vizskywalker

Having started my life programming by finding books and online tutorials, I have to say that tutorials are frequently better written, although less comprehensive. I think this is because books are frequently written because they need to be, but tutorials are written by enthusiasts who want to share their knowledge. And I can't stress enough how much experience is worth. Figuring out something for yourself ingrains it into your mind better than looking it up ever could. I have to admit that I do a lot less experimental programming now than I did when I first started, and it's definitely a bad thing.There is one resource that has been overlooked in this discussion though, which is finding a mentor to help you. Forums online are great because you can ask specific questions. However, I can now say from personal experience that taking classes with knowledgeable teachers can also be useful. For example, I just took a course on Data Structures which used C++, which I knew, but most of the class didn't. So a lot of the class was focused on the C++ language. Since the professor does a lot of work in C++, she has a lot of insights into the language that you won't get from a book. For example, she teaches the language according to the guiding philosophy of C++ and teaches confusing technicalities in a way such that we as a class discover the issues and usually, how to fix them. It is a highly effective method of learning the language itself, and the experience we get on the assignments is useful for learning the standard library, which is the primary library for the language. However, we all used the course texts and online resources as supplements.Basically, I feel that any method you can use to improve your understanding of a language is a good resource, but the first resources to tap are the free, easy to obtain resources, which in most cases is online tutorials.~Viz

It looks like the above method is the best bet. I'm very disappointed in the lack of full support of objects in browsers. For example, there are some tricks that use inline frames which should be able to use objects, but unfortunately, changing parameters via javascript doesn't cause the object to be reloaded, and I have yet to find a way to reload objects manually. But I think merging the above method with the Flash-Satay method should yield good results, especially since streaming Java applets is usually not possible anyway.~Viz

Well, a lot of how that is used depends on the software using it. For example, I frequently run my computer with both a wireless internet connection and a wired internet connection. When surfing the web, using Firefox, it picks one connection and sticks with it. If one of the connections dies, it switches to the other automatically, but then it will stick with the other even if the first reconnects. When using AIM however, if both connections are active when I open the messenger program, it picks one connection. If only one is open, and then I add the other, it logs me in from two separate IP addresses. So for some applications you may see a boost in speed, such as downloading two different large files, but liekly you'll only see a very slight increase int he stability of the fact that you are connected to the internet. Although, if you still go through the same kind of connection, such as two modems from the same provider, you likely won't even see an increase in connectivity. That's not entirely true. Yes the operating system can bridge two connections, but essentially what that does is create a virtual connection that shares both of the real connections and only allows software to see the virtual connection. If you don't bridge the connections, however, software can still take advantage of the two separate connections on its own. So both the OS and the applications share the responsibility. ~Viz

Personally, I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu, especially on Dell systems. I'm currently running the latest release of Ubuntu on an old PIII made by Dell and the default theme for the GUI has progress bar issues. Unfortunately, Windows does have better drivers for many pieces of hardware than Linux, and that includes Ubuntu. I have noticed, however, that some other releases of Linux (most notably Fedora) do not have as many issues with drivers. No idea why this is, but whatever. One of the main issues I see with Dell preinstalling Linux is that a majority of Dell customers are people with little to no technical experience. And maintaining any Linux OS, even with the Synaptic Package Manager is more difficult for generic updates than for a Windows system, not much more, but a little more. Also, the Synaptic Package Manager provides easy access to software that directly violates intellectual property rights. Granted, it must be selected, and isn't by default, but it's very easy to find. I have no problem with preinstalling Linux, but I do think care should be taken to make sure that drivers, at least for the specific hardware that comes with the OS preinstalled should be updated on a normal schedule. Which means Dell will need to force some hardware providers to do so. And intellectual property violations should not be made easily available. And I don't see why a great majority of people would want the Linux system, especially since Dell caters to people who want to use their machines for entertainment, and few large companies make games for Linux, and to my knowledge, there are no truly legal DVD players for Linux with proper codecs, but I could be wrong on that.~Viz

I like the script. It works rather quickly and effectively. (I also find it amusing that my site is one of the first listed, even though it's suspended.) The status indicating a valid site is interesting, but as far as I can tell, it makes no distinction between invalid url and suspended site. I think it might be better if it did. Shouldn't be too hard to do, just check the HTTP status, and if it isn't 400, see if the page is the Xisto suspended page. You may also want separate colors for forbidden vs not found.I can't help but wonder though, how many requests does this script make? Cause it seems like a lot of requests. I'm wondering if perhaps it would be possible to just take advantage of IPB to do a faster (and less HTTP intensive) database system. Especially as large number of requests can slow a server down. It shouldn't affect Xisto, we have powerful servers, but I'm wondering at taking the same methodology for different purposes to some smaller sites, and thus smaller servers.~Viz

They do have a toll free number, it's just difficult to find (I usually go through the small business page since I have a small business account). Here is their Customer Care number, along with what they state about it: I have a feeling that this is the right place to call, since Messenger is one of their services. But even if it isn't the right place, in my experience, they will connect you to the right place. Just don't assume that they are a stupid tech support person from the start. Treat them courteously, and they will return the favor. (Yay tech support in the US, instead of outsourced!) ~Viz

If you really want to get through, I would try calling them. I've had reason to call Yahoo! a couple times before, and they have the best phone tech support of anyone I've ever dealt with (Sony VAIO department is a close second, though). But they are very good at getting you connected to the right person and to listening to what you say.Also, all major chat protocols (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) store the friends list on their server. Otherwise, it would be impossible to practically notify you when your friends come online, or to let you use the messenger program on more than one computer.~Viz

This sounds like a driver or settings issue. Go into control panel and open up the sound and audio devices control. Go to audio and make sure that the proper sound card is selected for playback and recording. If you don't see your card listed in the drop down menu, try reinstalling drivers for your sound card.~Viz

Sounds like something done by a neural network. At least from overhearing all the people who were in the neural networks class at my college talk about their projects. It seems like it could be a good approach, but it will still likely have issues with words that can mean many things, and more importantly, slang and connotative only meanings. It could take a lot of data to get this up to a reasonably useful level. What I'm wondering is what if they try mixing the two styles. Using grammar rules and dictionaries on a first run through, use the statistical translation the second time, and then try and merge the two into one sensible document. The third part should be fairly easy relative to the second and first parts, especially when considering how well modern content management systems are at merging.Also, Google's approach sounds (from the name they give to it) similar to the cryptograph solution method of finding the most common letters in the coded message and assuming they are the most common letter in the alphabet, working until it is easily guessed or a contradiction or unlikely situation occurs.It will be interesting to see how this compares to grammar and dictionary based translations (good ones anyway) for grammatically precise well conjugated languages such as Hebrew and Latin. From languages like English to those languages it probably compares well, but I'm interested more in going from those languages to English.~Viz

Let's find out. I am making this post in IE7. And now I am misssspelling words. No red lines, so no it doesn't seem to by default. However, there are several addons for IE7 that add the functionality such as this one. ~Viz

If there are names you commonly type (or any other word that spellcheck complains about) you can simply right-click the underlined text and select add to dictionary. Then it won't bug you about them anymore. I don't, however, if later you can remove things from the dictionary.~Viz

I have a couple starts of ideas, but I want to look more into them first. But I'll tell you one of them. The first idea I have is to right a function that copies the contents of a file and mixes it with the main code into a temp file, and then call the temp file with an include statement, but I don't really know if that is feasible. But I'll look into this more for you and post back when I find something. (I'm pretty busy this week, so it may not be until the weekend).~Viz

Yay! More Firefox config settings. One day I'm going to just go through all of the different configuration options in Firefox and see what they do. In the meantime, thanks for this one Buffalo.~Viz

Sorry vujsa, I couldn't find any motherboards matching your specifications with an AGP slot. However, I found some with 4 PCI slots. Check out newegg.com, if you do an advanced search, you can specify all of your options. Here's the results page I got for your specs without AGP. ~Viz

Considering how few people know about, or use, DEP (I didn't until you posted this) I would not be surprised if Yahoo! is unaware of that issue. Did you notify Yahoo!? Or just disable DEP temporarily? Because I have a feeling most advanced users who use DEP just get annoyed and complain, but don't notify Yahoo!. Then I would not be surprised if even if they know about it, it is not worth their time to fix it right now, since they can fix it for the next release or so, and the people complaining will most likely be able to find a workaround.~Viz

The one thing that standpoints me about the spellcheck is that it only applies to text fields. There is no way to spell check a web page or to spellcheck a text box. I mean, I see (and have made) more typos in titles of threads that could easily be fixed with spellcheck. Granted you can right-click the text-box to enable spellcheck, but it's so much of a nuisance that I never do.~Viz

So, just wanted to let you guys know about a game design and development competition if you are interested in game programming. Dream, Build, Play is a contest by Microsoft to showcase XNA. The deadline is less than 3 months away though, but the prizes are very nice. If you plan to enter, you'll need XNA Game Studio Express which is available from Microsoft's website. You'll also need Visual C# 2005 Express. Sorry, but if you have Studio 2005, you'll still need C# Express for XNA. Also, I recommend TorqueX for the game engine, as does the contest, from Garage Games. Unfortunately however, it only has 2D support, so any 3D you want to do, you'll need to do engine components yourself. ~Viz

I really didn't begin to appreciate that feature until recently. My college has several e-mail lists, some of which are slightly formal and official. It's so much easier to have Firefox run spell check on my emails as I write them than to have to manually click a spell check button. And after getting chewed out a couple times for forgetting to spell check, those red lines are a friend of mine. It does annoy me how they hate my name, and anything relating directly to code though.~Viz

This does not surprise me. A couple (read less than a year, more than half) of months ago, PCWorld released an article with a comparison of bugs discovered/threats and viruses created and found/patches and fixes released int he past couple years and as yearly average for linux kernel, OSX and Windows XP. Although OSX had far fewer by far, Linux, especially recently, came off as slightly worse than Windows. Intrigued because of all the bad press Windows gets, I looked into it, and sure enough, Linux did have more problems. The reasons for the bad press seemed to be as follows:1) Every issue with windows effects as many people as maybe every 10-50 issues in linux.2) Microsoft makes a point of announcing to the whole world over various sources when issues are found and fixed, linux just posts them in places where it's assumed users know to look.3) More people who should not be touching computers use windows, so the issues with windows are compounded by stupidity.However, to combat that, think of the number of antivirus companies that write for windows, and mostly for windows. It's most of the top companies, such as Symantec and MacAfee. These companies know what they are doing, and are quick to find new viruses and ways to beat them. But with linux, because of its open source nature, all of the holes that are easy to find have been found, so the viruses are very complex and take advantage of wholes that whole communities have missed. This makes finding them, identifying them, fixing them, and predicting them much more difficult. Also, Windows and Linux do have the same permissions system, much as people like to feel that linux permissions make it safer. It's just that most people run XP in administrator mode.Vista changed a lot. Because it is a very new system for Windows, a lot of the old viruses don't work, and because it is a small population, it is not yet a large target for viruses. Also, Vista by default does not let the default user account be an admin account, so the permissions actually manage to protect the naive user, and the advanced user can change to a default admin account if they wish.~Viz

Whenever I go for a new machine (or upgrade) I do one of two things (well three things really).1) I manage to acquire lots of old computers (PIII) and lots of memory (mostly 32MB unfortunately) so I occasionally just take all my machines and put the best components together, leads to decent, but not good by any imagination, computers.2) Simply upgrade CPU and RAM (motherboard if required) and graphics card if the upgrade is for a game.3) Get an entirely new computer, but build it myself, or at least pick a highly customizeable (and upgradable) pre-built.So far, the most common thing I've done is #1, and I've done #3 for family computers and when getting my laptop for college. Never had a chance (or reason, or money) to do #2 yet, and probably won't for a long time because I'm saving up for my $15000 machine (no the three zeros is not a typo).In your case, I would probably just go with the better CPU and RAM, although you may want to look into a higher speed RAM if the motherboard can support it. Going up one level in speed (I'm not sure what the 200 level RAM speed is exactly, I think it's 267 or 266) will give you much less of a bottleneck for not much more cost.~Viz

I don't know much about Flex 2, but I know a little about the concepts behind Flash vs. Javascript. Although Flash and Javascript are both run client side, they were designed for, and should serve, different purposes. Flash was designed for animation on webpages, and javascript was designed primarily for data handling, and that is how it should remain. One of the issues I have with flash is how it breaks common functionality, such as the ability to travel back and forth with ease between things that seem to be separate pages, the ability to save images, etc. Javascript however, would require too much ugly code to do movie-style animations and games. AJAX was designed primarily to transfer data regarding changeable small content, such as most recent newsposts, and CSS style data. It was not designed to pass back and forth images and the like, although it can do that. As far as connecting to the remote server for data transfer, that depends almost as much on the server for passing data back through the respective applications (I use php scripts for AJAX) and the flash actionscript and javascript code themselves as it does on any difference between the two.~Viz

The desktop's purpose is to provide easy access to frequently used programs. Although it takes 500KB of ram at start up (which is not much) when full screen applications are started, or the desktop is hidden for a while, that memory is paged, which is why sometimes using Windows+D to show the Desktop takes a lot longer than other times.The idea of putting all the icons on the QuickLaunch to save memory is a bad idea, because QuickLaunch buttons load some of the essentials for the program into memory as well, so starting the program takes less time. For programs with no QuickLaunch functionalityt designed, this bit is tiny, but for programs (take iTunes for an example) which give you the option during install of placing a QuickLaunch icon, they have helper programs which take up lots more memory.If you hide your icons to see the wallpaper, then you can keep the functionality by printing out the wallpaper and placing somewhere where you can glance at it easily. This way, even when some program is blocking the Desktop, you can see your wallpaper.Think about it, if you aren't going to take advantage of the UI provided by the Desktop, you might as well just work in the command line. There's a reason that desktops have been incorporated into all modern operating systems. Not that it's wrong to hide your icons, or delete them, but, really, what's the point?~Viz

Also, C++ was designed to not be a thinking language. It was designed for powerful speedy code. The assumption is that if a programmer wants to do something, they can explicitly have the program do it, so there is no reason for the compiler to do it, but if the programmer doesn't want it done, it is wasteful to do it. So the compiler does not put it an empty catch block moreso because it doesn't assume anything than because there is no reason for it to assume an empty catch block.In regards to the empty catch block, however, it is bad practice to use one. The only time to use a try block is if the program is or could throw an exception. Since this exception will almost definitely impact later code's performance, it should be handled with at least a message to the user explaining the exception. Otherwise, the try block should be left out so the program will fail. Otherwise, unintended and possibly bad results may occur. For example, take a move file function. If it throws an exception when trying to create the new file because it fails, but handles it with a blank catch block, it may then delete the old file anyway. There goes some important data. So if you are using a try statement, always do something, at least output, in the catch.~Viz

Well, I got the external harddrive open (used a cafeteria metal knife to open slide the tabs) but I'm still having problems with the drive. When I plugged it into my windows machine, After a short while it got really hot, and when trying to open a file, there was an error writing $MFT to the drive. Now the windows install won't read the drive at all. Does anyone know why, or have any suggestions?~Viz

So, yeah, been trying to get the case open all afternoon (you're right about the bad sectors, it was getting worse). Anyone know any tricks for this type of external. Cause I really don't want to hit it with a hammer, but I'm having trouble finding any other release mechanism. I searched online, and someone indicated there were some metal tabs accessible through slits, and I think I see them, but am having trouble accessing them. The slits are maybe 1/16th of an inch thick. And the tabs are metal. Anyone know of anything that might be lying around that could possibly fit in that? Cause I'm out of ideas.~Viz