chiiyo

I bought ten years from godaddy at one go. Never looked back. *wink*

Site address: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Theme: A domain for random art/writing/photography/hobby sites for me and my friends. Currently the only ones in the making are Ricepaper, my personal portfolio site for writing and photography, my friend's photography portfolio Shutterbug, and a cosplay/kimono hobby site Handsewn. Active: Under construction Added - m^e

What you should also look out for is what kind of syllabus they're offering, whether it's run-of-the-mill basic to advanced photography, or are they having many hands-on courses that would improve your photography by, maybe, dabbling in other types of fine art to help broaden your perspectives and stuff. My friend is entering an Australian university soon also to do Photography (they call it something else, media art or something), but the good point about that university is that it is well-known for having many contacts all over the world and then sending their students on internships with well-known studios and photographers to gain experience and to gain contacts. That way when you graduate you immediately can start working, based on the contacts you have built up through all the internships. You should look at universities that offer this type of exposure.

It always amuses me when my name pops up somewhere without me knowing. Hi M^E. Yeah, but I want to reemphasize Soleq's point on using the small aperture (big number = small aperture = slow aperture), not just to increase the overall depth of field, but also because if you're using the Bulb function or just normal long exposure, you would need to compensate for the extra light but reducing the aperture through which the light goes through.Basically (mini-photography lesson here), there are two things that control the amount of light that hits the film/digital back. One is your shutter speed, which is basically how long your shutter stays open, and the other is your aperture, which is how big the "hole" in your lens is. One common rule of photography, if you're playing around in manual mode on your digicam, is that if you increase the shutter speed (making the shutter open for a longer period of time), you should likewise decrease the size of your aperture, so that the amount of light entering your camera at any time is roughly the same. You would want this or you risk having over-exposed pictures. I'm emphasizing this point because you would be using the bulb function. Normally on a digicam if you select the manual mode and select a shutter speed, the camera would calculate the appropriate aperture for you and use it. But if you use the bulb function, you might have to figure out the aperture yourself. My suggestion would be to use the smallest aperture you have on your camera (the largest number, 16 or 32 probably) and then try out a few shots. Since you're using a digital camera it should be easy to see whether it works out or not. If you're at the smallest aperture but things are still too bright/overexposed, you should probably see how you can speed up the process, or fiddle with the ASA/ISO rating if you have it on your camera (try setting the ISO rating to something smaller, like 100 or 50).Hope this helps! (Hope it's not too technical...)

Uh. I have the Powerbook. I recommend the iBook. *pause*Not really. Since the Intel ones are coming out in 2007. I can't really deep down say I recommend the iBook at this point of time. But have you considered the Apple line of portables? They're really droolicious.Anyway, laptop-shopping. Ah. To really shop for a laptop you must know what you want. If music is a must, then check out brands that have good speakers and good sound cards. When I was still shopping for a laptop (a year or two back) and I was still considering Wintel laptops, several brands were good for their sound output. I think they were Fujitsu and Sony.You might also want to consider the size of the screen, and the size of the laptop itself. The connectivity options are also important. Do you want to lug around a laptop all day? If so, you better get a good laptop bag, and make sure whatever laptop you're getting is light enough for your tastes. Most of the Wintel laptops are pretty light, especially if their shell is plastic instead of metal (like mine... ), but because they are plastic covered, do invest in a good laptop bag or hard shell for protection. Size of screen is really up to personal preference, I settled for a 12 incher, I'm used to 1024x768 resolution and don't need a big screen for what I do, but some people might be switching over to a laptop from like 19 incher LCDs, and might find the screen too cramped out. My suggestion would be to drop by any hardware store nearby and play with various models of laptops, to just basically get a feel of what screen size is most comfortable, and try to carry some of them, to basically get a feel of what size is comfortable (remember, too big won't fit into your bag!) and what is a good weight that you can lug around the whole day.Connectivity. Would you be using a lot of the ports on the road? Would you like to watch DVDs on the road? Then make sure you don't get one of those laptops with a dock. If you don't use anything from the laptop except the keyboard and the trackpad then get one with a dock. Personally I like an all-in-one, that means all the ports and drives and what-nots are on the laptop itself, no dock, but I know people who are not so demanding of their laptop, and they use the dock concept pretty well, and end up with a less bulky and lighter laptop to lug around. Make sure if you have a lot of USB devices that you have enough USB ports on that laptop. USB 2.0 ports. Some devices can run off a USB hub (and USB 2.0 hubs are not that cheap) but some might not, due to power consumption reasons. You might have devices that make use of Firewire. What type of ports does the laptop have to connect to projectors and monitor if you need to present from your laptop at school? VGA? S-video would rock if you want to watch stuff on TV off your laptop. Input and output sound ports are a must if you love music. Let's not forget to check whether the laptop comes with good enough ethernet and modem cards, you never know where you would travel when you'd need those. A wireless ethernet card would also be a great addition, something like airport on the mac. To fully utilise any internet connection anywhere (seeing how a laptop can travel), you should make sure your laptop has most of the available means to connect to any internet connection, be it wireless, cable, ethernet or modem.You might also want to find out how long the battery lasts on the laptop. Most people forget this point. It's actually a very important point because sometimes you really just can't find a power point. This is important especially if your school does not provide power points for each student, and you need your laptop to take notes (mine does though, every student in a classroom has at least one powerpoint to themselves). Somewhere between 3 hours to 5 hours should be good enough. Check whether the power supply is bulky. Or the price of another battery.Sorry about the disjointed points. Hope this helps.

So does this REALLY mean that the PS3 can be used as a PC? I'm getting confused here. As in hook up a keyboard and mouse and hook this all up to a TV and run it like a PC or something? (Although if it was the PS3 probably we'd be using the controllers to move through the operating system. Keyboard maybe.)Wouldn't the lower resolution of TV affect such PC-like actions? I've always heard that the resolution of a TV is always much lower then on a normal computer monitor.Now if this is true then this really rocks. Great for convincing the parents. It's not ONLY a game console ( and not ONLY the latest most coolest game console) but for that price you're getting a terribly fast PC too! What other offer can beat that?*already plotting*

Oh, you mean this is not the final version yet? It's pretty though.But yeah, hosting credits really ought to be all the way on top, otherwise we'd get EVEN more people asking the same question of "where are my hosting credits?" than we already have...BTW, are reputation points gone? Can't seem to find them? Will wait until the skins are functioning properly...

Whoa, very impressive. The guy did quite a bit of work just to get GIMP to look like Photoshop. Personally, I bought my own version of Photoshop, so it's not like I'm a Photoshop pirate that would benefit from switching over to open-source GIMP (one of his aims) but I would definitely take a good look at GIMP now.I've always heard good things about GIMP, maybe if I ever switch over to Linux I'll use GIMP and GIMPshop together. This rocks.At first I found it strange that this guy is on the Mac platform, I would have expected him to be on Linux instead, then I realised it made perfect sense, he was on the platform on which both Photoshop and GIMP does exist to a pretty large extent. Cool.

Providing a Mac voice here. I used to use WS_FTPLE when I was still on the PC, but since I've moved over to the Mac I've been trying out quite a few different FTP managers. The one I currently use is CyberDuck, which is really good. It's freeware, gets updated often, uses the concept of "bookmarking" your individual accounts and shows the bookmarks in a easy-to-access drawer. It can change permissions, and it uses an "Upload" and "Download" concept instead of having two windows, which is what RBrowserLite does, one window shows your target, one window shows your home folder. Oh yeah and it can upload entire folders at one go too, and you can apply permission changes recursively, so i can make everything in one folder, including subfolders and subfolder contents, all 777 with one click. Very convenient.

The irony is that now that Apple is moving to Intel, Microsoft is moving to IBM for it's Xbox360 chips..Anyway, am in the middle of watching the Keynote, stayed up last night just to follow the live updating on several news sites. I've been reading commentaries and editorials at OSNews, (like the one I just posted up), and I don't know, am I the only one excited about all this? If Apple does this right, I'll still get my lovely mac machine, have the capability to run my lovely mac os on it (since ppc applications, if not yet ported, is to be run on an emulation layer called roseatta), and still have the option to dual or even triple boot windows and linux on it. Run Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Longhorn, and whatever flavour of linux I want (since I'm now no longer restricted to the PPC flavours of linux). That's my "Triple boot on a mac mini" topic come true. I think what Apple is going to do is to have locked down Mac PCs, where only Mac PCs can run the Mac OS X. That's fine with me. Releasing at least one part of the restrictions is going to lose some customers, like the people who hate intel, but we're also going to gain a lot more switchers this way. People have been tempted to buy a Mac for ages, but put off by the price, the speed, and the O_O of a new operating system. Now they have the choice to buy a (probably) cheaper Mac PC, which has specs they can understand (no more G5 ghz are faster than intel ghz), and they know if they don't like the Mac OS, they can always install Windows or Linux on it. Whoa, but won't this put Virtual PC out of business? But anyway, I'm excited at least...

http://www.osnews.com/story/10757 I think this editorial is really good in explaining somewhat perhaps the reasons that Apple should switch. It's worth it to read through some of the comments too. Now that not only CNet, but also Wall Street Journal and now The Inquirer has confirmed CNet's story (and added that Apple is also talking with AMD), one wonders what kind of fantastical thing would be revealed at WWDC this time around. Considering it's less than one day away... *waits patiently for the keynote address*

Hmm, I took some time off to really think about why I like film so much and why I really don't like digital so much, talked to a few photography friends, discussed at length with my good photography buddy, and here's a (still rather confused and disjointed I'm afraid) opinion about film and digital in general. Please don't get offended in any way. This rant/opinion is mostly triggered by ykf's post. One factor was the rather damning link that he had posted up talking about how digital quality is now better than 35mm film, and is now comparable to medium-format slide film. The other factor was the rather smarting comment (at least to me) of: I cannot deny that the facts are that digital quality is now indeed better than film in some ways, the resolution bit at least (I don't quite agree with dynamic range), but as I thought through the facts and tried to straighten out my own reasoning of why I still stick to my trusty Nikon FM2 and film, it became more and more convoluted. To spare you the confusion I went through, my final conclusion after talking to other people, is that I choose film and chose film, NOT because it had offered me better quality and resolution at that point of time, but because of the feel of the entire film idea versus the digital idea. I mean, digital quality catching up and surpassing film quality is inevitable. Technology and research for digital continues on whereas nobody is trying to make better quality films. When one side's research ends and the other continues, it's obvious to anyone that one day digital will surpass film in terms of technical quality. That has already been done, apparently, and that I shall not argue anymore. What I wanted to bring up is the idea of film and the idea of digital photography. I'm a great believer of "capturing the moment", of minimal manipulation of the photograph after actually taking the picture. A great legend of the photography world passed away not too long ago, he took only black and white photographs and he never cropped his pictures, because he believed that his photographs are perfect when he took them, that his composition is exactly what he wanted his photo to turn out. I never cropped my own pictures, not because I'm expert like him, but because I believe the same thing. If you have to crop your picture after you take it, there would be a certain lack of photography spirit in how you take your photographs. But I'm digressing. What I really want to say is, the good point about digital is the amount of instant feedback you get. You take a picture, you can see it immediately, and see whether it was okay or not. If it isn't okay, you can go ahead and take another one, and correct yourself immediately. This is great for beginners, but I somehow feel that this instant feedback has created a loss of professionalism, no, the true photography spirit as I see it. Being a film photographer, I know that I would only get to see my photos in maybe a day's time at best. There is no instant feedback. I have to make sure each and every photo counts, because I'm working on film, and I don't carry too many rolls with me. I have to make sure that in one photo, I manage to really capture what I saw and felt inspired by when I wanted to photograph the scene. I have to make sure my focus is correct, my composition is perfect, my exposure is what I want it to be, all these small but important details must be in place, because unless I bracket, I might never get the same scene to photograph again. In a way, this makes me more in tune with the spirit of photography as I see it, as in "capture the moment". There are lots of professional and really good photographers that use digital, and still have this spirit of photography in them, and I respect them. But it's the growing amount of photographers who became good at their art because they know how to finetune their pictures to make it look good, either by digital manipulation after, or by actually on the spot fine-tuning their composition or exposure after the instant feedback that they have, that truly disturbs me, that truly makes me dislike digital photography in a sense. Photographers who truly understand the pros and cons of both film and digital, and then choose to go one way or the other, these are the people I respect. But it's the photographers who were weaned on digital, never touched a film camera before, and believe in the power that higher and higher resolution and instant feedback brings to their art, those are the ones that disturb me. A good friend who runs a photography studio once told me this story. He and his friends were at a shoot, all using film medium and large format cameras. On the other side were these really noisy and cocky photographers, all using super high-end DSLRs (not any of those Hasselbad digital backs though) and basically making fun of the amount of time and effort my friend and his friends were using to take one shot. Feeling slightly irked, my friend approached them, and basically challenged them to use their equipment to take just one shot. Verdict? They were all too scared to even touch the cameras. Now my rant is not towards those people who use digital, only a small subset, the set that basically doesn't know and doesn't understand film, and diss it anyway, just because digital is "better". I'm a person that believes you should never diss anything that you don't already understand, and people who do so disgusts me... >_< Sorry for the long rant/opinion thingy. But these are my true feelings towards this subject...

I haven't replied back to this topic for some time, because ever since I switched over to Tiger I've been downloading and experimenting with programs, and trawling through versiontracker's freeware pages... so here's some more mac os x apps to try out~ iBackup (Freeware) - Backup Utility. I don't need a very complicated or comprehensive backup solution, all I really needed was a daily backup of my system and application preferences as well as several files that always change from day to day to my external harddrive, and this program makes it easy to select your system preferences and other files. Namely (Freeware) - Application Launcher. This one is simplicity at it's best. Type a keyboard shortcut (for me it's Apple-Esc) and just start typing in the letters of your application, and a dropdown list would appear with the applications that fit, with the most closely one highlighted so you can just hit enter and the application would load. Works well for me because most of my most-used programs are in my dock anyways, so I use Namely occasionally to open iCal and Yasu which I don't use that often, and to open the stuff in the Dock when I'm not using a mouse... I love how it's so simple. NetNewsWire Lite (Freeware) - RSS Reader. I used to use MiNews, but it didn't work on Tiger when I first switched over, so I started looking for other readers. Although this is a "Lite" version, it's tremendously easy to use, very much like the older Apple Mail, and I love how you can style your RSS feeds using stylesheets that are included with the program. SkalMac Tuner (Freeware) - Tuner for instruments. It has basic notes for piano, bass, guitar, organ, flute, banjo and violin, though I only really use it for my electric bass and other people's classical guitars. It's a really small and simple program, but it does what it says well. Tofu (Freeware) - RTF reader. Actually that doesn't do it justice. I use it to read RTF files because Smultron doesn't handle them well, but Tofu is essentially a program that opens up any text file and arranges them in easy to read columns like in a magazine, and you scroll sideways to read more columns. It makes reading manuals and ReadMe files so much easier, and it's really fast and light. I'm amused to see it's by the same author as Namely... VitaminSee (Freeware) - Image viewer. I have pretty specific requirements for an image viewer, weaned on ACDSee in Windows and from my days working at a photo developing shop. And I have a variety of different types of files, photographs, mangas, doujinshis, artwork that I usually look at, and what I really wanted was a fast image viewer that gives me flexibility in seeing both the thumbnails and the actual picture at the same time. I actually tried a lot of different image viewers, but in the end I still liked VitaminSee the most. We should have some topic named Favourite Dashboard Widgets or something...

Actually you can find those two pieces of information right at your cPanel, on the left underneath all that information about domains and space. For your information I'll just state them here, yours should be the same as mine, but you should check anyways.Path to PERL /usr/bin/perlPath to sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail

O_O. Why would you want to put frames in tables??Oh yeah, and hello~ Don't worry about being new, most of us are "technically" new, I mean, some of the admins only joined last year or something, but we're one big community here~

Good luck then m3ch4.... to madcrow, I used to want to use a CMS, but somehow I've always felt it's just better to code the website by hand and then upload it... For me customizing the CMS to produce pages the way I want them to look would have taken even more time than to actually code them... that's probably why I still end up manually coding my pages... and manually blogging.... and manually creating my own rss feeds after so long... =_=... *heh*

Actually that would really depend on which ftp manager you use. If you use the file manager in cpanel, you would have to create you folders first, and then go into your folder, and then create your subfolders, and then go into your subfolders, and then upload your files. It's kinda tedious, I know. It helps if you already have the structure on your computer, and you can mirror it as you go along.There are a few ftp managers out there that allow you to haul the entire folder with all it's subfolders and inside pages headlong and just dump it all at the location. I used to use one on the mac platform, rbrowserlite. Not too sure about what ftp managers do that on the windows or linux platform. My current ftp manager Cyberduck doesn't do that either (I think, haven't tried). I do not think you can upload a zip and open the zip onto the location, if you try opening the zip you would be, in actual fact, downloading the contents onto your own computer. Having said that, I think it's better if you do it manually and in the long way I mentioned earlier in this post, because that way you can be sure all your files ended up where they should. Having more control over where your files land up. You never know, sometimes your connection might be interrupted along the way and you might lose some files, and if you just dumped the whole folder in you would never know what didn't get uploaded and stuff. Best option that is a compromise in between is be sure to get a ftp manager that allows you to upload multiple files at one go, and then when you hit the subfolder level you can just select all the files and upload.

Don't worry too much about it. I was kind of skeptical about it too, but really, all you need to just comb through a few forums, give your opinion when you think you really have something to offer, and that should be able to get you enough credits. After that just check in maybe everyday and take a look at the new posts. On good days you should be able to post enough to get you more hosting credits. Right now I'm just maintaining my own number.And it's really fun! I learn a lot from here...

It's always better to have your subsections in different folders, because if you ever want to expand your site, it'll be neater and make more sense logically. Actually, it'll be good if you planned out your site structure before you plunge into designing your site and actually making your site. A good site structure is one where you have a balanced "tree", that means, for example, if I was to have a portfolio site, and I have the subsections of "poetry", "prose" and "art", those would form the first "branches" of the tree. Under each branch, let's say for poetry, I would only have poetry, whereas for "prose" I have stories, lyrics, profiles, snippets, and for art I would have photography, design, websites. Now you see the branches are imbalanced, because my poetry subsection is only one level deep whilst my prose and art sections are two levels deep with several branches offshooting. The idea is to make your subsections logical enough so that you have a nice even tree. If you plan your site this way you can also control the number of clicks a visitor would need to reach the most inner page. The old traditional number was that a visitor should only need to click three times to get to the page they want. I personally feel it's okay if they click more than three times (though that's a good number to stick to) if you provide interesting content along the way and make your navigation logical. Now finally back to the topic. If you plan your site structure out this way, you will see that it's common sense to have folders for every subsection and section for your site. In my case, I would have a "prose" folder, and then within the "prose" folder I would have more folders named "stories", "lyrics" and the like. This is because I know I would have around 10+ files in each folder, and it just makes it easier to maintain, instead of having a smattering of files in the main public_html folder with random filenames that I have to click and open to know what is inside. Having folders just make sense if you know you're going to have a complicated or big site, and having them around even when you have a simple site makes expanding the site easier. A good gauge is the number 10. If you know you're going to have more than ten files, you should start to folderise. That's all my own opinion of course. *wink*

I just saw this page through one of my RSS newsreaders... It's a very complete and extensive list of linux applications that are in a way replacements of typical windows applications, and is a list to help switchers who are from Windows background thinking about switching to Linux. It's really cool, I would use it if I ever switch to Linux. They even have non-english versions of the list!

Okay, I'm going to sound like a real noob here, but what exactly does this site work?? O_o. There is no main page with instructions or an introduction in fact, all I know is that the nice people of Xisto run this, and I see lots of familiar faces, and I'm a registered member, and it has to do with games. =_=. I'm really quite confused here. Is it a forum with a lot of community games? One overall strategic game akin to Utopia? Or a place to develop games? O_o.*small voice* everyone else seems to know what's going on, i just don't get it.... *small voice*

Sorry, I'm just so amused by a tutorial where the author spends one entire paragraph at the beginner berating and putting down the very thing he's doing a tutorial on... *giggle**shares your hate for Frontpage*

I think what you're looking for is the title attribute. The alt attribute in IMG tags is actually often misused to create tooltips when your mouse is hovered over the image, alt attributes are for when the image is switched off or otherwise inaccessible, and then displayed as an "alternative". The title attribute is actually the correct attribute for tooltips and the like, and can be used in most tags, although apparently not all browsers would show the title string as a tooltip, especially the older ones.Although in your case the noembed tag recommended by Becky is a better choice...

It could also be a problem with your internet service provider. Over here we regularly run into problems with the wireless network, but it has nothing to do with our hardware or our software, but with the internet service provider running into network problems.

Actually ThinkGeek is a really cool site to dig through for people who consider themselves as geeks... I mean, blankets with caffiene molecules as motifs? Ties with binary code that makes fun of people who can't read binary? I love Thinkgeek, it's like my one favourite online site. This USB penknife came out around a year ago on Thinkgeek... Anyone else likes Thinkgeek?