Vyoma

Actually SP, I did find out a few things about InvisionFree that should be noted. I know you do not know much of it, because you hardly were able to spend some time on the forums then.

InvisionFree has now changed its name to ZetaBoards. (Though, you can access their website using both domain names). They have been talking about upgrading to new software from IPB 1.3 but I do not see it happening. They have been saying it for almost more than an year now - and they refuse to answer the question of when the upgrade would happen. They are rather blunt about it, but you cannot blame them, because they have to tolerate a lot of immature members.

Another issue, that I have been reading around at their forums - but am not 100% sure about it is that they do not give a good service when you try to shift out of their servers. They charge you for it - which is ok, but it is said that their service in giving the database dump is not up to the mark. You should know that one day, your forum might be a hit (every forum has potential), and you may need to shift to dedicated servers. Think about it because being in a situation where you loose 1000s of posts and numerous members does not sound that good.

You can always get hosting here at Xisto (after earning the Hosting Credits, ofcourse) and then install phpBB or SMF. Later, when you shift to a paid server, you could probably affor the hefty licencing fee of vBulletin and not bother about loosing your posts/members, because there are converters for both of them in vBulletin.

I have been running a site for couple of months that is powered by Drupal. And I like the way Drupal handles everything. It is kind of lean and mean, when compared to the other CMS that I checked out at OpenSourceCMS.com. But it has one down side that I must accept.It does not have a decent forum. I am sure, if I say this over at Drupal.org, I would be staked and asked what feature does Drupal forum not have. If I give few of the features out of the whole list, I would be given a module each to substitute for each feature. And in a way, what they say is true. A feature must be available site wide, and true to their UNIX like principle of do one thing at a time and do it best - I have to say, they have pretty much achieved it.That still brings the issue of forums. Users have been using forums like vBulletin, SMF and phpBB and others, and they are used to all the juicy features provided by each of them. But as some said over at the Drupal.org 'forums', I have seen a lot many sites that use forums as many other things - directories, blogs, news websites and more. Forum software is attempted to be made like something else.But, that said, I am at the start of an endeavor where a forum in it’s almost tradition sense is a must. I may start an RPG forum that has the modus-operand as play-by-post, and I would need a forum, that looks like a forum. And no matter what the Drupal.org guys say, Drupal 'forum.module' does not conform to my requirements.I know there have been attempts to integrate other forums (phpBB and SMF), but a search through the Drupal.org forums, phpBB support forum, and SMF support forum, would show that it is a hard nut to crack due to the architectural differences. In case of SMF and Drupal, it results from the use of generic function names for database layers that go by the 'db_' prefixes. And with case of phpBB, its security systems seem to be lacking to go along for integration with Drupal.And that leaves the option for us Drupal-ers to use the forum.module we already have, or try and code a better forum that has the flat forum look. There has actually been a development in this area too - with a person developing what is called the UIEForums. It creates a different set of database tables to maintain its own content information.I find that undesirable, as the content is the basic element of any CMS and I would like the forum content to be used by the full website. Surprisingly, as I know, the present 'forum.module' of Drupal 4.7.2 stores only the first post - the start of the thread as node, and the rest of the replies are tucked under as 'comments'. I find this too as undesirable, as I think that all the replies to the thread starter should be categorized as node - it would be as any other content.I would like to know, your opinions on this, as I am sure, there are few Drupal-ers here at Xisto. I would attempt for such an endeavor though I definitely cannot give a deadline or schedule as all this is my hobby, and my day job lies in a bit different domain. But, if someone wants to have collaboration, I would love that too, and we could contribute to this pool of Open Source code.

I am not sure it is an ongoing problem. It came once for me, and it stayed for a day. But then it has resolved, and it has not cropped up again.

This is one of the elite or as they call the primier advertising network. They compromise of a handful of high quality websites - 'A List Apart', 'Coudal Partners', 'Design Observer', '37 Signals', 'Waxy.org', 'Daring Fireball', 'Kottke.org', and 'The Morning News'. I am a frequent visitor to few of these websites myself, and I am pretty impressed with their quality of content.But, here, I would like share with you what I learned about 'The Deck' and their business model. (It was no great work, as it was all in the Deck's homepage.The Deck offers advertisers to advertise on these 8 websites. They are selective in who they choose to advertise too - even their advertiser happen to fall under the group of quality-and-standards. And they take only ten advertisers every month. Hence, there is a 10% exposure in all the pages of the group of these elite, high traffic, websites. The ads are not diluted by placement of any other ads. And they charge a pretty hefty sum for that.I found it quite amazing, because for quite some time, I have been thinking. Presently I have just started a website, and I run Google Adsense ads on them. Now, I was hoping that once I get enough traffic and revenue and credibility on the web, I would stop using Adsense, and shift to taking Advertisers myself - direct deal without the middle man. And mulling over that, I knew that would be hard. Gainging traffic and revenue is difficult. And to do so with credibility is more difficult. (And I am hell bent to do it the straigh path and not take any crooked side path). And it would be quite some time before I can start receiving 'quality' advertisers.But this concept by Deck seems to be a good one. May be if I can find few other websites with standards at par with my website, a similar ad-network may be used instead of taking the market alone. Ofcourse, that would involve a lot of designing, as to how the revenue is tracked amoung the group and such things, but I think that would be easier than trying to attract advertisers alone. I mean, since a group as a whole would have higher traffic, as a package, we can get better deals. (Any AstaHoster thinking of working this out? )So, what is your opinion?

Make sure that the crons are set properly.. :-0

 

Edit:

That is odd! I checked it up just now, and it seems to be running fine. All the logs are squeaky clean as they should be. I check up my Drupal admin area and it shows:

Cron is running. The last cron job ran 33 min 36 sec ago.

Is anyone having problems with their cron jobs? I have Drupal installed, and it requires a script to be run every day, but it has been about 2 weeks since the cron job has run. It is required so that I can clean up old logs from by database. But instead, I have been just getting mails from the server that my cron jobs did not run.I have not made any changes, and it was running properly prior to that.Could someone please look into this? It is not a priority issue, but it would soon turn into one if my database starts to bloat with unwanted old logs of site statistics.

Yes SP. I think the problem is specifically related to IE. I talked it over at the Drupal.org support forums, and many were of the opinion that IE would create a quirk in its cookies system, and that would run havoc on the authentication systmem. But clearing the cookies, and trying again after opening a new IE window, should work.

BunnyTu2006, I think the question has been placed in the appropriate section. I do not see where else the question might have been asked. And moreover, I do not see the point of the information you have posted. I dont think that would be helpful to doudou at all.

Anyway, doudou, I too had this problem when I registered a domain name http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/.

It had something to do with the cache of the browser. I could login using the kmaheshbhat.astahost.com URL, but I could not log in when I tried http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. It was quite frustrating.

Then, I tried a couple more times by clearing the cookies stored by the browser, and starting everything afresh. I have not had problems after that. But yeah, I do remember having this problem.

Hmmm. The particular link you have given is a forum hosted at InvisionFree (that I believe is presently called ZetaBoards). Am I understanding right? Do you want to create a game where people post their action in a forum, and the game proceed? I am curious as to how, it could be viable to put an almost strategy based game in a forum. Because, I too have tired an endevour like this, but that was for an Roleplaying games. The forum/bulletin-board system is very suited for a RPG game.

Or did I get it all wrong? The forum is just for the discussions between the developers, and you would be creating the game from the scratch on another server using PHP?

In any case, I think you should give the following link a vist: Almost everything about making a game. I am sure you could contribute some more over there to the discussion and also learn.

There is some setup where you can run multiple sites using one Drupal installation itself. I have not tried it myself, so I cannot be sure how this is achieved. But I belive it involves setting up another set of database tables, with some specific prefix w.r.t all the other sister sites that you want to run.

Hmmm. I get your part about where you want to place the links. The source of the problem (or we may say it to be the limitation), is due to the theme and not Drupal itself. If placing of a particular group of icons is the problem, then I would suggest you take a look at the theme templates. It is pretty much in HTML with some php code in it. Locate the code that puts the groups of links under question in that theme code and then you should be able to place it anywhere you want. Now, to do that, there would be two possible soltuion depending on what way the theme is designed - table oriented or CSS layouting.With Drupal, there are two sets/groups of links - primary and secondary. Other than this, you would be able to create your own set of links. I would suggest, placing the Logout link in the primary and place it at the top right (or whereever you want), and for the rest of the navigation or other links (including home), place it in the secondary links; left align the secondary links.

Ok. I will try to answer some of the questions here (there are too many - if I miss one, do ask again. )

You want your different types of content to be shown as different pages? (Hope I am not mistaking it to be a requirement, where you want it to open in a new window).

Well, here is a fact - Drupal (or any other CMS) has only one page to display. There is only one index.php that fetches the requested data from the database dynamically, and generates the HTML on the fly and that is seen on the browser window.

Now, you can make it to look different for different types of content. How would you do that? Well, if you go to your administration links in the Navigation links section, you should notice something called blocks. Here try to define all the blocks (that would come on the left, or right or bottom or top), for all[/a] the types of content you want. Some things would remain common for all - for example the header and the primary links. Leave them alone. For the other blocks, you need to make them conditionally appear or dissapear depending on the type of content that is being shown. You get my point? See if you can do it, if you do not get it, do ask again on the specifics.

Now about the Blog posts coming in the front page - well, I think the solution is simple. When you create the blog posts, scroll down, and there will be something called the 'Publication options' if I remember right or something similar if I remember wrong. There, you have to uncheck the check-box against the 'Promote content to front page'. Hope that answers it.

Yes, I belive it can get a bit frustrating at using Drupal as opposed to other content manangement systems for one particular reason. The design philosophy is a bit different in Drupal.

In Drupal, a module does not necessarily mean having a complete setup plugged into your site. It just means that it would provide one feature - that is all. I have used the other CMS a bit, and I saw that they were really great at providing out of the box solutions. You need a shoutbox? Just enable, and it will appear somewhere on the page - some even let you control where you want it.

Drupal, on the other hand is more of a framework (now that I have started to understand it) than a out of the box solution. If one needs something specific out of it, it needs to be tailored and customized. Now, one may ask, why the hell would some one go for such a pain in the *** (pardon me there) setup just to get a website administration/content management setup. Well, such do-only-one-thing-but-do-it-best design philosophy would help in continued support to be provided for the code base.

Say, you have a feature X being used in feature Y and Z? If the feature X needs to be upgraded, then you just need to edit that module code. If this particular code happened to be coded into Y and Z itself, then for that upgrade of feature, one would need to edit the code of module Y and module Z. Viewing it in terms of just 3 modules might seem trivial, but a live CMS contains numerous features, that need to work in tandem.

The Drupal creators did not want to restrict any kind of customizations, and that I think is the reason for this hard to master code base. But I think, it is possible to do almost anything with Drupal, and customize it to your needs. And when the Drupal upgrades to a newer version, one need not worry much about porting it, because of the framework being designed the way it is.

Now, let us get to specific problems.

doudou, could you be a little specific as to exactly what you want to do with the template? (You want to display 'ABC' at 'DEF' block, or something like that?) And also, I did not get the your doubt on Taxonomy module. Here again, could you be a little more specific about your doubt? But as far as I understand, here is what I have to say: Do not worry much about Taxonomy module. Just let it be there and let the content get created or you put them (a handful of them). You can use the Taxonomy module to create any further Categories you want, and assign to the content. (Remember, all contents are induvidual nodes in Drupal). If I have not clarified your doubt, please ask again, with few more details.

Ah SP Rao, my friend. Which menu items are you talking about? The primary and secondary menu items (that comes on the top bar in the default theme) or the ones that appear along with the navigation links (left or right depending on the theme, again)?

Yes, 3D Studio Max is definetly more intutive and Blender is a bit less. And there are reasons for it. 3D Studio Max has its developers working solely on it, with research done on user friendliness and such stuff.

Blender on the other hand was a inhouse production tool that was made open source I belive after a fund raising campaign. And yes, you do need to read the tutorials of Blender if you used 3DSM or other 3D softwares before, and I think that would be the cost for having a software with so many features free of cost.

It is sort of like would you go for Linux or would you go for Windows as an Operating system. Windows costs money and is very easy to use. Linux on the other hand does not cost a dime, but is a hell of a work on your learning curve.

But I see promise in Blender. You should download the latest version of Blender - it is so much better in terms of usability than the prior versions - prior to the production of the OpenSource movie Elephant Dreams. Moreover, if Blender makes it fully to the mainstream of game development, we would have a quite unique market setup in the game industry.

The content creation (in terms of 3d model) and the game engine would be in the same pipeline. Now, what is happening is, one would use a third party tool like 3D Studio Max or Maya or LightWave to create models - which would need to be exported to a proprietry format that can be understood by the inhouse engine so that it propagates down the pipeline. At a later stage if there requires any changes, it has to be done again at the 3D tool, and needs to be passed through lot of filters and converters to put it back to the pipeline. Now, if Blender (is already having a crude gaming or physics engine) would have a full fledged physics engine built into it, all the gaming companies could concentrate their efforts on creating the game - the gameplay - the content. This case would be good for all, except for the gaming companies that rely on selling a gaming engine. Imagine what kind of cutting edge game/physics engine would be created when the developers work as one and focus on one standard engine.

And because of this, and some wishful thinking, that I like Blender, and would like it to take a path that would make it better.

Now, in terms of learning it using tutorials - I must confess that I have not found much out there, than the few Blender Magazines. If anybody want to collaborate here at Xisto and create a Blender Tutorials, I would love to contribute what I can.

I think it would be a great idea if enough willing volunteers contribute to the effort. I don't think new information necessarily needs to be created, but old information dispersed throughout this forum can be categorized in an easy-to-navigate format on a wiki. IMHO, the forums already include a wealth of information. If you need to know something related to hosting here, creating a website, etc., the technical details are listed _somewhere_. However, the problem is that sifting through the individual forum subtopics or doing searches can be quite cumbersome.

These Wikis that I am suggesting need not contain new information. We can first create the Wiki pages with the information that is already present in the forums. We need to add this information to the Wiki only if it is present in the forums. Then as we discuss more in the forums, we can keep periodically updating the pages for those respective sections.

Yes, for once, the editors/subeditors would have a truck load of work, going through all the threads in a particular section and assimilating it in an organized way. This work might go on for days, but once it is done, it would take relatively less of an effort to update the pages at regular intervals.

Oh sure. I would like to help. I would almost take any sections where I have been participating the design section though. Or may be we can assign a group of people for particular areas - heck - we have so many members. I am sure many would volunteer for organizing the information we have here.

I was just wondering if this was feasible after what Mark420 or someone mentioned in one of the threads around here. Each of the forum section would have a Wiki, which would have eventually contain a good summing up of all that happens in the forums.Once members participate in a thread, solve a problem, discuss, or come up with something, we could put that info in the Wiki of that section almost summing up and polishing all the information the thread had gained. That way, some one wanting to search the knowledge base would really find it easy to get what they need.What do you guys think?

I too do not find any other way of solving this other than the phased approach that evought has beautifully explained. I was pondering over how to do it, and came to a similar solution, and when I came to post it here, I saw that he had already done a better job.

Anyway, I am still not exactly sure at the design of how all the things are placed in your design architecture, but I would also suggest something in terms of the following lines:

As evought said, consider using a class to handle only exceptions. If you have different exception, either inherit them from the base class of exception or make if you are sure the types of exception are never going to grow, make them as one class - just an exception handling package.

Next, you make the three functions that you mentioned call the methods of these classes. I am still not sure if you would be allowed to do that, because then, you would need to call methods of a static instance of that class. (My memory on static/dynamic classes/methods/objects are a bit blurry - so you need to bear with me). Now, if you are able to do that, then, I do not see any other way of approaching with out any design change.

Edit: OK. About the rules on C++ static functions - I searched around and I got the following using Google search:

A static member function can access only static member data, static member functions and data and functions outside the class. A non-static member function can access all of the above including the static data member.

A static member function can be called, even when a class is not instantiated, a non-static member function can be called only after instantiating the class as an object.

A static member function cannot be declared virtual, whereas a non-static member functions can be declared as virtual

A static member function cannot have access to the 'this' pointer of the class.

Anyway, as it says above there, static functions can acess other functions outside the class. So, if I understand your problem correctly, you should be able to call some other exception handling function that you should not restrict by making them static. Those functions can play with the data anyway they want without anyway you want. That way you should be able to track which exception is raised, and depending on that you can perform a particular action.

PS: I may have got this totally wrong though - you will have to tell that. If that is the case, do explain the problem in more detail.

First, I have to apologize, because I now realize I skimmed over this part

When I said:

 

... I failed to mention that, even though we could - to a certain extent - stop worrying about seeking incoming links, we still have to work on publicizing our Websites. For example, I've always thought that listing my Websites in general directories (e.g. DMOZ) AND niche-specific directories is a MUST.

The point here is that we don't have to focus 85% of our time and effort on SEO, as we once did. But then again, SEO is not the only method of publicizing a Website, is it?

Cheers.

 

Yeah, I know what you mean. Here it is just a norm for consumers to get fleeced. Anyway, I have been trying to get a connection to my home. One of the ISP said he could provide a phone link Internet, but would contact me later if he could give me broadband or not because he had to talk with his manager. He said he would get back to me once he does that.Anyway, all I can say about that is that it is lying in one corner of the room collecting dust, and being the worthless piece it is. And I checked up the support ticket where I had asked a question again asking if I could ask for a refund. They have been silent. I just cannot imagine I would be talking like this about a company (Sierra/Valve) that created a great game like the Half Life series.

I think this is quite natural to happen. There are two approaches to it:

1) Get connected to your account using the FTP access and do the changes

2) Use the File Manager in the cPanel itself.

Here is what I suggest you do with the .htaccess:

Using any of the above two methods, change it to some backup file, say: Sep12.htaccess or Sep12bak.htaccess

It is advisable to do this because you never know when something gets messed up and you need to restore everything.

For the images on the other hand, it wont be much of a problem. If you do not have anything else installed, and do not have any other images with in this folder (I am assuming it is a folder) then you can rightaway delete it. Else rename the folder to something else (example Sep12images or something like that).

No go ahead to the Fantastico and do the Joomla installation.

After you are done with that, if you had taken backup of Images is the above step, move all the images from that back up folder to the new images folder that was created by Joomla installer. After that you can remove the old backup folder.

As for the backup .htaccess file, let is stay there for a while until you are sure everything works fine.

Edit: Oops. Pyost beat me to the post, but I see we almost came to a similar solution.

I do not think that would be necessary tamer3kz because I saw that it was not visible for some time after I read his first post here. Then, some moderator would have come along and approved the post, and that is why it got visible.

I am not sure if the processors - the architecture they are built would be suitable for giving an real time solution to the problem. (You did not say, it would be real time - but out of what I understood, that is what is required, I think). Anyway, let me see if I understood this correctly, because I am not familiar with the GP32 or GFX8 and such things.

You would use this setup to take input from a musical instrument (a guitar), and also from a 'foot switch-board', and these signals would be converted to digitals (because I belive, guitars by default, gives rich analog signal), and then it would go to the processer to do the number churning to get a digital sample of the effects applied sound or music and that would be played or recorder out. So a general, very minimalastic data flow architecture would be something like this:

Musical Instrument + Foot Pad -> ADC (Analog to Digital Circuit) -> Our DSP unit -> target

Correct me if I am wrong, because the rest of the things that I am going to say are based on this assumption I made above here.

Now if it is just the DSP unit you would want to work in real time, then I actually have my doubts. The reason is something as follows:

The CPU processors that we use for our systems, have adder units and multiplier units. (The old ones only had adder units). Now using these units, the CPU is able to perform one calculation (adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing) in one machine cycle (the actual time is the inverse of the speed given in terms of GHz). This is fine as far as normal computing goes.

But for a DSP there are a lot of Cosine Transforms, Z Transforms and similar time-to-frequency-curve-converter functions involved. These heavily depend on what is called multiply-and-add units. The DSP is able to do a multiplication and addition in one machine cycle. This calculation is built into the hardware itself. And usually in DSP, as far as I know there are multiple multiply and add units, because each of these transformation functions that I am talking about has numerous such operation. Now if we were to implement it in software, we would need to do a lot many things. We would need to - in terms of basic machine operations - one multiply, one move and one add operation. And that is just for one unit - it would be required to be done for several such units. That would mean 3 times number of such calculation required for a transformation.

And that is just for one transformation. All effects would require atleast two transformation - one to convert from time signal to frequency signal, and the other to convert it back (because only time signal can be played back).

I would like to repeat that I am assuming here that what you require is a real time solution, and over that I do not know the speed of operation of the DSP units in GPX8 and GP32. If they are very low when compared to CPU, the speed of CPU would compensate for the round about methods and we would be able to pull it off.

May be someone with more knowledge of these special effect units who also have the knowledge of DSPs would come along and clear this up.

Just now I posted a topic in the forum Websites and Web Designing entitled Website Maintenance Guide - Why And How , however, soon after my post I just can't open the page. The requested url returned the following error message:

 

I am confused.

sid.calcutta, I belive you posted a tutorial post, and that was posted with in the Tutorials -> Websites and Web Designing - am I right? If so, then it would take some time for it to be displayed. A moderator has to approve it and then that post would be displayed and you would get the credits for it.

Hope I have answered it correctly. Else some moderator would come along and correct me.

I think I have to put it down here that I agree with Pyost and add a few things.If ones bandwidth is getting used up pretty fast, it means two things. One is good and the other is bad.The bad thing would be that it gets used up serving requests for some unwanted graphics like it would have been for some graphically heavy designs that are based on tables for positioning and layout. In such a case, one should think of optimizing the visiual elements, shifting to GIF or PNG, reducing the image file size May be you should consider shifting the design from a table oriented old-timer appraoach to the CSS designed standard complaint present approach.Or the good thing could be that you are getting genuine visitors that take up the bandwidth requesting for the textual data itself. Which of the two you face? That could be answered by doing some simple analysis on the WebStat analyzer reports. If it is the genunie bandwidth usage, then as Pyost said, your site must be really good.Take time to nourish it by shifting it to a paid hosting provided (Xisto - Web Hosting for example) and then think about monetizing it to complement the costs using Adsense or similar Advertisement network.