Garthnak

Cookies are useful tools for web developers to provide useful site functionality to their users with. It is a way to store information easily for a particular client so that you can retrieve it later. Yes, it also means that advertising companies may be able to track your activity online - but they can still do that WITHOUT cookies by looking at your IP address (and possibly other information you send them). It may not be as reliable as cookies are for tracking purposes, but it can be almost as effective and just as much a privacy concern.My suggestion is to limit the amount of information you wish to be "private" up on the public Internet, unless you encrypt it with something like PGP or GnuPG. Heck, this very forum site stores FIVE cookies all by itself. You're taking a chance with your privacy just by posting here. Personally, that doesn't really bother me.

There's absolutely no possibly way to make encrypting HTML foolproof. Peoples' web browsers have to see the real source code at some point in order to actually render the page - all these "encryption" programs are really just "obfuscation" programs. Anybody with a brain will be able to decode any of them given (at most) a day or so.Really, I think it's a waste of time. As I said in a different thread, you shouldn't put anything up on the Internet that you care about people seeing. There is no way to reliably protect your data from being taken by other people. If they can see your website, then they can download all of it and do whatever they want. That's just the way things are.

Anyone who is smart can look at your source and get the image from that. There is no way to prevent it. Besides, people have to download your images to their computer anyway in order to view them in the first place - its just that their browser does it for them transparently.Personally, I think the concerns about people stealing your images are a waste of time. If you are really worried about people stealing your data, don't put it on the Internet! Once your data is on the web, it is fair game for everyone. That's just the way things are.

I will second the suggestion of Webmin. I use it on several Linux servers myself, and it is quite robust. Not perfect, and not as pretty as cPanel, but still very good for a free tool. The Virtualmin module in particular is a godsend for those of us that need to manage multiple websites.

A very interesting hack - though not very useful for those of us that like to use multiple windows at one time :-) I just use Mozilla Firefox these days, it has built-in popup blocking. But I do like this little hack.

Because of operator precedence. There is a decent page that lists Java operator precedence here. Since the "+" operator has higher precedence, the first one is trying to concatenate "aaaaa" and v, while the second one makes sure (through the parentheses) that it processes your "v==null?:" set first. Parentheses are useful whenever you need to force precedence. Think about it this way... 1 + 2 * 3 = 7 ...because * has a higher precedence than +, it gets processed first. Whereas if I add parentheses: (1 + 2) * 3 = 9 ...now I force the program to interpret the + operator before it does the *. I hope that helps.

I have used Vi for several years - specifically, I use Vim. A great general text editor, with syntax highlighting for hundreds of programming languages. It does have a steep learning curve, but once you get over the hump I find it is the most intuitive application I've ever used, hands down.