Mordent

Mine's pretty straightforward: I just like the sound of the word. The actual meaning is essentially a funny little trill sound in musical terminology, but so far I've had few problems with using it as a name. Aside from that, namely where someone's taken "Mordent" before me, I tend to use "Tidher" for no real reason other than it's - again - a word that I like. This one doesn't mean much, though.

Hey all! Another quick PHP question for you: Is there a function that can check whether a string you enter is a date in the format of a second string? For instance, if I typed: $validDate = isDate ( "2009-08-13", "YYYY-MM-DD" ); I would expect to have true stored in $validDate. I can't seem to find one in the PHP manual, nor has a google search presented one. The closest I've been able to find are here and, to some extent here. Both could be tweaked to my needs with relatively little difficulty, I was just curious if a more "built-in" functionality existed.

Interesting...this might be the case now, but back when I signed up to PayPal that wasn't the case at all. They had caps on the amount you could send per X days, as well as the total amounts you could send/receive before becoming verified, but there was no actual requirement for it. I remember using it as a means of both getting paid for various jobs online and paying for several game subscriptions, and only fairly recently did I get it verified so I can move funds around a bit more. If what you say is true, what's the point of having an unverified PayPal account? Surely you'd be unable to do anything at all meaningful with it?

As a bare minimum, you need some for of text editor to create your HTML pages. There's a large list of these available here, along with various recommendations and so on. Technically, this is the absolute minimum you need (and it's highly likely you have a basic one already, such as MS Notepad), though there's certainly a lot of other software you could make use of, depending on exactly what your site needs and how you wish to implement it. For instance, it's likely you'll want an FTP client (unless you want to upload each file individually) to make keeping your site updated with the latest version simpler. Similarly, you could use a whole range of software to create your own images - a list of which I won't bother with here, there are plenty all over and a quick Google search will yield more than you could ever need - or perhaps you're after a means of using some pregenerated scripts to help get your site started? If so, clearly you'll need that particular script (or scripts). To give a clear cut list of exactly what sort of software you need will require you letting us know what sorts of things you'd like to implement in your site. Hope my brief outline helps a little!

Nice idea. Though I should point out that it only caters for Americans (i.e. those with a US Zip Code). Still, it's not a bad concept and seems genuine enough. I can't see the site making a profit, due to the lack of cost on the user's part and I can't see any ads or the like. Seems someone's making such a facility available out of the kindness of their own heart, likely after losing someone without a goodbye. Good to see there are still some generous folk out there.

That depends on what you mean by "transfer". If you're trying to transfer funds from another account to this one then it should be fine. There are a few limits on the amounts you can send/receive from an unverified account, but as you say you're new to this then I doubt you've reached anywhere near them yet. If, on the other hand, you're trying to transfer funds from a bank account to your PayPal account then you have to wait for verification. Where the one cent came from I'm not entirely sure. Overall, I think it's a little odd that you can't transfer money, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to achieve.

The wording in Article 12 is "arbitrary interference", so provided it's not arbitrary (namely they have a reason for doing it), then that's probably how they're getting around the issue now. Either way, don't get me wrong, I'm by no means in support of the idea. I just reckon they'll find some way of getting around it.

To be honest, this sort of thing doesn't surprise me. The population of the UK is already one of the most monitored in the world, so it wouldn't be too long before this next step was taken. In all honesty, though, I don't really see it as a problem. Provided the monitoring stays with those families who are deemed to be "the worst" then it shouldn't affect the majority of us, and I doubt they'd be doing it if they hadn't seen positive results so far.This all said, though, if they can get away with this then it's only another step to monitoring private homes (as opposed to the "sin bins") - initially temporary installations of the equipment to act like portable sin bins, though there's little reason that this couldn't move on to a more permanent fixture given time by those in the government who view it as a useful tool - after all, what reason could we provide for not wanting it in our homes? There aren't any human rights that I'm aware of that stop mere surveillance, and why would honest, hard-working citizens mind having their lives watched?We'll see where this goes in a few years time, certainly something to watch out for.

So...it took me about two days to get rid of it, but finally my cold headache is gone! Was it paracetamol that did it? Some snazy new drug squashed, compressed, and concentrated in to tablet form? Something a bit more herbal, like lemsip, perhaps?The last option is by far the closest. A bowl of boiling water, a teatowel, and a generous sprinkle of dried rosemary did absolute wonders for my head (not to mention the fact that my girlfriend reckons the steam did my skin some good!), and I'm so damn pleased with the result that I figured I'd share it here with you folks. Sure, it might not work for everyone, but from now on in rather than popping out the paracetamol next time a cold headache comes along, I'm sticking to rosemary and water!

Ignoring the concept of pain for a moment, the question you have is essentially which of the two masses would impact harder, if you will. Given that the masses don't bounce, stop in the same time, and that all of their kinetic energy is transferred to the foot, a bit of basic physics (Force = Mass * Acceleration, and a couple others) can give you your answer on which one would physically cause the most damage.How this affects how much it hurts is an entirely different matter, but given a bit of common sense I'd say that the one that impacted hardest would hurt more. If you need a bit more detail on the calcuations, just ask. I'm sure there are more than enough mechanics/physics students on here (me included) to help answer.

Through a combination of having Firefox remember my most common passwords and being able to get my fingers to do the rest, I've got most of my passwords sorted. When it comes to a lot of things computer based I tend to find I don't really have to think about doing them, my hand just does what it needs to do. The wonders of the human brain, eh?

That's what BBC iPlayer's for. ;-)

The image creation will be a one-off event. The images will not be used on a website. GD library certainly rings a bell, and the link tells me that what I want to do can be achieved. Thanks! Two people for GD library, then. That list of other modules is certainly interesting, but it seems GD is the simplest of the options, so I'll likely use it. Cheers! Ignorance is bliss.

One issue I have with TV licensing is that some university halls of residence, despite being one building, require a separate TV license for every person (i.e. every room). As far as I know, no other type of building has this sort of problem. With around 20-30 people per building they could charge a couple of pounds from each and everyone gets a TV license (in the university's name). True, it makes it such that it's compulsory, but it's no real expense and I'd hazard a guess that the residents would certainly appreciate it!

Hey all! I'm looking for a way of creating images (preferably in PNG format, but it doesn't really matter) using PHP (and, I assume, some extension module). I'm certain that it can be done, and I even remember seeing a thread about it here before but I can't find the blasted thing now. Anyone care to point me towards such a module, and has anyone had any experience in generating images using PHP?In case you're wondering, I'm intending to use it to create a whole range of similar images, tokens if you will, that have some slight variation on them (i.e. worth, a different central image, different text) but essentially the same template, and rather than do a hundred of the things in Inkscape I figured I could find a way of automating the process based on, say, the contents of a MySQL database.Thanks in advance!

A fear of rational things, such as spiders (given that some are venemous), sharks (omnomnom) and anything else that can actually do you harm is fine with me. If someone's had some sort of run in with something that terrified them (particularly as a child) then I can see why a fear of such a thing can develop. These all make sense. Phobias, namely the irrational fear of something, I simply don't get. Arachnophobia and the like don't seem all that "irrational" to me, but given that even the tiniest of spiders can apparently set a panic attack off I can believe it's "real". The fear of a number, rational or not, is utterly bizarre in my mind. Such a fear isn't "natural" in that we can be born with it, so it's something that society must do to people. Another reason religion seems a little whacky to me, but there you go.

I learned the basics of HTML way back in junior school (so about age 8), but of course never really made a website. When I was 16 I decided to give it a go, and given a bit of patience I'd managed to get some half-decent stuff off of the ground not too long after with help from w3schools.com. The main problem I had for quite a while was finding a decent free hosting company, and only when a completely unrelated google search took me to Xisto one day that I realised I'd stumbled upon something brilliant. Back I went to w3schools to brush up on HTML, learn a bit of PHP, and I was off!

Essentially the functions simply save you typing out the same thing over and over. An example would be as below:function displayText ( textBlock ) { var ajaxRequest = ajaxConnect (); function getText () { if ( ajaxRequest.readyState == 4 ) { document.getElementById("textDiv").innerHTML = ajaxRequest.responseText; } } ajaxPost ( ajaxRequest, "updateText.php", ["textBlock"], [textBlock], getText ) }Which could, for instance, be used as a simplistic means of altering the text inside of a div element based on the variable "textBlock" passed to it. Note that the variable name and value need to within an array, which also allows for limitless variables to be passed by simply adding them to the end of the array.

Off the top of my head, I'd say the closest titles would be Morrowind/Oblivion (though options for being evil are a bit limited, they are there, particularly if you take in to account the whole vampirism/lycanthropy thing) and, though I've never played it, Fable (anyone here care to comment?). If you're not so fussed about the era/setting, you could try Fallout 3, though I'd hazard a guess that you're after a more fantasy-based game.

While I've only really recently started dabbling in AJAX as a way of generally making my site more "friendly", I was originally put off of it quite a bit by having to go through the tedious process of using the same pieces of code again and again to perform the same tasks (namely creating an XMLHttpRequest/ActiveXObject object and going through the request code), so I sat down and made myself a pair of functions that have proved pretty useful in my first few attempts at getting AJAX used in a meaningful way. As I'm currently undertaking a new project I dug up the functions again and wondered if anyone else would be able to make use of them. Feel free to use them as you see fit, none of this copyright malarky is necessary. function ajaxConnect () { var ajaxRequest; try { /* Opera 8.0+, Firefox, Safari */ ajaxRequest = new XMLHttpRequest (); } catch ( e ) { /* IE */ try { ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject ( "Msxml2.XMLHTTP" ); } catch ( e ) { try { ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject ( "Microsoft.XMLHTTP" ); } catch ( e ) { /* AJAX not supported */ ajaxRequest = false; } } } return ajaxRequest; } function ajaxPost ( ajaxRequest, url, varName, varVal, stateChangeFunc ) { var postSuccess = false; /* check varName and varVal are arrays */ if ( isArray ( varName ) == true && isArray ( varVal ) == true ) { /* check length of varName and varVal are the same */ if ( varName.length == varVal.length ) { /* check stateChangeFunc is a function */ if ( typeof stateChangeFunc == "function" ) { /* build varString from arrays varName and varVal */ var varString = ""; var varLength = varName.length; var i = 0; for ( i = 0; i < varLength; i++ ) { if ( i > 0 ) { varString += "&" } varString += varName[i] + "=" + varVal[i]; } ajaxRequest.open ( "POST", url, true ); ajaxRequest.setRequestHeader ( "content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" ); ajaxRequest.setRequestHeader ( "content-length", varString.length ); ajaxRequest.onreadystatechange = stateChangeFunc; ajaxRequest.send ( varString ); postSuccess = true; } } } return postSuccess; }I'll confess that they lack the initial comment to explain what they do, particularly ajaxPost, but I'll leave going through them as an exercise for anyone caring to learn a bit about AJAX. Any comments/questions on the code are welcome, particularly if you've any suggestions as to how to improve it.

Your last statement there is certainly true, as by using the progressive enhancement method it would be complicated to ensure that you could fully exploit the latest techniques available to you due to having to cater for the simplest of machines first and foremost. In the worst case, this would mean that as time goes on you have even more work to do as new technology comes out to add on top of your current list of techniques. I agree with your views on JavaScript/AJAX pretty much completely, though I have to say that I tend to ignore IE6 as well simply because I've no real way of testing with it excluding some websites that offer such a service. Interesting viewpoint there, and I have to admit it's also the one that I'm currently following. In my case, though, it's more because I haven't really considered the other options available to me, or learned the techniques required to execute them. From what I can gather, the only real times that JavaScript is going to be disabled by the user is if they have no choice (for instance, if a company's policy is to have JavaScript disabled on its computers and the user is browsing from work) or if the device they're using is something like a mobile phone (which may not support JavaScript). While I expect the actual number of users who this affects would be pretty minimal, it still does cut down on the number of people who can access your site if you exclude them completely.

Depending on what OS you're using, I'd personally recommend Notepad++ for Windows, or either gedit (which comes as standard in a fair number of Linux distros) or Geany for Unix systems. I'll confess to gedit being my favourite for its simplicity, but if you're after a bit more functionality than either of the other two will do you well. Naturally there are a heap more out there, but soon you start getting in to relatively heavy applications. I'm not saying any of the other suggestions on here aren't valid, mind, as I haven't tried all that many of them myself, but of the few I've had experience with my views are as above.

Hi all! I've stumbled across two little issues while attempting to design my website which I thought I'd get some opinions on. Firstly, the main discussion of this thread, the idea of progressive enhancement compared to graceful degradation (in the context of web design). In short, the former relies on building a website for the most basic system/browser/etc., with additional features added for those with more advanced versions, and the latter train of thought is that a website should be designed for the most advanced user first and foremost, with older versions having more limited functionality and the like. Essentially, both ideas achieve the same thing, but what line of thought do you follow (if any) when designing a website? Have you always designed sites that way because you weren't aware of the other options, or was it a conscious choice? My second issue is closely tied with the above notions, namely that of unobtrusive JavaScript. I'm curious as to how to implement this ideal when attempting to use JavaScript as the main means of navigation for my site (combined with AJAX) - i.e. the links clicked on on the navigation bar at the top of the pages use JavaScript as standard to load the pages. Is it worth coding a site that works out whether you've got a JavaScript and AJAX compatible (and enabled) browser and produces the pages differently, or would it make more sense to essentially create two seperate sites, one for older browsers (or those with JavaScript disabled) and one for newer ones? Any comments, thoughts and suggestions are more than welcome, cheers!

Hey all! It's been a while since I've shown my face around here, but I figured you folks would be just the sort to give me a pointer towards what I'm looking for. So, I'm in the process of creating a website (pretty much from scratch), and it's come to the stage where I've got to spruce up the navigation bar a little. I'm not all that confident in CSS to take too big a stab at what I want to do myself, and any examples I can find either don't fit the HTML structure I'm looking for, seem overly messy (have 101 variations depending on browser - although that's mainly IE's fault), have some funky CSS syntax or have a thousand lines of code. In essence, what I'm after is a menu system that is: Customisable - i.e. I can change background colours, images, and the contents of the menu without having to worry too much about changing the CSS to keep up Either entirely CSS-based, or a combination of CSS and JavaScript (I'm a complete newbie to JS, so would rather not include it if possible) Either dropdown or dropline (I'm not overly fussed which) Lightweight - i.e. don't require a massive chunk of CSS to implement Simple - no fancy rounded corners and so on, please I gather that a Google search of any combination of the words "menu" "css" "dropdown" "dropline" and so on will turn up more results than you can shake a stick at, but 90% of them either don't fit my criteria or wouldn't fit my site, plus I have a lot of difficulty picking them apart to work out how they do what they do. In an ideal world I'd like to have it built from scratch so I don't have copyright issues to worry about and get a decent understanding of how to make them in the process, but this is by no means necessary. Suggestions are welcome! For those wondering, the HTML for my menu has a structure similar to the following: <div id="nav"> <ul> <li><a href="">Item 1</a></li> <li><a href="">List 1</a> <ul> <li><a href="">List 1.1</a></li> <li><a href="">List 1.2</a></li> <li><a href="">List 1.3</a></li> </ul> </li> <li><a href="">List 2</a> <ul> <li><a href="">List 2.1</a></li> <li><a href="">List 2.2</a></li> <li><a href="">List 2.3</a></li> </ul> </li> <li><a href="">Item 2</a></li> </ul></div>

Yup. As I said, the rest of the website's working absolutely fine. It prints HTML, parses PHP, accesses the MySQL database etc. with no problems, I just can't seem to get .htaccess to work. Odd, huh? EDIT: So, after trawling cyberspace for the answer, I found it (or at least the start to it). Seems the default installation for Apache doesn't allow overrides. One tweak of that later and .htaccess works like a charm...that is when SELinux is disabled. Damn, I hate that thing...I don't suppose anyone knows a way to stop SELinux from blocking Apache from using the .htaccess files, or perhaps some other workaround? EDIT: After some more rummaging around, I've drawn a blank. I'm tempted just to disable SELinux, as it's being more of a pain than anything, but as a last attempt to get something working I figure I might as well show you the errors I'm getting: EDIT: And, as per usual, I've been a complete dunce. I did what it told me to do, and it now works like a charm!