Hercco

If the homemade antennas that you can find instructions online are too complicated I don't think there's anything you can do with little money. I've read through some of the building instructions and they don't seem very difficult to do. I could have implementem them but I just didn't bother as a 17e antenna works fine for me. And I'm no electronics specialist; I study communicaions engineering but strictly in the software side

I'm testing a new design for my webpage. I set the content type as application/xhtml+xml for all browsers except for the ones that are or pretend to be IE. All works fine and I've made sure that possible database errors and such don't cause the XML not to be well-formed.Then today I asked my friend to try out the new design and he said that it caused XML parsing error... After few questions and a document source sent to me I realized that it was his firewall that blocks ads causing the problem.The ad is a webring icon that just happens to be of the typical size for ads and thus gets recognised. The firewall (Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro) replaces the ad in the most stupid way I cna imagine... While simple tect [AD] would be sufficient (which it does), it changes the image tag "<img>" to <AD-> tag and leaves part of the url inside the tag, not making it an attribute. Now this doesn't matter in HTML browsers which simply skips the tags that they don't understand and doesn't mind about not well-formed markup... But as my document is XML the page cannot be displayed at all. I haven't come up with any other solution except for resizing the image a bit so it won't get caught in the ad filter. I've also thought about *****ing about this to the firewall manufacturer but that's just because I'm pissed of someone being so dumb, this is a commercial product for crying out loud! I guess they haven't heard about this little thing called XML...

I did the upgrading today... and man was it worth it. First of all the upgrading went really smoothly and I had no problem getting my theme and plugins to work with it.The new admin panel is just awesome. Writing there is like working with a text processor. I have a lot of categories and keep always adding more and it's really handy that I can add them while I write the post, not needing to save as draft and go to the categories page to add a new one and then edit the post again. Same goes for files.

Hey all crackersI need to get PDF print protection cracked. Certain lecturer thinks his material is so awesome that you must buy it for a ridiculous price at the bookstore. I know the cracking can be done, just don't know what tools I need. Thanks in advance.

Couple of things about sessions... I think it was already mentioned but deserves to be emphasized: do not use sessions without a reason. Generally speaking, it is better to use cookies to store simple variables. Yes, cookies have a bad reputation but you are going to have to use cookies with sessions anyways (I'll get back to that later) so it would be kind of pointless to save the users preference of to show or not to show the help box in a session which ID is stored in a cookie anyways. Why? Because sessions are not all that server friendly. The data of PHP sessions are stored on the hard disk of the server which means it is slow to access and takes processing time on the server. And as usual for a site with sessions, all your users are going to be storing some information in the session. This is not to say that don't use sessions, you should because they are handy, but don't use them for tasks for which cookies suit better. The sessions ID and how to transfer it. Session IDs are essential as they are the one and only way of identifying which session belongs to which client. As default PHP tries to use a cookie to store the session id, but failing that it will append it to the URL as a get variable. This is not a good thing. Many PHP sites use GET variables to identify different pages and so on, and the php session id appended to the query makes it even longer (thus unacceptable to some systems) and can mess up your system. And for sites no using GET variables... well with session they now use it. And as you might know, using GET variables isn't always the optimal thing to do as search engines tend to have problems with them. Basically you have two options instead of the default PHP method. Either you set ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', false);,which prevents the session ID to be transmitted in the end of the URL, or you code the transmission of the ID in the url in your system. The first option would mean that a user that doesn't accept cookies won't be able to use the session and the latter means that you have to do the session id transmitting to every link pointing to another part of your site. First option is not that bad: it is reasonable to expect your visitors to have cookies enabled if you are offering a service that requires sessions, a login system for instance. The second... well a lot of work. And you end up having urls with session id's stuck to them. By the way, it is recommeded that you don't initiate session for robots; the content requiring to have a session does not need to be in google anyways. And it's always nice to end with some discussion on security. Sessions are a nice way to do a login system. But in itself it is not enough. Setting a session variable "logged_in" into boolean true is not sufficient login system for practicalyl anything. Sessions are ridiculously easy to copy, if your friend sends you a URL to a webstore and the URL contains the session id (his id) it might be that you can by simply opening the page see the contents of his shopping cart: remember, in session system, the server only recognises the session by the id. So you need to take this into account. A secure way is to do it is by using an additional method of authenticating. For many simple systems, simply just keeping the records of which session ID belongs to which IP address is good. Sure, user behind same proxies seem identical this way but it rules out a big part of the users. Plus there is IP spoofing. Also having another variable for identification in a cookie helps too. This would be a random number for example. Yes cookies can be manufactured but it requires the malicious person to know the contents of the cookie. This kind of security measures should suffice for simple authentication for a shopping cart for example. And don't forget session length, shorter the length more secure the session becomes. On the other hand it's not nice to keep typing your username and password or lose your shopping cart every ten minutes. So be reasonable.

There should be no problem as long as you got the software set up right. So download the latest drivers and software and install. If you have done so and it doesn't work you might wish to get a driver cleaner utility and remove all old drivers and then install the new ones. Then of course you might have the software installed correctly but setting wrong for your monitor. Could it be that you're trying to use too high resolution or refresh rate? If you suspect it, drop the resolutions significantly and see if it works.

Best program to design a site is a text editor. Choose any flavour you like, Vi, emacs, editplus for windows. In this sense I'm old school.Alright, I give you that the modern design programs like DreamWeaver have come long way from what the WYSIWYG editors were at nineties and they probably work well for trying out things and so on. But for the future of web designing - or what I think we should be doing now - is the separation of content and design and I myself find little need to do designing with a WYSIWYG editor. Anyways I don't condemn anyone for using them, it's just not my thing.Graphics... If I was old school with the page degigning I'm very predictabl with the graphics issue. Yep, Photoshop for me. Simply it is just best graphics design software ever produced.

Neat!I'm not totally unfamiliar with databases having studied everything my university has to offer regarding them but I didn't know that. Granted, I don't use mysql much from the command line but anyways this is cool thing to know.

Although I've been working with PHP for a while now I just recently heard of Smarty, the template engine written in PHP to be used with PHP pages. I read the introduction stuff from their website (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) and glanced through the rest of the documentantation and it seemed quite sensible system.So I've started thinking that may be I should go Smarty. Should I? First of all I haven't done my PHP stuff with templates, although for my gallery system I want to go for template driven designs so perhaps at some point I could give out the system for other people to use and it would be easier for them to customize. First I thought I'd write my own template engine, but why bother if there are ready systems out there. So has anyone used Smarty and would you recommend it? Are the packages installed here at Asta? Or are there other similar template engines for PHP and are they any better?

Handling file uploads is much easier that you might think. Actually, if you can process typical textual form data, you should be able to process files too. In exactly similar manner than in a, say post form, the file information exists in a superglobal array $_FILES, just like the superglobals $_POST and $_GET. The array contains the temporary filename for the file from which you can move it to your directory of choise. And that's about it. Then you are free to do whatever processing you wish, such as resizing the image and so on.Although the file uploads is really easy to do in itself you should pay attention to some issues especially if you are allowing uploads from anyone (so not just your own admin panel that only you have access). In all cases there are limitations on filesize: in PHP a certain maximum size for an uploaded file is set and it can be a real limitation for large images. So if your upload fails you know what to check first. But more importantly you should pay attention to security... remember you are allowing file uploads to the server! So it is essential that you check that the data is what it is supposed to be and make sure that no malicious person gets his own program code to server. So if you expect images accept only images.

SSI is a bit of an old technology to use. I don't have any factual knowledge but I believe it now is less commonly supported by web servers than PHP. PHP is a still developing technology and so popular that I don't see it disappearing anytime soon, unline SSI. So definitely go for PHP includes, it will ensure that your code is working on any other server your site might be in the future. Oh and especially as PHP is a programming language unlike SSI you can later add some dynamic elements with it to the same page. It's rather inconvenient to try to mix dynamic content produced/included with different methods. As you mentioned that you have SMF forum running on your site, check out the page ssi_examples.php at your forums directory (access with browser). SMF has these nice little things that you can use on any page of your site. For example you could show the hottest discussion topics on your front page and so on. Check the examples and you'll understand. By the way, these elements are available for both PHP and SSI. And one more final remark: PHP tends to run faster with includes than SSI. Not that it matters much though...

Thanks for the replies. Netbeans sounds like something I will get. And of course if I feel like I need more features I can consider the other options -Sun's IDE sounds promising too.

Why do you want to store a text file in a database? I mean after you get it from the database it'd be just the same text file and you'd need to parse it just like if you read it straight from the disk. Instead it would be much smarter to put the setting in a database table from which you can easily and fast read them to memory and then use.

Hello Java people!I'm starting to work more on java this spring (university stuff) and I think I need a proper IDE. So far my java programming has been in little scale so editor and command line compiling has worked just fine. So I'm looking for a good, free IDE. It does not need to have fancy features, just what you'd expect from an IDE. My previous experience on IDEs limits pretty much to MS Visual Studio. I've also tried out Borland's builders but I've hated them, granted they all were quite old versions. So what IDEs you use and what you'd recommend. And links please.Thanks in advance.

I understand what you mean... It's actualyl same thing in everything that gets discussed online. If you visit message boards and/or accept random people to your intant messaging lists you'll know how many times some people ask a question for which you can find answer on the first page of results from a search engine. It's actually funny, these people bother to write a question (well, granted they usually don't bother to "write" in the sense of getting anywhere near with spelling and grammar) although it would be usually less of an effort to type the keywords to a search engine. Plus search engines give you the information (if found) immediately and Google or Yahoo! doesn't get pissed for asking dumb questions, they in fact like it. And Finaldesign, your webpage looks neat, very good job for only one year of learning. Good thing for you is that you're knowledge and views of web design are fresh, meaning that you're not stuck with the five year old styles and templates but do sites that modern web users like to look and use. And congrats for not using iframes.

In phpBB the username, password and the database name are stored in configuration file at the phpBB root directory. So what you need to do is to put the correct username, password and the forum database names in the configuration file. If you do not know the right user name for the database you can create a new username password pair through cPanel. From there you can also see the database name for your forum.

Only thing I can think of is some sort of power saving settings that could cause this. Anyways I'm no WinXP wizard so there might be something else too.

Graphics look really neat but I have the same complaint as everyone else: site loaded painfully slow. And I'm on a 5.5M / 10M connection (802.11b WLAN, tends to switch between those speeds)

You just need to iterate, ie. loop through the list of addresses and call mail() for each. And by this way making the email dynamic such as saying "Hey, [name]!" on the begining is really easy too. Just use a messafe templae of which you will process in the loop, replaceing the keywords such as [user] with the appropriate content from the database. Naturally there are many ways to do it, so use what you feel most comfortable with. Just adding text to beginng and end of the message is easiest route. And since you're working with mail() don't forget to study documentation on how you should build the message headers. It's lot more "professional" to send automatically generated mail with proper headers. If I remember correctly, PHP documentation (or comments) has realyl nice info on headers, including examples.

With the right search phrase... Seriously, I've found that posting news to your site is a good way to get more hits from search engines. It of course depends greatly on what you site is about, but has worked for mine. The thing is that people tend to search about the recent happenings on their area of interest. I've monitored the search words that lead people to my site and the most popular ones are usually about new product releases that I've posted on my site. And I can't but underline the importance of the PageRank. Good sites with good content and good working design tend to get rewarded with links from other pages thus raising their Rank. One more thing: do not underestimate the power of "media" searches. Especially images. If it just suits your site subject, having good images on your site on a permanent pages brings a lot of hits nowadays. So whatever pics you have, put them on a HTML pages with a neat design with links and menus of your site. This way, people searching for images find your site, and not just consume your bandwidth with the image loading and leaving. I have no experience but I guess same goes for audio and video searches, at least in future.

I'd recommend installing the forum software first and then studying how user groups are done on it. Then check if there are ready mods available for using PayPal and any other stuff you want/need.Do everything so that the forum supports it; for instance create the user groups through the admin panel. Then mod the system (with ready or self built) mods but always keep in mind that the forums need to work. If you're assigning users who have paid to the "Gold" group, use the assigning function from the forum software. Oh and if you're wondering about programming, most forum systems out there are built using PHP. So if you don't know it and don't wish to learn (which by the way is easy if you know C for example) you propably need outside help. If this is the case I suggest finding a forum software that already has as much of the features you need.

I've got Logitech Mx510 mouse as well and I really love it and I'd say I'm kind of attached to it. When ever I need to buy a new mouse it will be of a very similar shape. I used to have a cheap Mitsumi keyboard that I used for almost 10 years. I just loved it. Then the space bar started to be a bit dodgy so I thought to clean the keyboard. Well then it broke and now I'm using a cheapest Logitech with proper keys (not annoying springy ones).

HabboHotel must be doing quite well as they are now advertising it a lot at finnish TV. I personally find their practise a bit questionable... They are obviously targeting teenagers and as far as I'm concerned they (at least here) allow payment through SMS, ie. sending a message and then will be charged in the phone bill. Selling something virtual for a 12 year old and (practcally) for credit is a tad questionable. Well I guess parents should pay attention...

I do this too. No matter what I do I always have a CSS class called .fakelink on my stylesheet. It just changes the cursor into pointer. It's a really handy way to indicate that my clicking this image or whatever expands something or a full sized image is popped out. This is the type of usage that I encourage people to do; if you have elements that appear to be working like something else then make the using look the same, ie. use pointer when an elements acts like a link, although the click would be a call to a javascript function for example. Help cursor has kind of become a defacto for abbreviation and acronym elements and thus is nice if used. Also it is quite common to underline abbreviations and acronyms with a dashed line. (border-bottom-style: dashed;)

What are you expecting the application to do? A program cannot write code, it can contain blocks of code or templates that can be dropped to your system. And for this functionality a search engine and copy & paste should be just fine. Or are you looking for an editor that is geared towards writing PHP?