Pain in the Tech

THE BEST EVER!
It plays, my soul dances.

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i love this cd , and of course i love R.E.M.
Mike
Peter and
Michael

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"What if the news and updates were feeded into this one location" –– Matt, I don't think "feeded" is a word. Perhaps you meant "fed"?

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You are right. Thanks for pointing that out.

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Cameron Rose welcome to the family. I can’t wait to hold you. Where did you get such a pretty name??

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What a cutie!! (Oops, I did the "ee" thing, too. Sorry.) Congratulations to Daddy Dave and to the rest of the family. I’m sure that Cameron loves her new home and her new family!

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josey wants to know when she can come and visit! congrats on the new addition.

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I loved the movie it made me cry and for a movie to do that means that is was really great, i suggest everyone goes to see it

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First of all, i think the big fish is a metaphor for two things. One thing is what you had mentioned, that the father was the big fish. But remember how the big fish was caught? With a wedding ring. Maybe it could also be a metaphor on how you "catch" the woman you love. You marry her.

Second of all, he never had an affair with that woman. He had walked out on her, don't you remember? Well, at least that's what I understood. As for the giant... i really have no idea exactly what that is symbolism for. But overall I agree with you that it was one amazing movie.

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I think that Spectre is a heaven or Eden. Everything about the place is perfect: the grass is so perfect and green that nobody has to wear shoes, there is always freshly baked pie, and nobody has a care in the world. The people in the town are angelic and innocent because they have not been exposed to the harsh truths of our world, which is much like young Edward.

When people are young, everything is brighter, happier, and better. Young Edward arrives too 'early' and therefore cannot enjoy his stay; he has not fulfilled his life yet. The shoes hanging on the wire are like binding contracts stating that the people there must remain because nobody can leave without their shoes on right?

When Edward leaves, he breaks this contract and in a sense alters this peaceful Eden. The others are awoken from their innocent fantasies and snapped back to the harsh realities of real life. When Edward arrives too late, he is older and more knowledgable and now views things in a dimmer light. Spectre is in ruins because the people did not know how to deal with these new realities.

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I just stumbled into this site. My name is Cameron Grey Rose and I live in Seattle. I wish my namesake good luck in her new home. And I am grateful I can show people pictures of the dog named after me.

ps there is a adult film director named Cameron Rose. Watch out. I learned this the hard way.

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here are the ansewers:

1. We are currently voting for who runs to represent the democratic party in the race for president, which ever party is not holding the role of president does this, yes the vote is still in november.

2. To run for president there is a certain age that you have to be and you must be a citizen of the us who was born here, the other stuff i dont know.

3. You win a state in the preliminaries, which we are going through now, the citizens of the state vote for who they want to be the canidate for the party to run for president, by the time it reaches us all of the other canidates drop out, it is important to win a state so you know where or not your chances are to winning in general, it is a test of the campaign. in the end though it is the party who will say a definte yes or no if someone is to run against the current president.

4. There are several different parties that run against the president, and you will see that when you go to vote in november, but mainly there is 1 real party that runs against the president.

5. to learn about the different canidates i am sure that they have websites that you can visit, if you do a simple web search i am sure you will get the ansewers you are looking for.

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Column view has been an option since the OS X Public Beta. In fact, I believe it was a view option in the Mac OS X Server 1.x Finder. It's been a while since I've used it, so I can't recall.

You are right about the process of creating new documents — in most cases. If you keep a document-based application in the Dock, whenever it is clicked it should create a new empty document if none are open (in the case of open applications). This is specified in the Aqua HIG for creating application windows.

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Just to let you know that there is a lot of planning that goes into where a company will place their next store. If the market in a particular area will not support another store, then they will not place it. When a store opens, they survey the area for traffic and survey people in that area about the possbility of a store opening. These are just a few things they do. Despit the fact that some may feel coporate america is money sucking, they too have a business to run like just like anyone else and if they position a store in an over crowded area, the store will not do so well and fail. Also another little tip, dont get sick to fast of stores popping up, becuase with in the next few years you will see more stores leaving their traditional mall settings to go to areas such as village crossing. Oh, and by the way Home Depot is spread out a lot more than other stores and you and i both only know of 2 stores at all that are anywhere close to our houses. Coporate america is also responding to the needs of the consumer wanting more convience, mutiple things in one area, less driving less trips all over the place, consumers want to have everything in one place, that is why walmarts with grocery stores and same with kmarts do well. You can get your grocerys and undies in the same place. Technology too has now forced these stores to offer a wide variety, you can buy anythin on the web and they need to compete with that. In conclusion, as a marketer and further coporate american, what is happening is to meet the demands and needs of the consumer, and everything is done with a great amount of research prior to actually breaking ground.

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I would run for president

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I've heard Seabisuit is a Field of Dreams type movie -- it makes guys cry. Why would you rent Phonebooth??

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I admit it... I have a crush on Colin Farell...!! Oh geez I said that out loud! No... I rented Phone Booth because, as Shell says, I have a "thing" for phone booths. I think they are intriguing. Well... the fact that there are NO MORE of them - that is intriguing. I guess that could be one of the reasons...

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Is there any particular reason you aren't using AAC? Better quality than MP3 at the same file size…

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I thought the AAC format was a "locked" format. I was under the assumption that I would have more freedom with my digital track if it was in MP3 format, rather than the AAC format... Of course I am probably very wrong.

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The AAC files encoded by iTunes (via QuickTime) are completely unencumbered - no use restrictions other than playback support not being nearly as widespread as that for MP3.

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i would play the california lotto. Then I think i could do more things that I would not fail at if I had a bunch of money.

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I've used a nice PHP driven style sheet in the past that would cook up a random colourscheme on every page load (one that works and not one that makes your eyes bleed, mind you). It worked absolutely great untill I switched to XHTML1.1. For some reason, my PHP driven style sheet won't play with my site since. Too bad, really. There's probably some restriction on the file type that can be associated with XHTML1.1 as being a cascading style sheet, but I couldn't find anything about it in the W3C specs. Perhaps it's an Mozilla bug. I'll look into it again this week.

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I say keep the books! You never know when you'll need or want them...or even better, when someone else may need or want them. The beauty of reading books is that when you're done, you can share them(or in your case, before you've read them). Knowledge is power...pass it on : )

Plus, if you let someone borrow a book you haven't read, they can give you the info and then you can decide if you want to read it yourself.

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You're right... I can't "part with them" that easily. They are timeless entities.

Sometimes just opening a book and reading a random page makes me feel better. Why give that up?

The garage sale is going on, and the books are still in my closet. :)

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I've had an old cell phone sitting in my house for weeks now. I used your first listed website, and am getting some money back. Thanks for finding it!

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Indeed, common sense is out the window with Word, and also with Excel. Word is constantly doing things on its own, as if it has the ability to reason and know when you are already having a bad day, only to decide to try and make it worse. Necessary evils suck.

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Just thought I'd let you know that in firefox 09 Win XP your stylesheet is not being picked up at all. It might be something to do with the way you've 'optimized' it by removing a lot of the whitespace. Not sure.

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Ahh, here it is. Good to finally see the styles. I like your header image. Bevelled fonts don't always work but in your case I think it does.

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Thanks for the feedback, Jim. I wasn't sure if that bevel looked right.

I'm a big font fanatic, and I love the font that's used. "Folio," it's called.

...mmm, I could stare at that font all night.

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Hello Matt Thommes,

Thank you kindly for stopping by my site and dropping me a line. There are so many Matt Thomases in the world! Google thinks nowadays that I am the #1 Matt Thomas on earth and that's pretty nice. But you are Matt Thommes and I have to say it helps your chances. Google says there are 35,000 pages that say Matt Thomas but only 11 that say Matt Thommes. So good on your ancestors for adopting the more unique spelling.

Ok I'll be on my way now. Nice site Matt Thommes. Good luck on the job hunt.

Peas out
Matt Thomas

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Is this of any use: http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2004/june/smarttext

Of course, most of us just use blogging software like MT or WP, saves us from these kinds of headahces. I admire you for doing it yourself though.

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Very helpful, yes. Thanks.

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I agree. It seems everyone has jumped on the web design band wagon. And, when asked the same question myself,("what do you do") the instant response is 'web designer'(although I am always certain to add 'freelance' to reclaim that special uniqueness because to me, that somehow emphasizes the fact that I must know more than the average joe).

All of your points are valid. Almost anyone can design a web page. It's all the other things that come in to play that make a web designer(or should we say web marketing specialist?) good at what they do. In the end, you are delivering a product that is expected to get results. With out any intel on how to design and implement an effective site, it's very difficult to produce the desired effect.

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Lol and here's me wondering if you two are the same guy! I was beginning to get confused.

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Hhmmm.....interesting, been thinking about trying out Netflix. I live out in the boonies, so getting to the video store is kind of a hassle sometimes, plus I forget to return the damn things. BTW, what did you think of Something's Gotta Give? I hated that movie, all of the whining and crying...cry me a friggin' river, lady.

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Yeah, there was too much crying, on the part of Diane. I think she was good in the movie, though. And Jack... he put on a good show too.

The movie was a bit "drawn out," but it had it's moments.

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That's pretty slick. Unfortunately for me though, I have to work on Windoze. One day I hope to have the extra cash to be able to get a Powerbook though, I hear they are pretty feature-packed and powerful (maybe that's why they call them Powerbooks, eh??)

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Well, the Powerbook is not mine. It's my girlfriends. Lucky for me, I can use it often :)

And, you're right, they ARE expensive, but she does monthly payments on it, which comes out to about $50 per month. Which is not that bad.

If you're considering buying a Mac, I strongly recommend the payment plan option, because then it's affordable. Of course you have to make payments for three or four years, but you could pay if off more quickly over time.

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Maybe he is just busy with work, and don't forget he has a lil mini-zeldman on the way too. I sometimes wonder how bloggers like D. Keith Robinson and Paul Scrivens find so much time to keep us posted.

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Yeah, firefox is where it's at. Definitely.

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Jim, I like Firefox, but I also can't wait for Safari RSS, and Mac OS X Tiger. I am guessing Safari will only get better.

By the way, I love your "War on Web Standards." Great stuff. Except... your intention seemed harmless, but you still managed to rally purely political comments... which I guess is not a surprise.

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Wow man, this all sounds too familar to me. I grew up in northwest Florida, near Pensacola. A little town called Milton. I have weathered plenty of hurricanes and tropical storms, my parents many more than me. They have had their house flooded and their roof destroyed. You can see all of the pictures you want on TV, but it can never prepare you for what it is really like when you are there living through it. Sorry your vacation is sucking. Just be glad you get to leave.

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It was not your typical rain storm. You could actually feel the pressure that was being put on the house. The windows were very close to being shattered. We had taped them, so they ended up OK.

The vacation is much better now. The storms are gone, and I am in Daytona Beach, just enjoying the waves. We are going to try for Disney again this Friday.

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I use firefox as my main browser. I can only believe more people will be converted when it hits version 1.0.

It's nice to see another matt*.com :)

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Hey is that a gecko? (*Starts whistling the Geicko theme*)

Funny, the word 'old' just doesn't have the same meaning in America as it does back home in England.

Still, it looks like a very nice place to visit, and any history is always interesting.

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No, that is a chameleon. They are so cool. In Florida, they are very common sights, in grassy areas. In Chicago, we have ants. Florida has chameleons.

I've never been to England, so I'm not sure how it differs, in terms of the word "old." I would LOVE to visit there someday, though.

Since you live in Ohio - from what you've seen, how does America's history differ from England's?

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We spent a week in St. Augustine last summer - it is a BEAUTIFUL place, isn't it? Where we stayed wasn't so touristy busy - it was a relaxing and quiet week! (and I loved going over all the bridges and seeing the different "islands".)

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How's it going with Netflix? Are you still enjoying it? I've seen over a hundred movies since joining in January.

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I face the same dilemma. I use Access at work, but I have a Mac at home. Have you ever tried using FileMaker Pro on the Mac?

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Becky, I've tried FileMaker Pro on a Mac, and it is great - no doubt. But Access is so SMART. I just love how simple it is to create form fields that dynamically pull data from the database. Plus the fact that it coincides so easily with Microsoft Excel, and Word.

I've been learning so much about it.

By the way, do you have a non-Netflix blog? I love "NetFlix Fan," but maybe you have a personal one?

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Becky, I do enjoy the luxury of (almost) always having a DVD on hand to watch. Makes my evenings more enjoyable.

But sometimes I think it's more of a "chore." A friend once told me she seems like it's an "obligation," because if she doesn't watch a lot - she feels she's not getting her money worth.

I have to agree slightly.

I DO love NetFlix Freak! Best software!

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Check out Markdown - a very useful text processing tool. As for the acronym tool, MovableType and Wordpress have plugins that auto-create the abbreviations, so it depends on what blogging system you are using.

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Hi Matt. Use NoteTab Light. It's a free program for HTML, CSS, and plain text editing. Plus tons of other things I haven't even got to.
http://www.notetab.com/ntl.php
On the bottom of the screen are the tabs for each kind of document you want to use. Under the HTML tab, in the left hand menu, click on 'unordered list' and it will then ask you how many items you want in the list. Ta da! There you go.

I've been using this program for about a month now, and it's awesome. Hope this helps you out!

Amanda

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Trent and Amanda, thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. I am looking into both options.

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Cartography is great, isn't it? I too love maps. As a matter of fact, I just got my copy of the new Geology of South Dakota from the SD Geological Survey. It's a beaut. I used to make maps and still get to on occasion at work. Begin shameless plugI have some of my maps I've done over the years up here.End shameless plug

If I had my way, I would write code and make maps all day long. I could never run out of ideas for cool maps to make.

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Chad, very cool. Is that just a hobby of yours, or did you actually work in the industry?

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I'm a geologist by training, but worked in the GIS/cartography realm for a while; I titled myself "Map Monkey". Now I built GIS-based models that simulate water-quality in rivers/streams, so I get to make watershed maps on occassion (but not as many as I would like to).

BTW, I think that your "Remember personal info" may not be remembering me?? Or perhaps I'm doing something wrong??

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No, I am doing something wrong. It's not you. The immediate problem with my site is that I don't rely on blogging tools, such as WordPress or Movable Type. I do it all myself.

So, when I notice certain enhancements made to sites that are powered with blogging tools, I try to add those enhancements to my own site. Unfortunately, it's not always easy or straight-forward.

The "Remember Personal Info" is just a few JavaScript functions, but I am having trouble getting it to work.

I am toying with it, but nothing gives. In the meantime, maybe I should just take that option off for now, since it's not working.

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I've noticed RSS to be very useful for my websites too. The user adds it to their news reader and when ever something new is posted on my site they know about it within a few seconds (or whenever they next turn on their reader) and therefore go and visit the site.

It is like "pushing" the information to them (of course it is their choice to use RSS). A very good way to get people coming back.

It's like a general email to the world, but there is no chance of spam. Fantastic!

BTW: I like your blog site, nice work for coding it yourself :)

yay! mod_rewrite too! Great!

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It's like a general email to the world, but there is no chance of spam. Fantastic!

Never thought about it that way. Good point.

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Sounds interesting. I'm a big dork for politics; always interested in an informed and pleasant debate.

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Poor man's trackback :p

HERE

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Yes, thank you. I am a poor man, indeed. :)

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Hi Honey,
I love driving! and you know that, even when there is traffic and it is stop and go, i guess it is my way to relax. The only thing i get mad about is when i am driving behind someone who is driving slow and i cant get around them RRRRRR

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I Love You too.
Thank you for a wonderful day, you are my soulmate and the one who knows me best, without you my life would not be complete. (crying)

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I think firefox is pretty ready for general public. My parents both use it, I was like "don't use IE because there is security issues" and that was it. The interface of a web browser is pretty much the same (different browser, or even operating system).

For workplaces, firefox *might* not be ready. Things like it doesn't listen to windows domain settings etc. Although that is a good thing ;)

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If I'm remembering correctly, Zoe has a similar message summary interface. It does make it easier to locate specific messages, particularly in lengthy threads.

http://zoe.nu/

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Thanks for posting this - I'm a Photoshop novice and this is one of the things I've wondered how to do without having to edit on a pixel level.

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No prob. Now if I could only figure out how to do the same thing in Flash!

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Cool Thanks for that :)

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"In the midst of a war – our nation at war – why on Earth would anyone want to change leaders, during this time?"

Isn't this the argument Big Brother put forward in Orwell's "1984"?

"Who will do whatever it takes to hunt the merciless killers down?"

Who pulled special forces troops off Bin Laden's trail in Afghanistan to prepare for the invasion of a country that didn't attack us, had no operational ties to the group that did, and posed no threat to us?

"He hunted down the prime terrorists…"

Except for the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and its mastermind Ayman Al-Zawahiri. I guess if you make an exception for the two most powerful people in the organization… Then there is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi…

"…and anyone who harbored terrorists."

Hussein-controlled Iraq was not a hotbed of terrorist activity prior to our invasion of the country. Al-Zarqawi was based in northern Iraq — territory controlled by the United States through the military enforcement of the no-fly zone. Pentagon plans to eliminate him were repeatedly tabled because some feared that killing Zarqawi would weaken the case against Iraq. Zarqawi is responsible for hundreds of deaths in Iraq that could have been prevented had he been eliminated when the opportunity presented itself. Instead, because of political considerations, a killer was allowed to carry on as he pleased.

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Daniel, thanks for your input. I never read "1984," but I'm sure you have a solid comparison. Does that mean you agree with that one point, or no?

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I adamantly, vehemently disagree. One of the premises of 1984 is that there is a perpetual war, a war the authoritarian regime ("Big Brother") claims that only it can win. I highly recommend 1984.

Incidentally, I'm also looking at the Interaction Designer's mailing list at the moment - one the members has the following in his sig:

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

-Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

Can you honestly say that the Bush administration hasn't used some of these tactics to justify four more years in office?

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I absolutely have no qualms about changing leaders during this time of war. In regards to your comment about the threat of terror hovering over America, I believe it to be over-embellished by the media. Can you think of a day in the past 3 years or so where you haven't heard anything about a 'possible' threat of terror attacks, or that security has been stepped up in 'the event of' an attack? I think the media has been a contributor to America's paranoia of terror attacks.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be on our guard, but I don't think we need encouragement from the media to constantly be on the edge of our seats, wondering when a tragedy like 9/11 will happen again. I suppose I choose not to live in fear of such an event happening again. I trust that our men and women overseas are doing some good and their presence is somewhat justified, but does Bush honestly think he can single-handedly oust every terrorist organization there is? I think our goals need to be re-aligned with a more realistic approach that does not involve American occupation of another country.

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Amanda, good points. I agree that the media suffocates America, and like you, I don't live in fear of a next attack. But I know in the back of my head that it could happen again.

I also don't think Bush is trying to single-handedly oust every terrorist organization there is. More or less, he can only do so much.

In general (thoughts to myself) - I don't want John Kerry and John Edwards in charge of this country, if and when disaster strikes again. I just can't come to terms with that.

I don't know. It's my gut feelings. Call me crazy.

I appreciate everyone's feedback so far.

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Funky. Is is possible do just do a general RSS for comments over the whole site?

If you'd like help with your sql problem just let me know I can have a look. ;)

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Thanks Dale, I will certainly ask you if I can't resolve the issue.

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I normally don't like to post about my political views but I guess I'll bite. I personally feel that the terrorist threat on American shouldn't be the only reason to vote for Bush but I think that what you stated in "The Bottom Line" is one of the more compelling reasons to vote for Bush.

I know he will do whatever it takes to protect this country. I know he will be aggressive, and forceful, when dealing with these hideous people. I know he will stand up, and face fear "head on."

At this point, I would rather go with what I know rather than hope that John Kerry will do better when it comes to fighting terroism. I will leave the discussion of the merits of both canidates stances on other issues for another place/time.

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At this point, I would rather go with what I know rather than hope that John Kerry will do better when it comes to fighting terroism.

Good point, Matt. My thoughts exactly.

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Yeah. My forums currently have over 17,000 posts within less than two years with no problems. Then you have places with millions and millions!

For my blog the only problem would be the unix timestamp, it only goes up to the year 2038. aw :(

I'm sure they'll come up with something by then.

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I'd like an invite if you still 'em! Even though my alumni address is great because I don't get spam, it's going to look weird in a short while.

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My dentist has a TV mounted in the roof. It's kind of odd, because that's the only TV I think I've watched for... quite some time now. That's normally playing MTV, and he's got speakers setup and everything... yeah, so he's a yuppie dentist :P It's all good!

On a more technical note, how do you think noise cancelling headphones would work with an intermittent sound like that of a dentists drill? I've never used them, but I'm curious...

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Hmmm. There would be no way that headphones could sound out the dentist's drill. Impossible.

My dentist DID let me use the headphones though, the other day. I can't say it helped a lot, but it was certainly something I've never tried before.

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No kidding. I just bought a spanking new laptop less than a week ago, which claims to have a 60GB hard drive. Ha! That storage is actually split between 2 hard drives, one with the recovery info on it, and a mere 14GB leftover which leaves the other hard drive with a wimpy 40GB.(Where is the other 6GB, I have no idea) I totally should have gone for the 80GB. Thank god for external drives!

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Really Simple Syndication. Why? Because it sounds more funky :p mmmm Syndication.

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mmmmm Summary. RICH summary. Dark Chocolate summary.

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It really pisses me off! My iPod is significantly less potent - without those 2 Gigs. Not to mention it seems like it "rounds down" the available storage.

I just realized that manufacturers or companies could actually LIE about the amount of storage available, just to get consumers to go out and but the bigger model - AFTER they purchased the smaller one.

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There are a lot of stories about that cemetary that are unique and interesting, there is a book that i read called haunted chicago and there are many stories about that cemetary in it. Also a very rich man named mr.pullman, he designed and built railroad cars is buried there. He was a very selfish man and when he died he was buried with lots of jewels, gold and money so no one else could have his fortune. But the funny and odd thing is that to make sure no one robbed his grave his casket was put in several cases i believe the final one made out of steel so on one could get into it.

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I live just a few blocks away from there and have passed it while on my rollerblades...I've never been inclined to enter the gates, however.

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Or, alternatively, computers become able to better interact with the material, through improved digitisation methods (OCR, etc.)

I think that for me, if my filing on computer was represented in a physical realm, my paper organisation skills would be far, far better. I don't really think it's that bad, aside from the space-saving aspect of it all, of course.

The only thing you missed in there is that paper can't be indexed, it isn't searchable... that's the biggest drawback, for me, that paper has when compared to a digital medium. That said, I disagree with the comparison of mediums like this -- there's no reason for one to necessarily replace the other. It's far more sensible to suggest that both have applications, and can or may be used to augment the communication of the other medium (for example, a book, with an online reference system with a fulltext index -- you get the best of both world; a physical, tangible copy of the book, and the ability to search it).

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Just one question, would you rather read a book or the pdf equivalent of it? Reading large documents [on a computer] can be cumbersome at best.

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Joshua,

I guess I am more concerned with the "space saving" aspect of digital text. And like you said, you can do so much more with the digital version, like fulltext search.

So, in a sense, I wasn't truly comparing - one cannot replace the other, like you said. I was more or less welcoming the transition - or, better yet, wondering if that transition will ever happen.

Ucosty,

I would rather read a book. A PDF has no "feeling."

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Paper will never die. It's too tasty for words. *begins to devour yummy paper* Ahem... The positives I find with the digital counterpart of paper is that it's so much easier to find your work on a PC than in a not so tidy stack of study notes. Then you have the ability, as you said, to do fulltext searches, which is such a great time saver especially at the moment as I 'study' (procrastinate) for my HSC.

Oh oh oh and i'd be thinking less about reading large documents as cumbersome as such... more like extremely straining on those peeperlike things that situate themselves a tad above and to either side of the nose.

/me goes back to procrastinating

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I suppose this brings up the topic. Should users register to blog sites? I know wordpress supports the option but many don't use it. Would it be easier to handle comments if there was some kind of login system? Although I think people like blogs because they can post once and don't feel like they need to say anymore.

I like that commenting system and have been planning to add *something* like that in mine. Although if I get around to it is another thing. :p

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/offtopic

Cool you got trackback working :D

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Dale, I can SEND trackbacks, but I can't RECEIVE them. I need some way of storing the trackback information in my database, and then displaying that as a comment, in the order that it was received.

You're not off the hook yet. I will still be bugging you about it. ;)

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The way I do it is I have another field called trackback in the database. If it is a normal comment the field = 0, if it is a trackback it is set to 1. Then you just check it as you display the comment and change it as needed.

Wordpress does it differently. It stores the trackback inside these tags: (is that going to display?) and checks that when it reads it out of the database.

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Hmm. Dale, your trackback sending is broken... observe the post here: http://www.joahua.com/blog/2004/09/26/freetel-are-evil#comment-110

"Spam by $_POST" -- looks as though your PHP is a little muddled...

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Brand awareness is pretty damn important for those site names which are quite widely used. Take for example, Terminate, the name is used quite a bit. So to counter being one of the others I developed the 'brand' which you can see as the upside-down 'i' come-explaination mark.

Speaking of which, are you going to create a bookmark icon for your site :P

I generally didn't notice it, until you mentioned bookmark icons ;)

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I have a bookmark icon, and it's in the right spot in my web directory, but it doesn't show up in some browsers.

It's strange. And frustrating.

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I figured out why. I just read your sites source code. You don't have 'shortcut icon' defined in your head tag. Put this into your head tag:

Should work then :P

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argh....

[link rel="shortcut icon" href="/resources/terminate-icon.ico" /]

replace [ ] with < >

obviously! :P

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Thanks... I tried that.. hope it works.

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As they say. There's no place like home

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You know, I would, if it weren't for my lack of teleportation device... working on it ;)

Enjoy!

P.S. Yeah, I think the iCal thing *is* a tad odd... I run my life from electronic organisers, too, but not when I'm sitting down to watch a movie. Hehehe.

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Hmmm. Is your website doing some really trippy thing with mod_rewrite? Your favicon looks as though it were being included, or something. As an aside, you should change [link rel="shortcut icon" link="favicon.ico"] to [link rel="shortcut icon" link="/favicon.ico"], so that it works from ALL pages -- the preceding slash means the URI is relevant to the root of the current website. So, on this page, my web browser is looking at http://www.matthom.com/archive/2004/09/29/01/favicon.ico for the favicon, when in fact it should be looking at http://www.matthom.com/favicon.ico instead.

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Gracias. My favicon has caused nothing but problems, anyway. But your tip might help, in some way.

Thanks again.

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Ah good old mysql. You just install it and watch it work its wonders. Although a good tweaking can really bring its performance up.

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Yes, hold down Alt while you're selecting the text:

"my wonderful link. Please"

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Excellent, thanks Dale.

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Don't try this in xwindows tho... all you will do is drag the window around the screen :).

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Paste Special is very useful. Although normally I'd just paste it into notepad and then copy it out again. Although your way is easier :p

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Thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for. Super tutorial!

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You should read this (if you haven't already), mainly the comments.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/ENUM.html

enum column type allows for a more strict set of input values, which could be good or bad.

Overall I don't think your choice should affect anything too much.

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Thanks for the link and feedback. You're right, though. It's barely worth consideration. It's not going to affect anything drastically.

Therefore, I am going with char(1).

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Because I'm lazy, and can't be bothered looking it up, is enum case sensitive, or could you have got away with using the column type you specified in the post for both upper- and lower-case characters?

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Josh, enum is NOT case sensitive. But you bring up a good point. I will have to look into that.

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Ahhh, a man of my kinda thinking. Always coming up with ways to get around the quirks of Microsoft products. I will keep this in mind, I have that problem alot also. But a shortcut key would be sweet as pie, wouldn't it? I am a HUGE fan of Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V. Sometimes my left pinkie finger gets sore from going over to the Ctrl key so much.

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So did this happen to you? The same thing happened to my mother in law a few years back. The deer ran right into the side of her car, fell down, shook it off, and got up and took off. Whodathunkit??

Yesterday morning on the way into work I saw a deer that had just gotten hit lying on the side of the road. A truck was pulling up to it, presumably the person who hit it. Luckily my 2 year old son didn't see it. Bad way to start the day, huh?

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The deer did more damage to our car, than we did to it. It was huge. And yes, it just got back up and continued across the road, like nothing hit it.

We were lucky to not have been killed.

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I'm out of getting them. This year alone I caught the flu, I have only just in the last 2 weeks gotten over it. But yeah, the shot only works for one strain so say for those rare cases like myself who catch two different strains of the flu, it kinda would be useless. *sigh*

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Argh just to relieve confusion, I forgot to mention that I had caught the flu twice. I think I edited it out.

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Very interesting idea. I'd see no problem entering it into a database.

I've only really worked with php and the problem with this is the script only runs when someone visits the site. We'd want this to occur every X minutes. I think there is a php program that runs php scripts outside the web browser. I shall have to look into this.

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I wish the cubs were there but I am happy for the Red Sox!

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I agree. It would be pretty electrifying if the Cubs were playing the Red Sox in the World Series. Ouch. Hot.

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But what I'd like to know is - are we still going to have all this bloody spam? ;)

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DEFINITELY HTML tags!

I'm using a User Agent which doesn't support styles (or, I've chosen to disable them, or something). I load your website, and what would have used to have been a header displays like any other normal text.

If that's acceptable, then you shouldn't have been using headers to start with (because that would mean they were never intended to function as headers, but instead as simple styling devices for text with no STRUCTURAL meaning -- what semantics is all about).

So, consider the semantics of header tags (they're designed to create structure in a document, as with all headers), then consider what a website would look like (and structure like) if styles went and jumped overboard, or the website was being read aloud by a screen reader.

Additionally, there're search engines to consider: content in headers (within reason) is given greater weight than normal text -- if your "headers" aren't semantically headers, and just styled text, then search engines (which don't care about style sheets!) aren't going to index your content as well as they could, and your ranking will reflect poorly because of that...

Josh.

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Josh, I agree with your ideas.

But, something bothers me when I have a GROUP of lists, and I use HTML header tags for each. I just don't see how - semantically speaking - each header tag applies DIRECTLY to each list.

It almost makes more sense to include each header WITHIN each list, but that is not possible with header tags.

Don't get me wrong. All your points are correct, and they make sense. I'm just kind of curious, is all.

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Okay, fair enough... I see your point. I think you're wanting to be able to tangibly LINK elements, like using label tags for form controls. Whilst this is good where it's applicable, think about your webpage as though it were a text document (because, more often than not, that's what it is)

TITLE
Heading 1
Heading 1.1
 Heading 1.1.1
  List goes here.
Heading 2, etc.

Logical structure exists, and the reader may safely *assume* (unless the list has a legend or caption below it directly associating it with something, in which case they *know*) that the list falls under the content section 1.1.1

I see what you want (I kinda do, too!), but there aren't really facilities to deal with it (so far as I'm aware) in our current markup. At any rate, it's not 100% necessary, given logical document flow would dictate a connection, anyway.

My $AU0.02 ;)

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I suppose what I'm really looking for is a "list header," much like a table header.

The table header would be <th>. So... I guess I'm looking for <lh>, which obviously doesn't exist.

You're right about the document flow. The headers would dictate the next item in the document, and that's natural for the reader/viewer.

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SELECT first_name, last_name, count(first_name) AS count, count(last_name) AS count2
FROM persons_table
GROUP BY last_name having count > 1 AND count2 > 2

DISTINCT will just pull out the value once. So if I had two Matts I would only see one.

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opps. Change

count2 > 2

to

count2 > 1

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Excellent. Thanks.

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How bout this Matt: Do you need the day in there? You say if you remove the day, then it works?? Could you write a function that removes either the day (what you don't want) and gives you the date (what you do want) or maybe just remove the date and put that into a new field? Do this using LEFT, RIGHT, or MID...is there a TRIM function in Excel?? You will have to use some logic since the days are all different character lengths, but nothing too bad....maybe worth a shot...

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Yes, I would have to somehow use a function that removes the day - or, in this case, the first entire word after the first comma:

Wednesday, November 3, 2004

I would need to remove everything from AFTER the FIRST COMMA - backward. I don't want to have to go in and manually remove each one.

I looked for a TRIM function in Excel, but there's nothing obvious right now. It will come to me...

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Oh wait... I just figured it out!

Text to Columns!

Under the Data menu, there is an option called "Text To Columns..."

I could then break up each cell, using the comma as a column delimeter.

Bingo!

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DOH! I shoulda thought of that! Text to columns is sweet, ain't it??

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Agree 100%. For a little more about the semantic use of <br /> elements, I wrote something a while ago about semantic indentation, which is (when correctly used) dependent upon the application of break tags in a semantic manner.

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Thanks Josh. Your reference is much more in-depth... good stuff.

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Have you seen Shrek 2 the graphics are awesome.
Especially the sky becomming a storm I was in awe.
What's funny is HP payed millions for it to be made and people after seeing ads for Shrek 2 where HP was advertised asked after the film what's HP? For eg) Talking to Dad. That's funny people don't know what HP and the AD for HP didn't say what HP was? Father's response: Most people as you call newbies do know HP. (Then hear Mum and sister ask what's HP?) =).

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Matthew, I haven't seen Shrek 1 OR 2. Everyone says I should. I suppose if I like The Incredibles, I would like Shrek too (pun intended).

I like your HP story. Yes, there are far too many acronyms these days.

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Ever since I saw the first trailer for The Incredibles, i've wanted to see it.

It sounds great, but are you saying it's better than Finding Nemo?

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Stuart, it IS better (in my opinion) than Finding Nemo. The Increbibles doesn't have that "baby" element. Finding Nemo was great - but it lacks the substance that The Incredibles has.

The Incredibles is geared more towards adults, where as Finding Nemo is more towards kids.

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I wanted to share a news item from today:

Incredibles tops Nemo.

Rightfully so.

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Norah Jones doing Christmas.....I am right there with ya on that one. She is one of my all time favorites and her voice and style beg for holiday music.

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(nodding) Yep.

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I liked the incredibles and loved the annimation, however, i felt that it was a bit long and i started to loose interest and one point. When it comes to comparing Finding Nemo to the Incredibles, i think that you should not, there are two totally different stories there and the content of the message they are sending should not be compared to the work that was done. If you take away the story and look at the film for its computer graphics then you can reasonably compare them. However, i feel that if you did compare them in that sense you would see that the movies are very similar, yes one maybe more advanced than the other as over the years technology advances, but i think they both have the quality that we have learned to looked forward to in pixar. I can wait to see the next one - Cars-

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"trackback"

http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/192

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My current system has very few comments which is bad. Although the new thing should be much better.

settings.php
//remove ^ E_NOTICE for full error reporting

//uncomment to display errors in browser

//adds prefix to the table names. Allows for multiple installs in one database

functions.php

//start the timer, works out page generation time

//stops the timer and returns the time it took for generation. Level of accuracy can be changed

//checks if gzip is enabled, if the server supports it and the client supports it. If so output gzipped content

//checks if gzip is enabled and server supports it. Use for admin panel stats or something

//checks if the user has come from another link on the current site. If so any actions to go back will take them there (i.e certain post etc) otherwise take them back to the root of the site.

#FINISH THIS (move to another file?, cookie array)
//remembers users information, handles guests

#FINISH THIS
//handles registered users info

//adds slashes to a value. Protect yourself from SQL injection attacks!! No one likes them. This will add slashes to an array too. Recursion baby!

#FINISH THIS (work out custom session name or something, option for use only cookies?)
//starts the session

//lets get the details about the site out of the database

#FINISH THIS
//modified wordpress trackback. Shall code my own after the hsc ;)
//submitted patched version to matt. Port trackback thing. Wordpress now patched
//SQL STUFF HERE

//serialize an array and put it into a cookie

//return the array from the cookie

//deletes a cookie

//display links bound to a certain category

//makes title into one that works nicely in a url

Not sure how useful it is without the code :)

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Excellent, Dale. Love it.

It is more useful than you think. It inspires.

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Ok, I admit it, I have NEVER commented any of my code. Not even my HTML. But, since I am a PHP late bloomer, I definitely know I'd better get my act together because I have worked with ColdFusion before and I know how easy it is to 'lose' code.

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Amanda, yes - losing code and forgetting what some code does is frustrating... can't wait to see your comments

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// test to see if we are not on the homepage

// if we are, then echo the welcome statement

// categorical listing - only displays the title and excerpt

// post listing - lists the entire single post

// opening statement included with the 5 most recent posts

// nothing matched the query string

// set the allowed order by columns

// if order is not set, or it is not in the allowed list, then set it to a default value. Otherwise, set it to what was passed in.

Also, here's a post with some heavily-commented code.

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Like it, Chad.

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I'm more of a C coder [switching constantly between game development and operating system development]

These comments are old. They are from my old CMS system which was left incomplete and shoved into several sites before being ceremoniously replaced by wp.

// strip url of such things as '..' and '.'

// find if page exists and include it if it does load it

//display newsitems + comments
//(shit the is fugly ass code)
//i should really investigate css+xhtml soon
//gah!!oneoneone

//now substitute stuff such as page breaks, comment blocks, spam... mmm spam

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UCosty, I like the personal comments - or "notes to self..."

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Sounds like a great idea....I look forward to hearing more about this for next Xmas.

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Excellent album. My favorite song from here is 3x5. Fabulous lyrics.

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Snazzy summary. You're missing information regarding content encoding and MIME types, though -- the latter of which is a requisite for Strict and 1.1, from memory. Anne always has a lot to say (or rant!) about this particular issue, and there was a lengthy discussion about it on WSG a few weeks back.

Other than that, good job!

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That's fantastic. Good work that's exactly what I needed.
;)I've been learning HTML and looking at PHP now.
Thxs for puting that up. I really appreciate it. Cheers.

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When you use n in a single-quoted string (') it will not be parsed as a newline, remember that.
And btw: look in to short-tags ;) (for php.ini/htaccess)

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A good point made by 'HTML dog' today, regarding using Strict over Transitional doctypes.

http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/archives/000078.php

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Thanks for that. I've been trying to figure this thing out for months on and off. Easy to do without the anti-aliasing other ways but this is one sure method to get the job done right.

Thanks again.

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What IS the htaccess script that I need?

And, everyone, please ignore the 'echo' example from above... I totally messed that one up. Like Blitz said, I don't need the newline (n), and I don't even think I need to escape those double quotes... but I could be wrong on that one.

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Great song, great album. Although my personal fave on that album is City of Blinding Lights.

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Yes, City of Blinding Lights is great too.

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mysql_fetch_array() is a very cool function. I use it all the time.

Although I don't use phpmyadmin I use a program called MySQL Control Center which can be downloaded from the Mysql website. I think it runs on most operating systems.

It supports profiles of different servers etc which is good because I use more than one. Plus I think I like the interface better than a webpanel for some reason.

But both are great programs.

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I also use MySQL CC, on both Windows and Linux platforms. There's something on the MySQL website about it being deprecated, but I'm uncertain... it still works great over here! The ability to manage multiple servers from the one app is a huge plus IMO, but you can't beat web apps for convenience sometimes...

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I wholeheartedly agree. In order to have the maximum productivity, you have to schedule things out. I even take it one step further and do it on a day to day basis. I plan my morning, and then before lunch, schedule things that must be done that afternoon. And as I think of things, I write them down. I am an endless trail of post-it notes and little reminders. But it works for me!

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Try voice recorders, too. They work wonders. No need for pens, paper, etc.

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Google is doing it (and GMail has been for a while now). I'm not sure how it works myself yet (haven't had time to play), but it looks damn cool!

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I wish we all had more time to "play." December sucks.

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hehe, thanks for that. Took a whole 1 minute to do. Wow I now have a CSS guide on my ipod! :p

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Oh yes, the winter blues. One thing I try to do is remove myself from my familiar surroundings. Usually, this constitutes heading directly to the adorable little coffee shop that is just across the street with a book in hand and a taste for a warm drink. It helps tremendously just to get out of my apartment for a while. I too am looking very forward to spring!

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I am not the biggest fan of winter months as matt knows. I am always running from one warm place to the next. Yes, the first snow fall is beautiful but after that is it nothing but a cold mess. I would love to be able to get out there and enjoy nature, but my toes get cold faster than normal so i get to enjoy nature through the window. What gets me through the coldest months are the thoughts of spring, that first day when you walk outside and smell the fresh southern spring air, it is the thought of the first walk on a warm night with the one you care about, it is the joys of the future spring and summer that keep my mind a drift during the sub zero days. I found summer type movies such as Blue Crush keep me going, also if all else fails a trip to orlando to see my sister and thaw out.

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When you have an image, that has (to make it simple) the word "Contact" written on it the ALT attribute value should read "Contact". However, some people like to make it "Information on how to contact us". Now that is not alternate content, that is additional information and should be put inside a TITLE attribute.

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Thanks, Anne. That helps a bit.

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Hixie explains it best with his and alt text and tooltips.

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Oops, I screwed the markup in that comment, sorry, you'll need to fix it. It should say:

Hixie explains it best with his mini alt text FAQ and alt text and tooltips.

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Thanks for the links, Lachlan.

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There's an easy way to check whether or not you have used good ALT attributes on your images: view the page in Lynx. You can also use Opera, which makes it very easy to toggle images on and off, but I think the effect is even more apparent in Lynx.

It may be somewhat surprising to see that many images will be better off with alt="", i.e. an empty ALT attribute. If the image doesn't convey any vital information, there's no need to bother text browser users or visually impaired users with the fact that there is an image that they can't see.

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I think storing HTML in the database is good. Although not everything. You can convert new lines (n) to

using a cool script from photomatt, Extended autop which can be found here: http://photomatt.net/scripts/autop That is what I use in my blogging system.

Storing HTML in the database means that you can store almost anything and you are not confined to functions that you have coded yourself, such as bbcode ([b][/b]) which is what I currently use.

Then if you want to remove certain html from posts (such as comments) just use this function http://sourceforge.net/projects/kses/

Hope that helps.

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Dale, cool. You make a good point. After all, there is no harm in storing the HTML in the database, because if I want it removed, I can just use a function that strips out the HTML elements.

And, I also use that "autop" script for when comments are inserted.

However, the problem comes up with images, and other such HTML that just doesn't belong in the database.

And what about paragraphs that have a class applied to them? What if that class is changed down the road?

These are things that are making me question my whole approach of storing FORMATTING elements within my content.

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Tommy, thanks for your input.

I read Ian Hickson's FAQ regarding alt text (thanks to Lachlan above), and I have a better understanding.

However, what constitutes as "vital information?"

Just curious. This is where the fine line is drawn for me - from a vague understanding to a firm understanding. I am getting there, though.

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Mmm formatting is a good question. You COULD write a bb-like-code thing to do div styles.

So [quote]bla[/quote] which then gets converted to the right html. But you'd still need to do this for all your different styles and tags etc.

If you did need to change something from the database you could just write a script that takes the div tag out of the database and changes it to the new div style.

I'm not sure what the best way to handle formatting is. Both storing HTML in the database and using BBcode isn't the best. Although I don't see a way around it.

I'd head the HTML in database way...

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My way of doing it goes something like this:

I'll mark up the page and enter ALT texts that seem reasonable. Then I'll check the page in Lynx to see how it turns out when you're not "distracted" by the images. More often than not I realise that those ALT texts aren't very good at all. They tend to be descriptions of the image, rather than a textual equivalent.

In some cases I rewrite the ALT text so that it works better, in other cases it dawns on me that it's better to use an empty ALT.

For people who use graphic menu buttons and such, the ALT text should just say the word(s) in the button. Diagrams will need a brief summary as an ALT text, and then a comprehensive description via LONGDESC. A photograph is iffy. If it's just a picture of the author with his wife and their dog, posing in front of their sailboat, it should probably have ALT="". People who can't see the image probably aren't interested in knowing what they are missing.

If the purpose of the picture is to illustrate something about the main point of the page, it's different. Say I'm including a picture of myself on my "About" page. The point is to give people an option to view my ugly mug and put a face to the name. In that case, I'd use ALT="Tommy" and a LONGDESC pointing to a description of my grey hair and scraggly beard. :)

Sorry for getting long-winded, but the point I'm trying to make is that you need to test your ALT texts by seeing the page with the text equivalents instead of the images. Only then can you get a fair idea of how well they work.

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Dale, good enough. Thanks for your input.

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What a wonderful idea Matthom. My suggestion is for you to email information about your idea to the developers of Mozilla Firefox. The whole point of open source is anyone can influence a project ie improve it, and it will not be ignored (hopefully or they reply with no).
BTW I just encountered a bug with your webpage for this blog, for making this comment. I'll email you now with an image of my experience, while I encounted the problem.

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Matthew, thanks for your feedback. You have a good point. I will make an effort to email Firefox developers.

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I thought the idea of a website being accessible was that it worked on any browser even if that happens to be IE.

Although my site doesn't look quite the same in IE as Firefox it still has all the features etc.

Yes IE's lack of Standards support is dodgy but I think we'll have to put up with it until IE7, which I'm hoping is going to be very good.

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To me, an "accessible" site is one that contains as much semantic markup as possible. But yes, the markup is exactly the same, no matter what browser you use. The only difference is how the browser interprets that markup, and that browser's support for CSS.

If only IE wasn't such a headache...

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if it is purely for display purposes, you would have used < b > < i > something < / i > < / b >

but < strong > and < em > are different .

if your web page is read by a screen reader software, for the blind people, it reads your raw html / xhtml and when it sees a strong or em tag, it says it LOUDER than the other words so the user gets the meaning of it.

thats the idea.

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Sadish, if it is purely for display purposes, I would NOT use <b> or <i>. I would use CSS, like you're supposed to.

<b> and <i> are soon to be deprecated HTML elements that have no semantic meaning whatsoever.

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you are right on that too...

the main idea I wanted to convey is, 'strong' and 'em' are has more meanings to themselves instead of just visual representation.

Thanks.

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Yep new years eve has come and gone. But what fun :)

Us Aussies are always ahead of everyone :p ;)

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Fun is happening now.

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So if i go to one of those other sites (ie napster)i have to pay a fee which is probably like $10 a month and i can only listen to my music on my computer cause if i do us anyother source to play it (ie burn a cd) I have to pay, what a rip off, so in the long run the website is costing more than it would to go to i tunes and get the song for 99. What a joke!

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Call me old fashioned, but I just can't get behind the idea of "renting" my music.

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Yikes! Looks like someone was using FrontPage, huh? Dirty code makes me feel dirty (and not in a good way), and I can't stand it either. Lately, I find myself constantly validating my local code, and I'm also really getting into using n and t more and more. I hate looking at my parsed code and things like ul's not being lined up all pretty.

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Chad, I agree.

I love using new lines (n) and tabs (t), as well. I like viewing the source and seeing nice, clean, structured code.

God, was FrontPage a disaster, or what?

At least Macromedia is serious about Web Standards. I don't use Dreamweaver, since it's too slow - but the code it produces is top-notch.

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I'd always drawn the distinction differently...

Acronyms correspond directly to letters (GUI - Graphical User Interface) whilst Abbreviations aren't so true to form -- take the example of abbrev. -- it's an abbreviation of abbreviation. As opposed to your approach of phonetics...

I'm too tired right now to think enough to find evidence either way, but I don't know I agree with you so far as the definitions go... sure, there's a difference, and as such it's important to use the different elements, but I'm (in a tired state) disputing your definitions... *shrug*

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Josh, are you referring to the definitions in the English language, or the HTML elements?

Because, you're right - they might differ a little.

I'm almost 100% positive that my definition (here) of the HTML elements are correct.

As far as the English language - I can't be so sure.

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Well, I just briefly flicked over the W3C recommendations for XHTML 1.0, and couldn't see anything. I just checked a dictionary, and my (English language, not XHTML spec) definitions were correct:
Abbreviation
Acronym

I'm still unconvinced about the difference in spec terminology, but remain open to links.

Anyway, amidst this (kind of pointless, for all the practical difference it makes -- sorry for wasting time!) debate over terminology, in terms of actual usability I think it's best to define and redefine a term as much as is realistic rather than not too much -- another idea is to have an appendix of acronyms at the end of a (more lengthy) document, taking advantage of target hyperlinks from the content body. This allows you to not only define terms, but also give explanation/annotation as required.

Josh

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The W3C has nothing on <acronym> or <abbr> elements?

I was thinking more about the English language definitions for each word, and you're right - an abbreviation is nothing like it is defined in HTML.

Maybe I'll try to find some links with better information...

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Oh wow. Those are some seriously nice photos. Great stuff!

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Thanks! You can't go wrong with icicles. They are great portrait elements.

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Well, from a marketing perspective, they're probably figuring that people within the same household are less likely to sign up for their own accounts anyway than people who live alone/elsewhere. By doing this, they're encouraging ALL members of the household to use the service (albeit with the same account) -- probably resulting in increased usage.

If people off-site are using the same account, then billing falls to someone else who the off-site users of NetFlix *may* consult with before spending money -- this delay isn't something healthy for NetFlix, and can be avoided through effectively forcing separate geographic locations to use their own accounts (and billing info).

Just a theory...

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Josh, you're right. It's just "wishful thinking" on my part.

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I totally agree. This movie's a lot of fun. Best part: they're making a sequel. This always has the potential to be a disaster, but I don't worry too much about sequels after watching Bourne Supremacy. Did you see that one yet?

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Theresa, I did see Bourne Supremacy - and I can't wait for the third sequel to that series. Very exciting too.

I didn't know a sequel to The Italian Job is in the works. I know the movie is based on an old movie...

I'm looking forward to it.

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Those are great - I really like the 2nd one, especially, with the trees so sharp in the background and the icicles out of focus.

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I cant wait for basball to start again and to sit at the bar and watch our beloved cubbies. I did not know that matt clement was traded, it is sad to see him go. Only a few more months until we can go to the greatest ballpark in the us.

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Tools -> Options -> General -> Fonts & Colors -> Always use my: Fonts [] Colors []

Should do it just fine... or have I misunderstood the question? You shouldn't need extensions...

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p.s. that's in Firefox 1.0/Win

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I think there is a plugin for firefox that allows you to setup your own custom CSS file for each site (the css file loads off your HDD), although I cannot find it at the moment.

I've also heard this feature is going to be part of firefox some stage in the future.

Bit off topic, but I run Safari because firefox seems a little slow on my mac. Plus the scrolling is weird and the middle mouse click doesn't seem to work. Do you notice this?

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Josh, that's just what I was looking for. Thanks. That is pretty much the same location (Preferences > General > Fonts and Colors) on a Mac, as it is on a PC.

Dale, you bring up a good point. Firefox seems strange on a Mac, doesn't it? I noticed it too. However, I still use it because Safari doesn't have KEYWORD browsing, and that's a feature I truly take advantage of, in Firefox.

To speed things up, I tried this - I'm not sure if it worked, but it was worth a try.

And the middle mouse click thing annoys me too. Honestly, I think Firefox runs better on Windows. Same with Opera.

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Not being a US-ite, I haven't really paid THAT much attention to what Google does with addresses and all that... but isn't there some way to look up that kind of data using it? It'd be an interesting exercise to grab their XML SOAP kit and see if you could build a web interface to that data direct from Google. I think there's a limit to the number of SOAP queries you can run a day, but it'd be more than you'd realistically need. That way, you get your data for free, and it's updated live (unlike something distributed as an Access database). Just an idea, as I've never played with SOAP myself and don't have the slightest idea how to do it, or even if the data Google has would be right for the purpose. But, if you need absolutely up-to-date data or feel like some fun with pulling data from remote SOAP queries, it could be worth a look...

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p.s. This link is worth a look:
http://www.xmlrpc.com/googleGateway

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Josh, thanks for the ideas.

Simple Object Access Protocol is definitely something I’ve been yearning to learn more about. You may have just given me some inspiration to begin. (Another good link on SOAP.)

As far as zip codes, I am sure you are right with the fact that other distributed systems might already have the information available for exchange. This would be a much more "wise" way of approaching my zip code database.

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A1 = "Monday, January 1, 2004"

Put this formula in anywhere:

=VALUE(RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-SEARCH(",",A1)-1))

The output will be the date in numerical format. Reformat the number so that it shows as a date.

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As far as I know, they're quite similar (in fact, most sites just say RSS for both, like Apple). Pretty much they're just syndication formats that people want to read, and might want to use. Usually I don't think it really matters, most feed aggregators support almost any format...

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Scary about photo. It makes you look like you're about to attack the camera or something even worse. Nevertheless a good photo.

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Ah, but the Stitch shirt must make me seem somewhat harmless... ;)

Maybe I'll try to smile next time.

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I was looking at I-life and I - work yesterday when i was picking up my baby (my powerbook not a actual child) I like keynote, it seems to be able to do more than powerpoint, there seemed to be more options, i liked it very much and a nice altenative to powerpoint. I also saw the new minimac which i strongly believe will get more people to cross over to macs. I have both a mac and pc and i dont like the pc at all. My newest project is to get my parents to get rid of their beloved pc and get a mini mac, it will make their lives so much easier

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Keynote and Pages are two very intriguing programs. I really want them.

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so i will go 1/2 with you so we can both get them

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I found that i could not find somethings i wanted on i tunes either

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Matt, I use RealPlayer for my music....Their music store has Volume II(9.99) but not Volume I.

And, they do support you i-fanatics. : )

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Amanda, can RealPlayer music downloads be played on an iPod? What is the format that the music file is in? Is it MP3, or something else?

Thanks...

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The music downloads as RealAudio, but I think when you set up your MP3 Player it will convert it. They advertise that they support iPod players, so you shouldn't have a problem.

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Oh how much i love that place, even though there are not a lot of exciting and thrilling rides at epcot (whic stands for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow)there is something about that park which seems to make dreams more vivid. My favorite part of the park happens at night when the lights go down, it is then that the show begins. Illuminations, EPCOT's fireworks is so amazing that one must see it for themselves. I can't wait to go down there again, there is something about that place that strikes a fire inside me and inspires me to create. Someday i will be there, inspiring others to imagine and dream.

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Is that a file format from that old sissy Microsoft Works suite? Remember that crap? Pretty much worthless to anyone who knew anything about writing a real document. Surely there is a way to open it in Word without losing the formatting...

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You're very lucky to find such a good host. 1 hour backups is amazing!

So far my site hasn't been hacked, but anything is possible. It's always a good idea to keep backups.

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I think in XP there is...

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Hey, why don't you use their affiliates programme for linking to them? Sucks about the exploit, but that's pretty insane backing up! Spose it's just an hourly Cron job or something, still though... that's neat!

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I love to hear the star spangled banner sung live or performed live it always gets all the hairs on my arm to rise. The song means so much that words cannot explain, it is a feeling of knowing that song stands for so much of the past and future of our great country.

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You can’t just "out step" PowerPoint’s versatility.

Have you used Keynote? I was able to open it up for the first time and create a full presentation without reading any documentation. I tried to do the same with Powerpoint, but felt like I couldn't find the tools I needed fast enough.

And you can’t just create a program called Pages, and expect millions of Word users to take notice.

Actually, millions of Word users will take notice. Those that use Word on the Mac. Word on the Mac is slow and it costs money. Apple has introduced an application that you can get for under $100 that comes packaged with Keynote 2, and it is still compatible with Word.

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Trust me, Jeremy - I am an Apple fan indeed. You don't have to convince me of an Apple product.

I just think it's kinda bold for Apple fans (including myself) to believe that "Pages," and "Keynote" are going to be the new standards in desktop publishing.

Don't get me wrong - I hope they are. And I know they have the "ability" to be - BUT I am also a realist.

I don't doubt the quality of Pages and Keynote - and as soon as I get iWork, I am sure I will be nothing short of amazed.

But I believe there are more PC Office users, than Mac Office users, and therefore, I don't think these Apple products will put much of a dent in Microsoft Office.

Over time, maybe. But right away? No.

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Man I love Google. I can't even begin to fathom how much I have learned from sites I have found through Google. And this is pretty cool too, but I haven't jumped on the text messaging bandwagon yet. Yet.

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From what i've read and heard, Google has made good and innovative use of their information. But i'm in the UK and Google SMS hasn't reached us yet. My only complaint is that if it doesn't find anything, it doesn;t text back to let you know. It simply leaves you hanging, thinking to yourself "is there something wrong with the network or has google failed to find what i am looking for?".

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That's just awesome. Seem too good to be true. Do you have to pay for that service?

Also this amazed me a few weeks ago.. BTW(By The Way) Google has a search engine for every platform as well.

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Farheen, I have had that happen once. I just never got a response from my query. I, too, thought something was wrong with the network. Maybe Google needs to include a response that simply says "no results found."

However, I have had it respond with a "Did you mean..." In other words, if you spell something wrong (which is quite easy on a cell phone keyboard), Google will spell check, just like it normally does on a computer.

Mat, as far as I know, there is no fee for the service.

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I'm sending this page to Google. Let's see if they have anything to say.

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I just tried that, that is so cool, and i always used my t zones to look up info.

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Optimizing SQL queries is important.

I use left join a lot to join two tables together for certain information.

For example. On my blog site in the bottom right of each post there is the number of comments for that post. These comments are stored in a different table, but I want to get the information out in one query.

This is what I do (cut down version):

$query = '
SELECT posts.*, COUNT(comments.post_id)
AS count
FROM posts LEFT JOIN comments
ON posts.post_id = comments.post_id
WHERE (posts.version = 'published')
AND posts.blog_id = 1;

Also I use it for my RSS comments. You mainly want the data from the comments table but you also want the main name of the post, and it's link.

Also you should try and use SQL for things such as sorting and if possible DATE calculations, because they are much faster than doing with PHP. It also means that the array you are passing back to PHP is smaller.

So the point is, to try can get as much done as possible with one query. While keeping the PHP load as low as possible.

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I keep telling my wife I want a Powerbook, and she tells me "No you don't". She had a Mac years back and says I wouldn't like it. Matt, what kind of a learning curve would a Windows user have starting from scratch on a Mac? From everything I read, working on a Mac sounds so much more efficient than Windoze. MS Office pisses me off daily, but in my line of work, it's a necessary evil to use, since everyone else uses it.

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Chad, there's not too much of a learning curve (especially for someone like you who already is extremely familiar with computers) - but your question intrigues me. I may do a full blog entry on the topic... It's a good idea.

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chad, i made the switch 2 years ago and it was not that hard to change. I love my powerbook and prefer it over our pc.

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Roxy, what do you like about your Powerbook, over your PC?

Was it a hard transition to make? What did you learn from your transition?

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1. Depends, although probably email.
2. Email set to check every 1-5 minutes
3. Depends too. Some days I'll do heaps of emails while others won't be as much. But I'd still say email.

I don't think one can replace the other. One is personal while the other one everyone can read. (too many ones there :p)

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1. Email usually
2. Email. I use gmail, and have it open all the time.
3. Email

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I can't answer honestly at the minute as I haven't got an RSS reader on these workstations, but I think I'd check blog feedback first (respond if required), check email more often, and write email more frequently (to people I know and would generally email regularly, otherwise it's probably blog feedback).

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I'd love to use CSS table-layout, but until they add rowspan and colspan, it's just too limited to be of much use.

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I thought colspan and rowspan were added as "presentational hooks" anyway.

I’ve never come across a sitaution (while using tables for tabular data) where I needed to use either attribute.

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Nope, in CSS tables, there is no equivalent of colspan and rowspan. This confuses me, as there are dozens of cases where you'd need them. Oh well.

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Unadorned? That could be a bit boring, couldn't it? :P Perhaps in conflict with "passion for your words", too... other than that, sounds snazzy.

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Yeah, that "passion" part I just threw in there, because I couldn't think of a better way to end it. ;)

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I too, watch the extras after the movie. I usually go for the gag reel, or deleted scenes first. Then I may to go the trailer. On a rare occasion, I may actually watch the movie with the directors/actors comments on. Although, I've never made it all the way through the entire movie, as it gets boring after a while.

As far as getting more/changing extras, I don't know what I'd add, but I'd probably remove the actors' bio's. I don't think anyone reads through that.

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Matt, for whatever reason, the role of Peter Pan (on stage) has traditionally been played by a woman. Hollywood chooses men. I have no idea why.

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Well... she was really good tonight. It was Cathy Rigby. This was the last Peter Pan in Chicago (for now). So she put on a great final performance.

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I loved the show, the drum circle and the indian dances were awesome. The whole show was amazing. next up sweet charity. I cannot wait!

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Roxy, I can't wait for Sweet Charity, too. Christina Applegate will be cool to see on stage. Should be good.

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Sweet Charity is a pre-broadway launch, so it will be exciting to see something before it goes to broadway. I hope that it is good. Christina Applegate has done shows that envolve singing before, she was a pussycat doll (like the ones that were on Las Vegas last night)

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Interesting, worth considering. I like the idea.

Have you made this idea up, or is this is a new thing for blogs?

Anyways, I'm sure if you set up a forum. Me and many others would post on your forums. Just a thought. =:-)

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Matt, I think it's a great idea. You can bet on the fact that if there were a topic I was interested in, I'd contribute.

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macosxhints.com and The Web Standards Project are examples of sites/blogs that have many authors.

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Good article, but one clarification: there is a limitation on how many characters you can include when using POST (or there generally is), dictated by the webserver (or by PHP). From memory PHP has a 2MB limit by default? although it's possible to increase this.

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Passing variables with $_GET and $_POST is good but only for certain things.

I use $_COOKIE for storing details such as Name, Email, WWW in the comment area. This is good because you don't need to store anything on the server side.

Where as $_SESSION is good for storing more secure data. It's like a cookie on the server side.

Remember to ALWAYS check data coming from a user, you may need to filter it etc to stop people from hacking or breaking things.

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I've always liked the idea of multi user blogging.

I wrote something quickly about it last year:
http://www.bluetrait.com/archive/2004/09/14/multiuserblogging/

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I totally agree with you on this. I took a (very) short course on ADA compliancy a few weeks back and they harped on how important both the title and alt tags are. And I like the exact time tooltip also...may have to implement that myself!

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Filezilla for FTP
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

For text editing I use...mmm I don't remember it's name. I'll need to boot the windows box :p

Most of the time I use Dreamweaver for PHP coding...

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I haven't seen this film yet and I really want to see it. Tell me what it's actually like, i'm interested.

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Excellent, thanks.

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I use Notepad2 to edit all types of text files. It recognizes commom file types and formats the look of the file accordingly (colored font, italics, etc.). I use it to edit all of my .php and .css files, as well as .txt, .dat, .prn, .csv, etc. It handles line breaks properly also, unlike Windows Notepad. And Notepad2 is FREE, lightweight, and very robust. I used to use Dreamweaver to edit my .php, but it is so clunky and such a memory hog, I can't stand it anymore. Plus, using a text editor to write code keeps you more "in touch" with what you are writing.

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Dude, throw that Windows 98 junker out the window! That was the worst OS ever created! Oh, the horror!

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Chad, I wish I could. Unfortunately, I'm quite stuck with it.

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What about GIMP? GIMP is free (open source) and as nearly the same as Photoshop when it comes to features. BTW (By The Way), GIMP runs on all platforms ie that it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux.

GIMP on Mac

- GIMP

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Matthew, thanks for the reference. I never knew about GIMP. It looks cool.

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Don't know what server software you are running but at work and at home I am on Redhat (not my workstations, my servers). I use SSH (http://www.ssh.com/support/downloads/) Gives me shell access and ftp client. I do my editing in emacs on the server. Cuts out the FTP middle man and makes for faster developing (save-reload instead of save-upload-reload) Plus your server does the work rather than waiting for things to upload.

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If you want to use my laptop you can so you can have the comforts of working with photoshop cs, i hate it when i have to use other versions now that i have gotten used to cs.

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I would have to disagree the hotest tickets for this summer are cubs tickets!

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Definitly worth switching to Mozilla Firefox. I noticed there are no bugs for tab browsing when, I switched from 1.0 to 1.0.1.

There's still only one bug left, if you go over 19 windows for being open at a time. Mozilla Firefox will crash on my Linux box while on Windows XP you have to create a new profile for having more than 9 Windows at one, which is an annoyance.

Conclusion: Worth switching to Mozilla Firefox 1.0.1 as long as your not a tab browser or open window lover. =p

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And had forgotten to mention. RSS feeds via live bookmark on the toolbar is extremely awesome.

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Good, because apparently the start attribute has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1. Someone on the WSG mailing list pointed this out last year, citing an example where it needed to be used, something to do with legal documents and the way sections in those are marked up... and headings wouldn't suffice, I can't recall why. It seemed a valid (hah... that's unintentional) point at the time!

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Matt, I am sure that the reason why they sent you a postcard is because it is the one way that they know how to get ahold of you. And yes believe it or not many people are not in to doing websites, the school that i just graduated from which has all the technical bells and whistles asked for information on believe it or not, paper. I am sure that there some reason why they want you to call, maybe there is a survey that they want you to do, or they just might want a paper hard copy, remember computers do crash and they are not perfect. whatever there reason is i think that you should call them, maybe there is a long lost friend that will call you and will use that directory to get your information.

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Firstly it is possible to store images in a database, or even another file type. It just isn't recommend. The encoding used in say mysql will increase the file size by 20%. Yet it is possible.

It depends on what purpose your images are for. For your example, a product catalogue, this is probably the best way to do things.

For images used for styling of your site then you probably wouldn't do that. It still pays to have a good physical structure of your images.

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I get ancy sitting all day too. When the weather permits, I will usually walk to some place for lunch rather than drive.

Unfortunately, the setup I have at work wouldn't be conducive to standing while working, so when I get the chance, I'll wander around the office just to get some exercise.

On another note, I used to have the Jerker desk. I hated it. There was not enough room for all my gadgets and things. However, like a goldfish that will grow to a size allowed by it's habitat, I think the larger the desk I have, the more gadgets I will have too.

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Ah, but that's the challenge - to make use of the limited space... The question becomes, "what do you REALLY need?"

Of course, it certainly helps if you have space saving devices, such as flat screen monitors, etc.

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How wonderful it is! Today, I had seen the film - "The Incredibles" this afternoon, My father also had seen this film in this evening. This cartoon movie is powered by Disney-Pixar.
In this film, I love the people's sensation, scene, bugbears. The scene is so sublime.
With the great imagination.

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Cool, I'm looking forward to it! I love new stuff!

I think bloggers have a problem keeping anything the same! I probably to a "major" update twice a year. Ha.

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Very cool. Although, I wonder why all of the new fonts names start with a 'C'.

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Looking forward to it. Keep us posted.

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If you set the variables prior to the include statement, the variable are accessible in the include. It seems that the way the include concept behaves is that it really just becomes part of the file you are using. This is advantagous because it allows you put put your includes outside of the reach of the web server giving you further security by limiting access of files to malicious visitors.

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With my old blog I only did summaries, they weren't even really that. Just the first few words or something.

Since I've rewritten I now offer full RSS feeds, but I don't give the option for the short version (although short and full feeds can be turned on and off from the database).

When someone posts a new item I always visit their site. Most people put a far bit of time into designing their sites, so it's nice to give them a few more hits because of it! ;)

Categories can be good too. I have some code rewritten to handle it but I haven't finished it yet.

Speaking of an indicator of where you left off in an RSS feed. Wordpress sort of does it. Not on its RSS feeds but on the front page. When you click "read more" it will jump you to that section in the post.

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Interesting ideas, Dale....

I wonder how WordPress does that.

Is there just a simple <a id=""> element at the spot where the previous page left off?

However, it seems that a miscellaneous anchor element would be floating inside a paragraph... I don’t see the semantics in that...

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Personally, I prefer to get only summaries in RSS. I have hundreds of feeds, and very limited time to scan them, so I have to do it fast or I can never get it done. I usually have several hundred unread feeds at any given time. I can't remember how WP handles the "Read more" feature, and my core WP code is so hacked up now, who knows how I have it set up (I don't anymore). I also don't really use categories that much, but that's because I don't want to maintain them and well, I'm just lazy about some things. When I redid my Archives, I just decided to do it by date and not bother with categories. Get your hands on some WP code and you could figure out the "Read more" really quickly Matt.

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Check out
http://www.vbaexpress.com/kb/getarticle.php?kb_id=18
and http://stevemiller.net/puretext/

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Yeah, that's how it works. <a id="more-271"></a> is one such example, taken from this post on my weblog. I believe the numeric identifier is based on the number of characters into the post, although this is speculation.

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I had the same problem when I changed over to my new permalink model.

My old one looked something like this:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/289

Where as the new one is:
http://www.bluetrait.com/archive/2005/03/26/unicode-character-set/

It was a bit of a pain. Since I kept my old id numbers when I converted the database I decided on a mod_rewrite rule to redirect the old url to the new one, like this:
http://www.bluetrait.com/?id=289

Now that doesn't have the nice new format but. All links on that page refer to:
http://www.bluetrait.com/archive/2005/03/26/unicode-character-set/

So hopefully after a while the old redirects will die down and google will pick up the new ones. There are no places where I directly link: http://www.bluetrait.com/?id=289 or the old style.

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I also find it a bit awkward to include a signature with e-mails. When I'm dealing with a relatively new business contact, I'll include my signature, which has my full name, web address and phone number, and after a solid relationship has been established, I'll just sign my first name. I don't think it's necessary to include a signature on every e-mail.

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It's ashame they don't have it for Australia. :( Anways, I know you will like and find this hilarioushint Mac and wannabe hacker version of Google.

Anyway, sorry Matthom. I had not replied for a long time. I'd been flooded with work......

Best regards.

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You enjoy this song because -- somewhere deep in your subconscious -- you know that it reminds you of Pet Sounds.

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Happy Birthday! Hope you had a great day.

Mac minis look cool. I've not yet had a chance to use one yet though :(

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Thanks Dale.

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I was so suprised too how nice he was. How he acted now makes me want to watch the games to cheer him on. It is so nice to see pro atheletes being kind to their fans

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Happy Birthday. :) Just found out now.

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I'm having the same problem too. It won't accept my password and when I try to reset it I get the following error "You have entered an incorrect email address".

Doh.

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Dale, try the answer to the help question, "Why is My Account Bouncing?":

http://bloglines.com/help/faq/#bouncing

It seems to pertain to the issue, somewhat.

Oh, and all of a sudden, my account starting working again.

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Yep it's working again:

http://www.bloglines.com/about/news#83

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Ooh, good find.

I'll OPML, just in case. I don't like "downtimes" for my feeds...

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I was totally surprised too. I'm interested to see how the integration works. I thought Macromedia was huge, but I guess Adobe is making drastic steps toward being THE industry standard across the board!

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I think you may have missed the point to the hype. The fact that you can get satellite images from google is not the rad part about it. You've been able to get them from many places for a long time. The root of the hype is in the incredible interface. Dragging maps seamlessly without reloading. Zooming in and out nearly flawlessly. The fact that its so easy to use is what makes it awesome.

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So how is Wordpress compared to your custom script?

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It's smooth, that's for sure. I'm always torn on whether to keep using that system - and just customize the templates, or keep doing my own.

I just hate customizing templates, though. Going in, and trying to figure out someone else's code is not fun.

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Yeah, I remember Mapquest having satellite images. I also remember it had a really nice feature where you could select alternate routes. I think there was one for avoiding highways, and a couple others. In my opinion, that was the one feature that really made Mapquest stand apart from Yahoo maps. But like the satellite photos, they removed that functionality. I have no idea why. I would love if Google added that functionality to their site. So many times the route you're presented with is not the best, because of traffic patterns or something else too complex for the software to take into account, so it would be really nice to be presented with alternative options. Ooh, what would be really cool is to ask for a route that passes the most restaurants or gas stations or something.

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Happy belated birthday! Too bad the Illini didn't make it all the way, huh? I remember being in middle school in 1989 (I grew up in Champaign) and how exciting it was to be in the final four, and then how bitterly disappointing it was to have the ref make such a biased, unfair call which cost us the game. I didn't actually see any games this season, but it was great knowing how well we were doing.

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I'd just split on the slash like your second example (or "explode" as I guess PHP calls it), then loop through each element in the array.

title = "matthom :: ";
for (i = 0; i < url_array.length; i++) {
title += url_array[i];
}
echo title;

And maybe replace dashes with spaces.

But you've probably already thought doing it that way.

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Matthew, Jennifer - thanks for the birthday wishes... I appreciate it.

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Jennifer - I'm sure Google will add MUCH more functionality soon... And we'll forever forget about MapQuest...

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$row = mysql_fetch_object($result);
echo "n";


If you use mysql_fetch_object instead you will have an easier time managing the information. Then you are referencing the column name instead of its position. It's visually easier too.

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Try it again


$row = mysql_fetch_object($result);
echo "<a href="$row->column_name" ... >n";


If you use mysql_fetch_object instead you will have an easier time managing the information. Then you are referencing the column name instead of its position. It's visually easier too.

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With mysql_fetch_array you can just use the column name.

For example

while($array = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
echo $array['facssn'];
echo $array['facfirstname'];
}

Much easier

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Yep. You're right, aerial photography in mapping apps has been around for a while. But take it from a true map geek (it's what I do for a living), Google maps is the coolest and fastest online mapper yet. Funny that you called this post "Bird's eye view", since that Mapquest map of where you work and some of Google Maps stuff actually use Quickbird high-resolution imagery. Really cool stuff. Check out the sample imagery.

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I love that place too! I like the 'make your own stir fry' thing they have going on.

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Amanda, I have yet to try the "make your own" option yet... For some reason, I am hesitant. (Maybe I just don't want to get up, once I have sat down...)

In any case, the menu items are tasty enough to keep me going back.

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Timothy, Dale... what happens when you are issuing an INNER JOIN (or equi-join), and you have two columns with the same name?

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I suppose you would have to alias the fields that have the same name. I know there are some issues with aliasing and joins in mysql because of the order that the information is aquired but I can't put my finger on it exactly. I believe it works sometimes. It's all in how you design the queries.

The biggest benefit that I see to mysql_fetch_object is that it's two less characters to type. Other than that there is really no significant difference. It all comes down to preference. I had confused mysql_fetch_row with mysql_fetch_array.

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I have thought about this myself. When I get to about the thousandth line of code it becomes hard to remember which queries I have written already and if they are already there than why should I write them again. Most of my applications at work are relatively simple, but in the larger applications its important to maintain that information. I have thought about seperating them into a queries.inc.php file (or whatever) and them just including it in the other files. Then I can call the same query everytime.

Ideally I think the best solution though would be to build an object. Then you wouldn't have to worry about it. I slept through my OOP class though. Woah is me. I'll have to teach myself again.

I think separating your comments from your code is a step in the wrong direction. It adds a layer of extraction that really does nothing more than make your code look more streamline when in fact it will be harder to figure out what is going on when you revisit it later. Furthermore, when you leave your job and someone else comes in they are going to have to read your code. The more layers they have to deal with the more difficult its going to be for them to pickup where you left off.

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Timothy, I'm not too familiar with OOP, either (although I should be)... It might help this situation.

I think separating your comments from your code is a step in the wrong direction.

I'm sure it is... but nothing is stopping me from trying new things. This is one of those things that I can never really be "settled" with, so I'm always going to fight it, until I find a better way.

Your mention of mysql_fetch_object is interesting. I'll have to check that out.

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If you have two of the same name you do this:

tablename.columnname

so

SELECT post.id, comment.id FROM post, comment WHERE post.id = 1;

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Dale, will "dot syntax" work when referencing a column via mysql_fetch_array?

Using your original comment example:


while($array = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {

echo $array['tablename.facssn'];

echo $array['tablename.facfirstname'];

}


Would that work?

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Yes I think so.

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Collective Soul is one of those bands that toes the line between genres. We all know they are capable of really rocking out, but they rarely do. Please don't give us any more duets with Elton John (as in their 2000 album Blender).

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And trust me, these days... they don't come near rocking out. I saw them last year at the House Of Blues, Chicago, and they were pretty soft. They claimed they were all "dads" now, so they've "mellowed" a bit.

I'm like, "give me a break. Play like you know how." But no...

Yeah, where did Elton John come from?? Kinda weird.

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I can't believe that you think stir crazy is better then Lins Garden. That is some national chain that could not possibly have better food than an authentic chinese/asain place. I am speechless.

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The exhibit was amazing. It was soo cool to see inside what are bodies look like, not only was it science but it was art too. I thought it had to taken a lot of talent to remove specific areas of the human body without damaging others. I simply amazed by the exhibits that showed only the nervous system or the circulation system, how they seperated these with out damaging them I am in aww of. If this exhibit comes to a city near you, I strongly suggest you go see it!
If you ever get a chance to come to chicago, I also suggest that you go to the museums. We live in an amazing city where all it takes is a 15 minute drive and you are at so of the most amazing museums in the world.

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Not quite sure about your markup there, in terms of how non-visual UA's (screen readers) or non-graphical UA's (Lynx/Links/users with images disabled) would be able to access it, but your final outcome is pretty darn attractive.

I haven't tested your markup in Links, but personally I'd be inclined to go with something more like this (taken from my contact form):

<label for="msgname">Your name:</label> <input type="text" name="msgname" id="msgname" tabindex="1" />

and use CSS to set the label size to 1px height, or hidden display by some other means -- and THEN apply styling to your input element. I think this would be a more accessible solution, but haven't fully tested yours, so take this criticism as tentative. Having said that, I know for a fact this alternative would work fine in other agents.

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On second reading, my first comment was pretty negative, sorry... I got caught up in markup and forgot to say that I love the design of it, and think it's an excellent technique to use -- one I hadn't even considered before (not the background, changing the size of the dialogue to fit it below the text... brilliant!)

Just out of curiousity, what happens when the user resizes the text? Does it go over the background?

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Josh, you're right - the markup is wrong.

The <label> elements should surround the actual label, and not the text field.

And, these designs were just me being rather unproductive one afternoon - I don't think they would float in the real world.

Thanks for your thoughts.

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Avril is the best singer in pop rock if she wants to sing christmas songs she can and she will do it well.

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Hmm, I've never had a problem using labels, you just have to make sure to actually include some label text somewhere, or of course it won't display. Also, you don't need to include the for="id" if the input is nested inside of the label tag - you only need it if the input is seperate.

Pretty cool background labels - I would have never thought of doing that. Very original.

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There is still one more show left, little shop of horrors

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20 to 100 messages a day!!! Is it increasing or decreasing???

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I have yet to purchase Apple’s latest OS, Tiger, so I haven’t had the opportunity to try the latest version of Safari.

Well I have. =p

I recently had a visit to a Mac shop with a few friends.
The whole one button mouse thing was really annoying. Ironically enough a Microsoft USB mouse is a common solution to the problem.

Anyway's Safari looks better but I noticed it ran really slowly with Tiger on a Mac mini. Maybe, because it was on a Mac Mini.

Enjoy Mozilla.

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Track 11, Caroline, Yes, is a thinly-veiled answer song to the Beach Boys' Caroline, No.

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Safari 2 runs much faster on my ibook than version 1.3.

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Matthew, I thought about your previous comment as I listened to this album... There is a slight hint of Brian Wilson in the lead singer's voice...

That is so awesome if the lead singer actually knows that - hence, why he named that song Caroline, Yes.

I wonder...

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Cool :) I dig the new layout... one criticism, though - there's no way to see how many comments are on an entry from the blog index page...

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OK, I just added that. I wasn't sure if I wanted it there, at first, but it's OK, I guess.

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Tiger is a far bit faster than Panther, that in itself was enough of a reason for me to upgrade.

Like the new site! Although not sure if I like the way the commenting system works. Are you going to give us a run down of the code changes? How much has changed (code wise) from your last version?

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Dale, sure, I will talk about the code changes... over time.

What suggestions do you have for the commenting system?

The biggest change in the commenting system was the addition of the "feedback" directory, as an extension of the permalink:

/archive/2005/05/09/02/feedback/

Before, I had an anchor link within the permalink page:

/archive/2005/05/09/02/#feedback

This new approach, I'm pretty set with.

Although... the fact that the feedback now appears on an entirely separate page (/feedback/), was an issue I was concerned with.

That's why I also included all feedback in the right column of the permalink page, as well as on a separate page.

Not sure how this will work out.

I'm certainly open for ideas.

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I'm not terribly concerned with my security or privacy with google. Seriously, if they want it they're gonna get it anyway. Gmail? I use it cause its good. Simple as that. Like you said, it makes email easier. As for search history, its pretty helpful when I get home from work and I want to revisit something but can't remember how I found it.

I am disturbed though about accelerator. It sucks cause all of those apps that have been built using links as delete buttons are screwed. They are so easy. I have built alot of things at work with them. I sometimes use a different method that I'm going to go write about on my blog right now actually. Not only that but it sucks cause it would totally botch your site stats too.

I think that google desktop search is a far more intrusive product though.

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Thanks for this post Matt, I will definitely use it!

The new site is looking good too!

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This is meant to be good. Although I've never used it.

MD.

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That has happened to me as well (getting notice that a film is coming then getting notice it was returned before it ever got to me), without the message explaining why.

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I'm reading The Devil in the White City now and wish I still lived near Chicago. (Grew up in Elgin).

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My dentist offers headphones for listening to music during drilling.

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I thought the plane would crash on the way back as well. Do you think it was set up for us to think that? I've discussed this with other people and no one else I talked to thought the plane would crash. They all thought the beginning of the movie was just to show how "out of it" he was.

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Well Tiger has the following drivers:

HP Laser 4 Plus v2013.111
HP Laser 4 series - Gimp-Print v5.0.0-beta2
HP Laser 4/4M PostScript 600DPI

I've not used that printer so I don't know if it works. But it looks like tiger supports it.

I've had success with other HP Lasers

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Thanks, Dale. That helps.

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Oops. I should of left my comment here.

*embarrassed*

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'Ring out the Bell' marks the songwriting and singing debut of Travis bassist Dougie "Doug-E-Fresh" Payne. A humble and competant song, Dougie sings as if he has one lung. Travis are known more for their emotional, drawn out vocals than for their harmonies, and this vocal performance almost begs for a counterpoint.

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This song is deceptive -- it sounds like an introductory song, but is just a tad too long for that. Yet it is not developed enough to be considered part of the album proper, which starts on the first strum of 'Happy Kid'. Still, it is catchy and energetic enough to be one of the standout tracks of 'Let Go.'

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I agree. It's almost like it's incomplete. Like someone just "pulled the plug" on it.

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I just got my first Mac not to long ago. I upgraded to 1.5 GB of RAM, which I thought was still not enough. Of course, this is because I am used to working on a Windows system and it has 2.0 GB of RAM which runs like a snail with a crutch... no, seriously.

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Yep that explains a lot. I recently had a bad experience with a Mac Mini when it comes to performance.

Time to save up for an iBook or powerbook. BTW, how much RAM can the Mac Mini have?

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Nick, how could 2 GB of RAM not be enough? Perhaps I will upgrade my Mac again, just to get it over 1 GB - seems to be a safe point.

Matthew, I'm not sure how much RAM a Mac Mini can have - and that's one reason I am hesitant in purchasing a Mac Mini - I want to be "assured" that I can easily add more RAM, whenever I feel like it - and with ease. My desktop G4 makes it easy to add RAM - just open it up, and put the new RAM in. The Mac Mini seems "locked up." I'm not sure how accessible the "inner compartments" are.

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Up until a couple months ago, I was still running on 128 MB RAM on my Windows machine. Though I hardly ever run very intensive applications on my home machine, so it's not that bad. Though it was pretty awful anytime I ran IDEA (Java IDE).

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My biggest issue with your idea is that IP's are not going to be unique to every machine that comes to your site. At the college I work for, we use NAT to assign IP's. So internally my IP is 10.1.1.1 and my boss is 10.2.2.2 by if you were to look at my IP externally we are boss 207.1.1.1 (whatever). So there are cases when it will get confused. Not a huge deal but it would certainly be more irritating than not remembering anything at all.

As far as the issue with sending the cookie before the HTML, I am supposing that when I submit this comment it will go to another page perform some jiggery pokery and forward me back here using the header: location blah method in PHP. If you set the cookie right before you redirect, you won't have a problem. The issue is once you send HTML the header information must already be on the clients computer. So you need to get it there with the header.

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I am supposing that when I submit this comment it will go to another page perform some jiggery pokery and forward me back here using the header: location blah method in PHP.

Well... the jiggery pokery is performed, but once that's done, I redirect the page using JavaScript. Perhaps this is a weak approach, but it is the only way I know how.

Your mention of the PHP header:location method is probably a better approach, and I might try that.

This may help me out with the cookie problem.

Thanks, Timothy.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c497

Well you could gzip your pages first. This zips the page, checks for any setcookie info and handles that out first before the page is created. But you probably should fix your code to support cookies...let me know if you need help.∫

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If you want to see another cool real estate related google maps hack check out http://www.cytadia.us where you can map your search results on a google map.

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Matthom goodluck man.

Send him your domain. That's all the credentials you'll ever need. :-) j/k

Lucky, my employer rang me up. =p

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No problems here. I enabled php on a friend's tiger install yesterday. Just make sure you have uncommented the correct things in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and restarted apache.

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Thanks, Dale. I might just try a re-install of PHP.

I restarted Apache, to no avail.

I also searched for some info on which lines are supposed to be uncommented in the httpd.conf file - but found nothing quite useful - other than this.

Hopefully I'll get it working soon.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c502

You need to un-comment
#LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
and
#AddModule mod_php4.c

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application/xhtml+xml - as just recently alluded to on the WSG mailing list.

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Perfect... thanks Josh.

I wonder how much of an effect changing text/html to application/xhtml+xml would have on my entire site.

Maybe I'll give it a shot here...

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Try this

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One thing I like about radio is that it can introduce me to new music I haven't heard before. Or to different recordings of pieces than the ones I own (speaking of classical music, here). It injects a little more variety into the music I hear.

Though I know it's different for a lot of non-classical stations - they play the same two hours worth of music over and over throughout the day. I get annoyed if I hear the same piece on classical radio within 2 weeks.

Plus I don't have an FM transmitter for my iPod yet, so if I want to listen to music in the car, it's either radio or CDs. And NPR programs can be pretty interesting listening, too. I never watch the news on TV, anyway.

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Hmm, I've never had mine crash while actually listening, but I have noticed that sometimes when I turn it on, it takes a little while, shows the Apple logo, and my clicker settings are gone (annoying!). Usually when the battery has been run down a lot, or I haven't turned it on in a while.

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Jennifer, no FM transmitter yet!? ;) You don't know what you're missing.

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I have, at last count 105 username/password combinations. All stored in my head. Ouch.

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I met Ronnie Woo Woo a long time ago at John Barleycorn's...it was quite an interesting meeting. He was trying to dance with me, told me I was beautiful and asked if I would be back there next week. Yeeeeeahhh....This was before I knew who he was, I thought he was just some guy posing as a Cubs player, and it was really kind of weird. My friends and I still laugh about it today.

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I am totally a summer person. I can handle fall/late spring but I can't STAND being cooped up inside with the windows closed, breathing recylced air, dry skin and static electricity. I agree that winter is pretty for the week of Christmas - New Years, but after that it's totally unbearable. All I can think about is how much longer until I can play outside.

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I prefer "split" to "explode", which is what Java and Javascript and some other languages use. Don't think there's any built-in "implode" functionality in Java or Javascript, though... just have to iterate over the array yourself or write a function to do that.

To remember explode vs. implode, I think I'd just think about taking one string, exploding it into many little pieces (of an array).

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I have to agree with Amanda, I am a total summer person. You can go out and enjoy the warm (currently extremely hot) weather. You can leave your house without a jacket and you and not loaded down with layers of clothes. I love the tan that i get too, it is nothing like a warm summer glow on your skin. Dont get me wrong I love the changing of the seasons but once we are into the heart of the fall and winter seasons i am bored and look forward to the days in which i can again wear my flip flops and feel the warm summer air.

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All new albums are released on Tuesdays? I had no idea. How strange.

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I'd cache the content in-memory, maybe refreshing or clearing the cache every so often. Assuming there's a way to hold objects across requests in PHP, which I would hope there would be.

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Yep, always been that way, since I've been alive. But... I can't find any good documentation (or reason) why this is. I think it's just because people are more "relaxed," or "in tune" on Tuesday's - the madness of the beginning of the week has subsided, and things are under control.

So, what else to do - spend money on music!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c565

http://forums.devarticles.com/archive/t-5039/XHTMLPHP-error

This should solve your .htaccess php/xml problem. I had the same issue.

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Have Reviewed http://www.google-watch.org/ Sacry isn't it. But still i want to try that one. So Plz give me that craziest email accounts. Errrgghz ...

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c567

I like to have all my music on my iPod. Instead of limiting what's on my iPod to a playlist, I just use the playlists on the iPod to determine what will get played. E.g. I can choose the "Baroque" playlist on my iPod, and press play, and all I hear are the Baroque pieces. I set up a bunch of smart playlists, so I just choose whichever one suits my mood.

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ref http://www.matthom.com/archive/2005/02/22/01

hey if you need a good net editor try notepad 2 it is very good for people who do programing. well give it a try it is free

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How about a thesaurus (like dictionary.com's sister site, thesaurus.com)? Not quite the same as looking up the whole definition, but if you can find a similar word, then it can work.

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I see what you mean, but I still think most dictionary/thesaurus sites are not helpful enough. Considering they are on the web, they should use the power of the web, and not limit themselves to just looking up a word, like I would with an actual, physical dictionary.

The way I envision a dictionary site is a database with a word (term) column, and a definition column. Why can't they make it so I can match a search term with the definition column, instead of only searching through the terms?

For example, let's say the word persistent slips my mind. All I can think of is the phrase 'not giving up.'

And the sentence in my head would be, 'I am not giving up.' Except I'd like to replace the phrase, 'not giving up', with a word (which I can't remember at that point in time).

I could search for 'not giving up,' and it could return all words that associate with that definition. And perhaps 'persistent' would show up.

Anyway, I think I am running in circles with this point.

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Thank you,

I would very much appreciate having a Gmail account

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I gotta tell you -- this really saved me some time. Thanks!

Cheers ~/

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Actually, enum can be case sensitive.

When retrieved, values stored into an ENUM column are displayed using the lettercase that was used in the column definition. Before MySQL 4.1.1, lettercase is irrelevant when you assign values to an ENUM column. As of 4.1.1, ENUM columns can be assigned a character set and collation. For binary or case-sensitive collations, lettercase does matter when you assign values to to the column.

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Nice blockquote style!

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Well, I don't know about rock/pop concerts, but for classical music played in a typical concert hall, I believe the seats very close to the stage do not have the best acoustics. It depends on the hall, of course. My college's auditorium had really weird accoustics - sometimes seats only a few feet away from each other would sound very different.

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Nice -- It's a very clear corporate site that rapidly communicates their products... but I do have four brief criticisms:

1. Markup/usability: I'd personally like a "skip to navigation" link to be closer to the top of the document. I think you've positioned the content well for SEO reasons, but it's VERY un-user-friendly for users either without CSS (in this market sector, your biggest consideration would probably be handheld/mobile users, rather than very old computers? I think?), or who are using non-visual UA's.
2. Document titles: What you've implemented works well (for SEO, anyway - screen readers may have a fun time trying to pronounce hyphenated words, but I'm no expert on those so I'll leave that alone), until you get to the product pages. For example, http://www.awardingyou.com/products/?id=2 yeilds a title of "products?id=2" - which isn't great for users OR SEO. Rethink your URI strategy to include the product names (and increase your search engine relevance through this!), or, at the very least, pull the product name from the database and use that in the title field.
3. Curved corners: I don't mind the look generally, but they're a bit pixellated due to the nature of indexed GIF files (no variable alpha). I'd say that's fine, but for the fact your site is fixed-width and you're using separate GIF files wherever you've got the curved corners - really, you should be using an RGB image with the background manually set so you can antialias the curves nicely (assuming you're not planning on changing the colour scheme, of course). I don't know if you were planning on changing this eventually, anyway... just pointing it out.
4. The header image. You appear to be loading two versions of this, though I can't figure out why? Maybe it's a relic left in the code, or something? Anyway, you're using an indexed GIF without transparency, which is fine (indexed reduces the size) - but an indexed PNG would be better. I quickly played with the graphic and got it to about 34.5KB as an indexed PNG (as opposed to 40.5KB as a GIF). There's also a few stray pixels in that which you should clear up (on the left of the central glass award, above the line, and towards the top edge of the grey background to "Engravers" - there's two specs there). Obviously because there's no transparency in the image, using a PNG causes no problems for IE.

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Josh, thanks for the suggestions. I am certainly still developeing, so these things, and others, will be taken into consideration.

Due to the frantic proposal to get this "up and running," I had to skip some things that you mentioned, just to get the site up.

But now that I have it up, I can go in and start looking at those aspects.

Curved corners: The method I am using here is mentioned in Web Standards Solutions, by Dan Cederholm.

And, the gif image is actually the space outside the curved corner, not the curved corner itself. This allows me to change the background color of the curved corner element with CSS, as opposed to changing it in Photoshop, every time I want a new color. It's the exact same thing that's on this site, except the curves are a bit less defined on the corporate site - perhaps I will alter that.

Thanks for the feedback.

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Welcome to the world of computing. Thats what happens you need upgrades and bug fixes. There aren't new features in each of the third digit increments. It's why they increment the third digit and not the first. First digit increments are for major releases. Besides I would rather have my browser upgraded every five seconds than my shit hacked. My firefox for windows has a thing that alows me to just click a little alert in the top right hand corner and it does all the work for me. No unpacking or applications folders.

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Here you go brother they must have seen your entry and updated the Firefox 2.0/3.0 Roadmap. They have decided to skip the 1.1 major release and go right to 1.5 to reflect the sheer amount of security updates

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Does PHP do regular expressions? In Java, I would do it this way:

searchResults.replaceAll("(?i)php str_replace", "php str_replace");

The "(?i)" tells it that it's case-insensitive.

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Jennifer, PHP does indeed do regular expressions - and that is certainly a great solution for the case sensitivity issue.

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You could explode (the PHP function) the search string first so you can catch instances separately. Would also help when actually building your raw search query (i.e. in SQL) for the database... explode then add "AND" between terms, or whatever. I don't know if MySQL already does this, though...?

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Glad u had fun in st.augustine.I came to st.augustine in 1993 and a resident here since 93 love it here as well :)

Mehmet (St.Augustine Beach)

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UltraEdit by ian mead rocks www.ultraedit.com

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I am not sure what version of SQL you are using, but in T-SQl, you use the "MAX()" function, like this:

SELECT max(myColumn) myMaxValue FROM myTable

This grabs all the values in that column of the table and returns the row with the maximum value.

This works fine as is unless you also want other columns in the row at the same time, in which case you have to "group by" any column that is not being grouped together by a function like MAX (MAX is a "grouping" function.)

So if you had the following data, and wanted the most expensive fruit:

WierdTable
----------
ID, Type, Cost, Product
--------------------------
1, Book, 10.00, Why SQL sucks
2, Book, 15.00, Why SQL rules
3, Fruit, 12.00, Apple
4, Fruit, 2.00, Pear
5, Tool, 34.00, Wrench

You would have to use:

SELECT MAX(cost) maxcost, prodtype FROM wierdTable
WHERE prodtype = 'Fruit' GROUP BY prodtype

Which would return:

maxcost, prodtype
-------------
12.00, Fruit

of course, that doesn't tell you which row had the most, so if you want that, you have to join or sub-query back to the table again to get the entire row of the fruit that cost 12.00:

SELECT * FROM wierdTable
WHERE prodtype = 'Fruit'
AND cost IN
(SELECT MAX(cost) maxcost FROM wierdTable
WHERE prodtype = 'Fruit' GROUP BY prodtype)

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You know, I got a missed call at work over the weekend from that number. I Googled it and found your entry here. Maybe it was an auto-dialer gone wild.

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Ahh.. more Googling, check this out:

http://ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff126328.htm

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Nice... good find Jeremy.

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I don't know what's up with Netflix either....I sent a movie back last Thursday, from my home, and still haven't received my next movie. It's a bit frustrating....

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Hmm, I would say the 987.654.3210 is the lazy form, since it's easier to reach the period on the keyboard than either the hyphen or parentheses. If I'm trying to be pretty, I tend to go for the parens, but lately I've been getting out of that... There's not much reason for the area code to be separate anymore, at least in my area, because you have to dial the whole 10 digit number anyway.

I really don't like the +1 because it just seems confusing to me, like it's supposed to be an international number or something.

Then there's the really lazy way: 987 654 3210. Just use spaces.

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Yum, I love donuts. Especially Dunkin Donuts. I love their lemon-filled and coconut varieties best.

And I prefer the donut spelling personally. Even though I usually hate spellings like "tonite" and "lite".

But yeah, it's too bad they get stale so fast.

I bet I could eat four in a day...

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With the last formula, if you format the cell to only show the whole number, it will round it up a couple days before the birth day and you won't have the good person's age. Here's the exact formula you should use to find a person's age:

=DATEDIF(birthdate,now(),"y")

You won't find anything better than that ;)

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Hee... guess I'm too nit-picky about it.

Personally, I hate phone numbers - they're like IP addresses - who remembers a random string of numbers? I can't believe I ever did.

The worst is when radio commercials repeat them 5 times in the same commercial. Argh! Stop wasting my brain space on useless information.

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Amanda, that doesn't seem right. You should probably let them know that.

They are (usually) really good at responding to inquiries and suggestions. The last couple of times I submitted a complaint, they responded within the same day, and corrected the problem.

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I am forced to use this alot on dccc.edu. I think its the wrong way to approach linking to whatever on the site but unfortunately we have a high volume of work and getting a department to change the wording of their documents is nothing short of a task saved for Sisyfos. On a personal site or a small scale site its easy to avoid, but on a large scale its nearly impossible.

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It's actually simpler than that:

select count(*), first, last
from yourtable
group by first, last
having count(*) > 1

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I actually don't understand the whole SMS craze. It seems like more trouble than its worth. At dccc.edu we have a system of school cancellation notifications. People can give us their phone number and phone provider and we send them a message if school is cancelled. We don't use SMS though we just use email. It's really easy and gives us the ability to reuse the script that sends the messages for other things too.

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I like change.

Groan :P I nearly laughed, because I don't think the pun was intentional ;)

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Well, in .au, we're only just starting to see phones on the market that can handle email, whilst SMS has been well and truly with us for at least five years.

Further, as far as I'm aware, Australian providers don't have any number-to-email system in place... I know 3 (our only pure 3G WCDMA network at this stage) offers their customers an @three.com.au address, but it's not a phone number, it's an account of the user's choice (most commonly a word, I'd imagine).

There's plenty of reason to still use SMS here.

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Glad I could share my crack with you friend. Now smoke up. I love that Application. I use the blog this feature like its delicious cake. Can't get enough. It's even easier to blog when you are only posting about an image quickly. Now come to the dark side of wordpress my friend. COME TO THE DARK SIDE.

(This comment was brought to you by a night of painting in an enclosed area)

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Tim, I haven't used the "blog this" feature yet... I should try it.

Hope the paint fumes didn't get to ya, too much. :)

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Heh :)... No, it was definitely not intentional - I didn't even notice it, until you pointed it out.

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Can you add a CSS rule for td's like overflow:auto? You'd probably need to have an explicit width and maybe height too, I guess.

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I don't think there's any way around it. I can't have a specific height - that would severly limit my data.

The only thing I can think of is somehow having the long string get "cut off" - while the table remains intact - because I'd rather have that, than the table expanding.

There is an old CSS property called word wrap, which cuts off a long string - and keeps the content in place.

I actually use that on this site - in the right column.

The property is deprecated - and it mainly targets IE, but it seems to work, in some situations.

I could try that, but I also might try toying with the overflow property, like you mentioned.

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What version were you upgrading from? I don't think I deleted everything first when I upgraded last time. And as for all your HTML changes disappearing, that's what the "themes" are for, I guess.

I'm like you, though, in that I wouldn't really want to use it in a situation where I'd want to be making a ton of changes in the code. Though I think that's mostly because it's written in PHP (sorry, this just seems to be a very poorly designed language to me). If I want to change the arguments I pass to a method or find the definition of a method, it's impossible to find what file it's in!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c611

Questions from a novice PHP user:

Why is it that I can access values of variables on the page referred to in "action" on the form without making reference to $_POST? In other words, if my form has:

<form action="results.php" method="post">
.. and selected "region" has a value of "6"..

Why is it that on results.php I can simply:
echo $region;

without using $_POST['region'] ? In fact, $_POST['region'] does not seem to be carrying a value.

Also, is there a way to combine this method of posting values AND having PHP code verify form data? The forms that I have seen with verification of data have an action which refers - not to the results page - but back to the page containing the form.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Best regards, Peter

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I do that based on a php function so that clients don't need to have javascript going.

Also it is a good idea to check input because the javascript stuff can be changed.

/off topic:

Have you been getting any spam through your contact form?

Also you have "" at the very top left hand side of your website, I've had that issue before, something to do with Dreamweaver I think.

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In fact, $_POST['region'] does not seem to be carrying a value.

If 'region' is the NAME ('name' attribute) of one of your form elements, it should be accessible via $_POST['region'] - without a problem. The only thing that could prevent that (that I know of) is an older version of PHP - which only accepted $HTTP_POST_VARS['region']. Notice the difference in the variable names.

I think PHP 4 (I could be wrong) started supporting the "short" format - $_POST['region'].

But... if you CAN access the form values by just using the variable - $region - that should be the easiest way, anyway.

The forms that I have seen with verification of data have an action which refers - not to the results page - but back to the page containing the form.

The action attribute for the <form> element can request any file - including itself.

Either way, to verify the form data with PHP, simple write some if statements, which test to see if a certain value ($_POST['region']) is not set, IE: == ""... or you could do: if ( isset($_POST['region']) ) { code }

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Have you been getting any spam through your contact form?

Ever since I added the security check, spam has dwindled considerably. However, I still think it's capable of getting through.

Also you have "" at the very top left hand side of your website, I've had that issue before, something to do with Dreamweaver I think.

Well... I don't use Dreamweaver - so it can't be that... I don't like it, though. I wish I knew how to get rid of it.

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Same Uploadr problem (fault on startup) running current Uploadr on XP Pro.

http://www.flickr.com/forums/bugs/10856/54816/

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I just missed a call on my Cell phone from the same number, when I called it back it was "Omaha Steaks" from which I have ordered from in the past. I just asked to be removed form the list, it was no problem.

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For the mini radio idea. How about an aerial attachment for your ipod and some kind of update that adds a radio menu with the ability to change stations, save them, etc. That'd be awesome.

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Thanks for your comments about Bloglines. We do actually support both weather and email subscriptions. When viewing your feeds, in the left pane click the 'Add' link at the top. That'll bring up the add page which will let you create weather and email subscriptions. Hope this helps!

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Mark, thanks for stopping by. Looking forward to future improvements with Bloglines...

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I find awstats to be more than enough for stats information. I would think your host would come with that.

It's free too.

Altough it does have a nice interface :)

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Dale, thanks for stopping by... Yes - I'm sure Dreamhost comes with and/or supports awstats... but there's just something so appealing about independent developers. I like the "candy" appeal of Mint.

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AWstats is susceptible to referrer spam, so its statistics are a little more skewed. Of course, some would argue that Mint's JavaScript dependence makes it skewed, but from my own site's stats (heh, ironically attained by AWstats), I've found that slightly less than 1% of visitors actually browse with JavaScript disabled.

Mint is useful in that the JavaScript dependence means it's only getting real human figures, rather than other stuff. I don't think it needs to be the be-all and end-all of statistics solutions: personally, I'd use it in concert with raw log analysis software, such as Analog or AWstats. It's useful in its own way, as well as being very good looking and extensible (via the Pepper API that is an integral part of Mint)

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Do you have a video of that song that you can send me?

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Sounds like lots of issues in the hosting world.

Did you pick up on this:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

?

Interesting read

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No, I did not pick up on that. Cool.

The U.S. is full of chaos, eh? How much to live in Sydney?

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Random question.

For this post why is "The power of jeans" a similar entry?

How you do work out that section?

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Hey Dale... The ‘Power of Jeans’ and this entry share the word "power" in the headline. Even though the entries aren't really "similar" at all. The query just checks the headlines, and compares.

This is a perfect example of why this isn't my final solution for this feature.

Most times, headlines are pretty descriptive of the entry - so it works fine. But other times, headlines are vague, and tend to "allude" to the topic, rather than absolutely describe it.

Maybe you have ideas??

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Yeah, I had wondered why I couldn't get to some of my favorite web development blogs yesterday. I figured something must have been up with Dreamhost, since that's the host that everyone is always pushing.

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I know it has been a while since this was posted.. but I believe it's Omaha Steaks. I ordered from them once and they call me repeatedly also. I answered a 402 once and it was them, I'm assuming it still is.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c632

They really compare programming to a microwave or bicycle? Or are they just using microwaves and bicycles as examples of objects, and you want something a little more real-life? (Like here's a Post object. A Post includes information such as Author, Date, and Content. There are also Category objects. A Category has a name and a collection of Posts. There are methods on Category like addPost(), deleteAllPosts(), etc. And so on...)

Converting existing code shouldn't be too bad, I hope. I would start with grouping all related functionality. Going with the blog example, take all functions related to posts and group them together, and do the same with categories, non-post pages, users/authors, etc. Basically any table in your database could be a type of object (a class), and each row in the table would be an instance of that object.

Here's an example I found on Google of using PHP for a simple Post class: http://www.php-editors.com/articles/simple_php_classes.php

Sorry I don't know about any good PHP OOP references, but if you have any questions about OOP in general, I'd be happy to help.

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There are two boks that I recommend, Professional php5 I have been reading it off and on for a while and going back and reading sections over. The books is well written and interesting. Crash course in OOP. The long winded, metaphysical crap is important though because you have to learn how to program in the OO way of thinking. Its a very different mindset. Unfortunately I don't have a reason for OOP at work because everything we do is very piece meal. I do however recommend it. Very solid, very down to earth with only a little bit of bullshit.

The one prior to it in the series is also good beginning php5 is excellent. You will guarenteed skip the first handfull of chapters but there are topics like PEAR and source control that really benefited me.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks Jennifer and Tim.

I'll be sure to ask both of you questions, when I get stuck with something...

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Just out of interest, how do online dvd rentals work?

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Hey Stuart... it's simple - you have an online account of your movies - it's called a "queue," which you can add and subtract movies from. The first movie in your queue is the one that goes out - whenever you send a movie back.

This is all done by postal mail - postage costs are included in the monthly rental fee.

You can keep your DVDs at home as long as you want.

Each DVD comes in a self-return envelope, with a sleeve-protector.

I wish Australia would "catch up" with this stuff ;) ... I'm just kidding..

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Just for the record, we do have DVD rental services here... I just don't think they're particularly widely used as of yet. WebFlicks, Quickflix, HomeScreen and BigPond Movies, just to name a few. All offer free trials, but I haven't personally tried any of them yet (don't watch enough movies/haven't got enough time to) nor do I know anyone else who has.

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Hmm, interesting idea.

Here's another question: how would you represent something that had no rating yet?

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Jennifer, that's interesting - because iTunes HIDES the stars, but Netflix just shows them "grayed out."

Representing that in a more "creative" way is definitely something to explore.

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I doubt that it is really another person, there might be a cookie that is messing it up. That seems really odd that they would make a public RSS feed for something that is only useful for one person. I've heard about Greasemonkey, in that you can customize some CSS and JavaScript on websites. Some even condone your modifications, but mostly it is considered a tweaker's tool. I think Wired covered it a couple months ago.

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Yeah, no joy on Linux here in either mplayer or xine. Alas, no Mac boxes, either! Will see if the latest QuickTime version is any good later today -- Sydney time, of course... October has started here, it's about 10am :P -- this movie doesn't even work in the future!! ;-)

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Ah yes. Do you find it strange that when you leave comments here - they are actually left in the past? YOUR past, that is. ;)

October is only a couple hours away, here...

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Anyone have any suggestions of what codec would provide "joy on Linux"? I have a DVD, but it is way too big to stream. :-)

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Ahh that's so fun! What other songs can you do??

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it's Orchard Bank and it is ALL OVER ripoffreport.com....don't answer it!

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I like that Netflix also has a "not interested" button. For me, that's the best way indicate the movies I hate.

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Becky, it seems that movies rated as 'not interested' don't show up in my ratings total. I wonder how those movies are "grouped," and if they are used to generate suggestions (or lack of suggestions, in this case).

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But is a hurricane that's moving really "inanimate"? Ah ha! :)

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Theresa, I mean inanimate, as in non-living things. You're pulling my leg, aren't you? :)

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Yeah, I agree, it does look a little broken. Having said that, the worst part of it is getting started (especially when importing an OPML list) -- it gets better once it gets over the fact you've just imported a whole bunch of feeds at the same time, they're all unread, and it needs to inform you that there are no new posts for all of them. Grr.

Hopefully it'll soon improve, though. Goodness knows GMail has since it first came out.

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It gets better! Right click on a text field on a search engine and select add keyword search. Then you can type your keyword followed by a search term in the address bar and your search will be executed.

I would love to see this feature in Safari; I would also like to be able to see JPEG EXIF data in Safari. Trouble with Firefox is the lack of colorsync or other colour profile support.

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He was Too big a fish for that little town.
-he was a fish, wife also fish/woman-in-the-river

The Giant greatly emphasized the validity and truth (though distorted) behind the tale, with his appearing at the reality funeral.

just my view.

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Also a novice PHP user.

I am trying to store an SQL statement across pages so I can reuse it at a later stage.

I use this

<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME=originalquery value="<? echo $originalquery ?>">

However since the statement usually contains single or double quotes so after a few pages the statment appears

SELECT * FROM `products` WHERE `name` like \\\'%l%\\\'

Originally it was

SELECT * FROM `products` WHERE `name` like '%l%'

How do I avoid this alteration? Obviously the SQL statment cannot be run in this format.

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Yeah, great point. I thought of this as well. For example, let's say on a personal site I am developing - I have a bunch of "admin" links, which are straight-forward text links. Instead of using a URL in the href attribute, I could just use the keyword that I already created for that URL.

Using the Netflix example - instead of linking directly to Fever Pitch:

<a href="http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=70023958">

I could, instead, link to my personalized keyword:

<a href="netflix fever pitch">

But, obviously that would only work in Firefox.

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One more great reason to use Firefox! Thanks.

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I'm sure you could get them to perform. They'd just ask for a large amount of bling bling to do it. ;)

Jack Johnson would be good, dunno about Franz Ferdinand though.

I'd personally love Eric Clapton and the Foo Fighters to play at my wedding. Clapton is much like Jack Johnson in the way he plays. The Fooies on the other hand... well I don't really have a reason.

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Yeah, Foo Fighters would be amazing - but they are almost too 'over the top,' for a wedding. Clapton, of course, would be phenomenal too.

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I've always thought that The Shore sounded (intentionally) like Richard Ashcroft from The Verve. The Shore have even been labelled as Brit-Pop, which is strange, being that they're from California.

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Hello! U2 anyone??

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Actually, I think you can save a step here. In Firefox, if the URL is one word - epicurious, wikipedia, netflix, google, froogle - you don't need to set up the keyword at all. Just try wikipedia hysteria in the Location bar and hit return. Magic!

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Sue, thanks for your feedback. However, I'm not sure I follow what you mean. Isn't the URL always one word? The wikipedia hysteria example works, but I'm not sure it works for any text box. But what do I know? This is all new to me.

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How about a writeup for GIMP?

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Hey, I just wanted to thank you for this tutorial. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get a nice rounded border, and I found this entry via Google; I was able to translate your steps to Photoshop 7.

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I recall Eric Meyer has voiced this concern before, as well, though a link eludes me (oh! the irony!) :P

On an unrelated note (and I'm sorry if it's been around for a while, I'm a guilty RSS subscriber!), really like the new design. My only qualm is with the kerning on the text in your "matthom" header and compression artifacts... it'd go well as an indexed PNG.

Quickly whipped up one:
http://www.joahua.com/matthomheader/full_logo_hifi.png 5029 bytes, PNG, indexed
http://www.joahua.com/matthomheader/full_logo_hifi.jpg

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c665

Josh - I just did these minor CSS changes today - so it hasn't been around for a while... Some of it was done rather hastily - and I agree with you on the header - the kerning needs to be tighter. I don't even think I want Futura as the font. I'll have to play around with it some more tomorrow.

What benefit does a PNG do? (out of curiousity - cause I don't know :)

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Well, it's not lossy for a start. So you don't get compression artifacts like on compressed JPEG images.

This can of course mean that the file sizes are larger, but, as with GIF images, it's possible to use an indexed palette with only the colours you need, which saves significantly.

Also, PNG's compression algo is better than that with GIF images, so if you have two identical indexed images in GIF and PNG format, the PNG will give a smaller filesize.

It's best to use indexed images where they are graphically simple and/or don't have many colours. This means logos are generally good candidates, but you'd be mad to do it with a photo, because it would be larger (as palettes are defined in the file itself) and look worse (as the limit to the number of colours in an indexed file is far less than in another format).

So, summary: PNG can be indexed or true colour (up to 64 bit, 16bit/channel - RGB+A - alpha is optional), has lossless compression, and compresses better than identical GIF images. It can be used as a JPEG replacement for photographs, but the filesize will probably be larger than a decent-quality (carefully compressed) JPEG would be.

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I'm not sure about the colour of your right side bar. It's a little too dark for my liking, although I think the site looks better over all.

Good stuff.

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Thanks Dale... I tried many different colors for the sidebar - I wanted something "red/orange" - and everything else was either too strong (deep red), or "bleached out," such as pink.

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Hi Matt - I think the color of the sidebar is ok, but maybe you could flip the color of your text to be a light color for better contrast against the darker orange.

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Jennifer, thanks. A lighter text color in the sidebar probably would help...

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I, too, enjoy the Sony Street Style headphones - for a variety of situations. The sound is really incredible, out of those, too.

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It was offended you didn't accept the offered receipt, duh! ;-)

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Apparently :) I have a vague feeling it still wouldn't have said Thank You, even if I accepted the damn receipt. Ah well!

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Perhaps on the receipt it says thank you... ; )

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Amanda, maybe it did - you're right. :)

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Yep - believe it or not, I use the same elbow, in the car, and at work. Crazy, huh?

Damn RSI's. I'm only 25, and already falling apart.

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Hello. Actually, the first number in Bloglines is just the number of unread articles. The second number is the number of kept new. I think that's how you want it, right?

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Hi Mark. Yes, I confused the first number with the total of everything - unread plus 'kept new' - but as you said, the first number is, in fact, only the unread.

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An ergonomic specialist who plays bass in my orchestra told me to try putting folded towels under my arms to help support them. (You see, my occupational therapist finally came in to look at my workstation and she told me to make sure my elbows were not too bent - more like a 110 degree angle instead 90 degree. But doing this meant my elbows were floating above the desk, which does not feel very natural.) And the towel works pretty well - I can be relaxed and in the right position at the same time.

You might want to try towels just to see how they work, since they would be a bit firmer than a pillow, and so maybe more supportive.

When I'm driving, I've started using my left hand more (it's my right hand that bothers me), and sometimes I move my left knee up so that my left arm rests on my leg.

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I try to limit reading of non-work-related blogs to lunchtime. Work-related blogs I'll read when I'm building or waiting for something. Occasionally I have blogged about some technical issue I'm having at work, but usually I write blog posts at home.

I can see an argument for blocking blogs due to productivity concerns (though sometimes if you're looking for a solution to a problem, the answer will be something somebody blogged, and it would be bad to block access to useful information like that). But leaking company information? That seems silly to me. You can leak information just as easily at home. Either trust your employees, or fire them and find ones you can trust. If you can't trust anyone, then you have issues. :)

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Very interesting ideas... thanks.

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This Wired entry is what got me thinking...

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Why do bands think that people have the patience or time to sit through all that crap?

Because most people use Internet Explorer, which is generally far less crappy when it comes to this stuff.

At the very least, I wish Firefox would come out with some sort of plugin that saves all browser tabs, continuously, in case of a locked-up computer, or browser.

There is, it's called Tabbrowser Extension. Amongst other things, it also allows you to re-order the tabs (like you've been able to do in Opera for goodness knows how long already), bookmark sets of tabs, open a bookmark folder in multiple tabs, etc. IIRC, it DOES attempt to save the tab state on exit, but seeing as Firefox is an unstable piece of crap with Flash, obviously it's not going to have the chance to save. The solution is simply to save your current tabs before going to a band site. Or use Opera, which is nearly as good as IE in that regard ;-)

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Excellent. Perhaps my Flash comments are ignorant and 'one-sided,' since I do choose Firefox over IE. So, I digress.

I've been using a particular Tabbrowser extension for quite some time, although I don't know if it's the same as the one you referenced. It allows me to set some pretty handy stuff with tabs, but not re-order, which I've missed since my days of using Opera.

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Okay, looks like I screwed up. The tabbrowser extension is reportedly buggy and crap (I stopped using it coz it gave me problems some time I upgraded Firefox), and there's an appropriation of it that's better with much the same features, called Tab Mix. Seems like there used to be an English version there, because the link from the Tabbrowser site was to tabmix.html.en, but that now redirects back to the straight .html version. Doesn't look too hard to understand, though... I'm giving installing it a go now.

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Got it. Looks okay, it's in English once you install it without any problems (though I had to save the XPI onto my computer, then load the local URI -- it didn't even warn me when I clicked the link, it just didn't recognise it as an extension. Bizarre.)

You go into the Extensions menu, then click Tab Mix → Options → Tab → "Restore the last session when starting Firefox".

Should work okay... probably is a bit dubious when crashing, though.

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A writeup for GIMP is certainly possible. Thanks for the idea.

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Hmm, sometimes you just feeling like browsing, though...

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Yeah, I'm with Jennifer on that. I've been thinking about radically changing the way my own blog is organised, too -- because it's a personal site, and I can get away with that kinda stuff (redesigning on a whim). I don't particularly want to sever links, though.

An essay could be (has been) written on this, but the value of the web is in its hyperlinking structures. Google got to be the number 1 search engine by, amongst other things, its PageRank algo that draws heavily from interrelations between sites.

You might have just meant eliminating internal links, but I think that means the same thing. It's just defining the boundary a little closer to home. Right now, I know that your "Base", "About", "Blog", "Music", "RSS", "Archives" and "Contact" pages are important because they're prevalently linked to sitewide.

Good usability architecture might dictate you trim that a bit. (Particularly RSS, in this era of browser auto-discovery thanks to <link rel='alternate'>)

Perhaps that also means getting rid of the "Archives" -- I personally agree this is a useless feature in light of the search-centric browsing habits we're just beginning to better understand.

Chronology has to play a part, though, if you continue to "blog". Your blog hasn't ever been unrelated articles -- for example, this piece was obviously foreshadowed by your entry, "Blog entries become history too quick".

What you failed to do here is establish a relationship back to the preceding piece in hypertext. There's your automatic "related" link in the sidebar, but that failed to catch on to what you were really talking about.

An anachronistic web log is kind of self defeating. If you were just creating standalone content/articles, that would be different. Maybe something like A List Apart's structure? Issues, with two or three featured posts? (Note its use of columns: in the present issue, 206, there are two new pieces and one "Editor's choice" rerun.)

I imagine this could slow your production of content, though -- and it would probably make you want to focus more, and each post would need to have a clearly defined point and parameters. Which is, IMHO, not a great thing for a personal weblog.

You're moving back more towards the idea of a 'zine, then, which is far more defined than the anarchous stream-of-consciousness blogs so often are.

So... I think its a good idea to challenge the accepted structure, but keep in mind users will still want to browse (heck, RSS will be chronological and there's nothing you can do about that!), and that it will probably influence your perception of your site (and hence posting habits).

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very cool! i love firefox and i love netflix. oh the joy of having netflix in my search bar! bliss!

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Josh, very good points.

In the immediate future, I'd just like implement a search feature, that searches through blog comments, as well as posts - because I also feel that valuable comments (like the one you just left) are just as important as my own content - for me to search through, that is.

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I'm a little unsure what you mean about Javascript returning true for a checkbox... do you mean if you're testing input.checked? You're not really getting the request parameter like you are in PHP or other server-side languages.

In server-side languages, it's usually enough just to test if the parameter was in the request (i.e. if it's not null, then it was checked).

An interesting note is that checkboxes can actually return any value you want them to. "on" is simply the default if you don't specify a value.

For example, input type="checkbox" name="mycheckbox" value="foo" checked="checked" would return a value of "foo" when you retrieved the request parameter on the server side.

For single checkboxes, it isn't that useful to specify a different value, but you can do some neat stuff like having a bunch of checkboxes with the same name and different values... For example, if you wanted checkboxes for every state, all named "state", but with their values set to "MA", "IL", "IA", etc. Then on the server side, you could ask for the "state" parameter and get a list of all selected states. It's very useful if you have a dynamic number of checkboxes.

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Tune the low-E string down to D. That's the only change.

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Sorry... yes, I am referring to the value of input.checked.

Good points - yes, if you have more than one checkbox that the user can check, then including the value attribute is essential.

Then on the server side, you could ask for the "state" parameter and get a list of all selected states.

What do you mean by the "state" parameter? Are you referring to an array? I'm just curious - because when getting the values of all selected checkboxes, normally I use an array (in PHP).

So, the name attribute in the <input> element would be something like state[].

Is that kinda what you were getting at?

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I'm pretty sure my bank (Bank of America) has online banking on Sundays. You can use an ATM on Sundays, right? Seems weird if you could use an ATM but not online banking. Even if they don't process the transactions until the next business day, you should still be able to use it. Can you not even see your balances?

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The way I would do float:left is to take a box (maybe paint it a nice color), then attach it to my right arm. That way when you're looking at me, you can see the box has been floated left of the content (me). Actually, though, the rest of me wouldn't be flowing underneath it, so many it's more of a negative margin.

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I can "log in" most Sundays, but every once in a while, it'll be down for maintenance - and it only seems to happen on Sundays. Just my rant.

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Actually, though, the rest of me wouldn't be flowing underneath it, so many it's more of a negative margin.

Yes, but I still see what you are saying. Maybe if the box was on your right shoulder, that would mean some content is to the right of the box, and some content is below.

Of course, your legs are two columns, so you might want to apply a clear: left (or clear: both) to that structure. :)

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Hmm, actually I'm pretty sure these are incorrect usages of commas. They actually make the sentences feel more awkward to me, putting pauses where I wouldn't expect to see them.

I think this sentence:

Never underestimate the power of commas, in sentence structure.

flows much better without the comma (while you might emphasize the word "comma", you wouldn't pause after it):

Never underestimate the power of commas in sentence structure.

Again, I would take out the last comma in the next sentence. (Also, I'd change "allow" to "allows", since it's the "brief pause" that is doing the allowing):

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, which allow readers to absorb the content, with ease.

would change to

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, which allows readers to absorb the content with ease.

Google "overuse of commas" or "misuse of commas" and you'll get plenty of hits. :)

Here's one page on how to use commas: http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/commas.htm. An important note at the bottom of the page reads (emphasis mine):

Yet the biggest problem that most students have with commas is their overuse. Some essays look as though the student loaded a shotgun with commas and blasted away. Remember, too, that a pause in reading is not always a reliable reason to use a comma. Try not to use a comma unless you can apply a specific rule from this page to do so.

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Jennifer - very good points.

One of your corrections:

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, which allows readers to absorb the content with ease.

... is perfectly fine. I like that subtle change. And, my grammar was wrong - so good catch.

Now that you made that change, I'd almost change it again, to this:

Commas provide a brief pause in the flow of reading, allowing readers to absorb the content with ease.

It was that "double 'S'" that bothered me:

allows readers

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Ooops. I didn't realize that now there's a "double 'ing'." :)

reading, allowing

Oh well. Your first correction is best, I think.

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The "allowing" version occurred to me to. I think either is fine - the doubled "s" and "ing" don't bother me - I didn't even notice them, actually. :)

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It's Omaha Steaks. I won't buy from them again 'cause they keep calling me.

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Nice articles Andy, this will come in handy when I have to do the same thing for my parents. Also, I was trying to do a similar thing last year and learned that you can have more then one person logged in at a time on a Windows XP machine, but it requires some registry hacking - UltraVNC looks like a much safer approach.

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Good work - it's definitely useful functionality, isn't it? :)

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You bet it's useful - thanks to associative arrays, and PHP's krsort!

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Great stuff, if I get time I shall upgrade my seach to be as good as yours!

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Hehe, yes, and I'd upgrade WordPress' search to be as good as yours if... it wasn't such an enormous piece of software and that I'd never get it merged back into CVS and hence it'd break as soon as a new version came out ;-) Actually maybe someone has written a plugin for this... hmm.

Irrespective of that, your search is cool! :P

With the array do you do one query then append the results of the second query? And then sort it? I'm noticing that the using commas example search doesn't group comments vs posts, so... sorted by relevance?

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Josh - yes, the results are sorted by relevance, which comes from the query.

So, I have two separate queries - one that searches my blog posts, and one that searches feedback. Both queries are dealt with separately.

For both queries, I loop through the results (for), and each time through the loop, a new array item is added to an array called searchResults_array. The array item is added as an associative item, with the key being the relevance number, and the value being all of the HTML output, merged together as one string, with hash marks ( | ) designating the table cell.

Once all of the search results are pooled into the array, I then sort the array by key, in reverse order ( krsort ). The key, remember, is the relevance from the MySQL query.

After that, all that's left is to implode each array item at the hash mark, into separate table cells.

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Hello, This is a nice and useful article. I have a question though that I could not find an answer for. My father is behind a firewall at his company and their administrators won't open any port so I can connect to his computer. I figured that if somehow his computer initiated the connection to my computer than I will be able to control his computer. But I have not seen any tool that does this reverse connection. Are there any solutions to this?

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No longer have to steal office WebEx This will keep me honest when helping out friends and family. Excellent article and looks to be a solid product.

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Hello, There is a patch available in order to allow concurrent connections on Windows XP with Remote Desktop. Although is does not allow the user logged in locally to see the other user's screen, it still gives a lot more flexibility. Look for something like 'teminal services windows xp patch' on Google. I still find Remote Desktop much faster than VNC, and no install/configuration is necessary. And there are ports of the Rdesktop client for almost all OS that I know of as well (Linux, BSD, OSX...). Dexter www.dexterphoto.com

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You should try www.logmein.com, it has been a lifesaver for me when machines are behind firewall and NATs with no port forwarding.

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Yes, UltraVNC allows you to do that.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3843

Used this very successfully with my Mother in Law. I went one step further and generated a SINGLE CLICK installer preloaded with my IP address that she could just double click and back connect the the UVNC Viewer I had running. No need for her to find an IP addresses or do anything but launch a small program. Check out the SINGLE CLICK Packager: http://www.uvnc.com/addons/singleclick.html A little less secure, but for a short fix it up session it was the best option going. My IP stays pretty much the same thanks to my router, so the SINGLE CLICK package on her desktop stays good. If my IP changes, I just generate a new one and email it to her or put it up on a webpage, send the URL and tell her to RUN PROGRAM FROM HERE and it connects up just fine!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3844

Great article - but it is certainly worth mentioning that use of the DS encryption plug-in provides decent protection for both the password handshake and the session.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3852

Great article once again. my family is soo HUGE and they live all over europe, and it turns out that om the only one that knows how to use a computer and i use WEBexPC ( http://pcnow.webex.com/MyWebExWeb/MyWebexPortal.portal )i registered long time ago (about 5 years :D) when it offered a free service and now i can add 10 computers on a "network" and log into them like in remote desktop. But i think this should work on any OS because its java based. Sry for bad english if there is any. --BUSA

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3853

Great write up! Question though. I am a teacher and all my students have computers, and at times, I would like to take control of their machines. To demand their attention, show how to work an app, knock them off the internet or email (novell) when they shouldn't be on it. All with a single click. I have about 25 desktops I want to control. Can the Ultr@VNC achieve this for me? Thanks!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3854

Remote Support System. http://www.download.com/Remote-Support-System/3000-7240_4-10447877.html Great tool. Takes about 2 minutes to create the exe file. Then send it to your friends and family run the server on your end and bam instant connection. This software package will allow you to create a single exe file that a client can download off your Web page. When executed it will automatically connect back to you (through firewalls) and allow you to provide remote support. You now can provide support for clients you've never even met, transfer files and directories, chat with the client, reboot the remote PC with auto-reconnect, reboot the remote PC into safe mode with auto-reconnect. A customizable invoice for the session is generated automatically. The program is free for non-commercial use only. New in version 1.5.1 is the ability to draw on remote client's screen, and a pager / attention bell to get their attention when needed.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3855

Anybody know of the way to access VNC through port 80? fyi, my company block all the port except 80 and https port.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3856

RealVNC viewer has a listener mode. The VNC server initiates a connection to the listener. Here's a sample batch file for your mom, with a few more tweaks, it can go out on port 80, by default it is 5500: start /MIN winvnc4.exe PAUSE Hit Enter when you see VNC in the lower right corner winvnc4.exe -connect "vnc-client-ip-address"

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3857

Hi, Thanks for your helpful article. Is this technology available for other verisons of Windows? I believe my mother-in-law has Wiindows Millenium. Thanks, Chris

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3858

The SINGLE CLICK package is the way to go. I created one that connects back to my IP and then installed it on the computers of everyone in the family. It makes it a piece of cake when they need help - they call me, and I have them click on the icon to share a desktop.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3859

But this will make impossible setting up the wireless connection. What's the point?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3860

Actually it depends. I have found that when I am using Windows XP to manage my wireless connection, I do not get wireless "drops" with the WZC service disabled when we do not have encryption enabled. The problem I am having now though is figuring out how to prevent wireless "drops" of connectivity when we have encryption enabled (since we need the WZC service enabled when encryption is enabled). I believe that the manufacturer's driver would manage the wireless connection and I would not need the WZC service, which would hopefully prevent the signal drops that WZC causes as it searches for new access points. I plan to do some testing with this soon. On my iBook, there is never a noticeable service drop, with or without WPA encryption enabled.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3861

Hello John, thanks for the compliment. As other visitors have pointed out, there is another version of UltraVNC called UltraVNC SC that lets users initiate connection requests outward. I haven't played with this yet, but since the user initiating the connection needs to traverse the firewall to make the outside connection, it makes sense that the remote user would be able to connect by following the reverse path. [UltraVNC SC](http://sc.uvnc.com/index.php?section=12)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3862

Hello Chris. Yes, UltraVNC says on their main page that it runs under Windows 95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003. [http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/](http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3863

Thank you for your suggestions. UltraVNC Viewer (in listen mode) does the reverse connection that I was looking for. The only problem is that my father's company firewall blocks all non-http traffic (I set VNCViewer to listen on port 80 but it didn't work, as the firewall stopped the non-http traffic). Is there a way to make UltraVNC (or another program) use http requests for the transfer? (Just like Yahoo Messenger's option "Firewall with no proxies") Thanks

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3864

It seems to me that this is a simple bug on their side. Hopefully not all feed readers have the same behavior. Have you tried emailing them to ask about it?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c741

You might want to take a look at the UNION command in SQL. With it, you can select data from multiple tables, so long as the columns you're selecting have the same datatypes in both tables.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c742

Indeed, Jennifer - that would be my answer! Thanks for pointing that out.

Only problem... upon checking just now - my server's current version of MySQL is 4.1.14.

UNION begins support in version 5, right? At least I think that's right...

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c743

Ooops, no - I'm wrong. UNION is supported in versions 4, and up. So I'm set!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c744

Yeah I'll confirm that Liferea doesn't have that problem. I'm opposed to absolute links because, reasons of moving domain names aside (which is 'bad' because it breaks permalink structures across the web), it's actually less accessible.

If you save a web page with relative URIs to your computer, it'll work fine. If it has absolute URIs then it's going to be broken. Note I don't just mean your local computer but also mirrors/cache servers, like MirrorDot et al.

Plus, yeah, from a maintenence perspective absolute URIs suck. Ever launched a static site having used absolute URIs during development? Pain.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c745

Hey, I did some research into Dexter's post above and found a very cool hack out there. It allows you to run your XP box as a full terminal server so you can have multiple simultaneous connections as well as shadow a session. While I might still use Single Click VNC for support, Terminal Services is great where you need to connect to a computer even if there is someone working on it. Here is the link: http://sig9.com/articles/concurrent-remote-desktop Again, I have done it and it works great. -Nate

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3865

I definitely agree that working side-by-side with other developers makes you better, particularly if you're working with really talented people. It's the same way in music, I think. When you play with people who are better than you, it lifts your own level up as well.

Being able to bounce ideas back and forth, debating the merits of one design vs. another, is invaluable.

Good luck on your new job!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c747

Thanks, Jennifer. And thanks for all of your help with web-related stuff... I'm sure I'll be using your advice and examples in the very near-future, as well!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c748

I work in the IT department of a large company, and if I caught an employee trying to compromise our firewall like that, they would be in hot water. Seriously, your dad most likely would have signed an acceptable use policy for company computing equipment when he started working there that prohibits just this kind of thing.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3866

So, uh, are you gonna say what (where) the new job is? Same kind of context or will you be in a team or...

Just curious... :)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c749

http://tinyurl.com/ is great if you want to share your wishlist or something. Obviously it's not a solution for the WHOLE of Amazon, and they really need to fix that, but for limited application it looks worthwhile.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c750

Josh, how dare you ask me that.

No I'm just kidding.

I'll talk more about it very soon. Right now I just want to do nothing but stare at the wall for a couple days. (I really needed some more time off, in between starting a new job.)

I will be in a team, sort of - but I will still be doing PHP work - maybe some ASP (ahh, the horror!), and definitely a LOT of MS Access, which I love. Maybe a lot of work in Access will finally push me into the .NET realm. (As if it's necessary). Notice my anti-Microsoft-web-technologies attitude. I just can't understand why .NET has to be so deeply involved and bulky. Why does Microsoft believe that ending development of ASP was a good thing? I don't need a framework, I just want to jump in and start coding, like PHP!

Woah - where did all that come from? I dunno.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c751

Thanks Josh... I agree TinyURL is helpful. But like you said - for the WHOLE of Amazon - this is not the way to go. After all - we're looking for semantic meaning in the URL - not some other application interpreting it.

So, if I send everyone my Wish List as a link with the words tinyurl.com/... in it - that doesn't explain (to the naked eye) what the hell I'm linking to. After all - what does tinyurl mean to anyone?

Sorry for the slight rant. I'm more talking to myself, in this case.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c753

Yeah I agree. It bugs me not knowing where a URL will take me, which makes me opposed to TinyURL in a way. For things like your wishlist, however, I reckon it's a viable option, even if it's not technically ideal (for a variety of reasons, including dependence upon another provider, non-semantic URIs, extraneous DNS lookups, etc).

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c754

Ahh cool. Just don't get too sucked into the whole .NET thing! From what I've heard of it from various WSG people, it's nigh on impossible to get it to play nice with markup. Nice to see you're anti-Microsoft-web-technologies, though :P

Have fun in time off... though I'd be inclined to try something more exciting than staring at a wall! (But then again, it's summer on this side of the world and I'm about to go on holidays, and in winter/towards winter I'd be prone to staying inside lots and reading, too!)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c755

Thanks Andy - yeah, works fine. I have to admit it's pretty nifty.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c756

Because it discards certain audio frequencies, AAC uses less space than ALE and AIFF for the same duration of audio. I use AAC at 128 kbps with variable bit rate encoding. My hearing isn't anywhere near perfect (14 years of drumming will do that), so I willingly sacrifice a bit of quality for substantial storage space savings.

The Lossless Encoder is just that - it retains all audio signal data, but throws out the overhead that comes with CD audio. If you want an exact reproduction of the CD audio and to conserve storage space, ALE uses about half the space of AIFF.

AIFF is also lossless, but retains absolutely all audio data and requires significantly more storage space than AAC and ALE. AIFF is mostly used in audio production, I believe.

I suggest listening to a few tracks encoded in all three formats and then considering how much disk space you want to dedicate. Given Apple's strength, I'm sure all three will be fully supported well into the future.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c757

Thanks for your ideas, Daniel.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c758

Brilliant, Andy! (It sure helps that Dreamhost comes with unlimited sub-domains for many of their plans.)

I wonder if many other hosts offer this. Probably.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c761

I use the MP3 encoder for interoperability.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c762

Done! [Creating Rounded Corners with GIMPShop](http://paininthetech.com/creating_rounded_corners_with_gimpshop)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3867

Ultravnc does not work through private networks, NAT and firewalls. RemotePC (http://www.remotepc.com) is a great way to connect to anyone's PC, especially if the host computer is behind a NAT. I think remotepc is the best remote access solution.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3868

I was thinking about trying it, but google already knows enough about me as it is :)

I wonder if it is any better than awstats, which has a stack of information.

Oh. I just clicked back into the feedback form and the "Your info" form was cleared. Is that meant to happen?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c764

Yeah - the form is only populated with the JavaScript cookies when focus is applied to the Feedback textarea.

I wasn't sure (capable) of doing it as the page loaded.

Thanks for the mention, though...

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c765

Great tutorial! Keep 'em coming!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3869

I Love You. I can't wait for tommorrow!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c766

Too bad you don't have this Canon:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0510/05102501canonsd430wifi.asp

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c767

Yea, that is impressive, indeed.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c768

That looks vaugely like the cable I use for my camera. Shame I use mine for my Camera :(

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c769

Hi, Thank you for the great tutorial!!! I struggled all day trying to figure out a way to do that using Photoshop 6.0. Your tutorial made it so easy. Found you on Google. Julius

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3870

It's interesting you noted the fact that leaving comments on a blog sometimes requires a user account, and/or login, which is a hassle for some people, who just wish to leave a quick note. For new people starting a blog, it's important to consider how you want to handle visitors who wish to comment - do you want them to be able to comment without registration, or would you like them to register first? Those are some things to consider.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3871

Wordpress.com (note the "dot com" and **not** the "dot org") is now offering free blogs based on the popular Wordpress software and the K2 template. I've read that the template is not very customizable, and one immediate drawback is that you must choose a third-level domain (i.e. myblog.wordpress.com), but this might be a good alternative to Blogger in terms of features and/or look-and-feel.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3872

I haven't necessarily got a better method, but sometimes I make rounded selections by painting with a round brush in the quick mask. The advantages of that method are that you can visually select the size and the fuziness of the arc, and that it just feels like it is a faster method than the others (though it probably is quite the opposite).

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3873

I know what you mean....I discovered James Blunt a few months ago...love him!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c770

This is perfect. My usual method (up until now) has been simply exporting the HTML bookmark list, from Firefox, and then saving it into my iDisk account, which I can access from any computer (Windows or Mac). Then I just re-import the bookmarks each time I made a change/addition. Forget that! This idea is much better...

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3874

Wicked, i was doin the same as Matt, now no more. Also this is awesome for my notemanager project. Online bookmark synchronization. Wicked article, and awesome site. Im bookmarking it.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3875

What about Yahoo Companion, very easy to have your bookmarks online.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3876

Awesome! Thanks so much. Very useful @ my work place.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3877

Great, but not "Feature-complete" When it includes my adblock patterns (or the prefs.js in general) and saved passwords (signons.txt), it'll be as good as Roaming Profiles.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3878

If anyone is interested I have a PHP file that will parse the uploaded XML file from this extension. This basically allows you to access your bookmarks from anywhere on any browser. If your interested in a copy drop me an email @ y393ichkh9ofl7r@jetable.com (this email will expire by 5th Dec 2005).

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3879

It doesn't work with 1.5.....

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3880

Hi there... For me the best way for use bookmarks in another computers is: www.spurl.com Have extension to Mozilla, Ie etc... Please try it!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3881

Good tool but BE CAREFULL! I lost 6 months worth of painstakingly chosen bookmarks when I decided to synch a new computer with this utility. This computer's Firefox had no bookmarks and when I went to synch, it cleared out the xbel.xml (the file this utility uses) on my server. So make sure to back this file up from time-to-time.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3882

Directly off mozilla update page, instructions for making this work in 1.5 RC3: If you haven't got this one already, install the Nightly Tester Tools from https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=958 then, install "Bookmarks Synchronizer for Deer Park Alpha1" from http://torisugari.spymac.com/ and check "Install using Nightly Tester Tools etc." It should work.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3883

Great, but doesnt support a proxy

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3884

Using http://del.icio.us and the Foxylicious extension at http://dietrich.ganx4.com/foxylicious/ accomplishes much the same thing (except that it _does_ work through a proxy). The integrated right-click 'add to delicious' makes the updating easy. Furthermore, it just syncs the bookmarks in the folder you specify as being mirrored. This allows for having common bookmarks and site-specific bookmarks (corporate Intranet pages aren't much use on my home machine).

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3885

I've been using this on and off since it came out, and unless I'm doing something wrong (which I don't think I am) the problem I have is duplicated bookmarks. Lets say I re-arrange a bookmarks folder (for instance, move a folder to a subfolder) when the xbl file is downloaded to the other computer, it is duplicated, not moved, to the subfolder. This is just one example, but basically I find that once you save the bookmark you can't really touch it or it duplicates, because on the other end, all its doing is merging any different bookmarks it sees and not making any comparison. Also, the real reason why I don't use this much anymore is simply the speed. Every time you open and close firefox it synchronizes (if you've allowed the setting) which is actually kind of annoying if you have many many bookmarks. Another invaluable tool however is AM Deadlinks (not for bookmark synchronization), if you haven't used this program you should check it out.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3886

I've been using the (now) free FolderShare (www.foldershare.com) service that was recently acquired from Microsoft. With the easy installation of an agent on each of the computers you wish to synchronize, you don't have to worry about setting up an FTP server. Plus you get access to a bunch of other services that FolderShare offers.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3887

flock does this natively through del.icio.us.. which uses gecko... timtowdi... thats all

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3888

I like the idea of this. Unfortunately my work does not allow FTP uploading. Any hope for HTTP u/l support?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3889

Chipmark.com also has this feature, and is an easy extension for Firefox. You can choose to make the "chipmark" public or private, and it can hide the standard Firefox bookmark toolbar. I choose instead to bookmark some things locally and chipmark other things that I know I will want to access on all of my computers or via their web page.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3890

Abstractmouse.com does a good job at doing this too. IMHO it's a better extension.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3891

I just use blogger.com along with the Firefox extension JustBlogIt. And that way I can also view the "bookmarked" links from any computer.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3892

www.spurl.net

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3893

Clearly, the solution is not ready yet to emerge. From yahoo IE toolbar (perfect except limits to 1000 bookmarks), delicious (or similar) and the other works being done that utilized Firefox extension (no true sync,version conflict control), it has remained a dream to human kind that to take their bookmark, opml, links, tags to anyhere they go. Technical challenge to implement such a tool, hardly. It's only to the blindness of the players on the tech market not recognize the demand of such a service. The dream bookmark service that I have should support everything Delicious has, plus: 1. Resolve version confliction when replicating between computers, no wipe out blunder anymore. 2. In order to manage the ever growing number of bookmark any one person can keep, a alghrithm must be implemented to treat bookmark differently, those only clicked once and those visit frequently. Likely the frequent type of bookmarks are the ones need to be synchronized between computers. 3. Not to be confused between bookmark service and Digg.com kind service, but it's nice to recognize the digg effect of the bookmark you've stored, and it should not stop there. 4. Why I have to read my rss feed using bloglines kind of interface. Why can't I read my feed article in way a similar to digg.com. Where the rss feed sournce is from is not impportant, I only care about the author and date,isn't it? 5. A better yet question, why do I even need blogline, if I can find a reasonably good firefox extension, it will be the end of war between online rss reader and desktop rss reader. Unfortunately, I can't find a good rss extension yet. These are probably 10% of what my dream service will be comprised of. However, the key is firefox extension that really blur the line between browser and desktop. If Microsoft hasn't recognized it, it should be clear by now, that IE is a browser, firefox is the "OS".

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3894

Great extension. Just tell me where I can get a compatible one for opera and IE (don't ask) and I'll be happy.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3895

I just installed FF 1.5 and Bookmarks Synchronizer works great after you update it. [ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5/](ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5/) When you open FF the first time it will say that Bookmarks Synchronizer is not compatible. Hit 'OK' then go grab the update for the extension (thanks to digg user dcormann): [http://btcorp.dyndns.org/Tools/FireFoxExtensions/FF_1.5_extensions/](http://btcorp.dyndns.org/Tools/FireFoxExtensions/FF_1.5_extensions/)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3896

Could it just be that you didn't merge the bookmarks? Just replaced with the "blank" PC? I've used it a long time and have never had a problem like this... And I guess you had the "backup" on the other computer, unless you don't merge the bookmarks there either........

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3897

I got myself this extension, and created a Ripway account. On the My Files page of Ripway, they had URL to this folder: http://home.ripway.com/2005-11/531704/ Alternate: http://h1.ripway.com/HowardBrazee/ I went into Bookmark Synchronizer, and put in: . FTP HTTP HTTPS Host: http://h1.ripway.com/HowardBrazee/ User: HowardBrazee Password: ****** (My password was entered here) Path: /xbel.xml I clicked on Browse next to Bookmarks, and it appeared to show my bookmarks file. To be safe, I have all boxes unchecked. I then upload manually and it gave me 0x804B001E: The lookup of a hostname failed. I am at work behind a firewall, and tried setting it to FTP, HTTP, & HTTPS. I did a search on my hard drive for xbel.xml without finding it. Obviously I am not understanding something, and trial and error is failing me. Any advice?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3898

You should check "FTP" and use the following information: host=ftphost.ripway.com username=HowardBrazee password=*** Have you tried this? Some people have indicated that their workplace does not allow FTP uploads (ports 21 and 22 are probably blocked on their firewall). If that is the case, FTP accounts will not work (including Ripway) and you will have to find a storage location that you can access over HTTP(S).

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3899

Thanks. I just uploaded the file OK. I'll test at home before setting it up to work automatically. I did a lot of guessing, but did not guess the correct host name.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3900

Windows Live Favorites which is still in Beta used to synchronize favorites. But due to many problem they have removed the sync feature.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3901

Do it. Free net access and access to a 30" screen is like a dream come true.

It's not like the staff will care or anything.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c771

I recently started [?external:http://www.mylinkvault.com/ MyLinkVault], which is an online bookmark manager that uses categories rather than tags (personal preference), and uses a quick drag-and-drop interface to let you rearrange them. There's no social bookmark aspect to the site - purely focused on managing an individual's own links. I set it up because I bookmark a lot of sites and regularly use multiple PCs (home/work the most common two places), and didn't find an existing site with an interface I liked. Anyhow, check it out, hope you like it. :)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3902

I simply use [?external:http://sourceforge.net/projects/bookmarksync SyncIt]. SyncIt syncs Firefox bookmarks _and_ Favorites across _multiple_ computers. It's free software, and setting up your own 'minimal' server amounts just to 5 minutes' work.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3903

If you have several browsers on several computers, you may need an external (and easily "back-up-able") storage for bookmarks. (I use "URL-Album", but it seems to have only Russian interface. ^_^)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3904

This does it the old fashioned way and makes sure it's all in the right order: Transferring Folder Favorites to a new computer. If the file and folder layout is absolutely identical and there are NO folders in one system that do not appear in the other, you *should* be able to export and import a Registry key to transfer this information. It has never failed for me. 1. Launch REGEDIT from the Start menu's Run dialog. 2. Navigate to the key named: KEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerMenuOrderFavorites 3. With this key highlighted, choose Export from the File menu (Export from the Registry menu if not Windows XP). Export just this branch to a .REG file. 4. Bring the .REG file to the machine with the identical set of Favorites. With all instances of IE *closed*, launch the .REG file. Allow it to modify the registry.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3905

Looks like Santa Maria set up a group already. I'm getting really excited. I am such a freaking nerd.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c774

I love the bourne series, the books more than the movie. I hate the fact that there is very little relation between the film and the books. The films concentrate more on treadstone than the "rivalry" between Bourne and The Jackal who is non-existant in the Supremacy.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c775

Changes probably haven't propagated across servers yet, so I'm not seeing the Google Talk ad in my account, but good news about the Delete thing. Not because I actually think they're going to delete stuff (I'm a little privacy-concerned about GMail, so I use it mostly for mailing lists and personal stuff only), but just because it's so much more sensible in terms of usability. I used to have to think really hard to figure out that "Sent to Trash" really was the same as "Delete"... probably in part because "Trash" doesn't seem to be a term used outside of the US much. So I'm glad about that change!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c776

what/where do i login into to view the computer i want to work on? if someone would be so kind to email me the step by step process... i'm very new to this. thx rc

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3906

You can either download the client application, or use the web browser. Make sure you have your firewall configured correctly or temporarily disabled. If you want to use a web browser, make sure it has Java installed (it will prompt you if it doesn't). Then figure out what the external, routable IP of the machine is you want to connect to (use "http://whatismyip.org" or another method), and type it into the web browser. Example: http://66.67.68.69:5800. The "5800" is the port on which the UltraVNC server is running, you will need to specify it with a colon. Hope that helps.

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I delete so much, it's definitely "jumping out" at me. I was so used to seeing "Move to Trash."

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"I’ve found that I still want to use traditional bookmarks" I'm surprised nobody mentioned why traditional" browser-stored bookmarks are still worthwhile. There's only one reason I use them anymore, but it will be a reason until automatic and dependable synchronization becomes the norm: RELIABILITY. I want to use bookmarks to my workstation, the company intranet, or the rest of the world even when there are problems connecting to a given server. Exposing web-based bookmarks as RSS to FireFox comes close to solving the problem, but it's not there yet.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3908

I happened on this discussion after googling for UltraVNC. And I have to say I am lucky as I seldom have to deal with imbeciles that are trying to circumvent network security. I can't think of ANY reason an employee's offspring should EVER be remoting into a network I manage.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3909

Thanks Sean. I wanted to explore methods of remote connectivity through firewalls, but I certainly don't think anyone should be remotely connecting inside a private LAN environment. What I want to explore is more about helping out family memebers in their own home, but thanks for drawing attention to the fact that en employee would certainly be violating their license agreement by having a unauthorized user log-in remotely to a PC.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3910

That's right. Bookmarks stored to a file can be backed up, whether they be in HTML or XML format. Bookmarks stored on the web are only available if that company's web servers are up and permit you access. Even the biggest websites can have database problems, which means you won't have access to your bookmarks. At work you might have a complex intranet site where bookmarks make navigation very helpful, I know I certainly do. Furthermore, you wouldn't really use delicious or another social bookmarking site to "tag" a link to your intranet site, so there will be a need for browser-based bookmarks for some time. Ajax programming methodologies break browser bookmarking functionality, so it will be left up to the designers to add a "create bookmark" feature, a la Google Maps.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3911

Thank you! This worked a treat on my wireless network. I have three computers - one wired up to the router, the other two connected wirelessly. The wireless connections were dropping every 30 minutes or so. I tried the usual suggestion of disabling IEEE 802.1X authentication - but to no avail. Your suggestion of disabling WZC has finally worked! I now have a constant connection (I also have encryption turned on - I don't understand why the poster above needs WZC in order to have encryption). Thanks again!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3912

That's great news. I originally heard the suggestion from Leo Laporte on a [This Week in Tech](http://thisweekintech.com/) podcast, and explored it since I was having the problem at home. With encryption enabled however, I am still getting drops in connectivity. I need to experiment with TKIP instead of AES WPA mode, or changing when keys are renewed. I heard that it may be possible to either increase the duration of keys, or set the time when keys are re-generated to a time when the router is not in use. This may any drops in service would not actually be noticed by the users. I need to explore these solutions however, so I may be misstating the problem slightly.

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Hey! I really like this guy - they seem to be sold out of his CD most everywhere I check though. Nice taste matthom.

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You can use $_REQUEST in php. This takes into account $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE.

http://www.php.net/reserved.variables

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Funny thing: the first song on the CD played a major part in CSI New York tonight. It was the give-away ring tone of two killers.

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Interesting... thanks Dale. Another example of the versatility that PHP has over ASP.

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I got the call On My ID also In Texas....
and found your blog.....
If you find out let me know...Drummer788@hotmail.com

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c785

I have winvnc on win2k servers with fixed IP addresses. From behind my work firewall, using a browser and port 5800 I get the login screen. Thats great, but when I submit the password I get the error "java.net.UnknownHostException: " Any Ideas? I've seen posts about something called SCIII that may work and downloaded it but it seems to do nothing - or I'm just not seeing it.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3916

Just for the record, I suffer from the same thing. Only difference is mine isn't seasonal, I just get it from time to time. Parents think I should see a specialist about it, but unless it's causing me to wield a weapon at night and attack people unawares, i'll be right.

(Totally off topic, can you check the latest post on my site, CSS help is required.)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c786

Not entirely sure, but I know I get a similar error when the VNC service is not running. I don't have it set to run automatically when Windows starts, so sometimes I forget to start it. On Windows XP, you can go to Start > Run > type 'services.msc' and scroll down to the "VNC Server" service, right-click it and hit properties. Make sure it is started. Not sure how this maps to Windows 2000. I also noticed that I had to open up port 5900 *and* port 5800 since VNC runs on 5900 (these are defaults) but accepts HTTP requests from port 5800. Hope that helps.

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Mmm... dubious about the security of such versatility, though. PHP has earnt a bad rep for such things, even if people generally consider IIS/Microsoft stuff to be not much better!

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PHP Security to the rescue!

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Very cool. However, I'm very concerned about privacy (confidential information) - so some of those "web apps" might not be the solution. I really wish they were, because they're so easy to use - but I have to be careful about what I post on the live web. I got in trouble for that once, already.

Oh, I just realized I did say web-based, in my original post, so that is my fault.

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Wow. That's really cool! Thanks for posting this!

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That's crazy, cheers for the post. I always thought credit card validation would be a really complex process but that's just simple. I'll keep this post in mind if I ever get a potential client that needs credit card validation on their site.

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Earlier Webex was offering Remote Connections for 5 PCs FREE. But ever since they became paid, Ive started using LogMein

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3918

Hi, I've been interested in doing some home automation - including adding a media center component - and was wondering if anyone here had heard of or used HomeSeer + MainLobby software and what your opinion of it is. I know this blog hasn't directly addressed this subject, but I've found a lot of useful information here and thought it might be a good source to learn about home automation experiences of others. Thanks, Courtenay

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Hey~If you go to the link you have for UR, they have pictures from New Year's posted already.

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Sweet. Actually, that link I included just goes to the main page - not to the specific event. My bad.

Here is a better one.

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And the fact that you can have the power of Google in e-mail (with gmail) is great, too. My brother's graduating college soon (no more school address) and I'm pushing him to get an account with them. It's been so handy on so many different occasions; I don't know why anyone would use another e-mail system.

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The one thing I love about external hard drives, not counting it's size and ease to carry around, is the ability to transfer files that you want to keep temporarily while you format. It's good for the situation that i'm in at the moment because I need to format all partitions on my PC at the moment but I want to keep things like my music, movies and other things kept on my PC.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c797

Good stuff, I like it. Maybe I'll give that a shot ;)

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z-index is (probably) your friend. May also help to set position:relative. I was actually having similar problems today (though not with AJAX per-se, seeing as the JavaScript was pulling in plain text and not XML... no matter)!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c800

Good ideas...

For now, I just went ahead and used styles to "hide" the obtrusive select lists, when the DHTML layer is shown:

document.getElementById('selectListID').style.visibility = 'hidden';

And then when the DHTML layer goes away, I make the select lists visible again.

document.getElementById('selectListID').style.visibility = 'visible';

Eh. Works for now.

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i am interested

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It it going to be nice to workout with you. Me so happy you joined.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c802

If I want to store my bookmarks on an Internet-accessible site, I would want the data encrypted before and after transmission. Another feature would be the ability to selective share bookmarks with friends. I..e mark one or more links as private so they do not get exported to files meant for sharing bookmarks. I think a database solution with versioning control would be best, include the abililty to mark a link as 'static' so it cannot be overwritten. Oh, and you definitely would want to make the plugin work with Internet Explorer somehow, for those who have to use IE at work but use Firefox at home, or who want to share links with people who use IE as their browser. Fortezza

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3915

Mmm, good fun. My first AJAX-utilising (though not dependent... it degrades nicely) project is launching in a week or two (end of January), which is exciting because it is a situation where the minimal bandwidth savings of sending raw data, rather than reloading a whole page, will make an enormous difference (it'll be a very high traffic site, broadly promoted, and uses innerHTML to change some content).

Having said that, I'm still uncertain where the "XML" in AJAX comes into matters... the data I'm pulling is marked-up, so in a sense that means it's XML, but it could be anything (i.e. doesn't need to be XML), so the link there is a little weak. I don't quite the purpose of XML as something special in that context, but no matter... I'm sure it'll become clear soon enough!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c803

Josh - yep... good points, regarding the XML confusion. I've seen the same thing. For one AJAX project I was working on - the script that was used to generate the dynamic content (the "remote script") was actually the same exact page as the HTML page that was currently being viewed. I simply used a variable in the URL (for the remote script call), so that the content was different.

However, I could easily visit that "remote script" in the browser (manually entering the address), and tada! --- I saw my XML content surrounded by my HTML template - ie, DOCTYPE, head tags, body tags, etc.

The AJAX still worked fine, but I'm not sure that was truly an XML document.

(It had me thinking for a while...)

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c804

Hey Andy, Great job on the site, I really enjoy it. I was wondering if you know how many concurrent Uvnc connections you can have. I need to be able to load Uvnc on my windows 2003 server and have multiple concurrent connections logged on to it. Do you know if this is possible? Thanks in advance for your insight.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3924

Hi Tim, thanks for the compliment. I did a little bit of searching, and it looks like you can download [this "Repeater" add-on for Ultra VNC](http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/addons/repeater.html) that supports concurrent users. [This forum post](http://forum.ultravnc.net/viewtopic.php?p=19214) seems to say that there are 20 "slots" listening for connections when you are running the repeater. Would that suffice for what you are trying to accomplish? Do you need to support more than 20 simultaneous connections? This might be worth looking into myself. I've found the documentation of UVNC to be rather poor, so I'd like to contribute by testing things that might be of use to other people and myself. I know Windows 2003 will give you concurrent users (without blanking the local screen) out of the box. The limit is probably defined in with a registry key and largely depends on system resources? Does Remote Desktop Connection suit your needs?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3925

These are interesting points. A versioning system for bookmarks sounds interesting, although I can't see how one person might use it that well. What might be nice is a "ranking" system instead of versioning system. Also, why might you want your bookmarks encrypted? I'm sure you have a reason, but I can't think of one myself. The private and public flag certainly seems logical and easy enough. That would be a nice feature for del.icio.us or any of the other guys to implement (an extra database column called IsPublic for example), for people that might not want to share *all* of their bookmarks.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3926

Hmm, I'll have to put this on the to-do list. I recently moved into a place that is wired with Cat5 in each room, making home servers and devices more reliable and more secure than wireless. Do you have any open source/freeware solutions for me to try out?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3927

RDC is excatly what I would like to use, however... 2003 server will only support 2 concurrent connections via RDC without purchasing additional licenses. The additional licenses are around 2000 each for this type of connection. I would really like to spare that kind of expense if it is at all possible! All I really need is the ability for 4 users to concurrently connect to the server. Unfortunately, I am only able to connect 2 at the same time using RDC. Thanks again Andy

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3920

WebEx PC might have been a real contender to LogMeIn, but how can you compete with the generous free trial LogMeIn offers without offering one yourself? (you can't). I'll be recommending LogMeIn to my friends and family.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3921

Thank you so much for this tutorial! I am learning how to create my own graphics and have a quick question. As an example, is there a way to add a border around the image of the trees above?

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3930

Hey Daisyhead, thanks for the comment. Adding a border is relatively simple. After you copy/paste the selection into a new document, just go into layer properties (Layers palette, double-click layer), and you should be taken to a dialog box, where you can add drop shadows, borders, gradients, and much more.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3931

I kinda wish that Apple would release something like an iTunes Lite for those who just want the player itself, none of that additional eye-candy.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c805

Hey that's a good solution! I had this problem a few days later but had forgotten about this post... oops. BUT, apparently it's been fixed for IE7, so... we can all be happy in ten years when everyone adopts :-/

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Dear Matt I read your on the paininthetech.com was great help! Took me ages to find a solution. Thanks again man!!!you are an star!!!

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3928

Hello, I was very interested to read your post on Google Analytics vs Statcounter. I've been using Statcounter for quite some time, and for me one of the best features is the ability to see exactly where a visitor has gone in my site. I have now just been able to use Google analytics, and I can not find this feature anywhere. They list all pages visited, but they don't seem to put it in an order that mirrors the visitors movements, but rather, they list the pages in alphabetical order, making it a little difficult to work out the visitors exact movements and why. Is there a method of doing this in analytics that I have overlooked? Cheers Dean

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3923

1.5.1 is meant to fix a lot of the mac issues.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c807

Well... that's good to hear.

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Yeah, but 1.5 (original) was meant to do that, too. I can't see why any Mac user (i.e., not a web developer) would choose Firefox over Safari.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c809

I can't see why any Mac user (i.e., not a web developer) would choose Firefox over Safari.

You're right - there's only two possible scenario's for that:

1. They've used Firefox on the PC, before, and they realized there's a Mac version of Firefox, too.
2. They are closely related to a web developer (ahem), or a close friend, etc - of which the web developer screams "Firefox!" in their ears, every so often.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c810

It's a band man.

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I want this CD! :) Did you see them on SNL last weekend??

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No, I didn't see them (or Death Cab for Cutie) on either of the previous SNL's... I should watch that more ;)

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does anyone know where to get a walkthrough or help with the various options when ssetting this up. I get the gist of most of it but can't full grasp all of it. thanks

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3922

YES! That's the ticket--stay home more often on Saturday nights! :)

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The idea was that this *was* supposed to get you up and running, but the article could be improved. It’s difficult to write for different technical expertise levels however, without knowing ahead of time who will read the document. If you are looking for a very easy way to be able to access your remote machine, I suggest [creating a free account with LogMeIn](https://secure.logmein.com/go.asp?page=create_account), if you found this tutorial too difficult. Generally freeware or open source software requires a heavy amount of "configuration," which is good and bad depending on your skillset and the amount of effort you want to expend.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3929

What about using Access? You can link Access directly to your database (using ODBC), so that changes made in Access are saved directly to the database.

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True to the point, Jennifer. Good idea. IF I was using Access as my database, then I probably wouldn't need Excel that much.

But I'm referring to a MySQL database, in which you'd have to either use a GUI tool, or the command-line, in order to enter queries.

I probably didn't specify "MySQL" in the entry, so my bad.

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How was Death Cab on SNL? I'm curious what song they played, although I bet it was "Soul Meets Body" ...?

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It was good. And you're right. :)

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I still gotta give you their previous album, "Transatlanticism." Come out for a beer tonight, and I will do so... (tempting bribe...)

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You should be able to do that. I needed to for one of the java things I was doing.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c825

Sounds kinda-array-ish. Can't you just create the array then fill it up with as much stuff as you want? Or was that just the example that I kinda misconstrued?

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The problem when adding things to an array, is with java you need to define the array size, and you're not sure how big this is going to be (for example, adding CDs to my java program, http://www.bluetrait.com/projects/dca/).

With PHP the array will just increase if needed. Java doesn't do this.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c827

An array would obviously make sense for storing multiple values, but I was thinking more along the lines of initializing variables in JavaScript, for use in manipulating the DOM.

So... with that for loop, not only could you initialize the variables, you could also do some basic initialization tasks, to each variable - provided it was the same for all variables.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c828

Sounds like a job for variable variables. Don't know if javascript can do it but php can. You make the value of a variable the variable. I don't know what the use of this would be. Sounds like you may be over thinking somethings. I'd be interested in seeing an application of this.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c829

Tim, yeah, that's kinda what I'm getting at. I looked at that link.. Wow.. gets pretty confusing. All those dollar signs and conversions - I bet it's hard to keep "straight," in the head.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c830

No, I'm saying you can link Access to non-Access databases. For instance, I've done it at work with Postgres databases.

See this page for instructions on how you can do it (well, if you're using Windows - not sure how it would work on a Mac).

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c831

This comment is for Michael:

The problem when adding things to an array, is with java you need to define the array size, and you're not sure how big this is going to be

If you need an array that can grow, why not just use a List? I use Lists ten times as much as I use arrays in Java. The Java Collections framework is enormously useful.

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Well, that's very interesting... thanks for the reference. I didn't know you could do that.

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Hope it's helpful. :)

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Sweet. You said "anal".

I like that .net book. All the reviews on amazon are relatively nice and there are vb.net C# examples for every script. Thats pretty awesome. I believe that is the biggest issue when you learn .net is which one you want to choose. Seeing them side by side when you are first learning would undoubtably help.

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We also used Access as a front-end to SQL Server at a previous employer, which worked quite well for GUI management and viewing of a SQL Server 2000 DB. PS- when you move the focus away from the text boxes below, it deletes anything you entered, which is annoying. Not sure if you want to dig into that, or if it is a Wordpress thing...

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when you move the focus away from the text boxes below, it deletes anything you entered

Thanks for pointing that out. If you've saved your personal info as a cookie, in the past, it will always re-populate those fields, with that cookie info - whenever you apply focus to the main feedback textarea.

This is undoubtably a bug, on my part - but it's a "home-made" system, so that's what I get. ;)

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Let's see the pictures! :)

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Their Wikipedia entry

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They're all right except the last one, p + a. In your example, a is actually a child of p, not a sibling. Here's a correct example, I believe:

<div>
<p>Paragraph</p>
<a href="#">Link</a>
</div>

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Ah yes... that is correct. Thanks for pointing that mistake out. I confused "sibling" and "child" for that one...

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Great info here...I did not know that '+' and '>' were even applicable to a style sheet!

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Amanda... good idea... And, in reality, '+' and '>' are very useful, but IE 6 doesn't understand them, so they're virtually useless until IE 7 comes out - which is getting pretty close!

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I am a subscriber to this service, and I love it. I think that processing things through the internet instead of through a computer makes using things so much easier. You'll have to ping me to tell me how you like it.

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c844

I came here after reading your comment posted in the [Writely Blog](http://writely.blogspot.com/2006/01/beta-meter-up-to-53.html "comment posted"); i'd like to contribute translating your review; it would help me introducing prospective italian speaking collaborators to Writely; i would suggest using Writely for such purpose, as an example of [bilingual document revision](http://forum.writely.com/showthread.php?t=259 "Writely Forum thread") activity, which i'm presently "prodding" and reporting about in the Writely Forum. - luigi

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3937

This would certainly not be useful if you were trying to make an app more secure. For that you need to take different measures. That would be done server-side making it more difficult to crack.

I would say for 99% of the world this is very effective. The point would be to prevent Johnny Impatient from submitting a webform 43 times. Or you could set up an unobtrusive validation script that only made the submit button available when all required fields were filled. This would be great for improving your usability and making an application more like a desktop ap.

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CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN navigate through tabs in Firefox for Mac.

I keep Firefox around for the web developer toolbar, but Safari or Camino are just better applications for the Mac. Camino uses Cocoa to wrap the Gecko rendering engine, so it displays pages nearly the same way as Firefox but handles more like a Mac application.

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I believe you forget the "EEEEEVVVVVEEEEERRRRRR" in your title. Kinko's is a homeless man's armpit. Every time I leave Kinko's my girlfriend has her head hidden, hoping no one will see her with someone who would say such things. Kinko's has the worst customer service on earth. This is not an issue isolated to your local Kinko's. I have never been to a Kinko's where I didn't get attitude. I chalk it up to a poor business practice of solely hiring bitter art school dropouts who think that they have a right to be arrogant.

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It's obvious that it's written in big letters in the staff handbook "TO WORK FOR KINKOS YOU MUST BE AS RUDE AND ABRUPT AS YOU CAN. IF YOU DO NOT FULFIL THIS ROLE, YOU WILL BE TERMINATED AND EATEN BY OTHER FERAL ZOMBIES... ER... KINKOS STAFF"

Pardon the caps but they're exactly the same here in Australia. Only with the simple difference of somehow managing to get a second abusive staff member working on duty.

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Chapelle Show does it best!

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Ah, my neighbors recently vented about this as well: Kinkos: miserable attention to detail.

Not about customer service, but along the same lines.

The basic result is: Kinko's sucks.

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You could certainly do your taxes twice without submiting them. tax freebom by intuit gives you a free tax software online.

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But I'd probably have to pay for both - which might not be ideal... Good idea, though. I may try it.

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I've used TaxACT online for the past three years. It doesn't have the most beautiful interface, but it works and it's inexpensive.

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Hi everyone! i just installed firefox 1.5 and I have lost all my bookmarks... I dont understand why because the other times, they were automatically imported in the new version...can anyone help me please? do you know if they are stored somewhere? thanx

Quick Link to this comment: http://TTIP.me/c3936

3. Much better cookie manager
4. Much better way to make shortcuts for web queries (QuickSearch)
5. Extensions (eg. Sage, Flashblock, SessionSaver) let you add/customize features--even mimic Safari behaviors like snapback, or behaviors from Omniweb/Opera/IE (mix and match your favorites).

You can also change tabs in Firefox using Command-n, where n is the number of the tab you want (counting from the left). Or you can use the tab key to put the focus on the tab bar and then cycle thru the tabs with the arrow keys. Or you can customize how to cycle tabs by installing one of the many tab-related extensions.

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I'm assuming you are using firefox... horizontal scrolling does the same thing as scroll-wheel scrolling with the shift modifier on. In firefox, this makes the pages go back and forward. Use Camino! (or Shiira)

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To make a screenshot of a window: Cmd-Shift-4, _then_ Space, then click on the desired window.

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I have been meaning to give Camino a try. I have a lot of Firefox extensions, although I am becoming increasing disappointed with its sluggish performance on OS X, combined with the fact that the "Ctrl-Tab" keyboard shortcut for switching tabs broke in FF 1.5 I should have clarified that 2-finger scrolling is a feature of newer Apple machines (like the 1.33Ghz iBook), as the 1.33Ghz PB a friend of mine has does not have this feature. Looks like Apple made an upgrade to their touchpad. Thanks for the Camino suggestion!

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Go to about:config (type in the address bar) in Firefox and change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0.

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That would be great. Feel free to add a link or trackback to this article once your translation is complete. I can translate this article to Spanish (Castellano) if that would help your multilingual effort.

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I have started and published a Writely document with an "in progress" [italian translation](http://www.writely.com/Doc.aspx?id=bcccknjfmvn76) of your review; i'll be trying to use it as part of a "Learning the how-and-what of [Collaborative Editing](http://www.writely.com/Doc.aspx?id=bbc6x5pjm4f8s)" experiment ... which (in my plans) aims to start some kind of multilingual environment; your proposed catalan version would fit in very nicely .. if the work ahead turns out to be manageable .. .. which i'm very doubtful about ... Wishful thinkers never die ;)

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I totally agreed with you, until I remember the little used HAVING clause...
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/problems-with-alias.html

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I never seem to get that question, maybe it is because i am always busy

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That number is for Omaha Steaks. They have a bad habit of badgering those of us who took the time to order their product. I am on the supposed "no call" list, but the Omaha Steaks company claims they have a legal right to contact you for up to eighteen months after your purchase. Hope this helps you all out.

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Wow, that was easy and yet I wouldn't have worked that one out in a million years. Thanks folks.

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Totally....even though things are quite lax over here, there's still no other question that can throw you off guard. My desk is situated so that when my boss comes out of his office, my monitors are the first thing he'll see...every so often he'll stop and peer over my shoulder to take a look at what I'm doing. Talk about a ramble fest to explain what I'm working on. lol....

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That's a tricky one...what if, as in many cases, someone is of mixed nationality? That'd really muck things up.

Sincerely,
"Irish-German-Czech"

lol...

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I have tickets to August 18th which is another Cardinals. It is my companies day at the park. I have been waiting all winter for this day! I cannot wait for the season to start! Hopefully we will get to go to see a spring training game on our vacation!

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Yeah, I’d think it would have to be someone who is like 90-100% of a specific nationality, for it to "sound right."

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Note that the FROM address on the email is emarketing@netgear.com and your questions appear to be answered. Looking at the reply-to address of Netgear_Inc_tqqrwv@verasend.com you eventually get to http://www.gotcorp.com/ which is an email marketing site. They don't seem too unhappy about this settlement since they're proactively informing everyone possible. Look here for more info about the settlement terms: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/051125/ntgr8-k.html

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Hi Liljoe, Just go to your "Profiles" folder, and look in the sub-folders for another profile - you'll find (your old) bookmarks.html somewhere in there.

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*jumps up and down* DHTML-only forms are inaccessible to anyone without Javascript, etc., etc.

Yeah, it’s 99% sure to defeat spam at the minute, but so are CAPTCHAS... and we’re not using those for accessibility reasons, too. (Also, I STILL haven’t got a straight answer from anyone who uses a screen reader as to how generated content plays out if it’s read past that point! So I think maybe dynamic content is a general no-no if that audience are a consideration in the build process.)

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The information in the article above is correct for a Dynamic DNS account with DynDNS. But if you have a Custom DNS or Static DNS, then you need to slightly change the configuration. It is a bit difficult to parse through the somewhat ambiguous directions that DynDNS has on it site: http://www.dyndns.com/support/kb/archives/linksys_wrt54g_.html but essentially you need to add "&service=custom" or "&service=static" to your "Hostname" setting in your WRT54G DDNS configuration page. Hope this helps.

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Hello. I am aware of these services from DynDNS, but have not tried them myself. I have a friend that is interested in trying them for a home web server, so these instructions should prove helpful. If you would like to write a "how to" guide on setting up these additional services from DynDNS, I'd love to host it.

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Yes, Kinko’s does suck. Doesn’t it make sense that a place that understaffs as a rule and does not train its employees might have some problems? Corporate rules make it IMPOSSIBLE to provide good customer service because usually there is only one competent (severely underpaid) person working - trying to do the job of 5 or 6. That makes for a very stressful work environment and when you have 20 customers who can’t figure out how to hit the big green start button it is very hard to be patient - no matter who you are.

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http://www.gurujeff.com/kinkossucks.html

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Thank you, thank you, thank you! Much easier to understand than some of the other info out there on this topic.

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Oh, yes it does! Netflix has been throttling me and I’m getting sick of it! Yesterday, we sent back all 3 of our allotted movies.

Today’s queue? Two will ship today, and they say the next available movie will ship tomorrow. But I returned ALL of my movies at the same time! You’re telling me that they’re going to wait another whole day to send out my next movie?

Why? I suspect that it’s because at the top of my list is Flightplan(still on a very long wait for that since it was released), Walk the Line(released today but somehow I have a long wait for it already) and North Country(long wait for that one too) All movies are new releases, and I think they’re making us wait because we use our subscription too efficiently.

I really think they do do this and it’s starting to get really annoying.

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Well... as of right now (1:30 PM) it looks like those four movies that I mentioned are not all actually going to ship today. I’m guessing only two or three will, and the rest will say, "Shipping Tomorrow," like yours says.

Either way, I believe what you say about trying to rent "higher priority" DVD’s - there’s only so many to go around, and the new releases are obviously in higher demand.

Flightplan is on Long Wait for me too, and I rent 5 at a time.

Typically, I stay away from the New Releases, but you’re right - you should be entitled to any movies you select, and there shouldn’t be any delay.

This entry explains "throttling" a little better.

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I have one of the older models as well. There's a neat little program called iScroll2 which brings the 2-finger scrolling to our iBooks as well. I installed it and have been using it ever since. You can give it a try here: [http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/iscroll2/](http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/iscroll2/ "iScroll2") This guy also tells a bit about the firefox scrolling behavior, for anyone who might be interested in fine-tuning this a bit.

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Uhh, it ate my code.

a href="version for people without javascript or search engines" onclick="doStuff(); return false;"

obviously wrapped in lt/gt signs, which I’m not trying again for obvious reasons.

return false; cancels the link’s default action. You can also stick that in the doStuff() function, or whatever. And yeah, onclick doesn’t have to be inline... if you’re feeling really clever you can attach it with DOM methods, etc., but so often that’s just too hard (especially where the code is server-generated anyway, and "markup purity" is a relative term because THAT markup only exists for the duration of page runtime!)

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I know this is kinda old now, so I don't know how much more you've learned... but being a new Mac user myself (I have a MacBook Pro), I've thoroughly researched various things that have helped me adjust. Maybe I'm misreading it, but it sounds like you don't fully grasp the concept between restoring a window and max/minimizing it. Restoring it is whehn, in Windows, you click on the taskbar tab and it comes to the front. Maximizing it is when you make it fill the whole screen. Filling the whole screen is not generally an option in OSX because it wastes space. Anyway, as for being able to minimize a window and access it from the keyboard- instead of minimizing it so the genie effect sucks it into the right side of the dock, hide the application instead (command+h). It doesn't put it into a new dock entry, and in this instance, when you command+tab to the application, it brings it back to the front. You seem like you want to use the keyboard a lot, and I think this will be of great use to you if you don't know about it.

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At the time that article was written, I wasn't aware of hiding windows with "Command+H" as I am now. There certainly *is* a difference between hiding a window and minimizing it. I still think there should be (and probably is) a keyboard command to "extract" windows that are "minimized" to the dock. I found one mentioned on a blog, but could not get it to work on my iBook due to problems with the “alt” and “fn” key modifiers. Regarding "maximize," I was talking about a "windows-style" maximize, where the current active window is increased to the maximum size to fill the screen. I do *not* think this is a waste of space on a small screen, like the 12" screen on my iBook, although to the best of knowledge, OS X does not support any concept of "universal maximize" like Windows does. The trick of course, is getting used to Expose, which is great, and allows me to accomplish everything I can in Windows and more. I still find OS X to be cumbersome however, when there are some files on my desktop that I want to drag into my active window (like dragging files into an FTP client). My options are to used Expose, or hide it, both don’t work very well on a 12” screen at XGA resolution. In Windows I would minimize all windows, then maximize *only* the active window I want, this is clunky to do in OS X, since the only way I can think to accomplish it is to hide or send every window to the dock, the unhide or pull out only the window I want. Everything would change on a larger screen with a full keyboard of course, kind of like those larger screens and keyboards on the Intel iMacs. Hmmm...

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Effective today, [Google acquires Writely](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/writely-so.html). Hopefully it is for the better.

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Another thing to think about for the title of the movie: Have you ever heard a fisherman say "I caught a fish THIS BIG!" and make some grand gesture with his hands? Edward, in his older age, did just this sort of thing with his stories. We see at his funeral that Carl and the Asian twins, among others, do exist, but were exaggerated in Edward’s stories. That is what I initially thought the title of the movie meant. What a beautiful film.

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I've been using the foxmarks (www.foxcloud.com) for about a month now. Works real well, no problems and once you set it up it's pretty invisible to me, it auto syncs and I don't worry about it.....

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I didn’t know you saw this movie! (Or maybe I did. It’s been a while since I checked the site.)

But I agree with Bec--that Big Fish has to do with "fish tales" or "telling a whopper." The stories are real, but not totally true. If you think about it, everyone does this a little--where a story in your life might be completely true but you spice things up. You add or delete people, or things you might have said--or even how it appeared to you at the time. Even leaving something out adds makes something a fish tale. Man, I love that movie!

--but I don’t completely grasp everything in it either. :)

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I saw it right when it came out - almost two years ago. So, this entry is kind of "dated," but the comments here are great - it makes me want to see it again, to re-live it. (Just bumped it to the top of my Netflix queue ;)

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Y'know, Andy, I think what we got here... is a failure to communicate. (Did y'see Cool Hand Luke, dude? GREAT movie. Old, maybe - but GREAT.) Anyway - I need to ask you the same question 11 other good folks here have just asked you. HOW DO WE SET UP AND USE SINGLE CLICK UNTRAVNC? Please don't tell us that just because we had to ask for help that we don't deserve the help. And PLEASE - don't tell us to start using LOGmeIN. As far as I'm concerned THAT is not an answer. That's an insult. We all came here for the same reason - help learning and implementing SC UltraVNC - not to be driven away by somebody with an agenda. Thanks. If you can't tell us how or for some other reason don't want to provide the steps then is there anybody else that would be kind enough to walk us through it? Thank you so much in advance, Penny Trail President and Owner Penny Systems, Inc. D&B A+ Rated since 1984 email to penny_babe@bellsouth.net web page http://www.pennyfinance.com

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This article is for "UltraVNC." The single-click add-on (SC for short), was an afterthought, and is mentioned in another article. I planned a follow-up article on SC specifically, installed it, tried to get it working between two PCs, but ran into problems. I found the documentation to be terrible, and didn't spend much time troubleshooting. I also did not have convenient access to two PC's at the time, and now I do. I'm sorry you found this article to be of no value, I'll definitely take your suggestion for a step-by-step guide on implementing SC. Please send a mail to paininthetech@gmail.com, and I'll be sure to ping you back when I complete the article.

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matt, you are indeed a star: it is easy when you know how. much respect. :)

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I’m having this same problem. Did you figure it out? I don’t know why when I sort by album, the tracks are out of order....

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Andy, my Writely document (linked as the homepage of the Anonymous posting this comment) is almost finished. I have been scattering "Translator's notes" around .. for the non-English/technical reader. This comment replaces two earlier comments of mine which were wiped off by the problems you reported off-line. My translation of your article is presented as part of a "stub" idea, which requires exploring the potential of "collaborative editing" before it can be expanded by a mixed group of characters, rather than by "just an individual". Ciao - [luigi](http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docid=bcccknjfmvn76)

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Try sorting by "Album," ascending (A-Z). This seems to "group" the tracks by Album, and then "order" them by Track Number. Give it a shot...

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Store em with gmmktime and pull em with gmstrftime. PHP will do the work for you. You just have to be okay with making all your times GMT. Its really the best way to store dates anyway. Having a standard time zone like GMT is good because I’m pretty sure every language has GMT time functions. PHP has some pretty powerful date and time functions.

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This is a great program tha I use in my box of tools. Quick time is crap for people that video edit. But for what reason I do not know it seems that every digital camera maker use it.

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I’ve got a Google Pages thingo setup, it’s not THAT great. Plus, because you can’t choose your address (i.e. it has to be [your gmail address].googlepages.com ) it’s great for spam harvesters. Lame-o.

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Yo dude. I have access. Check this screenshot, what’s on the calendar today?

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Well... I’m still in the dark. Why must they keep me waiting? :) I guess it has to happen soon...

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You know, *FREE* was the queue word there.

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I was wondering how to convert those crappy quicktime videos my digital camera makes. Thanks for taking the time to post this.

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I wanted to try the Windows Live thing especially since it imports from del.icio.us. The problem is that, this functionality requires ActiveX so you can't do it using Firefox. Try it..

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two other free programs that can do the exact same thing -blender 3d (non-linear video editor function) -virtual dub and i'm sure there's more out there.

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