CaptainRon

what where??? i dont see no delete button! But yes in the drop down earlier it was called move to trash, now its delete selected items.anyway, they have this cool feature of accounts. i use it for all my domain emails. like i am forwarding all mails to ron@captain-ron.net to my gmail acc. not only that, i can reply from gmail interface pretending to be ron@captain-ron.net . so its like i dun need to bother with my server's space!

Although none of the *.NIX can kill the Windows in ease of use and overall enjoyment.I say install 98 or Me. Get them second hand if u want to go cheap.Now if you are sure you have the right modem drivers and other device drivers for Linux, then only you should think of moving to Linux.And once you decide to move to Linux, I think Mandrake 10.1 is the best. I prefer using it more than XP since I have got nearly everything set up on it. I got Opera, FireFox as browsers and then Ares, Kazaa (running on wine) and Limewire as the P2P.Lime wire is damn heavy, Ares is the best.Then you have Kopete as an all rounder (multi-protocol) chat client (for yahoo msn etc). So all in all, you can carry on with your day to day life just like on windows :-).

Ok i m posting a real interesting article. It actually makes me wonder at times how Google is earning money. Probably even in their OS they will have adsense )Read it and comment on it.The Secret Source of Google's PowerMuch is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring. No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else. I've written before about Google's snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines. Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup. Speculation: Gmail's Architecture and EconomicsLet's make some guesses about how one might build a Gmail. Hotmail has 60 million users. Gmail's design should be comparable, and should scale to 100 million users. It will only have to support a couple of million in the first year though. The most obvious challenge is the storage. You can't lose people's email, and you don't want to ever be down, so data has to be replicated. RAID is no good; when a disk fails, a human needs to replace the bad disk, or there is risk of data loss if more disks fail. One imagines the old ENIAC technician running up and down the isles of Google's data center with a shopping cart full of spare disk drives instead of vacuum tubes. RAID also requires more expensive hardware -- at least the hot swap drive trays. And RAID doesn't handle high availability at the server level anyway. No. Google has 100,000 servers. [nytimes] If a server/disk dies, they leave it dead in the rack, to be reclaimed/replaced later. Hardware failures need to be instantly routed around by software. Google has built their own distributed, fault-tolerant, petabyte filesystem, the Google Filesystem. This is ideal for the job. Say GFS replicates user email in three places; if a disk or a server dies, GFS can automatically make a new copy from one of the remaining two. Compress the email for a 3:1 storage win, then store user's email in three locations, and their raw storage need is approximately equivalent to the user's mail size. The Gmail servers wouldn't be top-heavy with lots of disk. They need the CPU for indexing and page view serving anyway. No fancy RAID card or hot-swap trays, just 1-2 disks per 1U server. It's straightforward to spreadsheet out the economics of the service, taking into account average storage per user, cost of the servers, and monetization per user per year. Google apparently puts the operational cost of storage at $2 per gigabyte. My napkin math comes up with numbers in the same ballpark. I would assume the yearly monetized value of a webmail user to be in the $1-10 range. Cheap HardwareHere's an anecdote to illustrate how far Google's cultural approach to hardware cost is different from the norm, and what it means as a component of their competitive advantage. In a previous job I specified 40 moderately-priced servers to run a new internet search site we were developing. The ops team overrode me; they wanted 6 more expensive servers, since they said it would be easier to manage 6 machines than 40. What this does is raise the cost of a CPU second. We had engineers that could imagine algorithms that would give marginally better search results, but if the algorithm was 10 times slower than the current code, ops would have to add 10X the number of machines to the datacenter. If you've already got $20 million invested in a modest collection of Suns, going 10X to run some fancier code is not an option. Google has 100,000 servers. Any sane ops person would rather go with a fancy $5000 server than a bare $500 motherboard plus disks sitting exposed on a tray. But that's a 10X difference to the cost of a CPU cycle. And this frees up the algorithm designers to invent better stuff. Without cheap CPU cycles, the coders won't even consider algorithms that the Google guys are deploying. They're just too expensive to run. Google doesn't deploy bare motherboards on exposed trays anymore; they're on at least the fourth iteration of their cheap hardware platform. Google now has an institutional competence building and maintaining servers that cost a lot less than the servers everyone else is using. And they do it with fewer people. Think of the little internal factory they must have to deploy servers, and the level of automation needed to run that many boxes. Either network boot or a production line to pre-install disk images. Servers that self-configure on boot to determine their network config and load the latest rev of the software they'll be running. Normal datacenter ops practices don't scale to what Google has. What are all those OS Researchers doing at Google?Rob Pike has gone to Google. Yes, that Rob Pike -- the OS researcher, the member of the original Unix team from Bell Labs. This guy isn't just some labs hood ornament; he writes code, lots of it. Big chunks of whole new operating systems like Plan 9. Look at the depth of the research background of the Google employees in OS, networking, and distributed systems. Compiler Optimization. Thread migration. Distributed shared memory. I'm a sucker for cool OS research. Browsing papers from Google employees about distributed systems, thread migration, network shared memory, GFS, makes me feel like a kid in Tomorrowland wondering when we're going to Mars. Wouldn't it be great, as an engineer, to have production versions of all this great research. Google engineers do! Competitive AdvantageGoogle is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application. While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming. This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?

Visual basic is equally fast on Windows machine as C++. Read the book called Advanced Visual Basic (available free on net) and it gets u an insight into probably the most powerful/easy windows programming language ever. It beats C++ in performance at times, and ofcourse, cuts teh development time into nearly half.But ofcourse there are other better languages too... and C++, undoubt fully rules the lot in power and flexiblity, and ofcourse portability.

Well, i would like to quote a few things here...Firstly its nearly impossible to overthrow the WIndows dominance in a fortnight.Secondly, there are millions of software titles floating around for Windows, which surely wont be the case for Google OS.I won't get my favourite web browser, File sharing app, and my favourite game to run on that OS over night.Thirdly, not all of mine, or other people's hardware will be compatible with this new OS. Wht's the bloody use if i can't get my modem, AGP card and TV tuner to run on it?Fourthly, we see tens of new products floating around daily, but do we just change over to them all of a sudden? Ofcourse not! we stick to our old tried and trusted apps.Fifthly, it will be a tough deal to provide security with ease. People are ready to compromise security for ease! and thats an obvious fact... people should be able to use a thing in the first place and then they will be concerned about its security.Sixthly, many attempts have been made and rather all failed, to overthrow Microsoft Windows. No matter how much u hate MS, it is the easiest and friendliest of the lot. Even for a programmer, he doesn't have to go through the dilemma as to what base to use for developing the software, which is the case with Open source OS's. Like to build on GNOME or KDE etc. Look at SuSe Linux, they tried so hard and they came way far... but in the end they realised it didnt even matter :-pThey themselves accepted the fact that Linux couldn't be made as easy as MS Windows and finally open sourced the proprietary Distro.Seventhly, Windows is getting securer day by day. Look at Vista for instance. Even XP, when installed on an NTFS partition and when run using Limited user account, doesnt cater to any of the flaws addressed by SP2.Thats it i guess... it will be a fierce battle fought if ever someone rivals... and as far as google is concerned... it will just be a dream shot.

Oh thanx! It was a pleassure to have been able to help. It was good to see that simple hack work.

OK I got a very simple solution which i think will definitely work.See once you export the SQL file, download it to your hard disk (by checking 'Save File' option at the end) and then open the file in Notepad. Switch on Word Wrap from Format menu. Now look at the second line towards the right end, there will be a statement like Database: 'neverseen_phpbb1'Change this name to a database name that ur current user has got access to. Now try importing through this file, and i suppose it will definitely work.In case it doesn't, check for your db name appearances at other places in the SQL file and replace them with the name of the database to which you want to upload.Hopefully that works for u. If it does do PM me.cya!Ron Out

Usually a Windows XP installation is done on a NTFS partition but at times you will find fools who install it on FAT32 partition and have no idea that they could create a Limited user account for normal using and then go about complaining that Windows is insecure to the brim.Anyway here we only need the Windows XP/Server 2003 to be installed on a FAT32 partition.There are three simple steps involved: • Rename the logon.scr file situated in system32 folder to something else. Then make a copy of the cmd.exe and name it logon.scr .• Restart the computer, wait on the logon screen for the renamed cmd.exe to fire up as logon.scr . Usually the time taken will be the time the admin set as the screen saver time. Usually 10 mins, and then you get a console window in front of you with all the admin powers.• Make a useful command. Best thing to do is run the explorer.exe command and wait for the GUI shell to load. Now you can perform normal computer operations. Another good thing that can be done is to change the Administrator password with the NET command on the command line itself.Now we will see how to do the first step in more detail. This can be achieved if u have a simple account or else use a boot disk and from command line you can perform the operation. Or else use a Linux installation to do it. Its always helpful to have a Linux live CD in hand. Else you can use the parallel Win 98 installation to do it (if available).I will elaborate the boot disk method. Most people will be having a Win 98 boot disk or a CD. Boot from it and reach the command line. Suppose Win XP is installed on C:\ then do the following:• A:\> C:\ • C:\> CD Windows\SYSTEM32 • C:\Windows\System32> REN logon.scr logon1.scr • C:\Windows\System32> COPY cmd.exe logon.scr • CTRL+ALT+DELETE (Restart the comp, remove the bootable media)Let see what happens in the second step. You need to do nothing in this step. You just need to sit and wait without pressing any key or moving the mouse for the screen saver to fire up. In this case logon.scr fires up. Logon.scr is nothing but a renamed cmd.exe .A command line shall appear after the set time expires.Now for the hacking step, we have a full powered command line in hand. Now we can do whatever we wish. Lets do one thing first; make sure that we have a long term access to the computer. We will change the administrator password. Type the commad:NET USER Administrator <pass of ur choice> ¿Very seldom does even a admin log in with the administrator account. So now you have the administrator account in your hand and not many can do anything about it.Supposing the computer is usually used frequently with the admin account, you can simply type the ‘explorer’ command at the shell to call the GUI shell. You get a full power shell in your hand. This is very safe since one will realize that anyone ever hacked their comp. But this will require you to wait for the command line to fire up as a screensaver every time.Anyhow, now you can hack comps of many FAT32 fools.

hi all my page http://iron-eagles.tripod.com/index.html had a page rank of 5 at one time. What i heard was google page rank is the number of other links linking to you. Now after a long time, around 2 years, I see that my page's rank had become 0!! Now what exactly was the cause of this? yes, also to mention that my page was unupdated too.

Don't know how many have you used this but try out the Diskmgmt.msc control utility.Goto Start > Run and type diskmgmt.msc and press Run.You will see a correctly populated virtual representation of our hard disk partitions. Now the best part is what is considered a head ache otherwise is solved just by right clicking and selecting. Its more efficient that most tools available in Linux.One important thing that will be seen is we can create multiple primary partitions in our hard disks. We can have at most 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition, or at most 4 primary partitions.If you are a novice and are afraid of command line tools like fdisk and diskpart, here is a way of doing the deed with complete safety. Now obviously you can't run this tool without windows xp and hence you wont have access to it incase xp crashes and even safe mode doesn't run. In that case you will need to boot from XP CD and use the partitioning tool within the setup.

Language: Visual Basic 6.0 (5.0/4.0) Level: Beginner Problem: How to find the current Line Number in a multiline text box? Some times it is necessary for us to provide a text editor in our programs, or maybe a text viewer. The text box control has no built in method to find the current line number like RichTextBox. Hence we need to code it manually. Solution: The simple concept of line numbers is the carriage return character, or simply the ASCII code 10. The line feed character has the ASCII code 13. In the code example I have used chr(10), you can also use vbCrLf in place of it. Simple concept is to keep finding the number of new line characters that have appeared before the current cursor position. Adding one to it will give us the current line number. On Error Resume Next 'This is required in order to bypass 'the error that comes when on first linefound = -1 'Initialize a variable to store the start position 'of last chr(10) foundLinenum = 1 'Initialize Linenum variable to 1, since in any 'case we have one linepos = Text1.SelStart 'Position from where searching beginsDo Until found = 0 found = InStrRev(Text1.Text, Chr(10), pos, 0) If found = 0 Then Exit Do Linenum = Linenum + 1 pos = found - 1LoopLabel1.Caption = Linenum The first four statements are explained with remarks. Don't think about the first line now. On the VB form we have two controls, Text1 (text box control) and Label1 (Label control). The line number will be shown in the label. We initialize three variables, found, Linenum and Pos. Linenum keeps getting incremented until the Do loop finally ends with placing the correct line number in it. Here is how it happens. Firstly we take a variable called found. This variable will hold the value returned by the InStrRev function. InStrRev function searches for a specified string in another string and returns its position. InStrRev functions does the searching in reverse direction from the position specified. Its sister function is StrRev which does searching in forward direction. Syntax of InStrRev: InstrRev(stringcheck, stringmatch[, start[, compare]]) We called the function as follows: found = InStrRev(Text1.Text, Chr(10), pos, 0) Text1.text is the string being searched and chr(10) is the string being searched. We take a new variable called pos, which signifies the starting postion for the search in the given string (i.e. text1.text). Initially pos is set as the current caret location, which is given by text1.selstart Pos is taken since when we find a new line char, its obvious that we will look for a new line char above of it. So we recall InStrRev with pos set to the previous value of found subtracted by 1. So InStrRev will return 0 when it doesn't find the new line character. That will symbolize that we have counted all the lines above the current cursor position. So we start a Do Loop which will loop until found = 0. The InstrRev function is the first statement inside the loop, since the searching has to be done until no more newline characters are found. If 0 is returned by InStrRev then Exit Do (quit the loop). Now if we are past this line that means that InStrRev did find a newline char and its position is stored in found. Since we no a newline char was found we increment Linenum by 1. Now we set the value of pos to value of found minus 1. To understand why, suppose the location of new line char came to be 23. So found = 23. Its obvious that if there is another new line char it will be behind the current location of the new line char. So we subtract found by 1 and put it in pos. The loop ends with Loop statement. Now this Loop block will count all the line numbers above the current caret location and store it in Linenum. All we need to do is use this value and show it to the user. We use a Label in this case. So the simple statement goes as label1.caption = Linenum There you go! Although this is very basic operation, and Rich Text Box has inbuilt method to do it. But suppose your application takes input from the user as the line number, and you are supposed to show that particular line in the Rich Text Box, then in that case even the inbuilt method doesn't come in a lot of use, since it is extremely slow at doing that. Whereas this method can be easily tweaked to perform the same. With this article you also learn a practical use of the InStrRev. Notice from miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Original article by the same author can be found at: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. Next time make sure you enclose the blocks of code between CODE or CODEBOX tags.

Mono shall catch up sooner or later. Its backed by Novell i guess.Anyway, I got Mono with my local programming magazine DVD and i could never figure out why it was not installing. I am not very good with Linux, and i am basically a windows developer. The notion of being able to write s/w on Linux in more or less the same way i do on windows (with .NET) made me hop on one leg and install Linux first and then try Mono. I installed Linux White Box distro (kernel-2.4.80) and tried installing the array of RPM's supplied. The place where i got screwed was, two RPMs were interdependant on each other, and both would ask for the other to be installed first.Now how to tackle that sort of problem? One friend told me that its due to the kernel version. I haven't tried it on a newer kernel (I have Mandrake 10.1, which has kernel 2.6) since i wud first like to be sure about the actual cause of the problem so that i dun end up wasting time.About my views on Mono, I would love to see free webhosting providers include ASP.NET as a server side scripting language in their arsenal as soon as possible. Maybe only Mono can make that dream come true... so waiting eagerly for its full fledged release.

As a matter of fact, gaming is easier once u develop on top of a gaming engine. I gave try to 3D State engine and it rocks!!! Its available for many prog langs like VB, VC++, C# and Delphi etc.I tried with VB. You have to accept that VB relieves lot of pressure from the programmer's head. Its case insensitive, has the world's most advanced IDE! what else needed?Since finally everything is handled by the gaming engine, all you need to do is call the functions and program the world behaviour. Lets you focus more on actual gaming rather than having u wonder "what the heck is the problem with retained mode?"

Performing DOS Operations from Visual Basic By: Abhishek Chatterjee Language: Visual Basic 6.0 and below Difficulty: Beginner Does your project need to perform some DOS based or Command line operations? Although there are many techniques to do the same, but performing tasks like calling the DIR DOS command to list the contents of the directory or calling the Move command to move a folder, and the like, can't be done as smoothly by the built in functions of VB or the Windows API. The technique that I introduce to you is extremely simple, doesn't require any high level programming knowledge of Windows API or anything else. All you need to know to be able to work smoothly is to know File handling using VB. Although I do introduce you to some basic File I/O concepts, its suggested that you read further about it. The Technique: Whenever you needed to do a DOS task repeatedly, what did you do? Create a shell program (Batch file) and run it. Well that is exactly what we are about to do here. All those of you who know File I/O well, are already on track of introducing DOS operations into their projects. Just follow these steps: * Start your project and create a new function/subroutine that will create a batch file and execute it. * Creating a batch file is simple. Create a variable called strFileText which will hold the contents of the batch file. * Suppose you want to use the move command to move a folder from a specified location to another. So the function declaration will look something like this: Public Function MoveFolder(strSource as String, strDestination as String) Now generate a DOS command from the parameters passed above and store in the buffer variable declared above called strFileText. strFileText = "move " & strSource & " " & strDestination Now write the file to disk by using File I/O as shown below. * fnum = FreeFile() 'Assign a free file no. to fnum * Open app.path & "\dos.bat" For Output As fnum 'Let the .bat file be in the same location as your .exe * Print #fnum, strFileText 'Write the contents of strFileText to the batch file. * Close #fnum Now when the Batch file is written to disk, all we need to do is call it. Shell( App.Path & "\dos.bat", vbHide) The batch file will execute without showing itself on the screen and exit after its done. Since this example was a very basic one, anyone who knows about Dos and Batch files, its no big deal. You can create a fully customized Batch file by controlling the contents of strFileText. Now, suppose you run a DOS program, and you want to see what was the output, or let your software know about the output, you must do the good old piping tactic. This command will store the output in a text file: C:\>DIR *.* > output.txt The complete C Drive directory listing is stored in a file called output.txt. All you need to do is open it using File I/O and read the contents. To give input to a program do the following: Store the sequential key inputs in a text file. Then issue the input pipe as follows: C:\>flames.exe < input.txt So by now many of you would have already made plans to make GUI interfaces to some XP console commands... eh? If someones tries things out, please make GUI's for CHKDSK and the NET commands. (I am too lazy to spend my weekends on these)

What i would like to suggest is, MASTER C/C++ and you can master any other language. Not only learn the C/C++ language but also learn various programming API's available for it. Go in for Windows programming with WinAPI and try out creating OpenGL/DirectX programs. You will then be able to rule almost any other language.As for Java or .NET, I suggest .NET must be gone in for. History has it, Microsoft has won every war it fought (mostly), and it is sure to do so with .NET too.Sorry MS haters... but lets accept the fact that 90% of computers are running MS Windows, 91% of browsers are IE. Hence when u develop a solution, its better to develop one which is tightly integrated with the platform. Java sucks at it. Swing doesnt utilise the underlying OS for its GUI looks, its slow and unresponsive... anyway... C# is a great language. With the power of C++ and ease of VB, it rules.

hi, see i too am new to AI, but what i have learnt from others is, DO NOT FOLLOW ANY RULE while writing AI Progs. What everything depends on is the type of AI program u are wrtiting. Even a smart adaptable Tic-Tac-Toe program can be AI. Games like Chess etc have always been fields of AI. Let me suggest u something. Get a good book (ebook or real book) and study it to get an overview of what exactly AI means and learn some classical problems of AI. Other wise you might end up re-inventing the wheel, which elsewise u wudda known in the second chapter of the book itself. Go to this site for finding more relevant information and people who can help u out. http://ai-depot.com/ I am making a smart language analyser based AI-Agent. Hopefully it will be really helpful to people.