k_nitin_r

@inverseOne of the benefits of having training in both accountancy and I.T. is the ability to specialize in E.R.P. technologies. SAP and Oracle Financials consultants are well-paid compared to ASP.NET, Java and PHP developers.

When dealing with international issues, the nations can't do anything on their own - they have to go through the United Nations... if they didn't they'd be waging war on Somalia!Just when everyone thought piracy was abolished a long time ago and they released a film about Captain Jack Sparrow, somebody decides it's a good idea to go swash-buckling and piracy is up on the rise again.I wonder if it is illegal for merchant ships to have cannons like they did back in the day.

Yes, you are right - Flex is not a server-side language. It is a framework based on ActionScript that you can use to create Adobe Flash based front-ends. It provides a level of abstraction over Flash, thus enabling you to develop web-based software faster. I would say comparing PHP with Flex is like comparing PHP with client-side Javascript... it's like comparing apples and oranges. One is a server-side scripting technology while the other is a client-side scripting technology. Both technologies address different problems.

Hi! I think I need to step back and correct myself - when I said "jQuery language", I meant "jQuery library". jQuery provides you with common functions that you would normally write yourself in Javascript. The benefit that jQuery gives you is that you get to work with tested code that is optimized by the jQuery developers with every release. Depending on what you want to do, jQuery offers a different set of functions so you can pick up a specific tutorial here: http://learn.jquery.com/ Since you've mentioned about AJAX in your original post, I'd like to mention that you have to combine Javascript with a server-side technology such as PHP, server-side Javascript, Java Server Pages/Servlets, ASP.NET, ColdFusion etc. If you scroll down on the jQuery tutorial page with the "Using jQuery with", you'll find tutorials specific to a server-side technology. Don't get me wrong here - each server-side language does not implement it's own formats, but how the requests and responses are encoded in the format does vary (Eg. array instead of multiple parameters). If you want to do something that the tutorials do not address, you can look up the API in the documentation or you can search their plugin repository from here: http://api.jquery.com/ Regards, Nitin

The Quad Core (4 cores) is actually better than the Core 2 Duo E8400 (2 cores), so you ought to feel good about your purchase. BTW, how much are you getting it for and what are the specs? The Core i7 is for high-end servers so Intel gets to charge a premium on those processors since most customers would be larger firms with a lot of cash at their disposal. You can, however, go with dual-CPU quad-core servers if you want to find a cheaper solution.

Hi! You can also use the WAMP server. It's a webserver suite consisting of Apache, MySQL, and PHP that runs locally on your computer. I haven't tried ThemeDreamer yet so I can't tell if it's the same (although it hints at being different with the statement "Setting up a local server for WordPress can be complex and bulky"). The screenshots also illustrate the auto-complete for WordPress function calls and arguments, which seems like a pretty neat feature. -Nitin

Hi! I so envy you right now because you get to work with animals all day. Every year I go on holiday and visit a couple of places where I see lots of animals that I don't usually see - elephants, horses, flying-fish (not the real flying-fish, but so-named for lack of a better term), sea snakes (they were swimming about in a river), chameleons and toads. Anyway, if you need some help with setting up your website, give me a buzz. I've been doing quite a bit of work with WordPress (the software, not the website) lately, so I might even be able to create a couple of plugins for you. Hope to see more of you in the forums. Regards, Nitin

I've seen a couple of forum posters with over 700 posts to their credit, and I see the "Privileged Member" title. Perhaps we ought to create a web page with an updated list of ranks? Maintaining everything on the forums makes it a little difficult to find, especially as a new member to the forum (although I admit that on posting an introduction, we do see a reply with links to the FAQs).

I like the way you describe the birth of the spiders. For me, insects, arthropods and other creatures with more than 4 pairs of limbs are just plain frightening. Two feet to stand on, and two hands to hold a sword and a shield with, I can handle. A 4-armed cyclops with 4 sword-weilding hands, I can't handle. No offence against any cyclops out there, I don't want to start a war of the worlds or anything. You seriously ought to consider writing a book, or at least blogging.

Hi!I've been on Xisto for a little over a week but I haven't posted an official introduction yet so here it is...I'm a software development consultant with two degrees and a couple of certifications in I.T. I took up a course on 3D development with OpenGL, but haven't done any 3D for quite a while. While in university, I also took up a course in accountancy and another in business law.I recently took to PHP (I had a quick preview a couple of times before) and am developing stuff for WordPress, though I've been an ASP.NET/C# developer for a couple of years. I hope to contribute more to the technology and programming categories, though I'd occasionally pop into some other categories too.Lately, I've been playing MafiaWars and Scramble on the iPhone - I literally spend hours with it. I also play CounterStrike, Unreal Tournament, and occasionally Age of Empires or Need For Speed on the PC. On Facebook, I sometimes play Scrabble.Hope to catch more of you guys in the forums.Signing out,Nitin

If you want to have a fun, engaging pet, get a dog. If you want to just have something to look at, get a goldfish, canary, cat, turtle, stuffed toy, screensaver, whatever. My point is, if all you are going to do is just look at your pet, you probably have the wrong idea of having a pet anyway.

Hi! You ought to use the IE Tab Add-on for Firefox. You can use IE rendering from right within your Firefox window! -Nitin

I think you ought to consider more than just speed when you evaluate browsers. Supporting additional standards (Eg. CSS3) requires more processing. This makes it un-fair to pit an old browser against a newer one for a mere speed comparison. Would a difference of half a second make much of a difference to you if the browser couldn't display the content in the way it was intended? If, however, I did support speed comparisons... Although I really love Opera, which is great for older PCs, I would say Lynx is the fastest browser I know of You would say, "But it is a text browser!". Yes, that it is, but it is a web browser and it is faster than any of the browsers mentioned in the report. Lynx doesn't have to bother about CSS support, image rendering or anything of the sort.

Why? I love Opera too, but I find Firefox better supported by websites that have browser-detection scripts. Opera has an identify-as setting which is set to Internet Explorer, by default, to send the IE User Agent string.

I find Firefox so much of a convenience when browsing with multiple tabs. Internet Explorer gets unresponsive with multiple tabs loading pages. When Chrome was initially released, I gave it a shot but it's got a problem with the way the TextArea (multi-line textbox) elements are handled and since most of my online experience involves typing text into a TextArea element, I just had to give it a thumbs down. I had the same experience with the second release of Chrome, but I guess it will take them a while since most users are just casual surfers. Among other browsers, I would recommend Safari and Opera. Safari lacks a bit in keyboard shortcuts and so isn't as good for data entry. Opera is great for older computers - it even runs on my old P-II on Windows 98 with 64MB RAM.

Internet Explorer 7 has a couple of issues - the startup time is longer than for Internet Explorer 6, the browser security model is flawed (tabs and browser windows are handled differently), rendering of HTML/CSS is quite different from other browsers. AFAIK, the upgrade is one-way i.e. you can't go back to a previous version.Internet Explorer 8 solves some of the problems that Internet Explorer 7 had, but the startup time appears to be slightly more.

You can learn PHP in under an hour if you have done web development before with a similar language. Look up the lecture notes here: http://college.yukondude.com/2003_01_comp220/html/notes.php Install the WAMP (Apache-MySQL-PHP for Windows) server to get your server environment setup in a hurry and install EclipsePHP for an IDE.

I use Notepad++ for simple editing. It's open-source and there are frequent updates to it. When I have to work on a server with no software installed, I use WordPad instead of NotePad. I also like EclipsePHP, which is a complete PHP IDE though I occasionally use NuSphere PhpEd.

I would advise against moving away from the "config" in the name because it's convention. If another developer/administrator were to take over your code, it would be harder for them to locate the configuration settings. What I mean is, you could use "config.inc.php" instead of "db.inc.php". I believe MantisBT uses the "config.inc.php" as the filename for the configuration settings. -Nitin

What server-side language are you using currently? You might want to just go with what you have instead of porting it to PHP, unless you have a specific reason to switch over. If your code doesn't compile, it's pretty much useless so you might as well just go with the barebones and build up from there. The teacher teaches you to change variable names?!?! I'd seriously consider moving to a different institution if that were the case. It depends. If you have a client who knows nothing about computers and how the software is supposed to work, you can get away with selling junk. On the other hand, a client with more experience in dealing with such systems would say, "Hey, this isn't running efficiently - I won't accept it till it's been optimized and runs fast enough. See the code in file XYZ.php to see what I mean" Then, there are others who have a serious lack of understanding of how computers work but they say, "Why is it taking so long? Go to Google.com and see how quickly it loads." (although you've been making a couple of database transactions and generating images on-the-fly, while Google simply displays a form for search)

Hi! The quickest way to get started is to look at existing games. I'd suggest you take a look at a couple of OpenGL-based Hello-World-style programs and then look at open-source games that use the OpenGL library. Creating a game can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few years. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas took 3 years of development, and they even had their code from previous versions to build upon. If you want to take the 'quick' path, you can simple create new maps for existing games. You can find some guidelines in the 2-part series called Beginning Level Design here: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ -Nitin

Hi! Unless you ask a specific question, all you're going to get in the forum is a link to a tutorial on learning AJAX. I suggest you start off with the link from the W3C website posted earlier. After you are familiar with how the XmlHttp request object works, you can move on to using a library that provides some degree of abstraction. If you prefer to work with Javascript, you can use the jQuery language and an application server capable of running server-side Javascript. If you are an ASP.NET developer, install the Microsoft AJAX Extensions and use the UpdatePanel. You can find an AJAX framework for just about any web development framework. Regards, Nitin

Hi! You can assign points to each letter (Scrabble-style!) by creating an array of 26 elements (A-Z), assigning a score to each letter. Then, in your scoring function, instead of simply adding 1, add the value you retrieve from the array. You can also implement a simpler scoring algorithm by performing a simple IF-ELSE check. If the letter is a vowel (see my earlier post in this thread), add 1 point else add 2 points. You can add more conditions to scoring if you have a few types of letters (vowels, 'ZXQ', other alphabets). You can create levels by reducing the number of vowels available to the player (see my earlier post in this thread). You can start with a larger number of vowels and then move to fewer vowels and more uncommon letters ('ZXQ'). Alternatively, if your game-play is timer based, you can reduce the time allotted to the player for making a more. If you can, try to play a demo version (free trial) of BookWorm. It looks quite similar to what you are building though I can't tell for sure as you haven't provided much detail about how your game works. Regards, Nitin PS: When I played Scrabble, it wasn't a registered trademark. Now, I guess I have to say Scrabbled or Scrabbler to keep the corporations from suing me for using their trademark illegally :-P

Hi! I can't seem to figure out what you mean by scroll, because from the screenshot you've posted before, everything fits onto one screen. In either case, you can achieve the 'scrolling' effect by doing something like "object._x = object._x - 1" which in shorthand is represented as "object._x -= 1" Regards, Nitin

@mahesh2k Hi Mahesh! Thanks for the info. As I mentioned, I'm not looking for plugins to install yet because what they do is override the functions provided by WordPress and hook up to WordPress filters/actions. What I am trying to do instead is use a function that has already been defined, such that I can cache data (within my plugin code) while I'm retrieving it from the database. I appreciate your inputs though, and I certainly will buzz you back when I go down the path of overriding the default WordPress caching behavior, but that's a discussion for another thread. Regards, Nitin