rvalkass

I can help you install mods if you want. I have sent you a PM with my email address. It would be useful to know what time zone you are in so that we can work out a suitable time if we need to discuss things.

Sealand is a disused military gun tower in the North Sea, about 6 miles off the east coast of Suffolk. There aren't really any beaches near it and the only access is via small boat. Building a man made beach in the middle of the North Sea, a major shipping route, would be interesting to say the least Just an update on this story, it appears that the website The Pirate Bay intends to purchase the tenancy rights to Sealand if they can get enough money. Information is available here and here.

As far as I can remember, PC World charge a flat fee of ?30 for what they usefully call an "upgrade". I think it refers to a hardware upgrade or replacement, but they say you have to purchase the parts from PC World, and it is unlikely they will have the keyboard you need. Try calling the manufacturer and ordering a keyboard. They should have them in stock and even though you will have to pay, you are certain it will work with your laptop. You should also get some installation instructions with it.

Sealand is a great place, although the guy that originally lived there doesn't any more, I thik there is a data storage or hosting company there or something now. They have passports, currency, territorial waters etc, so why shouldn't they be a country? It's the same sort of arguement as to whether the Vatican counts as a country. Pity to see it get sold though.

I don't think it is right that companies should have access to your personal finances. I understand that they want to know if the person they are lending money to is trustworthy and reliable, but these reports are not accurate at all. Companies very frequently put inaccurate information on there, or information that is nothing to do with you whatsoever. I don't like credit cards anyway, and never intend to get one myself, as they just cause more trouble than the supposed extra convenience you have.

Sorry, but I think you are wrong The process is not 100% efficient, so the dynamo would never produce the same amount of energy as is being fed into the motor. The motor makes a small humming or buzzing noise while its running, and it also heats up. The energy for this is provided by the battery, and is being passed to the useful kinetic output of the motor.Connecting more dynamos would make it spin slower, as each one is creating friction, a resistance to the spin of the motor. The more you add, the more resistance you create, until eventually it would be unable to spin.

I have never seen a tutorial for comments or ratings becuase most CMSs and blogging solutions have things like that built in. The few tutorials out there don't go into a lot of detail and don't look too reliable. I am willing to help you to write your own, or can write one for you if you want. You can reach me on MSN, email or PM (details in my profile, or PM me), I've got quite a bit of free time this weekend. If you do decide to go it alone then the main things you will need to research will be the MySQL functions and the echo construct. For readability and security reasons, you should read up on nl2br and htmlspecialchars. Remember, if you need any help then contact me and I shall guide you through it.

Google has done well with their spam filter. I get very few messages ever reach me, and those that do are always correctly identified as spam. I have never had a single spam message in my inbox, and never a 'real' message go to spam. Real people are brilliant at determining what is spam and what isn't. Perhaps people have marked the GMail messages as spam because they don't know what they are, or Google may have a fault in their algorithm, but it seems unlikely.

I would use PHP and MySQL to store the information on ratings and comments. You would need two separate tables, one for ratings and one for comments. For the ratings you will need to store their user id, the post id and the rating. Comments is a similar thing: user id, post id, comment.Using the user information from your forums should not be that difficult. Without looking at the tables the user data is stored in I can't say exactly how it would work, but it shouldn't be too difficult.The rating system you have found for images would contain the same major code as a rating system for blog posts, you would just need to change a couple of things to adapt it to work for blog posts rather than images.

Congratulations to everyone who was nominated for an award and extra congratulations to those that won. It's good to see the devoted members here getting recognition. To those who lost out (including myself...) I wish you better luck next year.

If it only happens when you're wearing the headset then the problem is with either the headset or the headset connector on the phone. If you are hearing a constant, steady tone then it seems like a constant current is being provided to one of the connections, meaning you most likely have a short circuit or loose wire somewhere. If you have another headset, or a friend with one then try that and see if you still get the noise. If you do, its the phone. If not, then you need a new headset.

Happy new year and a healthy, prosperous 2007 to everyone!

RSS stands for really simple syndication and is used to take content from a website and display it in an application called an RSS reader. Most of the time the content is a short summary of an article or post, usually displaying the lastest ten. For example, the feed from my blog (here) displays the first few lines of the lastest 10 articles I have written. These are then picked up by my visitors so they can see if my site has been updated. Most of the time the scripts to create RSS feeds are written in PHP and are very similar to the code used to create a news page, except with a few XML tags thrown in. There are loads of PHP scripts available out there to create RSS feeds for you, so I suggest you look at a few of those to get the idea, most of them use a very similar concept and basic code. The actual XML generated by the PHP script that makes up the RSS feed and is read and interpreted by the feed reader may look something like this: <link>http linenums:0'><title>Rob's Blog</title> <link>http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; <description>My life, my universe, but not so much of the everything...</description> <pubDate>Sat, 23 Dec 2006 18:18:03 +0000</pubDate> <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.5</generator> <language>en</language> <item> <title>The BBC Is Wrong</title> <link>http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; <comments>http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; <pubDate>Sat, 23 Dec 2006 18:18:03 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>Rob</dc:creator> <category>Random</category> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; <description><![CDATA[I was shocked to hear, 32 minutes after I published my article, Stephen Fry claim that, each Christmas, we use enough wrapping paper to gift-wrap Guernsey! Well, the BBC has a requirement, as a public service broadcaster, to inform and educate us. No wonder people claim GCSE and A Level standards are dropping when we [...]]]></description> <wfw:commentRss>http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/; </item> The <item> section is repeated over and over for each item you want to appear on the feed, then you end the channel and rss tags and the file is complete.

I think the main way that the script creates security problems is if any user input is accepted as a string, which could run some malicious code via the shell. It would require that they knew how your script was working, but a CHMOD would have no effect. Then again, there is no harm in locking down your files as much as possible.

Hello, and welcome to the forums panicsafe! Unfortunately I think the TOS say all sites must be in English, but if you have the site in English and German then I would have thought that would be OK (best check with a moderator or admin first though).If you need any help with PHP then feel free to ask the various people on the forums, we have many skilled coders here in all sorts of languages.

MySQL is up and working fine, so the problem is therefore specific to your account. Try logging into cPanel and changing the password you use to connect to MySQL, even if you change it to what it already is (sorta resetting it) then try again. Also, do you have any other scripts on your site that access MySQL? If so, try those and see if they can connect.Finally, go into phpMyAdmin and backup the databases. Then try using the repair function and see if that helps. Sometimes the errors given out by these scripts are a little misleading and generic.

The two work slightly differently. Shell_exec, as the name suggests, executes a command on the shell and gives you the output. This is disabled by most free hosts as they run PHP in safe mode. Xisto is one of the very few that do not run in safe mode and give us access to the full power of PHP. The system function executes a program rather than a shell command and is therefore deemed safer. Really, you need not worry which you are using unless your script is taking user input, in which case you should use system for security.As to whether it is worth displaying the uptime, are your staff going to benefit from it? It is useful for us to know as webmasters so we can apologise to users for any downtime and to know how reliable the host is. It only takes a millisecond to appear and won't really impact loading times, so its up to you as to whether you think it is necessary or useful.

Is your browser caching one of the URLs, but not the other? Both of the addresses point to the same files and hosting, so they would update together. I have just visited both addresses and the sites appear identical to me.

Merry Christmas to everyone here at Xisto! I hope you all had a great day yesterday.

PHPBB does not, by default, have support for sub forums. To get sub forums working you have got to install a modification. I suggest you go to phpBB's website and search their modifications database. Bear in mind that the modifications are not officially supported, so you are relying on the community for support.

If you look in the cPanel for your hosting, the Fantasico section has IPB v1.2 (I think...) that you can install for free. IPB released version 1.3 after that and there seems to be a grey area as to whether IPB are happy with people using it. The website Invision Free provide free IPB boards, but they are ad supported and do not allow you to put on your own mods and themes.

With most forum software there is an option under Forum Controls or Board Setup or something like that that allows you to create the separate forums to post in. You normally have an option to set a parent forum, which determines if the new forum will be a sub forum.Some forum software will not allow you make sub forums as they do not have that functionality by default. However, the feature can usually be added with a modification to the code. I suggest searching through your admin panel, but as jlhaslip has said, we can't give specific instructions until we know what forum system you are using.

This tutorial will focus on how to create an image similar to the one seen on my blog. The basic technique relies on something called a displacement map. A displacement map makes other parts of an image appear to fit the contours and shading of another part. In my example here I have made the (rather uninventive) name of my site fit the cliff-face in the image. Start off with the base image you want to wrap the text on to. Ideally it should have some good contrast, yet the contrast should not change too suddenly, otherwise you get very jagged results. I spent quite a while selecting this image and tried a few before it, including a puddle, a hill, some clouds and a render I created. None worked that well, and it will take a few tries to find an image that works effectively. I finally plumped for this image from SXC. Open in up in Photoshop (this should work in other editors, but my instructions will refer to PS) and go to the Channels palette. Make sure you are editing in RGB mode (you should have 4 channels: RGB, Red, Green and Blue). Click each of the greyscale channels until you find the one with the most contrast in the area of the image you want to use. I often find this to be the Red channel, but maybe that's just me. Right click/Control Click on the channel you have selected and click on Duplicate Channel. Set the destination to a new document, and click OK. This will be the displacement map that we use later on. Depending on the dimensions, resolution, level of detail and quality of your image you might want to apply a gaussian blur, just to soften any sharp or detailed contrast areas. Save this new document. The file type is not really that important, but as it will never be viewed, a .PSD is probably a good idea. Name it something useful, such as dispmap.psd and remember where you put it. You can now close your displacement map. Enable all the channels of your original image by clicking the RGB channel. Flip back to the Layers palette and create a new blank layer. Put whatever it is you want to fit to the contours of the image on to this layer. I have added the text Rob's Blog. Make sure that if you do use text you rasterise it (right click/control click and select Rasterize Layer). Here comes the clever bit! With this layer still active, go to the Filter menu, pick Distort and then Displace... In the dialogue box, make sure the settings are the same as I have them here, then click OK: In the new dialogue box that now appears you are asked to choose your displacement map. Go to where you saved your displacement map and load it up. After a few seconds your layer should warp on to the contours of the displacement map. Now, to get the effect I have on the text, duplicate your displaced layer. On the bottom displaced layer set the opacity to 30% and the blend mode to Overlay. On the upper version, set the blend mode to Overlay but leave the opacity at 100%. Then open the oversized dialogue box that is Blending Options. Go to the Inner Shadow section and fill out the following settings: Viola! One displacement mapped image. This can be used to create all sorts of weird effects, and once you have grasped the basics it opens up a whole new world of more realistic-looking weird situations In my final image I have added a reflection for that added realism, but perhaps that is a tutorial for another day if you cannot figure it out. On my website, Rob's Blog, I have also sliced the image and added some links down the side to create a sort of navigation page.

Glad to hear that you like it! The other responses I've had have also (luckily) been positive :lol:Making the picture fill the whole screen is possible, the original dimensions of the whole image were 1600 x 1129 which should be OK for most people, although some may get sort of "letterbox bars" at the top and bottom.As for my blog, I may redesign the theme to fit in with that image, and add a horizontal navigation below the title block at the top, linking to the other sections of my site. Luckily I have the Christmas school holidays coming so I can work on it then. I may also use that time to get a tutorial up on how to make that effect.

At the moment I have just changed the style of the entrance page to my site, becuase it's going to take quite a while to do a Wordpress theme and I don't want to start that if this is not well received. At the moment my site is very simple and is done entirely with CSS colouring, apart from the image at the top of my blog. I basically want to unify all parts of my site with one style and tie the whole lot together. It will all be based off my main page here: Rob's Blog. What do you think of that design, and do you think it would be a good idea to try and base the rest of my site off of that image and style?