littleweseth

The correct question is 'what DON'T I use a computer for'. I dual boot Mandrake 9.2 (old, yahyahyah, dialup users can't pick and choose) and WinXP on my x86 box, where I play games, wrangle with PHP, and do lots of graphics stuff - the usual stuff like wallpapers and digipainting with my WACOM, and also un-usual stuff like skinning for astonshell. Then there's my ancient iMac (OSX 10.3.8) which i use for internet, tp play music in my room, and to display stuff while i'm working on school stuff. Oh, and i use the mac for BBEdit.mmm, BBEdit. Nothing on win32 will ever touch it.Anyways, I spend my spare time (and a good chunk of the time i should be doing homework) plonked in front of my x86 box playing Firearms, playing with photoshop or hacking out a spot of PHP.

Queensland's awesome. Don't dis it - or else. *threaten, threaten*Admittedly, the cyclones and constant rain in far north QLD sucksaw, but it beats the constant overcast and stormyness down south.

Fine, that WEFT thingy works in IE4+ - but you can forget about people using anything other than IE/Win. That's Mac users (except those wierd IE5/Mac people - rare) of all kinds, firefox users, and opera users. (Note that I fall into every one of these categories, except the IE5/Mac boat.)

My method?In your browser, save the webpage. You should get a file foo.htm, and foo.htm_files (or something similar). Measure the size of the folder and add it to the size of the HTML file, and you have a Kb size for your page.Typical 56k dialup gets you speeds of around 5kb/s - 28k half that. Divide your page size by five for a seconds-time for 56k dialup users - note that you're assuming they're not doing anything else. On broadband - if if takes your page more than a few seconds to load over broadband, you need to go back to the drawing board and strip out all that kludgy markup and those prettyfying images.

It's kind of in the nature of an ad. It's telling you that since you've gone to the trouble of writing valid CSS, you might as well check the HTML document it's attached to as well (hence the 'parse tree').

If it's for yourself, you could just use Opera. You can just tell it to refresh every n seconds.If it's for users - just annihilate IE, then put Opera into the vaccum thus created Quick, easy and beneficial for all, except Microsoft of course. *gloat gloat*

'computer optimisers'? Someones problably trying to sell you a crock full of brown goo. (or snake oil, if you prefer that term.)Step one : Spybot S&D. Removes much nastiness in the form of spyware, malware, nasty cookies, nasty registry entries, an the like. This one's free.Step two : decent antivirus. NOD32 is a good one, and it sure don't cost as much as Norton.Step three : claer out the registry. You can partially do this by hand, but it's not really recommended (you'll only scrape the surface, as you can only recognise the keys with plain-english names. Most have names that look like MD5 hashes.) Registry Mechanic works good, though it's pay-for software.Step four : Look at what you have installed. Look in your system tray, your Program Files, and ask yourself : 'Do I Actually Use That Thing?' Any program that fails this test gets nailed.Step five : Profit!!!Well seriously, that's all I have to do to keep my boxen airborne. Reformatting every so often (every year or so) helps, because desipte your best efforts bad stuff will creep in slowly, and a reformat (or some serious bit-twiddling) is the only to get rid of it, and often the only way to fix up a really bad computer is to reformat it (or spend 5x the times fixing manually ).

If you don't mind using a scrollbar, you can apply the following style : #longlines {clip : auto;overflow : scroll;} Anything that doesn't fit will automagically make it's parent box scrollable. Of course, if this is your content box, this will be a sonna sam for your users (scroll to bottom of page, move across, move back up, go back down, go across....), but if you're only enclosing small samples it should be fine.

arboc7 : in firefox, View > Page Style > [ No Style | Default Style [ Alternate Style ] ]......I think that's how you do it, anyway. I'm too lazy to hack up a test page right now.

eh? so you mean that the gmail web interface clips long messages?Would anyone like to tell if it also clips messages that a mail client (Thunderbird) pulls from gmail over POP3?

Didn't we already have this topic a few million times? Looks like this is the mother-topic though... don't know how many other threads go back to 2004 here.For the record, Firefox because of Scrapbook, Flash/Adblock and because of open-sourceness. As a mian browser, it's awesome (though with the amount of stuff i've loaded it down with, it's a tad sluggish and the HTML Tidy plugin crashes it sometimes). Opera is my secondary browser, which i'd probably use as a main browser if it had adblock and scrapbook, just because it 'run like fast jaguar' 'n all that. Safari is also very l33tful.As for internet explorer, one of my first acts upon reciept of this here iMac was to drag it into the trashbin of oblivion - and do a secure delete. I rest easier knowing that IE was overwritten three times - first with 0x00s, then with 0xFFs, then with random hex numbers. Ah, how I love OSX's unix roots.(it should be noted that IE5 mac is actually streets ahead of IE6/win. It's an entirely different codebase.)

did everyone purposely forget to mention that he should back up his stuff BEFORE the ubuntu installer wipes his FAT32/NTFS partition? Oh, whoops...... too late. A pity, that.I'd just like to quote something i read somewhere (*nix fortune command?) :" We should remove the safety labels from everything and let the idiots take care of themselves. "Ending my argument : RTFM, STFW.

I can't swim, per se. If I fall into a pool or something, I can get myself out with no difficulties, tread water, whatever, but swimming in a direction at above 1m/s is beyond me. Blame my nerdy lifestyle and failures at swimming when young - just never learned.Ah well. At least if i accidentally find my way into still water i'm okay, but i think that if i got tossed overboard into the sea (on a calm day) i'd be screwed - which sucks, since i live in Mission Beach (google dunk island) and the Great Barrier Reef is a few klicks east.

Oblig futurama : "Amy?! Did you swallow your phone again?"Seriously though - miniaturisation is getting a bit too excessive. Why didn't they just update the iPod mini line with bigger harddrives instead of making a smaller version? Personally, i'd rather have a reasonably chunky 6gb iPod than a slim, fragile-lookin 4gb Nano.[ Just my $0.02 ]

well you could go to their website and see if you can buy direct, maybe : else, find your closest computer shop. Assuming you don't live out in the sticks (rural australia) like me, you should be able to find a shop that carries them. Look around on the internet for prices first, though, to avoid getting ripped off.

I was just looking through the phpBB code, and, indeed, it does have a database abstraction layer. That's because phpBB doesn't know where it will be running - except that it will be on some PHP machine, with some database it can talk to using SQL. However, since we - the end-user - know that it will be running on mySQL, we don't need to use abstraction because we know that we're only writing the hack to run in one place. Of course, if you do move to a non-mySQL database, you're royally shafted.Oh, and i screwed up : it's mysql_select_db().

w3Schools is teh awfulness. I mean it. Personally, when i'm paying for dialup internet by the minute, i'd like what i'm pulling to be at least 30% actual content - but a typical w3schools page has about four times as much ads and table-layout markup than actual content. Blerch. Additionally, most of their stuff is out-of-date, and they should check their 'xhtml compliance since 1999' against a validator sometime.Practical PHP Programming, hudzilla.org/phpbook, is teh bomb and you should read it from start to at least nine or ten chapters in (the database chapter is a compulsory read.) One text-ad per page glorifying the authors other work, but seeing as it's an entire book - free - i guess he can put a personal ad on if he wants to. If you know how, you can write a spot of PHP to take care of that kind of thing using my perennial favourite, preg_replace().Ah, PCREs, how I love thee. (Yes, spectre, i DO have an obsession with regexps. You can use them to do everything - even slice bread! All you have to do is replace the atoms in the bread with nothingness at regular intervals.....)For learning mySQL, the database chapter in Practical PHP covers that very well - Hudson even explains normalising tables, which is somewhat complicated sometimes - but apart from that, I also have a printout of chapter three of the mySQL documentation, which is a rather concise crash-course in SQL syntax 'n' all that other good stuff.

dia? dia.sourceforge.netHaven't tried it, but I think it's more for doing stuff like diagramming workflows or database tables or something - but maybe it'll work for blocking out a website design too. Should come in a win32 flavour for you convenience.

Well - littleweseth is composed of three parts. Little, wes, and eth, each of which was arrived at in the process of decding a name for a bnet account.The wes bit comes from my big brother's nickname, wes. Simple enough. Little comes from me bieng his younger brother. That gives littlewes. Then, seeing as i was 11/12 and misguided, i decided 'that needs to sound more *medieval-ish*'. as I was a diablo addict, and hence came forth the 'eth', from the bowels of the collective.Littleweseth. Heh. No-one else is stupid enough to have something like that, or twelve chars long - but I, at 11, was an idiot and thought it was cool. Q.E.D.

PHP includes.Dreamweaver templates, last time i checked, used comments and stuff in normal HTML to define editable areas, and <!-- --> is very unpretty to say the least. (why couldn't they define // in HTML?)Also, with dreamweaver templates, the disadvantage is this : you need dreamweaver. PHP is free, whereas dreamweaver is expensive and not everyone has it - though if you've already paid for it, this is kind of a moot point.

A free bit of advice :a) If it ain't a wacom, don't bother. I mean it. Size ain't everything, unless you're Lord Expansive Drawer who draws with wide, sweeping motions. I have a 6"x8", and i usually end up resizing the active area to about half that. Don't pay for what you won't use.Now, with that said, i own a Wacom Graphire3 6"x8" tablet - kinda entry level, but it's pretty awesome. If I had a choice, i would gone for the smaller Intuos (mmm, clickwheel), but it was a present, so no dice. In any case, the graphire cost about $200 - australian, mind you - a year ago. I have no idea what that translates into in US dollars.Lastly, tablets rocksor, but aren't panaceas for bad drawing skills, and additionally the first few times you use a tablet your accuracy will suck, guaranteed. I pride myself on my control of a pen and ability to draw perfect lines, sans a ruler, but my attempts to o the familiarisation excercises the first few times ( draw a grid, then circle and cross the intersections ) failed, miserably.Now go forth and find a nice WACOM tablet

*thwack*Me needs to go back to regexp school - and possibly get a PHP book that doesn't suxor (i was looking at PHP in 24 Hours (SAMS publishing) because i couldn't be bothered opening my local copy of hudzilla when i had a hardcopy book just sitting there. In that book, they always use /'s.)[As a matter of curiosity, I didn't learn PCRE's by looking at the Perl docs, or the PHP docs, or even any websites - I learned from the manual of BBEdit, that beacon of Mac l33tness. It covers pretty much everything, right down to conditionals and lookaheads, so I tend to think in terms of those. I find it impossible to work with POSIX regexps that don't even understand .+?, ala the Apache mod_rewrite engine. Dammit.]In any case, there you go : you learn something every day, folks.

I have a TI83 (normal, not plus) on loan from the resource room at school, because i do maths B and C. We rent them out for $30 Australian a year and give them back at the end. Personally, i must say this : ti83s rule for everything, once you learn how to use them as a tool (and not a crutch). There's nothing like hacking out some integral calculus and then being able to check whether you screwed up by doing numeric integration on the graphics calc (83's don't do symbolic integration, 89's do i think). And then there's the games that everyone else has on their calcs. (you know you can get Descent for the ti83?) Anyways, a quick google for ti89 emulator turns up http://lpg.ticalc.org/prj_tiemu/, a nice open-source emulator for pretty much everything upwards of the ti-84, though not 83's or 82's (damn!). You can run it on OSX too, which is a big plus for me, because the official TI one only runs on win32.

I stopped upgrading MSN at about 6.2, because it's a chat program - not a program i want to sit around on my desktop, eating copious resources so i can enjoy animated flash icons, animated backgrounds or those damned nudges. I don't use trillian, though, because i don't use ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber et al and ChatZilla fills my IRC needs nicely.On this here mac, i use Adium rather than whatever version of MSN they just brought out for mac, because once again msn uses too much of my scanty system resources (it's a G3 400 w/ 320 SDRAM - not much to go around) to do absolutely nothing for me. Notice from Becca: Please try not to swear or cheat the word filters.

mike_savoie, kick me if i'm wrong - but did you say pull all the content from the database at load? If the guy has any more than say, 500k of html in his site, that's going to be a little expensive. I've never used JS, but i'm sure they provide some functions to query a database - if so, i think a better solution would be to load the index page at load time, then get the JS script to ask for the other pages as needed.