Mordent

Well, money does make the world go round. If nanobots ever do come to be, I'll be intrigued to see just how much of an economic effect it has. Nanobots that can fight off all viruses and bacteria? Say hello to overpopulation! Nanobots that turn waste in to something useful? There goes millions of jobs worldwide and in comes unemployment on a grand scale. While I've no doubt that if nanobots could do the things that have been put forward (or are even vaguely in the works as we speak) it'd be a leap forward for mankind, there would have to be some major control over them. They're the sort of invention that could well define a new age in human history, and once the first nanobot has been made I'd imagine the technology would be in place to create similar scale bots to fit a whole range of different functions. What about nanobots whose sole purpose is to create more nanobots to a more precise degree and potentially smaller than themselves? Naturally the atomic scale will have a say in the matter eventually, but I'd imagine you can get pretty damn small first. Basically, nanobots would be revolutionary, but could rapidly get out of control and cause some pretty severe problems if their use is not monitored.

Sorry, that just made me chuckle. On a more serious note, AVG updated to 8.0 recently, including the free anti-virus. I can't say I've personally noticed any changes, but I figure they updated it for a reason so woohoo! I do like how they keep hinting at you to go for their more expensive (i.e. not-free) version, though, cunningly hiding the free alternatives away in corners of the page out of people's way. Still, I guess they've got to make money some way so good for them.

Firefox is, if given the option, the browser I'd use all the time. In some cases (public or facility based computers, for example) this isn't possible, as they've only got Internet Explorer on them, so I tolerate it. I honestly can't see any real reason why someone would choose IE over FF, though, the latter having far more features and customisability than the former. Sure, it uses a little more memory and hogs a few more of the CPU's cycles, but when the machine I use for high-intensity gaming and so on is the same one I use for web browsing (and I don't tend to be doing both at once ) it handles fine. On slower systems I could understand the reasoning behind making that a fairly important negative factor in weighing up the two, but I can't really comment on that aspect. One comment I should add is that I've never actually used Opera or Netscape (or pretty much any other browser you care to mention), so I'm not even going to try to compare what I hear about them to my first-hand knowledge of FF and IE. Perhaps the most important aspect of FF to a web developer is the fact that it renders pages as the standards tell it to. While there'll always be a few minor discrepancies between the exact conversion of CSS to pretty pages, FF does have a damned good go at it, whereas IE says something along the lines of "web standards? They're the things all the other browsers stick to", promptly shreds all copies it has of them, ignores what every other browser is doing and then - and only then - decides to make its own mind up about how things should work and look. For some reason (perhaps the whole "it being distributed with every copy of Windows" thing ) it's commonly used, so developers have to deal with the mutations it can suddenly decide to make to the page you've designed that looks just perfect in FF, Opera and Safari. From that perspective, as all the pages I make are "personal" (i.e. designed for a select group of people that I at least vaguely know) I can choose to say "tested in Firefox, any freakouts IE has with it aren't my problem", which is a luxury a vast majority of developers lack. So anyway, overall I honestly can't see any reason why I would use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, although I understand the memory and CPU requirements argument that people take. Of course, saying that is perhaps similar to saying that you play a game that's not as good as another one, but requires less in the graphics department: your system can't handle it, so you can't upgrade.

Just a quick update for anyone who gets a similar problem: I'm assuming the fault was at the server's end, as after the support team looked at the problem they fixed it (after I provided them with the domains I had trouble with, the email accounts that weren't working, and the passwords so they could check they did work). Just to note, the department that the ticket got redirected to was "CH Support", so I guess using that one first would help get the issue solved quicker.Anyway, after the tech monkeys did their thing it all works absolutely fine now.

Anyway, after much tinkering I managed to solve my own problem. The answer was to use " instead of ". As the link was created dynamically, I did this using htmlspecialchars() (using PHP). It prints correctly, and the link points to the right place.

While my site's more PHP based than straight HTML, the problem I'm having is with trying to do the following: <a href="page.php?variable=foo "bar" foo">foo "bar" foo</a>Assuming I have a variable set to foo "bar" foo which I want as both the destination of the link to contain and the actual link itself to look like, how can I make it show as such? Currently, the first quote (just before the first bar) is closing the href element (I believe that's the right word, yes?), meaning the link instead points to 'page.php?variable=foo '. The link is displayed on screen correctly. I tried adding slashes to the variable (page.php?variable=foo \"bar\" foo), but that didn't work at all (it still closes before the bar and now I have slashes to look at in the link). Other than using single quotes instead of double ones, is there a way to escape the double quote character? This problem's most likely ridiculously trivial, I'm probably just having a mind blank (or brain fart, as some people I know call them ), so any help would be appreciated. - Mordent

Well, I raised my first support ticket a few days ago (concerning this problem) and have had no response yet. While I'm not saying I expected any within three days, I'd like to know roughly how "efficient" (I suppose that's the right word) the support staff are. What sort of response times have other people had from support tickets? Does it change depending on what "department" you submit the ticket to? Do the different priority levels actually mean much? Any feedback on this would be great, as it'll hopefully give me some hope that my email problem will be resolved soon. - Mordent

Seems not to be the case. Just to make a little more sense of that last sentence of yours, you're saying you switched email accounts to "bypass" the problem? Seems like a poor workaround, if that's the case. Still, I'm raising a support ticket so here's to hoping it gets resolved sometime soon. It's my primary secondary (as in, "first non-personal", if that makes sense ) email address, as well as a couple others that I use fairly regularly, so it's quite important it gets resolved. Any suggestions from anyone else while I wait for the support lot to get back to me are, naturally, welcome. Mordent

I haven't tried that bit of code out yet, but on first inspection I'm sure there are more "standard" ways of making things look 3D. For example, this page lists a whole stack of border styles (groove, ridge, inset and outset all containing "Defines a 3D <###> border" as the first part of their description). From past experience, the borders they give are often all you really need. Still, how that compares with your suggested style I'm unsure of. I might try it out tomorrow morning and give a little more feedback then.

I don't access my email from any other PC, so I couldn't say. I suppose I could try connecting up another computer to the internet to try that out, but is there an easier way or working out if it really is a DNS problem? Similarly, is there a way of fixing it if it is?

Ever since the server move (migration, relocation, whatever you want to call it) I've had a problem with both sending and receiving emails. I use Microsoft Outlook Express as my email application, and originally hadn't changed any of my email settings (figuring that there wouldn't be any difference between the two). I'm unsure of exactly when the problem started, as I get no errors or messages indicating that it was failing to receive messages (getting the normal "connecting, authorizing, checking mail" series of stages in the process). It was only when I first went to send a message that I noticed the issue, as I got an error that says: where all of the XXXs are the relevant pieces of information. Figuring it to be a "temporary local problem" I initially shrugged and left it for a little while. I tried again about 6 hours later, and again just now (around 24 hours later), so either it's less temporary than it says or something else is wrong. Wondering whether it was to do with the actual email address I sent it to, I sent an email to my hotmail account (which I know to be functioning fine) only to receive the same error. I then reversed the process, sending an email from my hotmail account to my one hosted at Xisto. During the "connecting, authorizing, checking mail" stages I received no indication that a mail had been sent. This leads me to believe that the problem is due to some option changing with the new server. Has anyone else had similar problems? If so, how did you get around it? If not, what could possibly be wrong my end and have you any suggestions as to how to fix it? Naturally I've tried using the automatic configuration given in cPanel to automatically change any settings that needed doing, but nothing different seems to happen. I should probably also point out that when directly accessing the webmail (via cPanel) there was also no indication of having received anything from my hotmail account. I'll see soon enough if the mail bounces, but as of the time of writing this it seems to have sent fine. It does make me wonder a little, as I never had any problems prior to the move... Thanks in advance, Mordent

Personally I find the idea of diving in to the big, wide world of freelance programming to be quite daunting. I'm not a half-bad programmer (or at least I like to think so), and the most I've ever made from it is £10 agreeing to spend a couple hours helping a friend with a few things on their site. That said, I've already taken the plunge and dabbled in freelance writing. The main problem is the relatively low rate of pay (most likely well below minimum wage) for a starting writer, and the work hardly frequent. Can the same be said for freelance programmers? I'd imagine that once you've made a bit of a name for yourself it shouldn't be too bad in either case, but getting a complete stranger to agree to hire you for a job with prices in the region of $XXX to $XXXX?Anyone had any real luck with it?

Heh, this takes me back a little. I remember spending an age on some of those levels, fantastic fun. I can honestly recommend it to anyone who finds things addictive, because this little gem will keep you entertained for hours. Very slick for something so small and simple.

The nameservers for Xisto hosting are ns.computinghost.com and ns2.computinghost.com. There are IP equivalents but I doubt it's worth the hassle of going to find them, as I've never had a problem with the two above. What you need to do next depends on if the domain name is for your main site (i.e. the one given in the cPanel) or as an addon. As you say you've got your account set up properly I would assume the latter, but the fact that you plan on hosting the site here without mention of any other sites you have it may also be the former.If it's your first domain (namely what you specified when you applied to the hosting) I honestly can't remember when you need to point your domain over. If an addon domain then there's a nice little option in the cPanel for adding it. Just fill in the information it asks for and it should be fine. One point to note is that it can take up to a few days for your domain name to point to the new place (i.e. Xisto), so if it didn't work the first time it may be worth trying again now.Just a few tips, how useful they are I can't say.

I think the sheer scale of your website needed to warrant getting your own web server is the limiting factor in most cases. Simply put, if a free host can do what you want then there's little reason to move: either to a paid host or your own server. Besides from the initial startup cost (i.e. the cost for the actual server itself), I gather that the majority of the expenses come from the maintenance. Most household ISPs don't allow you to run your own server, or they have fairly stringent policies on bandwidth and the like.Still, once the initial costs are covered you can run as many sites as you can manage with your server with relatively low monthly costs. Just in passing, domain names aren't at all that expensive, you can generally get one for a year for around $10. Compared to the price of the internet service it's a relatively minor expense. Naturally, if I could afford it I'd certainly be after my own server, but free hosting is all I currently need. Xisto is basically exactly what I need in terms of getting my site online, so I'm not looking for anything else.

Sadly I'm almost certain you can't. I've looked around a lot for a way to do so myself and haven't had any success. It's odd, really, how I use Firefox for all of my web browsing except for checking one of my email accounts. It's not as if you can't log in to Hotmail (or any of its other names) with Firefox, just it refuses to let you do so when clicking on that little link in MSN Messenger.Still, if anyone knows of a way then do share.

How would you rate it to other anti-spyware/adware? Currently I use a combination of Spybot, AdAware and SpywareBlaster, the first two of which pick up the odd bit now and then and I've never really had any trouble with them. Would you say that Spyware Doctor (the Lite version) is better than these, or other comparable products (none of which spring to mind at the moment)? How about the full product? In theory a piece of software which requires paying (in some form or another) should be better than its free counterparts, but sadly (or thankfully, depending on your perspective) this isn't always the case.The name "Doctor" implies that it can fix problems with spyware, rather than being a preventative, but does it do that as well?I just like to get a user's perspective on a piece of software before trying it out myself if possible.

I've a feeling you can use stripslashes() somehow, although how you make it act on the file is a little beyond me. I'll have to look in to it to see for myself, as I've never actually tried uploading anything with apostrophes in its name. If no one's looked at this by this evening I'll most likely have a tinker with PHP to see what I can come up with while patiently waiting for someone to look at my support ticket to get my hosting back up.

I'll fourth Notepad++ as the best option. Admittedly I haven't really "shopped around", but I don't see any need to as it does everything I want it to and more. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it also has a Linux distribution (although I wouldn't place any money on that fact)? If so, it's the perfect application. If not, then as a main Windows user I haven't looked for others and so can't be of much help. Either way, though, the built in text editor of Ubuntu (and any OS, in fact) does perfectly well, if a little blandly (regular Notepad is just a pain). EDIT: Just had a look at the Notepad++ site. Instructions on installing it on Ubuntu (although admittedly only two versions, from what I can tell) can be found here. As to how well that works in other distributions or versions, I haven't a clue. Hopefully you can have a tinker and come up with something, though. Notepad++ is certainly worth it.

...you can access your cPanel? Nice, I haven't had access to anything since the server "outage" (alright, I know it's not a real outage, but you know what I mean): sites; cPanel; email; anything. It's been a good few days now without access to my (now primary) email address, which is irritating me slightly, but I suppose it's worth it in the long run. Either way, I'm curious why you can see your cPanel and I can't see mine. *shrugs*

A fantastic piece of advice (in my opinion) for PHP coders - and coding in general - is the joy that is the indent. Tabbing is my generally preferred method, meaning instead of: if (foo != bar){while (foo < bar){foo++;}}else{if (foo == bar*2){foo = 0;}}Which just looks nasty, and is an absolute nightmare to debug, you get this: if (foo != bar){ while (foo < bar) { foo++; }}else{ if (foo == bar*2) { foo = 0; }}Which is far more readable. It's most likely been mentioned in a whole host of other topics, but never underestimate the advantages of good indentation. Some people use spaces instead of tabs, which works pretty well, but I find tabs just look neater (especially as I use Notepad++, which makes grouping this with curly braces a lot clearer). Getting your HTML code to look nice with the use of the echo function is generally a little trickier, although a little more irrelevant, as you'll find that the level of indentation your PHP code is at will most likely not be the same one for HTML code at that point. You can get around this by either ignoring it (as the browser does anyway) or by working out the level of indentation it should be at and tabbing the echo statements in as far as they need to be. This can get a little messy in the PHP itself (as you have two lots of indentation going on at once), but does make the HTML look decidedly more organised. Either way, the point I'm trying to get across is that 'indentation is generally a good idea'.

Personal preference would be for the second one's text (and font) without the big symbol between them. Just removing that and moving the lines closer together (more like the first one) would work for me, and I like the second one's background far more. The third one doesn't work for me at all, same with the fourth. They just don't have the "look" of the first two. As for the colour scheme, I still like green on red, provided the red is kept relatively dark and the green relatively bright and sharp.So overall, not too bad at all.

With current methods, most likely. We're refining the technology used to gather this "free" energy all the time, however, so given 10 or 20 years I can see it being far more economical to use solar panels and the like. Don't get me wrong, I'm almost certain that the Sun is a fantastic source of energy that we've barely started utilising, but right now we just haven't done the research and development necessary to make the lot worthwhile. While we've got some of our oh-so-clever scientists looking at harvesting the Sun's energy, we've got a lot more working on reducing the amount of energy we waste, with others coming up with ways of getting more energy in clever means (like the biofuel idea). Each method has its own merits, and if we really want to get "free" energy then the more ways of collecting it we have the better.

There's still the problem of not catching words that either start the string (and therefore don't have a space at the front) or end a sentence (and so have a "." instead of a space) or have some other piece of punctuation either before or after them. Given that we don't have any problems with capitalisation (I'll admit that I didn't notice you'd used str_ireplace() ), any thoughts on how to fix this other problem? I'm thinking using regular expressions to check for any punctuation or a space (both before and after), but I haven't used enough of them to know if this method would work. Thoughts?

I like sparkx's way of doing it, but one thing you might want to do is make $word " car " (with spaces around it). This stops words like "carousel" showing up as one of the words. Admittedly, you'd have to set $word_length to strlen($word)-2 to take the spaces in to account, but that shouldn't be too bad.One problem with this approach is that punctuation can ruin the count, as " car." wouldn't count, nor would "Car " (as in if it's at the beginning of the string). Capital letters need to be taken in to account as well. Anyone got any ideas on how to improve on this?