schedules eaiser to read, there is a new option in Schedule Properties->Display:

Some users have asked if we can add a similar feature to the schedules that are broadcast by e-mail. Due to the way that e-mails are rendered in different e-mail clients, there is not an easy way to do this. We will keep our eyes out for some technique that will allow us to add this in the future.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

New Account Activity and Manager E-mail Features

At the bottom of the Account page you will now see an Account Activity area with a log of recent activity. If something seems amiss, or you can't remember if you did something like broadcasting schedules, looking at this log my be very helpful. Not all actions are tracked. We will be fine tuning the actions that are logged and possibly adding features to allow filtering of actions to make it easier to find the event you are looking for. Reply to the comments here if you have ideas for this feature and we will see what we can do.

In the Scheduler Properties form you will now find a dedicated manager e-mail entry. This address will be used as a reply address on e-mails sent to employees and on pages they use to view their schedules and other information. This field was created so the main admin e-mail and the address of the person doing the day to day scheduling could be separated.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

New Add Employee After Select List

Companies with larger schedules have requested we add a way to make adding new employees to any location on the schedule easier. So now instead of all new employees ending up at the bottom of the schedule and then using the up button to place the employee at the desired location, a new Add After option has been added:


Look for this new enhancement the next time you are adding employees to your schedules.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

New send employee schedule viewer link button

Continuing the work on the mobile / iPhone friendly employee schedule viewer, we have added a Send Employee View Link in the Employee Properties area.


This is much easier then manually creating an e-mail and copying in the link. Once the employee has the link bookmarked on their iPhone or mobile device, they can easily check all their schedules.

As a bonus, we added to the schedule viewer a `Send a message to your manager:` link to make it easy for your employees to keep in touch.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com