Recent Posts

7226

General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for finance app

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 11:26 AM »

Let us know how you get on - if it supports UK bank systems I would be really interested.

To be fair the last version of Money I tried was 2003, but I couln'd be bothered using it any more and didn't see the point of buying new versions (esp. as there aren't discounts for upgrades).

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for finance app

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 11:00 AM »

I haven't tried them. I'd guess the problem Money has with UK institutions is down to the institutions themselves rather than the software. MS has got this stuff working in the US, and I'd guess that could be a reason Quicken gave up.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for finance app

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 10:46 AM »

Unfortunately.

I used it for a while - but it doesn't link to a lot of financial institutions easily. I gave up in the end because it seemd to defeat the object for me!

I bank with HSBC and the only way you could entre bank transactions was to separately go to the bank website, download your transactions and merge them into Money - this almost always led to some editing because there would be overlaps in data.

Barclaycard and other credit cards seem even worse as they don't even have a download format that works well (CSV was the best I could find, but it didn't import well).

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Living Room / Re: Interested in teaming up for good web hosting / website accounts?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 10:13 AM »

Ta ... I would probably be interested - see how things develop ...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for finance app

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 09:52 AM »

Tee hee - (not really) ... look up the thread a bit and you'll see where I said that a while back

7231

Living Room / Re: Windows culture vs. OS X culture...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 09:47 AM »

i have to admit to not being a fan of apple.
i know that mac osx is getting great reviews from programmers, and i think the basic idea of a pro quality user interface on top of an open source clean *nix based operating system with a robot commandline support is a great idea.

-mouser (October 20, 2005, 06:53 AM)

OSX is so much better than Apples previous efforts. Years ago I manged seven computer systems for a Further Education College. All the systems caused problems but Apple Macs were the worst to trouble shoot (and they did cause trouble).

They also had the huge disadvantage (and still do) of being hugely overpriced. At least now you can buy third party peripherals, but Apple's insistance in the past on controlling every product you plugged in nearly killed the company (and refusing to allow you 'inside the box'). The basic machines are still overpriced and focus (IMHO) in 'looking funky' (depends on your taste but I don't actually like a lot of the weird "Day of the Triffids" ideas).

to me, apple just feels to me like its more about building and selling an irrational cult image - and less about the product.  you can't replace that battery in your ipod? wtf !?!! 

Quite - in the UK it costs ~£100 to get your iPod 'serviced' - who are they kidding, they don't even send your own iPod back (so much for paying to get it personalised).

The biggest problem to me is the lack of choice. Less choice in hardware, peripherals and software. If you are going to use Linux you may as well buy a cheap PC and install Linux (or even buy one with Linux as the OS of choice). At least then you have the flexibility to make choices!

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Living Room / Re: Interested in teaming up for good web hosting / website accounts?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 09:34 AM »

Reading this thread with interest, having "chatted" about it yesterday.

I may well be interested, but would need help to know how to link domain names to your server (in the event it happens).

Would you be able to support any domain type (.com, .co.uk etc)

It would certainly have made things easier over the last few days ...

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General Software Discussion / Re: Looking for finance app

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 09:30 AM »

Seems to be becoming the norm nowadays ... lots of site have forums to provide support (which is a good way to do it) but I spent ages yesterday evening trying to register with a support forum, and there was no way to contact the website to say their registration system didn't work!!!

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Living Room / Re: StarWreck full movie spoof on star trek and babylon 9 (english subs)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 09:29 AM »

The post is edited - try again now (mea culpa)

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Living Room / Re: StarWreck full movie spoof on star trek and babylon 9 (english subs)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 09:15 AM »

So far I have setup two experimental blog sites (both using MySQL and PHP), two wikis (both using PHP+text files, one with PHP+MySQL)
and a Drupal based site - boy is that impressive !!!

If you want to have a look (no content yet but you can get the idea) checkout ...

www.lairdswood.com/drupal

www.lairdswood.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php (yes I know I can't spell, this uses text based files to store the 'pages')
www.lairdswood.com/mediawiki

www.lairdswood.com/weblogs (based on bblog)
www.lairdswood.com/weblogs/wordpress

So far I am most impressed with Drupal (is there anything it doesn't do out of the box?)

Of the others PMWiki is quick and easy to setup and has few overheads, MediaWiki has becaome a standard (though it isn't that easy to set up or manage from the limited look I have had), no so impressed with bblog - the blog pages look ok but the whole thing feels a bit amateurish, WordPress is quite impressive (but it was hard to set up as there was a PHP bug which has survived various version updates - ridiculous).

Drupal installation was quite complicated (it meant getting your hands dirty in MySQL and if you want to prefix all your tables you have to manually edit some scripts). It wasn't helped by the fact the latest version requires a later PHP than my provider supports, and all the documentation refers tot he latest version (which is different)!!!

I'm going to write up a full description of my experiements ... coming soon

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Living Room / Re: StarWreck full movie spoof on star trek and babylon 9 (english subs)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 09:03 AM »

Now you are making me think ... my memory is getting really bad these days ...

I think I used ULEAD Video Studio or ULEAD Movie Factory 4, but I can't be sure.

7237

Living Room / Re: StarWreck full movie spoof on star trek and babylon 9 (english subs)

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 07:03 AM »

And v.good for me (though I haven't watched it all yet).

So good infact that I could transcode it and burn it to DVD - looks as good as any other DVD4 quality film to me ...

7238

Screenshot Captor / Re: suggestion: improve zoom with mousewheel

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 07:01 AM »

No - that I don't speak German! (I bullied a friend to do the translation - though I did find the umlauts!)

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ProcessTamer / Re: ok finally about to do a round of work on Process Tamer - make your requests

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 07:00 AM »

I have spent a while looking for the article ... no luck, all I can find are articles suggesting precisely what you said ...

Oh well another brainstorm ...

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ProcessTamer / Re: ok finally about to do a round of work on Process Tamer - make your requests

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 05:34 AM »

It is a good idea ...

Actually, Mouser, it isn't that simple ... if you run CD/DVD writer apps a high priority they can fail. I'm not sure why but I have had a few coasters from this (when I furst started using PT this is precisely what I did) and found a reference to the problem somewhere which said don't adjust process priority higher on burning apps as it may actually make problems worse.

I think it was something to do with system bottlenecks but I can't be sure, and I can't remember where the article was. I think it may have been on ulead's site.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: suggestion: improve zoom with mousewheel

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 20, 2005, 05:29 AM »

ROFL ...

Shoudln't we take this to the Living Room, and continue over a cuppa round the fire ...

(Actually I have a confession ...)

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Screenshot Captor / Re: suggestion: improve zoom with mousewheel

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 04:51 PM »

Didn't find cat owners cat hears all over the table ?
I don't want imaging what we could find from this gigant cats 

-Stefan (October 19, 2005, 10:02 AM)

Finden Leute, die Katzen haben, nicht Haare überall auf dem Tisch?
Ich will mir nicht vorstellen was für Haare man von so einer Riesenkatze finden würde.


Well Mouser did ask for a translation 

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Living Room / Re: Making a donation ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 04:43 PM »

Oo err ... that does look good ... for anyone else interested you can see it at http://drupal.org/

Guess what my first Blog is going to be about ...

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Living Room / Re: Making a donation ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 03:56 PM »

Cheers - good advice ...

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Screenshot Captor / Re: suggestion: improve zoom with mousewheel

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 11:49 AM »

Well I think it is very clear ....

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Living Room / Re: Making a donation ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 11:45 AM »

Thanks, it was wordpress you mentioned.

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General Software Discussion / Re: IE can, but Firefox can't access internet?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 11:39 AM »

It's really odd ...

I am having problems with FireFox too ...

I have been waiting upto 30 seconds for pages to load on here, and I am frequently getting time out problems loading pages.

I have swapped to using Maxthon (without doing anything else to my connection) and the pages now load instantly ???

Strange !

7248

Living Room / Re: Making a donation ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 11:32 AM »

Have you decided which language you are going to use for the back-end code?

-NickW (October 19, 2005, 10:59 AM)

I was toying with learning ASP. I use Adobe GoLive which has good support for ASP but I'm not sure I have the time (or the energy) to learn it.

Any other suggestions gratefully received.

I may just go down the route of linked BLOG, Wiki and Forum, and other pages using CSS.

Given that the Wiki and Forum software I am playing with are PHP based I suppose I should really get into using PHP !!

Mouser (if you read this) what was the Blog software you mentioned to me today - I forgot to note the name down?

7249

General Software Discussion / Re: IE can, but Firefox can't access internet?

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 11:27 AM »

NIS is notorious for not playing with other security systems. I'd guess there is a good chance that it is causing the problem.

Disabling NIS doesn't actually disable it - it stops the functions doing their job, but if you check processes you will find them still loaded and doing stuff.

NIS and NAV are the most horrendous bloatfest ...

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Living Room / Re: Making a donation ...

« Last post by Carol Haynes on October 19, 2005, 10:37 AM »

The content never appeared (a lot of the stuff there has sat for two years or more).

I have a lot of ideas for stuff I'd like to put on Playoutdoors - but I'd really like it to become a community thing. That's why when it is up and running I am going to include a better (no crap) forum, based on the same software as this one, and a 'Wiki' so that people can contribute their experiences and stuff that interests them. Lairdswood is more personal - really just stuff I am interested in, but again I would like it to grow.

Ideally I'd like to pull the two sites together so there will be a common forum structure and interlinks between the two.

In order to do this I want to change how the site is designed to make it more content driven, and easier to update and organise.

Trouble is I am learning as I go along ... so it all takes for ever, and generating enough content takes a long time too ...