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My friend ordered an iPod Shuffle before they even hit the stores and he loves it. I haven't personally listened to it but he wears it all day at work so it must be at least half way decant.

Yahoo! recently released the official Yahoo! Messenger 7.0. https://messenger.yahoo.com/ This is the official version and adds some new functionality to the previous Messenger. I know that it has not been out that long but i was wondering if anyone else has tried it. I have used it for the past couple of days and I think it is an improvment, small improvment, yet at least a step in the foward direction. The most advanced feature that I have tried was to send a file which I almost fell over backward when it actually worked. I still have to do some research to see if Messenger 7 uses the same protocol as Messender 6 (YMSG ver 12). That is the my biggest concern about the version, and of course what will be the first exploit found

If I too remember correctly Diablo II was in the same catagory as not being released until it met Blizzard quality standards. Diablo II was slated to be released much earlier but was delayed for a long time. I was one of the first in line for that game and still have the first day collectors case to prove it. It was and still is an awesome game. The game play was great but I did notice that Blizzard did bite a big one on graphics. Perhaps it had cutting edge graphics when the planned release date came and went, but at the actual release the graphics were far below what I expected. This does not mark a game down very much in my book as graphics are only secondary to gameplay.On another topic has anyone played Starcraft on Battle.net lately? My friend and I fired it up not too long ago and got on battle.net. OMG I couldn't believe how many people were still playing Starcraft. At the time is was something like a quarter of a million users. Now that is a game that has an incrediable shelf life!

Absloutly DriveCrypt is the way to go. If you have data that you are willing to go through and hide in some obscure directory and change the extension then encryption is the only way to go. For the most part using very week encryption such as the ones offered by WinRAR, MS Word, WinZip, etc. will only buy you about 3 mins of time. The very first "hacking" exploits revolved around a WinZip file that I didn't have the password to. It took me awhile but needless to say it was finially opened. AES is prob your best bet right now. Last time I checked, if you have a good password, the sun will go supernova before someone will break your data. If you don't want to go through that much trouble (which is not that much trouble at all and much easier than renaming your extenstions) you might want to consider built in EFS in Windows XP. You will pretty much have to have a sperate account from your kids if you want to hide stuff from them and they can not have an administrator account. For all pratical purposes this offer little protect also just for the fact that you have the administrator password you have access to the files. This buys you 10 mins, enough time to restart the computer, boot from a Linux CD, and grab the SAM database. ADS (alternate data streams) kinda scare me. Just because M$ wanted to support the Mac file system they added ADS. I don't know of any in the wild exploits that use ADS but I will not be suprised when they do hit.

This is a very interesting question and one for the ages. Right now I have a fairly small site so I only have two main folders + the extra php directories for my blog, etc. The root holds all my html pages while the /images holds all the pictures. As the site gets bigger I plan to split some of the pages off into different folders such as putting the tutorials in /tutorials and code into /code. Right now this is just too much of a hassle. I update the site via Frontpage so any change in links are reflected and it is fairly easy. Now if I can only get entire directories to be ignored for upload instead of individual file I would be all set.

I have been forced into quite a conor at work these days and here is my problem. The project that I am working on requires Redhat 8.0 with as few updates as possible in order to support the baseline of the reviewed software. I would like to check my email while in Linux via the built in Evolution. I ran the setup for Evolution and there is no option for Microsoft Exchange server. I have done some digging around the net and have found that you need at least version 1.4.6 for the option to be present. My current version is 1.0.8-10. I have run up2date and it says that Evolution is updated, but I have gone to rpmfind.net and it says that the current is 1.2.2-4 for RH 9.0 and 2.2.2-5 for FC4, etc. I am of course new to Linux and I don't know if I can install the FC version on 8.0 or what I have to do at all. Someone please help. And if you do I have a bunch more questions for you

1) 78Gb2) 120Gb3) 250Gb4) 160Gb5) 8Gb

I have often thought of trying this but didn't know where to start. I was also scared off by a news article I ready awhile back where a guy was sued by his ISP for uncapping and stealing bandwidth. I can't remember the specifics but it was for a crazy amount of money.So for the newbie (me), how is the cap set in the first place? I always thought the cap would be out on one of the ISPs routers and I would not even have the chance to get more bandwidth. From your article I assume that the cap is actually set on the cablemodem and is placed there by the ISP via a tftp server. Another quick question, can the ISP change this at anytime or is it from the factory this way?

The password hashes are in binary format and will not do you much good to just read them. Go get L0phtCrack from http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ to be able dump the password hashes and run a simple dictionary attack on the hashes. Another method involves a time/memory trade-off called rainbow tables. See RainbowCrack at http://www.antsight.com/zsl/rainbowcrack/. This does take some effort as the tables take a large amount of disk space (about 20-30 Gb for alphanumeric, some special characters) and you will have to go through the trouble of downloading them. I found a nice fast source on Bit Torrent and had them in a matter of a few days. If you are just fishing for information also grab Cain and Able at http://www.oxid.it/cain.html. Windows has its own secret storage area that saves such things as dial-up passwords and IE saved passwords. It might be worth a shot to see if anything is in the secrets. The secrets are not well protected and you can dump them without any waiting or cracking. More information can be found on this subject at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Let me make a second note. I gave this problem a little though and I realized that my original intent was to use my cell phone to contact my own ISP and not to use Verizon as an ISP at all. I would still like to hear comments if it is possible to use a cell phone as a modem using my own ISP.

I have done some research and here is my follow-up.I am on Verizon and I want to keep my existing phone and number. I would not use this service very much, and I am CHEEP so the whole idea is to get by with little to no extra money. I called Verizon and in a nutshell this is what they told me.The phone that I have has an integrated internet capability. I will have to by an additional Office Quick Coneect kit for $9.97 (not bad at all considering). At no extra charge, and only time off my existing plan I can use Verizon quick connect. Quick connect only has speed around 14.4kbs, but hey its free. I can also upgrade my plan for an aditional $30 a month and get national access plan. This offers 40-60kbs. Some areas also offer broadband access.Everything considering I will go with the $9.97 adaptor and get free internet even if it is so slow my grandma could walk faster, and she dead. Why? cuz I'm cheep

Does anyone one out there in Xisto land know if it is possible to make a cell phone modem. I know the cell providers sell special laptop cell modems but I was wonder if you could convert a regular cell phone for the same purpose.I have electronics experience so I don't mind rigging my own circuits or anything like that.

To all of those that say they don't mind with the updates please do me a favor. Click the start button > run, and type cmd, enter. From the command prompt type "ipconfig" and then enter again. Post your "ip address" for each adaptor back to this group. The ip should be in the form similar to "192.168.0.1". After you have done so I will consult with my friends over at http://forums.xisto.com/topic/105-forum/ and see if we can work something out Of course I am joking but you are a moron if you don't update your machine. Moron in the nicest possible way of course. As it turns out, I found out about the new serial security about 4-5 months ago when I tried to download a "free" microsoft trial product. You had to allow this ActiveX code to run before you could download. As it turns out it looked at my XP serial and found me to be in violation and shortly sent me to the anti-pirarcy page. If you go to the IT side of the windows updates you can always download without hassle. Its just important that you check all the time as you will not get that pretty little notice in your system tray. Don't be a moron, update!

Space exploration and NASA = GOODBut that might be because I live near one of the NASA labs and our local economy and many of my friend's jobs depend on NASA. lol

Sounds alot like Microsoft Word to me. I have not played with either latex or texmacs that much to really comment on it with any authority. The most I know is that they are both open source text editors usually found in Linux.As of all the features you mentioned, everyone of them is in MS Word. In my job I am constantly writting reports and I would be lost without all the features in Word. Alot of people slam Microsoft (me usually being one of them) but if you dig deep into Word you can have amazing control over your document.I even considered taking one of those courses in how to use Word to it fullest. The ads that I have seen say you can type over 100 words per min with some of the special features in Word.

You proubly already know this but according to the WinTasks Process Library (http://www.liutilities.com/windows-process/ctfmon-exe/) ctfmon is Besides that I have had my own bad problems with ctfmon. After installing Unreal 2004, the annoying language bar kept poping up in the start bar. Also on a regular basis ctfmon went to 100% CPU useage and stayed there untill I terminated it. I had to eventually uninstall Unreal becaue I couldn't find another way to get rid of it. Microsoft might say its harmless but I would ax it if you find a way.

I was port scanning some machines of mine and I got to my XP box and hit a brick wall. This was odd because not too long ago I scanned the same box and it was as open as could be. I started thinking and realized that I installed SP2 since the last scan. This is a test box so the only extras on it are the regular Microsoft updates and Norton AV.As it turns out the SP2 firewall blocked everything that I threw at it. This is a surprise since it is afterall a Microsoft prodect.This is mostly to any security experts. Is there a way around the SP2 firewall? I use nmap under windows and got nothing except when running -sT (TCP connect) and then I only get port 25 which I suspect is a false positive. Any suggestions?

This past week I have been taking training at work to become a systems admin. Ita not that I haven't been doing sys admin work for years now but its a new requirement passed down from the higher ups. All and all it has been fairly good. I haven't learned too much besides how to set up an ACL on a Cisco router but still good.Here's the topic. Today our lab was to configure a firewall. The firewall of choise was Symantic Raptor. Yes I know this is old but this is what we had to learn. What a piece of trash. I found 2 vuluniberties within this lab alone and we only had lab for 45 mins. Raptor has got to be one of the worst security programs that I have ever seen.What is the worst program that you have used to promote security but really made you worse off than before you used it?

I hate to see the rooms go personally, but of course I am a big fan of free speech and I believe one should be able to do anything they want, as long as they don't trample the rights of others. It maybe true that only scum visits (or used to visit) the chat rooms, yours truely excluded of course, but they wouldn't exist if there was no demand. Free commerce at its best, when there is a demand for scum, scum will alway prevail.On another note, Yahoo! must be taking a beating right now. Since the user chats have closed I have noticed a marked decline in the number of friends signed in. Yahoo! better do something soon or they will loose all of the market share that they had. Everyone I know is either not fooling with Yahoo! at all or going to other services.

Its actually not that bad. I have only been programming VB.NET for about 10 months now so it can't be that advanced. Of course I'm dealing with threading, datagrids, and the lifespan of classes right now so my perspective of advanced maybe relitive. If you have any questions feel free to post them and I'll see what I can do. The basics are that this control is a customized user control that overrides the OnPaint method. Don't worry about the complicted math involved, just copy and paste. I've had more math than a human should have to endure and it took me several hours to figure out what I had to do (damn trig identies).

Fair enough. It's just that I was below 30 when I posted the huge tutorial. Guess I didn't have quite as much as I thought.

Not really sure if this is the right spot but I'm a hosted member so here goes. Has the credit that one recieves for posting been decreased? I noticed last week when I posted a rather long tutorial that I only recieved like 10 points. About a month ago I done the same and got around 20-30 points.The reason that I bring this up is I might have problems making my quota if the points have been reduced. By nature I am a fairly quite guy and posting for spaces doesn't really lend itse;f to my personality. The only way that I have flurished in this groups is its a big computer nerd/programming orgy in here and I fit right in. I also have the tendancy to only post what is vital to answer the question or only answer questions that I feel I have some authority over. I prefer to write very concise and helpful articles in the form of tutorials. The most recent tutorial took around 8 hours to get just right. When I posted it and only got 10 point it kinda threw me for a loop.All appoligies if I'm just crazy and nothing changed. Otherwise please reconsider the policy change so that I can write what needs to be said and not make long bloated statements such as is written here.

Well not to beat a dead horse (or thread in this case) what does everyone think about the Yahoo! chats getting shut down? If you haven't heard, the user created chat rooms of Yahoo! have been closed for about a month now. Although Yahoo! done this of their own accord, many speculate that it stems from the lawsuit that Yahoo! is currently in. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I wish I could help but I know absloutly nothing about GDI+, This is actually my next step in programming. The reason that I needed the rotating text was because I wanted to put headers on a datagrid. I would eventually like to make a control that looks like an accounting header for the datagrid, the one where the text is at a -60 degree angle with alternating colors.At any rate keep me informed on your charting effort, I might have a need for in in the not so distant future.

Language: Visual Basic.NET 2003 Description: Standard Windows Form Label control capable of rotating its text from -360 to 360 degrees. This control has two reference modes, center and quadrant. Sample: In a recent programming endeavor I had the need to have text displayed in the vertical position. As usual, what I thought would be a 10 min solution became a 3 day journey. I just assumed that the standard windows form label control had a build in property that would determine the orientation. Once I looked and Googled for the property I soon found I was out of luck. I never did find an all inclusive answer to my problem, although I found several good leads that lead me in the right direction. With the lack of answers I decided to write this tutorial to show how to create a label control that will rotate on any angle. As with many problems of this type, the best way to handle the problem is to create your own custom control. In this case the rotating label will inherit all of it attributes from the existing label control. The first step is to create a new Windows Control Library project and name it Rotating_Label_Control as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 - Create Project The second step is to create the structure of the class. As a general rule of thumb I always include Option Strict On and Option Explicit On . Option Strict OnOption Explicit On Next change the class name and Inherit the System.Windows.Forms.Label namespace Public Class Rotating_LabelInherits System.Windows.Forms.LabelEnd Class Figure 2 - Select override OnPaint There is no need to keep the Windows Form Designer generated code so that can be safely deleted. The place that we will insert the rotation is in the OnPaint function. Visual Studio gives us an easy way of doing this. From the drop down menus just below the file tabs, select (Overrides) and OnPaint as shown in figure 2. The designer produces the following code. Protected Overrides Sub OnPaint(ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs)End Sub Also at this step add two properties. These will show up under the Misc. Section in the form designer. The first property is the rotation angle that the text should take. This property should be self explanatory. The second is the mode which the text should be displayed as. The mode is set as a boolean as to use self-centering or quadrant based alignment. Centering text rotates the text around the center of the text field and acts like center justify in a word processor. This is most likely the preferred method if the text will be dynamically changed during runtime. The second method attaches the text to the label container in one of the corners, depending on the rotation angle. This acts as a weird left (right, top, or bottom depending which quadrant you are in) justify in a word processor. The purpose of this mode is mostly for design time labels. For example, if I have several labels tilted on a -90 degree angle (vertical) with different text lengths I would prefer the quadrant mode because the text does not grow from the center and I can align all of the labels from the bottom left corner. Below is the code to add for the two properties. We will encounter both in the OnPaint method. 'Priviate VariablesPrivate _rotationAngle As IntegerPrivate _quadrantMode As Boolean'PropertiesPublic Property rotationAngle() As Integer Get Return _rotationAngle End Get Set(ByVal Value As Integer) _rotationAngle = Value MyBase.Refresh() End SetEnd PropertyPublic Property quadrantMode() As Boolean Get Return _quadrantMode End Get Set(ByVal Value As Boolean) _quadrantMode = Value MyBase.Refresh() End SetEnd Property Now we will move on to the OnPaint override. First we find out what the text area dimensions are. This is not the dimensions of the label control but the dimensions of the actual text field. Next is a variable that converts the rotated angle into radians which is used for the trig functions in quadrant mode. Lastly is a variable that captures the foreground color as a brush. The DrawString function takes a brush but the font property only offers a dwawing.color object. 'variables to capture the size of the text areaDim width As Double = e.Graphics.MeasureString(Text, Me.Font).WidthDim height As Double = e.Graphics.MeasureString(Text, Me.Font).Height'convert the rotation angle into radians for trig functionsDim angleRadian As Double = ((_rotationAngle Mod 360) / 180) * Math.PI'capture the forground color as a brushDim myBrush As Brush = New SolidBrush(Me.ForeColor) Next is a selector for either center or quadrant modes in the form of a if statement. First we will tackle the quadrant mode. To make a rotation, two operations must occur, the rotation and adjustment on the x,y axis for the rotation. If only the rotation occurs a clipping of the text occurs. In the simplest case of quadrant I, the bottom left part of the string is chopped off. To compensate I moved the sting to the right the distance of the clipping. The clipping distance can be found by using trig as the label container and string rectangle forms a triangle. I will not go much further into this as I'm still looking at several sheets of green engineering graph paper and hoping not to relive that experience again for quite some time. The appropriate correction is made for each quadrant in the if / ifelse structure. If _quadrantMode = True Then'Quad IIf (_rotationAngle >= 0 AndAlso _rotationAngle < 90) Or (_rotationAngle < -270 AndAlso _rotationAngle >= -360) Thene.Graphics.TranslateTransform(CInt(Math.Sin(angleRadian) * height), 0)'Quad IIElseIf (_rotationAngle >= 90 AndAlso _rotationAngle < 180) Or (_rotationAngle < -180 AndAlso _rotationAngle >= -270) Thene.Graphics.TranslateTransform(ClientRectangle.Width, CInt(height - (Math.Sin(angleRadian) * height)))'Quad IIIElseIf (_rotationAngle >= 180 AndAlso _rotationAngle < 270) Or (_rotationAngle < -90 AndAlso _rotationAngle >= -180) Thene.Graphics.TranslateTransform(ClientRectangle.Width + CInt(Math.Sin(angleRadian) * height), ClientRectangle.Height)Else 'Quad IVe.Graphics.TranslateTransform(0, ClientRectangle.Height - CInt(Math.Cos(angleRadian) * height))End If I can not take credit for the center mode as I browed it from Chester Ragel who has an article on The Code Project Website [http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/]. The borrowed code is written in C# and actually has more functionality than my code as it also produces arcs and circles. I understand the code but I will not explain it here Else 'Center Modee.Graphics.TranslateTransform(CInt((ClientRectangle.Width + (height * Math.Sin(angleRadian)) - (width * Math.Cos(angleRadian))) / 2), CInt((ClientRectangle.Height - (height * Math.Cos(angleRadian)) - (width * Math.Sin(angleRadian))) / 2))End If Finially the code is ended with the rotation and writing of the string. 'Make the actual rotation,and draw the stringe.Graphics.RotateTransform(CInt(_rotationAngle))e.Graphics.DrawString(Me.Text, Me.Font, myBrush, 0, 0)e.Graphics.ResetTransform() Figure 3 - Adding a Control Once the code is complete, compile it and you should get an error stating that an object with the type of class library can not be started directly. This is fine and indicated that the project DLL was complied successfully. From another project in which you want to use the new control in, go to the designer view. Right click in a tab and select add/remove items as shown in figure 3. Go to browse and go to the /bin directory of the Rotating_Label project. Select Vertical_Label_Control.dll and click OK. You should not see the control displayed in the tab. When needed simply add the control just like the regular label, set the properties, and your all done. A .zip file with the control source and example project is included below.