k_nitin_r

The image from the original post has been removed so I am not really sure of the ideas that wre suggested, but I have a few ideas of my own. The traditional classroom sitting has pretty much the same seating arrangement as somebody who would attend a concert or an opera, minus the balconies. With all the seats facing forward, there is the best chance of fitting as many people as possible within the confines of a room in a reasonably organized manner. The next best thing would be to position the seats around the instructor such that there is about a 120 degree field of view for the instructor of the class and the students in the front-row face the instructor instead of having the students turn to look at the instructor and possibly result in neck fatigue or cramps. Finally, a couple of round tables within the classroom and chairs surrounding each of the tables is a great environment for collaborative work. It is difficult to adapt to different modes of teaching because of the time required to shift a group between different layouts or classrooms, so perhaps it would help if the classrooms were determined based on the contents of a session, and the sessions are planned such that minimal changes to the layout are required.BTW, has anyone else used an overhead projector for transparencies? Those may be going the way of the dinosaur, but there are so many of them still in existence and the classroom layout has to be planned in a manner that those overhead projectors can be used because no matter where an instructor stands, he or she would be blocking the view of the material for at least some of the students, unless the instructor is standing right at the back of the class with the projector, in which case the layout would have to ensure that the distance between the front and the rear of the classroom is not too much to cause the image of the overhead projector to go past the floor and the ceiling.Modern classrooms typically have a ceiling-mounted projector and projects the image from a computer so the instructor can sit in a corner of the room and convey instructions while using visual aids to illustrate or point, or put up slides of bullet points to help in delivering the content.

sheepdog,If you wanted to offer courses on pet care, Moodle is probably what you want to use. It enables you to sign up folk who want to take up the course, offer them a structured path to achieving the goals of the course, and deliver content, links to external web pages, tests, and assignments. If there is a pet care certification, you could prepare individuals for pet care certifications. I am guessing that it would take about two months at least to come up with the content and the structure for the course, but once you have a course built, you can offer it to any number of individuals before the next refresh of the course to meet additional course objectives or certification requirements.BTW, I always thought Moodle sounded more like a brand of noodles than a poodle, but now I guess the cross-breed seems more probably :-)

rpgsearcherz, If that is the case, the calculator would be rather simple to build - by providing an HTML form input box to enter an expression, the user could enter something like: "3 * (1 + 4)" What you can then do with that input is run it through the eval function to get the result and it is as simple as that! Now, experienced programmers would tell you about the security implications of it, in which case you would probably deal with it by having a security check on the input being entered to permit only digits, mathematical operators, and parentheses. Some web hosting servers may not provide access to the eval function but then again there is only so much you can do with a locked-down server without re-inventing the wheel.

While education is important, the system may also have the implications of discouraging some people who would be better off without a degree because of their financial status. For example, if somebody was making little money to be able to make ends meet, he or she would be better off working to support the family rather than taking up a full-time program. Also, from their perspective, such a person may not be likely to finish the program because of other commitments. On the other hand, they could deny an opportunity to somebody who has it all planned and manage to get by with five hours of sleep to be able to manage everything. It is a system where everybody could benefit from funding and low-interest loans, but they only have so much that they can do because of limited allocation of resources and therefore they are trying to do the most they can in an objective manner that does not seem to unfairly favor anyone. When a process seems like it is objective, it may leave out individuals who rightfully deserve assistance but for the people making the policies, it is something that they can live with as long as they see that they are able to manage all that they can within their budgets.

MrDee,Apparently, they narrowed down the angina to a sleep apnea. I guess that is something that most of us would never have correlated together, and apparently your early doctors did not either. The dropping oxygen levels may have caused the angina, which the cardiologist performed routine tests for to determine that there is no problem at all.During the period when they want to have you treated for sleep apnea, are they giving you anything to deal with the problems of lack of sleep? I think they use Amphetamine, Ampakines, or something like Modifinil to treat the symptoms so you can function normally till they have everything sorted out.If they haven't got you started yet, they probably have a plan to you playing the symphonies of Mozart while in your sleep.Anyway, I hope you get well soon so we can see you more often on the forum.

MrDee,That seems to be one thing your government is doing right - free healthcare is something that people in the rest of the world can only imagine. I sometimes wonder if that implies free food too, because hospitals usually charge quite a bit for the food they serve to in-patients.Many hospitals have medical students and interns working the emergency and general medicine wards, so perhaps you happened to meet one of them when they asked you what insulin is used for. It would make you wonder if he or she is even aware of stuff going on in the world, let alone reading the books.There are government medical facilities in India that are accessible to people who hold a particular kind of card that indicates they have been residing in a village or have been living in the slums. It basically means that a poor guy living in a city in a parking garage does not get access to the heavily subsidized health care, but a farmer who owns a quarter of the agricultural land in a village can gain access to health care by merely paying what is worth a few handfuls of peanuts.

You get to list to music all the way on a single AAA battery? I'm guessing the trip must have lasted about three hours at least. That is quite remarkable! I have a cheap Android tablet that I got for giggles and the battery on it lasts for just over an hour while it is being used. The iPhone doesn't last a whole day either, though I have to mention that when I leave some music playing and turn off the screen, it can play for well over eight hours with less than half the battery being used. MacBooks are quite popular for being able to run for extended hours on battery, so I expected no less from Apple. I sometimes wonder if Lenovo will bring the all-day computing models that the Thinkpad was known for with laptops running for about twelve or fourteen hours on a single charge. With one of those, stopping at a power outlet in an airport for a quick charge would be a thing of the past with everybody being able to go a couple of days because they don't leave their computers running all the time.BTW, for your MP3 player, you could get a battery-powered speaker. Those can be expensive for the ones that sound good, but if you just want to try it out, there are some rather cheap ones that should cost you no more than $8 and can be charged through USB while providing the ability to play MP3s through its own microSD slot. The sound quality was pretty bad on the one I tried, but it was much louder than my old laptop's speaker so it served its purpose when I needed it.

I'm glad that everybody agrees that all property can be treated as copyrighted property because simply the fact that it exists means that somebody created it and that they have ownership of it or at least have passed on the ownership of it to somebody else, unless it has been released to public domain.There is one case that I think was particularly unfair when it comes to displaying warnings. In the case of Stella Liebeck versus McDonald's, Stella accused McDonald's of service coffee that was defective because it was too hot. What else did she expect when she ordered coffee? Ice-cold ice cream with chocolate flakes? I would have agreed that it was McDonald's fault if the coffee cup melted, the lid wasn't fitted correctly, or if the staff would have caused the spill while handing the cup of coffee to Stella, but that was not the case. Stella put the cup of hot coffee between her knees and, while removing the lid, and in the process spilled the coffee onto herself. What was she thinking when she was merely holding the cup of coffee with her knees while sitting in a car? She was by no means physically challenged to have to use her knees to hold a cup, and why didn't she think about using the cup holder like everybody else. McDonald's was wrongfully sued and whoever ruled in favor of Stella were most definitely biased. Oh, and did I mention that there was a warning on the coffee cup to indicate that the coffee is hot? But the court ruled that the warning was too small and was insufficient. What do they expect? Get a baby-sitter to sit with customers in their cars to ensure that they do not do anything crazy enough to burn themselves? Sure, if a cup of coffee costs $150, they could go the extra mile, but that particular cup of coffee that Stella bought was for exactly 50 cents. For giggles, maybe McDonalds should put in print on the cup of coffee in reasonably large text - "Do not place coffee cup between knees" to avoid legal liabilities.Regarding trespassing signs, I think it would be reasonable to assume that somebody wanting to sell you a magazine subscription would walk through the gate and knock on the door, if there wasn't a beware of dog or no trespassing sign. Even with that assumption, having somebody enter the premises outside of regular working hours may have entered for providing an invitation to a party, a wedding, or something of the sort. Entering into an apartment with an unlocked door is perhaps crossing the limit and perhaps does count as trespassing even without any notice or warning.

Sheepdog,I had a neighbour with a black labrador that was about a decade old. One day, it decided it was king of the beasts, so it played hunter and preyed on a frog, devouring it whole. Frogs have toxins in their skin, which I do not really see the point of - if they have spines, it keeps preys away because they would not want spines stuck in their jaws. If they have toxins, they still get eaten anyway. Perhaps it is like taking one for the team - if a prey eats you, they die, so they cannot eat the rest of us. Sure, that sounds like team spirit, but more of the kamikaze pilot kind. If the dog was taken to the vet, it would probably have been given some kind of an antidote but its owners probably didn't think much of it because eating a frog seems a lot like eating a gazelle or wild deer or something of the sort. It's something that people understand only when it has happened to them at some point, just like the little puppy that the owner thought was having seizures when it was just having some rather active dreams in its sleep. Perhaps it was dreaming about the rich green grass in a pasture somewhere and a frisbee being tossed for it to catch. But still, seriously, the vet would actually charge $250 to tell the owner that there is nothing wrong with the dog? I'm assuming that does not include the fare for hailing a cab and heading out to the emergency room. If the vet were to look at the pup and say it was normal, a $50 charge would probably have seemed steep but still not too unreasonable for having to use the services of an emergency room. That's from the perspective of the vet, but then there could be some owners who would toss a law suit at just about anything and everything and ruin it all for the rest of us, requiring a whole series of tests that come back negative. If it were not for the threat of lawsuits, we would probably have the vet tell us that all is well and that the symptoms are normal.Oh, and did you mention that dogs have their temperature taken rectally? Ouch! The next time a dog barks at me as if to bark insults, and I say to myself, "Think happy thoughts," I'd probably be thinking of that dog visiting the vet and having its temperature taken :-D

Hi mamer!If you do get the newer version of Moodle working, do let me know. I had the installer tell me that the target version of the interpreter for the current version of Moodle was greater than what I had, and so it would not install. It may, however, be possible to edit the installer so that it no longer performs the check for the version of the interpreter or maybe the version can be hard-coded such that the conditional check always evaluates to true, even when the minimum version required isn't met. It should not be too hard to back-port some of the code to work with an older interpreter because it was not a complete re-write but rather a gradual change in the code base to require the newer version of the interpreter.As Saint Michael says, a tutorial updated to work with a newer version of Moodle will be more helpful because very few people still run Moodle 1.9.

Hi!Your account of the incident makes me think that this may be one of those conspiracy theories. Perhaps they accidentally thought that he was involved with a terrorist network because his name came up on a no-fly-zone list and so they decided to take him off the school bus and when the bus driver tried to prevent them from taking away the kid, they shot him and left with the target. After a while, they realized that he was just a five year old who has no trigger word or any sleeper agent training and as it was too big a risk to let him free stating that a UFO had kidnapped him and returned him mysteriously to the scene of the crime, especially since the bus driver was killed rather than disintegrated into thin air or kidnapped and stuck with probes into his brain and bodily cavities.The whole deal with the Guantanamo Bay is just about as fishy as this tale - they actually kept people detained for longer than they are constitutionally permitted to, and they lacked the substantive evidence. It took them all that time just to figure out that the person was an innocent civilian and therefore had to be let free. If any immigrants were involved, I think they may have been given a green card or citizenship for having been 'guests' of the United States for so long, especially since the country has determined that they are no longer a threat to national security. Either that, or all the people who were supposedly detained in Guantanamo Bay are undercover FBI agents who were called to duty, and Guantanamo Bay is a secret facility for operations rather than a detentions facility. I guess we will never really know and the folks who do know will be taking the tale to their graves.

Hello there!It is great to have you join us here on Xisto. Although we are all curious about how you happened to come upon the forum, we would also like to know more about what you do, what kind of food you eat, and whether you know the exact number of the kinds of cheese served in Holland. Okay, so I am kidding about the last one, but it would make a rather good password, just as the minimum of eight characters from disney is almost impossible to guess or figure out through a brute force algorithm.There are lots of people on the forum who talk about just about everything from the sun to those little critters that sneak up on you in the middle of the night with fangs to suck blood. No, not vampires, I mean bats. I'm sure we would have a thread about bats somewhere on the forum. If not, well, mamer will go ahead and create one. He's probably the one with the most threads to his credit over the past few months. Some think he may be Saint Michael's avatar. There have been reports about multiple avatars existing at the same time.

Moving from the mysql functions to the mysqli functions should be an easy shift. There was a mention on a blog that the mysql functions are 'lighter' and so execute quicker when compared to the mysqli functions, though I have not seen any benchmarks to compare the two. I think that it is in alignment with the observations of the JDBC thin drivers for Oracle as opposed to the OCI JDBC drivers that provide much more functionality than the thin drivers do. The mysqli API provides both an object oriented and a procedural approach to using the code. A downside is that a malicious user can do a whole lot more by using SQL injection with scripts that use mysqli so there's a problem that surfaces if a novice implements a PHP based application with mysqli coded in the same manner as the insecure applications that were build with the mysql extension. I don't mean to say that the extensions themselves are insecure but if the same insecure code were to be altered to use mysqli, there is a whole lot more than a hacker could do to a site. Fortunately, some web servers are configured to lock down the application such that malicious requests are filtered out and repeated attempt would lead to the IP address being barred from accessing the server. It could happen to legitimate requests too, but it helps to know that there is something in place that can prevent attacks against an application built by a novice.

A PHP calculator script without a calculator? I don't get it - does it mean that it is supposed to be a script that can calculate without actually providing a calculator-like interface? Perhaps two text boxes and a button to keep it simple? Sounds like this is the case, though am not sure what the "without parameters" means in the thread topic.To put together a form on an HTML page, Adobe DreamWeaver can be used - it does not really need one to be familiar with HTML. Placing a form on the page is shown in DreamWeaver is a red box formed with a dashed or dotted line (I am not sure if the newer versions of DreamWeaver still work the same way and represent a form with the red dashed or dotted line). Let's just assume for this discussion that it is a red box formed with dased lines. Within the red dashed-line box, place the input text elements from within the Forms tab of the toolbox. Give the input text elements a name that you can use to reference it, such as txt1 and txt2. Then, select the form (red dashed box) and assign the action property of the form the name of a PHP file, such as calc.php. Within calc.php, the values from this form would be accessible within a $_REQUEST global associative array, so all you would need to do is access the elements of the array using the names of the input text elements as keys to retrieve the values. You can simply add them together because PHP automatically converts the strings into integers, and you can echo the sum of the two variables.

Sheepdog,You seem to have quite a tale. In India, most people have arranged marriages, so they barely know a person before getting engaged. It all starts with a friend of a relative of a friend of a relative says, "Hey, I can get you hooked up with somebody," then there's a consultation with an astrologer who looks into their horoscope and makes sure that they aren't from the same family tree and that they are compatible in nature. There's an exchange of photographs, and finally the two families meet. There's usually a short chat for about five to ten minutes during which they make the choice to get engaged, and that's about it! SheepDog, you had so much longer to decide if he is the one compared to most Indians.Also, did I mention that when most people get engaged, they follow through till the wedding so even during the couple of months between the engagement and the wedding, all usually goes well so perhaps whatever the astrologer looks up seems to work out for them. However, there has been an increase in the divorce rate in India and that is probably because a lot of people are getting more hard-headed as they think about money, put forward their egoes and let petty things get in the way because of greed, selfishness, and stuff of that sort. Then, there's also the bit where people cheat on their partners, and it gets pretty ugly. It wasn't as common a few decades ago so it is perhaps the pursuit of riches that trumped over the pursuit of happiness that is more prevalent today.BTW, I know a former co-worker from the Phillippines who met his significant other one fine day when he was introduced to her. They went out together a couple of times, yet he would say that she wasn't the one for him. A couple of months later, everybody thought they were a good pair, and finally one day he proposed to her, they got married shortly afterward and they probably have a kid right now. From what I last heard about a month ago, her office moved to the same building that he works in so they even get to have lunch together, so it does not get any better than that. And since his office does not provide car parking, they get to drive to work together, she flashes her badge against the card reader and they get let into the parking lot.Of all the stories about people meeting up and getting married, the ones that you think are the best are when you know a girl who is well-mannered and polite and she ends up with a rags-to-riches tale, and then you think the world is a really nice place and that justice has been served. Of course, it does not always end up that way but when it does and you hear about, there's the nice feeling that the world is not such a bad place after all.

Hi!I don't really know if it is possible for every topic to have a reply because some of them are tutorials. You would not normally expect a reply for a How-To if it was really good, and you would not really want to have a lot of Thank You replies because they do not add value and that is what the Up-Vote button is for in the forum. Sure, a thank you seems like a more personal message and it is promoted on other forums, but it makes it harder for somebody who comes back to the forum later to browse through pages and pages of posts to find what he or she is looking for. You may be able to turn an up-vote into a thank you and list the people who posted the thank you through the up-vote button by adding on a plugin to the forum, but that is more about the workings of the forum rather than about the content within. Also, perhaps the up-vote should be positioned differently because I do not really notice any posts that have up-votes on them.Also, if there are some really old posts, we do not want all of the re-surfacing, particularly if it is about something less significant, like Al Gore's campaign agenda way back during the elections because in general people no longer have any interest in the political past. It could be relevant if there are a lot of people on the forum with an interest in political history though, so what deserves to be brought back from the past depends on the members and their interests. A lot of people on the forum have an interest in web design and web programming, but we do not really find much of a mention on here. Perhaps that gets discussed on Xisto, the sister-forum of Xisto. BTW, there is a lot of techie stuff going on in there, so if you do want to check out the issues that programmers and system administrators face, that's a good place to discover the issues and perhaps write a blog about it.Oh, and did I mention that the make money online forum could get outdated quickly with the number of firms going out of business each year? With that logic, resurrecting old post topics that are from about a decade ago about schemes and organizations that no longer exist would not have much value, unless it is for analyzing their strategies in retrospect.

Mamer, Using regular expressions is actually not better than using Levenshtein because of the overhead involved. There is a lot more computation involved when using regular expressions. It is, however, possible to use regular expressions for validation of things that have to be in a specific format, and then use levenshtein's algorithm to match against possible values if the format is invalid. It has very specific uses, but if there's a scenario that warrants it, it's the combination of the two will serve the purpose well.

PHP as a languages evolves with each new release, so I would recommend heading to the Amazon.com website and getting the latest PHP guide that you can find there.I am assuming what you want to do is develop web applications, because although PHP is also used for desktop application development and for scripting, its primary use is in web application development. Most of the scripted desktop applications that I know of are in Python rather than PHP. Most of the scripts that I know of are in Bash or Perl rather than PHP. However, most of the top web content management systems are built with PHP.

With greater adherence to the standard and standard-conformity browser tests, the differences between browsers is decreasing and we are seeing more-or-less fewer variations between rendering in different browsers. Back in the early days, some web designers and web developers went as far as to create a separate version of the website for Internet Explorer users but now if somebody uses a browser that isn't standards compliant, the accepted practice is to simply display a message indicating that the user should upgrade his or her browser or use a plugin such as Google Chrome Frame.On the forum, we typically have topics created when somebody has problems with something or when somebody wants to comment on a new development. Since most people don't use a complex layout, there are hardly any cross-browser issues that they post about to the forums these days.Cascading Style Sheets are, no doubt, an important concept. If it were not for cascading style sheets, we would still be working with attributes in HTML tags and just about any change needed for the layout would require changing the markup. Providing the directives needed for the display of XML documents is also quite simple with cascading style sheets.

Mamer,Just as there are variations in the American and British spellings, there are variations among different publication standards on the capitalization of headings. Whenever you write to a publication, you have to determine what standards they require you to follow, and you can either hire an editor or perform the formatting of your contribution yourself to adhere to the formatting standards required by the publication.

mrdee,I think one of the criteria that some webmail service providers use to determine if an email is spam is to determine if the From address of the email is in the addressbook. Of course, there is the content analysis of the email itself but there are points assigned based on whether the sender is a known contact, for determining if the email should be considered spam. There are different criteria used, and some email clients even use neural networks so it is hard to tell what weightage each of the factors would have.I cannot help you with the message filters in Thunderbird because I have only used them for routing messages to appropriate folders and forwarding email to other email accounts. Perhaps you can report it as a bug on the Thunderbird forums because of the message filters are set up correctly, there may have been other users with the same problem and therefore there may be a bugfix or a patch that you can apply to get it working.

Mamer,I'm glad somebody else has the interest in ActionScript too. I have not written ActionScript in a while, with the decline of Flash and all, but I'd love to see some of your code samples and ideas. I'm particularly curious about 3D development with ActionScript, because that's an area that I have not been able to investigate yet.

Mamer,Typically, when you perform a normal join between two or more tables, you should get the values you need. The only case in which you would have duplications is when the join condition is improper or if the tables were not normalized. With the ANSI style joins, you do not have to use the WHERE clause of the SELECT statement unless you want to filter the results further.

Hi!If you have used Adobe Flash, then you have used the simplest tool to create animations. Animation with Javascript and HTML involves code and perhaps using Adobe Flash's HTML support is the only way to go about creating animations with Javascript and HTML. More specifically, the canvas element of HTML 5 provides a drawing area and Javascript can be used to draw on that canvas. If you simply want to put up a vector image, you can use scalable vector graphics (SVG) and interact with that vector object using Javascript. The only gripe with that approach is that Microsoft Internet Explorer does not support scalable vector graphics.The ability to create key frames and define transformations is perhaps something that you can think in visual terms. Writing the code for it is like going back a few decades when you have to work with coordinates, unless you have a tool that can convert the visual 'programming' to the coordinate code like a user interface designer does within an integrated development environment.

Mamer,Good to see more posts from you on the forum.While the Levenshtein algorithm is useful in suggesting corrections, I doubt Google uses the Levenshtein algorithm as-is for determining the nearest match. Give the Levenshtein algorithm a try, and you will see that Google 'qualifies' (for the lack of a better word) each of the words that are supposed to be a close match before finally suggesting the one that is close to what you intended. I am guessing that they may be establishing context through geographical location, past searches, trending search terms, e-mails from GMail, chat history from GoogleTalk, and possibly social networking information from Google+.The Levenshtein algorithm is definitely one of the simpler algorithms out there that one can implement, but more complex algorithms exist that are based on linguistics. Think along the lines that although we may drive Lexus or Mercedes cars, there exist Rolls Royce vehicles that we would not even bother considering for a purchase because of the price tag. It's one of those things... after I created a program to read the bitmap format, but when I thought about the MPEG format, everyone I asked would say, MPEG decoding is not something you would write as an individual because of the effort involved in coding it - it is rather something that you would buy as a library or use one of the free open source alternatives.