Recent Posts

5976

Living Room / Re: Humour - how about a giggle column ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 25, 2006, 04:24 AM »

Gross - but very funny - serves them right doesn't it ;-)

5977

Living Room / Re: Humour - how about a giggle column ... Fantastic Find ....

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 10:30 AM »

Don't know how many american were aware or the late great Kenny Everet. He was a notorius DJ for the BBC in the 70s and 80s who had the distinction of being sacked on numerous occasions for being too outragous. Needless to say he had a loyal following (me included) and the BBC always had to chase after him to get him back!

A new podcast has just been released of his ongoing 'serial' item of Captain Kremmen ... give it a go - you'll be hooked

See http://www.creationp...p?cat=captainkremmen for details

5978

Living Room / Re: Run Word 2002/2003 in SAFE mode - say Microsoft

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 09:49 AM »

Just what I (and every other sane Word user) thought - shame MS people aren't sane really.

5979

Living Room / Run Word 2002/2003 in SAFE mode - say Microsoft

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 09:39 AM »

Let joy be unconfined ... just spotted these articles on ZDNet ...

http://news.zdnet.co...-6074403.html?tag=nl
http://news.zdnet.co...907.html?tag=nl.e589

The relevant MS security advisory is here

http://www.microsoft...advisory/919637.mspx

5980

Post New Requests Here / Re: predictive text for ms word

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 08:15 AM »

Another thread to read is https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2631.0

5981

Living Room / Re: Humour - how about a giggle column ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 08:02 AM »

When I used to teach young children I would get the kids outdoors to do the size of the planets. The Sun was a large beachball, Jupiter was a tennis ball and the Earth a tiny green lentil. We then used to set about getting the scale right, which meant the Sun and the Earth had to be about 30 metres apart (and from that distance you couldn't see the Earth). Unfortunately the playground wasn't big enough to get Jupiter in the right place on that scale!!

Certainly puts things in perspective.

5982

Living Room / Re: Humour - how about a giggle column ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 07:19 AM »

Just received the attached Powerpoint slideshow (I have zipped it) from a friend - made me laugh (a lot). Also shows you what you can do with photo editing software. Sorry don't know where it came from originally.

If you need the PP player you can get it http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=428d5727-43ab-4f24-90b7-a94784af71a4&DisplayLang=en

5983

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: meter my bandwidth during specific daily interval each month

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 05:00 AM »

You could use DUMeter (www.dumeter.com) which is a download and upload monitor. You can set it to give you a warning when a certain amount has been transferred (up, down or both) this day, week, month so by using a scheduler to start the program at the right time it could warn you when your bandwidth restriction is looming. Only drawback is it $19.95

(Sorry just noticed someone else has already mentioned this - I have only read this thread today and skipped through it)

5984

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: meter my bandwidth during specific daily interval each month

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 24, 2006, 04:50 AM »

the download/upload limit that is set on my account at the moment is 30 gig max (email warnings are sent at 24 gig). this isn't so terrible as i can download things through the night without any bandwidth restrictions but i have once exceeded their 30 gig limit and don't really want to do it again - they will expect me to upgrade my account - i pay £23 a month already so it's not on the cheap side here in the UK.

-nudone (May 11, 2006, 04:00 PM)

I'm amazed  - what on earth are you downloading ?? I have a 40Gb bandwidth account and never managed to get close and I thought I was getting pretty bad (there seems to be something downloading a lot of the time on my system!).

5985

Developer's Corner / Re: The Hunt for the Best CMS

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 23, 2006, 02:26 PM »

I seem to remember reading that integration of SMF and Drupal was distinctly none trivial because of a slah of global variable names.

5986

Living Room / Re: Humour - how about a giggle column ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 23, 2006, 06:52 AM »

LOL - I like the coding stupities page ... reminds me of yesteryear when I taught programming in Pascal and C!

5987

Living Room / Acronis TrueImage 9 now has direct write to DVD support

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 22, 2006, 04:10 PM »

Just got a notification from Acronis - they have just released an update for version 9 which can burn backups directly to CD/DVD so you don't need to backup to hard disc and then burn using another product.

I haven't tired it yet (I am downloading the 75Mb installer at the moment) but I'm not holding my breath. If past experience is anything to go by it'll probably work properly after a few bumps of the build number (call me a cynic if you want).

See http://www.acronis.c.../products/trueimage/ for details.

The update is free to current version 9 users.

5988

General Software Discussion / Midows Vista minumum spec published ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 22, 2006, 08:59 AM »

Talk about bloat ...

http://news.com.com/...779.html?tag=nl.e501

512Mb memory & 15Gb of hard disc space just to install - and that is the minimum recommended!!!

5989

Living Room / Re: Humour - how about a giggle column ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 22, 2006, 08:52 AM »

This made me smile this morning ...



Not to mention Garfield who is definitely my daily favourite read ...

5990

Living Room / Re: Calling all petrol heads ... take a peak at Top Gear!

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 22, 2006, 07:09 AM »

Don't know if you can connect via a UK proxy?

You could try here http://www.xroxy.com...proxy-country-GB.htm

5991

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Symantec anti-virus auto-updater

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 22, 2006, 05:45 AM »

You could use Website-Watcher - there used to be a discount for memebers but I haven't checked to see if it is still valid.

It will tell you if the page is updated. It also has a scripting language built in that can run programs so should be able to detect the filename and execute it.

Useful app in its own right too ...

5992

Living Room / Re: Calling all petrol heads ... take a peak at Top Gear!

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 22, 2006, 05:42 AM »

Don't forget URLSnooper & Streambox if you prefer to batch download and watch offline. They are quite big files (~90Mb) as the progs are 1 hour in length. For RealMedia they aren't bad quality either.

Also don't forget - the BBC don't leave these things online for long (usually just a couple of weeks at the most).

5993

Living Room / Calling all petrol heads ... take a peak at Top Gear!

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 07:03 PM »

If you are in the UK you probably watch Top Gear - if you live elsewhere you probably don't ('cos you can't).

Don't get me wrong my take on cars is that they get you from A to B and don't cost a fortune to buy, maintain or run - and when something needs fixing I GALMI !!!

However, Top Gear is a favourite programme of mine mainly because it is very funny testosterone driven silliness that doesn't take itslef at all seriously. I particularly enjoy the daft challenges - like the first epsiode let's make a convertable and then see if they survive in a car wash, and last week (ep 2) canoe vs. 4 wheel drive in Iceland.

Interested - well now the world can watch it 'cos the latest series is availble on a week by week basis via the BBC website ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk...grammes/?id=top_gear

enjoy ...

5994

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Encryption software

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 04:58 PM »

I suppose they might see TrueCrypt installed on your system! You can also within the interface associate .tc files with the image files so you can mount them with a double click, which seems to give them away abit.

Hoever, I think the scenario is ridiculous that they describe - unless you are a member of the secret service are you going to really hide information to the point of violence to get a password?

5995

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there an AV App that Doesn't Eventually Become Bloatware?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 10:50 AM »

The Agnitum Outpost Firewal has an AntiSpyware plugin seems pretty effective and is always being updated. That combined with Webroot SpySweeper (which has a few more functions than the Outpost plugin) and ESET NOD32 AV seem to work pretty well for me without being too bloated.

5996

DonationCoder Projects / Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 10:45 AM »

I can't see a problem with letting people use the blog tags in their own posts, or edit them accordingly at the request of a mod.

Once a post is considered suitable and edited into a consistent format it could be promoted to full blog status and would have an intro on the blogg main page.

If someone wants to write a significant piece outside the normal forum it could submitted in a separate forum section.

A simple way to acheive the blog main page would be to use something like eg. WordPress (or similar Blog) to act as a dumb frontend for the blog posts. It would then only need moderators (or whoever else you want to invlove) to have access to the frontend to copy summaried to Wordpress and add a link to the main SMF forum post where the blog is stored. That way it wouldn't require any sort of integration of Wordpress with SMF, just use WordPress as a quick way to get a frontpage up that is easy to use.

You could of course use any Blog type setup to acheive this, WordPress is just an example and maybe an overkill.

You could even use the "Blogger" website and have an extra point of entry into DonationCoder.com and then there would be no setting up work to do!

5997

DonationCoder Projects / Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 09:53 AM »

That's why I thought SPOILER could do the work now ...

An new blog post woul look like this:

This is my introduction to my blog post

Read more ...

This is the rest of my blog post

Perhaps the BLOG tag could use the existing spoiler code to do this but modified so that:

1) When you hit button the button is removed or changed to "Hide again ..."
2) The text is expanded within the thread as for spoiler but not in its own box just as part of the whole message

You could always have a set of BLOG tags so that you can set up standard formatting ...

eg.

[Select]

[BLOGTITLE]A New Blog[/BLOGTITLE]
[BLOGINTRO]This is my introduction to my blog post[/BLOGINTRO]
[BLOGSUBHEADING]Section 1[/BLOGSUBHEADING]
[BLOG]This is the full text of section 1 of my blog[/BLOG]
[BLOGSUBHEADING]Section 2[/BLOGSUBHEADING]
[BLOG]This is the full text of section 2 of my blog[/BLOG]

Each BLOG /BLOG pair wouldbe displayed as a "Read more ..." as above in the Spoiler example button but Titles, intros and section headings would be displayed.

Each of these tags would have a font style, colour etc. associated with it as the default (obviously they could be overridden easily within the text body in the usual way).

5998

DonationCoder Projects / Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 08:22 AM »

One other thought - is it possible in SMF to apply different templates to some forums - or are there any mods that might do that? That way specific areas could be given their own look?

5999

DonationCoder Projects / Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 08:18 AM »

How about having a "Proposed BLOG" section - then any editing can be done by the original poster and a mod/admin by agreement, once it is in final form the initial post can be moved to the live BLOGS area where the initial post is protected and others can post responses.

In the "Proposed BLOG" section there could be a sticky guidance article to get a uniform look and feel.

Suitable posts (by agreement with the author) could be copied to the "Proposed BLOG" section for tweaking etc.

Could you use a static page to point to new BLOGs with the brief extract automatically?

Could this actually be a possible overall solution - use the Forum as the main area for content as well as the forum (hiding areas from forum posts if necessary) and using a few static pages to grab relevant content to point to the appropriate forum pages?

6000

DonationCoder Projects / Re: DC Homebrew Mini-CMS Discussion

« Last post by Carol Haynes on May 21, 2006, 08:02 AM »

How about including blog tags in the forum? Something like:

[Select]

[BLOG]
Blog text

[/BLOG]

Which when display shows the first 5 lines with a Read more button?

This could probably be easily acheived by modifying the SPOILER code or to be honest there is nothing to stop using SPOILER anyway.

[Select]

Intro Para

[SPOILER=Read More ...]
Rest of text
[/SPOILER]