jonypawks

Just use the live bookmark button like dragon said. It'll integrate the rss feed into your other bookmarks. It's one of the best features that firefox has.

I've heard good things about BeOS but never tried it. I've wanted to but never got the time this semester. Maybe now that it's summer I'll get a chance to mess around with it. I remember hearing that BeOS's filesystem was basically a database where every directory and file was just an entry in this database. I heard that this was really fast but I'm not sure if I remember correctly.

HTML is a Markup Language. It's not really programming. It uses a series of tags to tell a web browser or other html parser to format a page. HTML is not a good place to start learning how to make games.

The game you linked to is written in PHP. It is similar to C++/Java so if you already know those you'll pretty much have the syntax down. It's not difficult to learn and it is extremely widely used so there are thousands of great tutorials out there. Google some php/mysql tutorials to get started.

Yes, Linux is more difficult to use, especially if you are at the console. But it's getting much better. More and more people are switching too, especially outside of the U.S. where not everybody can afford a 150$ operating system. I was a pretty fast typer when I started using Linux, but now that I've been using Gentoo for over a year, I'm blazing fast, especially at the console. There are several distributions that make Linux almost as easy as Windows. I would recommend Ubuntu Linux (https://www.ubuntu.com/) if you're looking for something easy. There is a price associated with ease of use as well. You will always have more power at the console than any GUI can give you, ever. There's just so much you can do at the console that haven't been incorporated into a GUI system. Take piping for example, you can use it to take the output of one program and immediately feed it to another. The only way you can do this with a GUI application is if the developers build in support for the specific program or by saving a file and then opening it in the second application later. I don't mean to make another OS war thread, but Linux is on it's way, and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. It is more difficult to use and for some people it's too much, but I do believe that Linux is growing exponentially and eventually it may be the OS of choice. End rant. Thank you for putting up with me. Well, about longhorn, the only thing that I have read/seen about longhorn is that it has this funky bar on the right quarter of the screen that's just wasting more space. I think the start bar and icons are a waste of space, but what I saw looked even more teletubbie than XP. I'm minimalistic and Windows just does not suit minimalists.

I would have to say that Tiger wins this battle in my eyes. Unless Windows decides to base Longhorn off of the unix kernel they will never win. I'm a gamer, but mostly on the consoles, so I prefer a functional environment like OS X or Linux. I'm not sure but I could be biased.

Here's a slashdot article that has a review of GCC 4.0. It compares filesizes and compile times of several different programs. It looks like in some areas it's a pretty big improvement but in others gcc 3.4 wins.

I found a similar way to do it in php here. This one checks to make sure the syntax is correct as well as checking to make sure the domain for the address they entered is registered with a MX (mail exchange) record in DNS. Basically, it makes sure there's a mailserver running at that domain. The documentation on that php function can be found here. Here's the code for the php function to validate an email address: function validate_email($email){ // Create the syntactical validation regular expression $regexp = "^([_a-z0-9-]+)(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@([a-z0-9-]+)(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$"; // Presume that the email is invalid $valid = 0; // Validate the syntax if (eregi($regexp, $email)) { list($username,$domaintld) = split("@",$email); // Validate the domain if (getmxrr($domaintld,$mxrecords)) $valid = 1; } else { $valid = 0; } return $valid;} And it returns a boolean so you could use it like this: if (validate_email($email)) echo "Email is valid!";else echo "Email is invalid!";

Okay, if you really want to do this yourself, it's really not that hard. First, you need to know basic html forms. The html form has to methods of sending data, post and get. Have you ever noticed a URL that has ?p=7&c=3 or something at the end? Those are get variables, where p == 7 and c ==3. Post will send the information "silently" so it's a little more secure, but if you just want a form that they can use to send you an email, there's no reason to get crazy about security. We'll use the get method, so first we need to start a form in the page you want them to be able to submit from: <form name="email" method="get" action="mailme.php"></form> That's doesn't look too bad I hope. The action parameter is the script that will be called when the form is submitted, in this case, mailme.php. Okay, now we need to add a couple of fields. I'm going to just use a subject and body for this script, but you can add others as you see fit. <form name="email" method="get" action="mailme.php"> Subject: <input type="text" name="subject" size="25"><br> Body: <textarea name="body" width="40" height="3"></textarea><br> <input type="submit" value="Send Email" name="submit"></form> Okay, let's go through this. First, we have the subject. The <input> tag will let us make different types of ways to get information from the user, in this case we make a textbox with the type="text" parameter. Note that we name it "subject" this is important later in the php script. The size just makes it a decent width for what we expect to be put in the field. Next we have the body, here we're using a textarea, this is just like the text box except has multiple lines so they can write and see their message a little easier. Width and height are again just making it about the right size, and name is "body" for this, again this is important later. Notice we have and end tag for the textarea. If we wanted to we could put some text between the tags that would be the default value of the textarea. I chose not to use one for the demo but you may want to. The last item in the form is a submission button. This will actually submit the information to the script defined in the action parameter above. Value is the text in the button, type is submit, which is telling the form, when they click, run the action script. Again, note the name is "submit". Okay, that's all for the html form, save it as email.html or something and include it on one of your pages. Now let's write some php. $subject = $_GET['subject'];$body = $_GET['body'];$submit = $_GET['submit']; Remember how I kept telling you those names we set were important, well, here's why. When we want to access a variable passed to a script using the get method, we use the superglobal php variable $_GET. Think of it as an array, that has a element for each piece of data you passed it. The "key" for each piece of data will be the name you set in the form, so we acces the subject field's value with $_GET['subject']. These three lines just make the variables easier to use later in the script. The same thing could of been accomplished with one line of code: extract($_GET); I didn't use this because I felt the other way illustrates the get method better but you should always know the easiest way to do things too. Next we want to check if they put anything in, if they didn't we don't want to send ourselves a blank email, and we'll give them another try. if (!$subject || !$body || !$submit){ printf("Both fields are required!<br>\n"); include("email.html");} else { mail("jonypawks@gmail.com", $subject, $body, "Website Comment"); printf("Mail sent, thank you!");} The if line just checks to make sure there's a value in each variable. We check subject and body to make sure that they entered values into the form. We're checking submit so we know that they came from our email.html, otherwise they could just type in the path to the php script. This isn't really a big deal for a script like this, but it's good practice because it can become a security issue if the script is doing something more sensitive. So, if any of those variables have no values we will print a statement telling them both fields are required and then we include the email form so they don't have to hit back. If there is a value for each variable we send the mail. The mail command is really pretty simple here's a description of it: mail(to, subject, message, headers) So you can see we're sending to the email address "jonypawks@gmail.com" which is my email address, and then we're setting the subject and message to our subject and body variables respectively. Then we're adding the header information "Website Comment". This is an unnecessary parameter but it can be useful. Have you ever noticed all the extra text at the top of an email that no one reads? Well, that's the header. And whatever we put in that parameter is added to that. There's really no point to this, I'm just showing you what you can do with this function. Finally, we tell them that the mail was sent. I hope you were able to understand everything well enough. If not, just post a question and I will do my best to answer it. You can see a working copy of this program here. And here's the source code for the two files: email.html <html><body><b>Email Me!</b><br><form name="email" method="get" action="mailme.php"> Subject: <input type="text" name="subject" size="25"><br> Body: <textarea name="body" width="40" height="3"></textarea><br> <input type="submit" value="Send Email" name="submit"></form></body></html> mailme.php <?php$subject = $_GET['subject'];$body = $_GET['body'];$submit = $_GET['submit'];if (!$subject || !$body || !$submit){ printf("Both fields are required!<br>\n"); include("email.html");} else { mail("jonypawks@gmail.com", $subject, $body, "Website Comment"); printf("Mail sent, thank you!");}?> Hmm, this turned out to be longer than I expected, maybe I should of put this in the tutorials section. Well, good luck and try not to abuse the page too much ;-)

Well, I guess I have three machines. My main rig is:Athlon XP 3000+1024MB 2700 RAM (512MB is 3200)GeForce4 Ti 4200 (overclocked to 4400)240GB Hard disk (80GB Western Digital & 160GB Seagate)Then I've got two machines I recently acquired for free one is a AMD K6-2 550MHz and the other is an AMD K6-2 600MHz. Don't know what I'm doing with them, original idea was make a small cluster just for kicks with a friend that has a couple lying around, but I think they'll just be a seti farm for right now.

I second the recommendation for qemu. It's great. There is a kernel module that will speed it up significantly if you use it. I use it to watch the crappy tegrity online lectures my university uses, that way I don't have to restart my computer and stop everything else I'm doing. If you use gentoo, it's in portage. I can't really say how it compares to VMWare, since I've never used it. But I was really impressed with how fast qemu ran Windows XP for me on my Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB 2700 machine. Very impressive for such a small open source project that hasn't really been around that long (I think?). If you're looking to go the other way (running linux in windows) there's always cygwin: http://www.cygwin.com/ It'll let you run a small linux environment in windows. I've never been that impressed with it but I haven't really used it since I've gotten into linux. It's probably better than I remember, I was stupid then. I do know a guy that uses cygwin to run an sftp server on his windows machine, which seems pretty useful to me.

If you're going to use Java I recommend the Eclipse Development Environment. It's by far the best IDE I've used for Java development. Another one that others like that I'm not too keen on is Borland's JBuilder. It has a built in GUI creation tool, but I was not impressed with the code created by it. There are plugins for Eclipse that do a much better job in my opinion. I'd recommend that if you learn Java, try and make the jump to C/C++ eventually. It's a lot more powerful. Java makes everything easy but comes with the overhead of having to run the Java Virtual Machine and isn't near as fast as a precompiled C++ program. The most difficult aspect for most people to grasp in C++ is pointers but if you just read some tutorials and learn some pointer arithmetic it's not that bad. I'd also recommend looking at the assembly generated by your compiler sometime to see how it allocates memory, this can help you understand pointer math a lot, and you only really need to understand a couple assembly instructions to understand most of it. I've heard of a program called DarkBASIC. It's based on the old BASIC programming language, but it's revamped for game programming. This might be a good place to start to learn basic game theory.

OS News: A site that has news about major releases for any OS. Linux Games: Keeps you up to date with games for linux. I like this site since it can be difficult to find a good game in linux. Distro Watch: News about official releases of different linux distributions. Linux Kernel Archive: Official website of the linux kernel. Gentoo Linux: My prefered linux distro. Slashdot: General tech news but you can always view they're operating systems section for OS specific news. Or you can check out they're topic categories and see if they have a topic for your favorite OS. The Register: Another general news site but they do have a Operating Systems Section if you feel like limiting yourself. I hope some of these are useful to someone.

Thank you guys, I looked up the ncurses info on php.net and it worked like a charm.

WineX has changed to cedega and you can get it at transgaming.com but it does cost $5 a month. But it's by far the best for gaming. For the emulators, like jnes, I'd recommend using an emulator written for linux, there's plenty out there and you'll get much better performance that way. For applications like alcohol 120 and winamp I would again suggest using an application written specifically for linux. Some popular media players are xmms, beep-media-player and there's others out there. I recommend beep-media-player. For cd authoring software, k3b is good and the other popular one is xcdroast. Xcdroast is a little confusing, most people use k3b, it looks and feels very similar to nero. Hope some of this info helps you out. Eventually you will have to break you dependency on windows apps, I'd suggest you try and get used to linux software quickly if you plan on using it for an extended period of time.

I've been doing a lot of scripting in php recently and I've really come to like it. But the one thing I can't seem to find anywhere is how to output text to a specific place on a console. What my script does is basically repeats a cumbersome process over and over for approximately 1800 files, and I'd like for the script to show the percentage complete but not print out 1800 lines. I'm not sure if this is even possible but it seems like a feature that would be commonly requested, even though php isn't geared towards console scripts. Thanks ahead of time.

I remembered when I was thinking of buying a laptop I was trying to find out which laptops had the best supported hardware. I found linux laptops to be extremely helpful. Maybe this is what you need, but if you're installing debian I think you'll be okay, it looks like it'll go on anything.

I would heavily recommend not using Partition Magic. Myself and many of my friends have had problems when resizing NTFS partitions with it. If you're not using NTFS then go ahead with it if you're more comfortable with it. I would recommend using qtparted, it's worked great for us in the past.

Just use shadow's bittorrent client. It's in the portage tree if you use gentoo, otherwise there's probably a package for your distro out there somewhere.

I love Gentoo but I'm definitely going to have to recommend that you try something else for your first distro. I recommend trying Ubuntu, very easy to setup and it uses debian packages so you have plenty of options there.

WINE == Wine Is Not an Emulator. Wine is an abstraction layer.

Yes. I believe it still uses their old engine when necessary, but I could be wrong.

The windowmanager used by Damn Small Linux is fluxbox.

I like fluxbox as well, I just prefer openbox a little more. Fluxbox is a little more eyecandy geared than openbox is. Not that I don't like eyecandy but openbox has a really neat feature called pipemenus. You tie a menu to a script that generates the menu on the fly based on the output of the script. It's really nice. I have one that checks my gmail, and another that'll tell which packages are out of date. And I love writing scripts to make them. It also uses XML for all it's config files which I also like. I used to use fluxbox until I found out about openbox, but if you just can't live without transparent menus and xorg's composite support than openbox probably isn't for you.

You can also refer to those variables like this: $_POST['username']$_POST['email'] If you want a quick tutorial here's one that I've used in the past, shows you the basics of forms and PHP and also using MySQL through PHP.