miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

True - the new cables rock !!! It's so easy to plug/unplug now. And so much more room inside the cabinet.. no ugly twists and turns of the ribbon cables - no fear of causing microtears in them rendering them useless.. The new SATA cables work real good. You're right that they should have upgraded to SATA type connectors far ealier. Now waiting up for SATA2 to hit the market. BTW, does anyone have/know of any comparision chart between SATA and SCSI ??? That'd be an interesting reading.

Dude I used to do a whole lot of mIRC Scripting - though I've long been out of irc. But Iguess I still have some of my old scripts with me. Will have to find them and post in here. Regards

Yup. I believe there are too many threads on the same topic. Followup on the old ones in the OS Section. Topic closed.

Great. Solved I guess ?? Topic closed.

Absolutely wonderful - that very fact that it can be done in such a way. Thanks for the great entertainment qwiji & looking fwd to more such links. This is one of a kind. I'd seen acsii art earlier and designed some myself - but this is unique.

Hey Xevian thatnks for that bit of info. Didn't know that bloggers have rights to protect their resources. cool

Hey I found two really good articles on how to do this hands on for Win2000 & XP. Find them at: http://www.littlewhitedog.com/content-9.html http://windowsitpro.com/systems-management/how-can-i-change-windows-xp-or-windows-2000-boot-screen This is applicable if you don't want to do it the StarDock way and like working your way into it the hard way

errr... I guess I will - but anyway there are so many sites sporting the FULL BOOK that as an "average joe" internet user - I don't think anyone's going to come and pursue me for illegitimate practises/copyright infringements.. the sites are bigger headaches... lol.. besides Douglas Adams passed away in 2001 - and I'm not sure about what happens to copyrights after you're gone, but as far as I know they lapse, unless someone in your family gets it done again... not sure. So .... Happy hitchhikin' szupie And don't forget to grab the other books of Doug Adams - the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series. I remember the name of one book: The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul... there are quite a few others

Here's what you need: Hardware 1. Two ethernet cards(aka NIC or Network Interface Card) on the two systems - from your post it seems you've already got them installed (Probably the one you are refering to as LAN Ports). 2. A small 8-port HUB (I don't know if you get cheaper ones with lesser ports. Maybe you do - infact you get USB based extremely cheap HUBs these days). A HUB is a must for connecting these two computers. 3. A pair of UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) cables (if possible CAT-5 or Category-5: that's the highest grade of cable you get in the market now). There was a method of connecting the two systems even without a hub through a special crossover-patched cable, but I forgot the wiring configuration - so can't help you there. HUB is a must. Software 1. Windows Whatever installed on both the systems. If you have both the network cards installed properly you should be able to see a connection named Local Area Connection in your StartMenu > Settings > Network & Dialup Connections. Also make sure that you have the following protocols installed and bound to your card. If you righ-click > Properties on the Local Area Connection you should get a panel with 3 protocols/devices installed: a. Client for Microsoft Network b. File & Printer Sharing Services c. Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) If these aren't installed then you have to install them using the Install button in the same panel. If you need to install these you'll find them under Client/Services/Protocols in the panel that pops up when you click Install. Also make sure that the checkbox titled Show icon in taskbar when connected checked. Once you've got all these set, you have to make sure both your computers have been assigned different names. You can find your computer name by right-clicking on My Computer on the desktop. Follow My Computer > right-click Properties > Network Identification. This panel will show something like Full computer name: <Somename>, where <somename> is the name of your system. These should be different on the two systems - or else they won't be able to connect due to naming conflict. If we were to use the NetBEUI Protocol and not TCP/IP you wouldn't normally require to assign any specific IP addresses to these systems, but NetBEUI is very limited in its networking capabilities and TCP/IP has many distinct advantages over it. So we're using TCP/IP here and it'd do good if you assign any two distinct IP addresses to these systems. You can assign IP addresses following this: Local Area Connection > right-click Properties > Select TCP/IP > Click Properties Button. That'll get you a panel where you can allot IP Addresses. Click on the radio button titled Use the following IP Address and in the IP Address field enter any IP in the series: 10.19.x.x or 192.168.x.x - these are the IP ranges reserved for Local Area Networks. Feel free to use any numbers - however they should ideally be in the same series. Remember you've to set this on both the systems. As for Subnet Mask, set it to: 255.255.255.0 You can leave the Default Gateway & DNS Servers as it is - no change needed. One more thing you need to ensure is that both the computers are in the same WorkGroup. You can find out the present workgroup by b]My Computer > right-click Properties > Network Identification[/b]. You'll find it right at the bottom of the panel. Set the SAME workgroup for both the systems and REBOOT both. Upon next boot - your systems should be visible to each other by their Computer Names when you click on the Network Neighborhood/My Network Places Icon depending on the version of your Windows. If they didn't show up yet try searching for all computers (*.*) in your network and they'd surely come up. Otherwise something has gone wrong and you should start right from the beginning. Now to share files/folders you need to select a drive or folder on each of these systems and right-clickon it and select Sharing. In the ensuing panel click on New Share and enter a name (any short name) as your Share Name. This is the name that the other computer will refer to your particular drive/folder as.. For sharing the Internet connection - you can do it with the Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing Services - but it's really bad and I find using a local caching proxy server much easier and better. You can get a good free proxy server called Proxy+ at: http://www.proxyplus.cz/ . The unpaid version limits the number of attached system to two - but that shouldn't cause you any hindrance right now. Install proxy+ on the computer that's dialling out to the internet and follow the setup instructions. It's quite easy and can be managed through your browser itself (the admin panel can be called up by doing a http request to the IP of the machine hosting the proxy server at a certain port) - you'll find all details in the Proxy+ manual. On the other system, in your browser and all other internet clients, you've to set the proxy address/port to whatever you configured. The proxy address should be the IP of the system hosting the proxy server and the port is whatever proxy port that you configured. This is from an example of what I did and it works perfectly for me... Give it a try and let me know if you're getting hiccups in any part.. Will try to help you out All the best and Happy Networking

This isn't anything real - it's entirely fictituous and quoted from Douglas Adams' trilogy Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe - the same place my signature comes from. The passage quoted is from the second book in the series named Retaurant at the end of the Universe. The idea of quoting it here in fact arose out of this particularly funny discussion about the "Xisto Executive Dining Room" lol... and it's restaurant (moonwitch: *points to a golden door, encrusted with diamonds and sapphires, the door knob is of the purest crystal* There is it Just order the food you like, our cook will prepare it and the butler will serve you on your whims ). The post can be found at one of the mods-only forums, so I'm making this post here so that all of you can read and have fun.. Hope it made a lively, fun-filled reading. If you're impressed, do get the trilogy, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for many more such mindnumbingly brainbogglingly stupid technological nonsense... BTW, I've got all the books in the series as eBooks (quite bulky) and exported to plain HTML as well. If anyone wants 'em for further reading, PM me with your mail address and I'll mail all of 'em to you

I've tried using all sorts of date formatting options - the problem is that even if you format the date otherwise, it is still not returned as a STRING type to VB. Instead VB still gets a pointer to that reformatted mysql date which is still in the native mysql DATETIME type and cannot be cast into a STRING directly or even with help of the mysql connector.net dll - I mean I'm sure it can be done using the connector.net - but I'm unable to and that why searching for the right syntax. If I can't perform this type conversion I'll have to resort to storing DATEs as CHAR/VARCHAR in MySQL - basically as STRINGS and not be able to use any of the great DATE/TIME calculation & handling features available in mysql....

Dude IRC is far worse if it is coursework that you're trying to get done.. I was dead addicted to it one point of time (irc.dal.net) and I used to eat, drink, sleep and do a lot more unmentionable stuff sitting right in front if this screen 24/7 and typing away to glory. At least with IM you are limited to chatting with a handful of contacts who are online. IRC breaks free of all the bounds and presents you with a truly global collection of chat-rooms. Besides you can create your own chat rooms (known as channels) on IRC and maintain a list of AOPS and SOPS (different levels of chatroom operators) and do loads such more fun stuff... And if you manage to make your channel a little popular - that's the end of YOU man We'll never see you again... lol If you want to know how the IRC Servers operate you can get some comprehensive info at: IRCHelp.Org All the irc servers in a particular network are actually mirror servers, i.e. there might be 50 different irc servers around the globe as a part of one irc network like DalNet, EfNet, UnderNet etc. - but all of them essentially reflect the same content. When you join one server and your friend joins another one - both of you are presented with a common list of channels to join and chat - you cannot really differentiate between these two servers, coz the whole content (including channels, aop & sop access rights etc.) are mirrored over all of them and presented to you. Sometimes though, the link between these mirrors go down and thus you are left chatting alone with a group of ppl on one server while your friend is separated out with another group on the other server. This state remains till the routers between these two servers manage to find an alternative route to link them back again. The best IRC chat clients are mIRC and Pirch - mIRC being my favourite. While the basic mIRC might look pretty plain & vanilla, it's got an extremely powerful scripting engine embedded in it that can completely revamp the client and include thousands of cool & handy channel management/chatting features into your client. Also the ability to link to functions in external dll's makes it even more flexible. I've had my lions share of delving into the irc world and all the scripts/clients/channels associated with it and managing them as well - as I got so drawn into it that I am not going back just bcoz of the fact that I've managed to get out of it. In case you want to give it a shot - one word of advice: FORGET COURSEWORK All the best... ---------------------------------------------- Sorry szupie - I think the original point of your topic got quite lost amid all these discussions.. maybe you got to start another thread all over again.. lol

Not really.. you can mess around with your ISP's SMTP server - it will work for sure if your ISP gives out SMTP access to all its users. In fact as long as you connect to the SMTP server through your ISP's connection - there's a major fun thing that you can do: Set your originating email address to WHATEVER YOU WANT. i.e., you can have a lot of fun sending an email to your friend from say: me@whitehouse.gov ... lol.. i mean ANY address you care to type in after that MAIL FROM: <address> part. When I'd learnt this trick I used to send mails to my friends stating their own address as the originating address. That way I convinced quite a few of them that I'd actually hacked into their mailbox and sent a mail to them from their own account. Lol.... :D It sounds real stupid now (this was almost 10 yrs back) - but it DID manage to fool quite an impressive bunch

Me me meeeee.. Count me in. I'm a die hard fan of sims. Have all of them in the series and just got myself Sim2 too.. What an immense improvement over the first one. And so much more to do/explore & achieve

Get Firefox. Get a Life lol.. I agree with the rest. Usually a uninstall/reinstall pair would solve your problem. But in such a case make sure you export your bookmarks. Even I've upgraded without a hitch and it imported my old bookmarks too.

I'm going to use the variables that you've used. Say your $word contains the very long word. Now: $short_w = substr ( $word, 0, 5 ); This should extract the first 5 characters from your $word and store it in $short_w. This is assuming you are using PHP with MySQL. If you want a little more explanatin - the substr function extracts a substring from your string based on the parameters provided to it. General form is: susbstr ( LargeString, StartPosition, LengthOfSubString ) - this extracts a string of length LengthOfSubString starting at position StartPosition from your original string LargeString. Hope this helps.

Xisto provides both MySQL and PostGRESQL servers - just take a look at your cPanel and you'll know.

Here goes .... Most new motherboards come with both SATA and IDE slots - SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) of course is the newer architecture. SATA2 - almost in production by now is even faster (300Mbps). The SATA drives don't use flat ribbon cables that were being used so far for CD-Drives and HDDs. Instead it uses a small 4 pin molex connector making it much easier to plug-in and remove. The narrow cables allows a lot more airflow inside the cabinet too. Besides as far as I know, SATA Drives are Hot Swappable too. The power cable is different too - so if you are going for SATA you've to upgrade your power supply (SMPS). Although you could use your normal SMPS with a addon power adapter that'd fit into the SATA power port. Speeds: SATA is 150Mbps while IDE (ATA133) is 133Mbps - but the IDE drives hardly ever reached that speed except for short sporadic bursts but the SATA drives consistently maintain that data flow rate. Even though you might not notice initially - if you compare their access speed parallely you'd surely see for yourself. I've been using SATA for a while now and I do feel the increase in speed and much smoother reads/writes, less heat inside the cabinet.... If you're going for a HDD upgrade, I'd say SATA is the way to go.....

Since we're talking about hacking in here - have any of you played the games, Uplink or Street Hacker ?? Both are real fun and simulate real world hacking upto a fair degree. Uplink is more of a MacOS based hacking game while Street Hacker's commandline and gives you a more authentic sense & feel ... But both are a must try.. Pit your skills and see how far you can go I've completed both without any kind of cheats. I've even got a saved game with full armoury of all the hi-tech gadgets - for Uplink. The game's saved right at the beginning. So any of you who want to start off with my character can pm me and I'll mail it to you... Uplink: http://www.introversion.co.uk/introversion/ Street Hacker: http://www.streethacker.com/

Hi, Can anyone provide me with a quick example of fetching a MySQL Datetime Field and converting it into native VB.NET DateTime format ?? Say for example my db contains a couple of fields: Field1, Field2, DateField... one of which is the default MySQL DateTime. Say I'm using the following code to connect... ConnectionString = "....."QueryString = "SELECT * FROM SomeTable"Dim myConnection As New MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlConnection(ConnectionString)Dim myCommand As New MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlCommand(QueryString, myConnection)Dim myReader As MySqlDataReaderTrymyConnection.Open()myReader = myCommand.ExecuteReaderWhile myReader.ReadField1 = myReader.Item ("Field1")Field2 = myReader.Item ("Field2")Field3 = myReader.Item ("DateField")End While'Close the connectionmyReader.Close()myConnection.Close()Catch exEvent As Exception'Do SomethingEnd Try As you can see the query result is being broken up and stored into three separate fields, Field1, Field2 & Field3... Now: 1. If all these variables are declared as String - what would be the exact syntax to convert that DATETIME field into a String on the fly 2. If the Field3 variable is declared as VS.NET DateTime then what would be the syntax to convert it .. I tried out a typecasting too: While myReader.ReadField3 = ctype(myReader.Item ("DateField"), string)End While In this case I receive an error message saying "Unable to convert mysql Date/Time value to System.DateTime"... BTW, am using the .NET Connector 1.0.4 and VS2003. Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks a million

First of all - you need at least 10 Good Posts to qualify for the starter free hosting package. As to what constitutes good posts - read the posting --> hosting rules at: http://forums.xisto.com/intro.php I don't know how your free domain name works - but to make it work with Xisto, you should be able to modify the nameservers for your domain and make them point to the Xisto nameservers (ns1.astahost.com & ns2.astahost.com) - mostly the free domain sites retain all rights over your domain and do not provide an option to reset your namesevers. If that is the case - then your free domain won't work with Xisto - you might be able to persuade the free domain registrar to do so for you though... Both of them provide similar services and are sister sites. You pay only a small price for the great free hosting service plus thousands of really cool tools that you get to use with your hosting - i.e. you have to be active on this forum and post regularly. It is your posts that earn you the free cash to keep your hosting account alive (this fictitious currency is known as HOSTING CREDITS. 1 Hosting Credit gets deducted from your account every real-life day. If you do not post for a while and your hosting credits dip below ZERO, your account is suspended till you come back and make some more good posts - to get enough hosting credits & unsuspend your account. Both Xisto and Xisto operate on the same principles, but posting rules are a bit different in both. Out of these two, Xisto is of a more serious nature and almost all posts deal with technical querries/help requests involving computer software & hardware. Xisto on the other hand handles posts on the lighter aspects of life and generally a fun place to hang out.. However, both sites prohibit posting of plagiarised news/articles/tutorials and you might loose your account if you are found doing so.... Hope this helps Welcome to Xisto and keep posting...

Okay here's a short explanation as to what might be happening. If you own your own domain and have setup mail/ftp/web services on your server (this is what I faced in linux) - each of those www, ftp, mail etc. actually refer to to individual computers. These names almost function like the netbios names on windows (or in some cases separate services running on the same machine... For example your extremely high load lan might have three different machines catering to mail, ftp and web.. In such a case a typical Domain Name Server configuration file will contain a section like: On the other hand, if only ONE machine handles all these functions then the config file might look like.. Notice that all the names point to the same IP in such a case. When the routers map an incoming pathway from a remote system to your server, control is handed over to it to redirect the line to an appropriate system on your network, which is able to handle the request. For this, it refers to the local DNS config file containing those records mentioned above to find the right system. When you type: http://www.mydomain.com/ ----> the server refers to dns config and immediately knows which IP to redirect to.. Similarly for ftp.mydomain.com or mail.mydomain.com ... When you fail to mention the www part in your URL, the server doesn't know where to send your connection at the first glance. On the second pass - it determines the right system from the protocol (http/ftp/mail) that you've used to fetch the url and only then it can refer to the right system. This process I think causes a slight lag - which you are facing while browsing your urls. Otherwise, whatever speed your connection might be - it should logically take the same amount of time to load the page in each case.... -------------------------------------------------------------- This isn't a Programming Question - moved to Internet Section. m^e

Hi all, Am quoting this mail about some shocking discoveries about the origin of the Taj Mahal (India) - also known as the Eighth Wonder of the World. While these claims may or may not be true this article makes a very interesting reading if you proceed with an open mind. The credit for this article goes to my friend Samik Roy Choudhury from India who works for a firm named: INTERNATIONAL TYPESETTING AND COMPOSITION . The discussion seemed so engaging and thought provoking that I'd to share it with you all.

Your objective isn't quite clear sarah. Could you be a little more elaborate about what you are trying to return, here ?? Whats the frontend you are using ? How do you intend to set it up, what development platform you are using other than the SQL backend ?? Don't think we can help you much unless you come up with a good brief about your project. Regards

I wrote to you at the address you provided here. It'd help though, if you posted a little more details here, rather than just php & mysql.