[Martin-Pondering]The surface water temp on Loch Ness today was 2.5 C. Seriously cold. The canal routes into Loch Ness from Inverness and Fort William now appear ice free so we are expecting traffic to pick up again. Nothing has been able to get in or out since about Christmas last year.
[Nikolai]Try the new freeicons.eu site for free icons. There is not a huge selection yet but it is new and growing.
The system has icons and clip art free to use and are organised into categories as well as presenting them in various sizes ready to use.
[thegeek]If you get an error related to this message perhaps withXBL you might have a virus or trojan. You might not but the best way to find out is to use the link and then follow the instructions.
[thegeek]// Turn off all error reporting
error_reporting(0);
// Report simple running errors
error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE);
// Reporting E_NOTICE can be good too (to report uninitialized
// variables or catch variable name misspellings ...)
error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_NOTICE);
// Report all errors except E_NOTICE
// This is the default value set in php.ini
error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);
// Report all PHP errors (see changelog)
error_reporting(E_ALL);
// Report all PHP errors
error_reporting(-1);
// Same as error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);
[thegeek]I hate to say this but Worpress does not run using MSSQL. You will have to stick to a MySQL database.
If you try to use an external database, make sure the host allows external connections. A lot of them don't.
Here are the rquirements for Wordpress:
[design]Here is a nice version of the google buzz logo.
The buzz logo has uses a bee on top of the speech bubble.
It is free to use with a link back to the site. Check out the google buzz logo...
[thegeek]The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process
I got this error when using IIS6 and found the answer here although it just fixed after a while without any intervention.
[guest]Updated online portfolio for John Cove, covering digital signage, development, events and PR stunts!
Worth a look! :-)
[warhammer]Found a nice image and retouched it. It is some Warhammer 40K space marines. I think they are from the Horus Heresy period.
[thegeek]It is very easy to create your own short URL service and everything you need to do this can be found here:
http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/make-your-own-tiny-url-shortening-service/
Also, see the example:
[Cancer]Researchers say dark chocolate and red wine may join other foods - such as blueberries, garlic, soy, and tea - as potent medicines in the fight against cancer.
The results of the study were presented by the researchers at the renowned TED Conference on Wednesday.
[thegeek]1.
Starting with the obvious – Avoid printing where possible. Use email for mailing. Also start using Office OneNote which can store documents in a way that makes them easy to find. You can even search for text in images.
2.
Choose the draft option – Most printers have a draft print copy or quick print option. The quality will not be as good but the print is perfectly readable and uses less ink.
3.
Laser Printers – Laser printers have come a lot in price and although still more expensive in general than an inkjet, the cost per page of printing is less than inkjets.
4.
Refill your ink cartridges – This is an option to look into. It can be a lot cheaper to have them refilled.
5.
Print Manager - For larger organisations and schools it is well worth looking into print management software that can track and restrict printing in an organisation. Huge savings can be made. You can limit printing by group, by colour etc.
[thegeek]You often see underscores and hyphens in file names but not dots. They are just as good as hyphens as far as I can tell.
In general, don't use underscores but hyphens and dots are fine from a SEO point of view.
Also dots look good.
Ex: http://3qwe.com/this.is.a.test.html
[Smashing-Magazine]If you're going to use color effectively in your designs, you'll need to know some color concepts and color theory terminology. A thorough working knowledge of concepts like chroma, value and saturation is key to creating your own awesome color schemes. In Part 1: The Meaning of Color of our color theory series, we covered the meanings of different colors. Here, we'll go over the basics of what affects a given color, such as adding gray, white or black to the pure hue, and its effect on a design, with examples of course.Hue is the most basic of color terms and basically denotes an object's color. When we say "blue," "green" or "red," we're talking about hue. The hues you use in your designs convey important messages to your website's visitors. Read part 1 of this article for the meanings conveyed by various hues.
[Smashing-Magazine]Each year, the battle for television ratings begins. Networks unveil their latest creations, jockeying for position in the ratings race, doing everything and anything within their means to gain and keep as many viewers as possible. Months, sometimes years of planning, preparation, marketing, shooting, and editing are laid bare on the "tube" for all to see. Some shows fail miserably and are cancelled after a few months. Others thrive, and become the next big thing. They all hope to become the next American Idol.Television broadcasts continue to have a major impact on society — both in positive and negative ways. Whether you have a long-standing love affair with your television set, or you just use it to kill the monotony when you're taking a break from the internet, I'm sure you'll agree that, due to the overwhelming impact TV has had on modern society (and on television producers' pocketbooks), techniques and principles unique to television broadcast production and marketing a
[Smashing-Magazine]Email signatures are so easy to do well, that it's really a shame how often they're done poorly. Many people want their signature to reflect their personality, provide pertinent information and more, but they can easily go overboard. Why are email signatures important? They may be boring and the last item on your list of things to get right, but they affect the tone of every email you write.Email signatures contain alternative contact details, pertinent job titles and company names, which help the recipient get in touch when emails are not responded to. Sometimes, they give the recipient an idea of who wrote the email in case it has been a while since they have been in touch. They are also professional: like a letterhead, they show that you run a business (in some countries, you're required to do so). Here are some tips on how to create a tasteful signature that works.
[Smashing-Magazine]Planning and communication are two key elements in the development of any successful website or application. And that is exactly what the wireframing process offers: a quick and simple method to plan the layout and a cost-effective, time-saving tool to easily communicate your ideas to others. A wireframe typically has the basic elements of a Web page: header, footer, sidebar, maybe even some generated content, which gives you, your clients and colleagues a simple visually oriented layout that illustrates what the structure of the website will be by the end of the project and that serves as the foundation for any future alterations.This article focuses on actual wireframing tools and standalone applications, as well as resources that you'll need to build your own wireframe: wireframing kits, browser windows, form elements, grids, Mac OS X elements, mobile elements, which you'll use in any typical graphics editor such as Photoshop or Illustrator. ...Or you could use pen and paper.
[Smashing-Magazine]When you hear the word "creative", what type of profession comes to mind? Maybe a graphic designer, painter, sculptor, illustrator, or writer? It's unlikely that you would consider a "programmer" when thinking of creative fields of work. But programmers have the potential to be creative and come up with ideas or concepts that will impact others in positive ways.We often turn to programmers to solve mathematical-related problems, but the concept of mathematics in programming is what powers programmers to innovate. When you think of mathematics you imagine numbers, expressions, and equations. But what about art, music, or even beautiful visuals? Those numbers and equations that we often view as mundane and overly-formulaic can generate beautiful visuals and music. This article will present dozens of examples of motion graphics and interactive visuals created with computational code, along with some useful references and resources.
[Smashing-Magazine]In the previous two parts of this series on color theory, we talked mostly about the meanings behind colors and color terminology. While this information is important, I'm sure a lot of people were wondering when we were going to get into the nitty-gritty of actually creating some color schemes.Well, that's where Part 3 comes in. Here we'll be talking about methods for creating your own color schemes, from scratch. We'll cover the traditional color scheme patterns (monochrome, analogous, complementary, etc.) as well as how to create custom schemes that aren't based strictly on any one pattern. By the end of this article, you'll have the tools and skills to start creating beautiful color palettes for your own design projects. The best way to improve your skills is to practice, so why not set yourself a goal of creating a new color scheme every day.
[Smashing-Magazine]“Mathematics is beautiful.” This may sound absurd to people who wince at numbers and equations. But some of the most beautiful things in nature and our universe exhibit mathematical properties, from the smallest seashell to the biggest whirlpool galaxies. In fact, one of the greatest ancient philosophers, Aristotle, said: “The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”Because of its beautiful nature, mathematics has been a part of art and architectural design for ages. But it has not been exploited much for website design. This is probably because many of us regard mathematics as being antithetical to creativity. On the contrary, mathematics can be a tool to produce creative designs. That said, you don't have to rely on math for every design. The point is that you should regard it as your friend, not a foe. For illustrative purposes, we created a couple of web designs that present mathematic
[Smashing-Magazine]Over the last months we released a variety of icon sets, tools and templates, but now we would like to release something a bit different for a change. In this post we are glad to release Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts, a PDF-file with a handy overview of most useful keyboard shortcuts available in Adobe Photoshop. The cheat sheet was created by Kenneth Setzer and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.The cheat sheet is a mousepad-sized image featuring a typical PC keyboard. Photoshop's keyboard shortcuts are listed for each key, with the shortcut and its icon printed on the individual key. In red is the shortcut you will get by hitting the key in combination with the Ctrl key. For example, typing "t" in Photoshop will activate the Type tool, while typing Ctrl+t will allow you to use the Transformation tool. Additional shortcuts requiring more than two keys are listed as well.
[Smashing-Magazine]Almost every movie has a scene in which a character pull the protagonist aside and says, "There's something you should know about [insert another character's name here]." Most of the time, we find out some dark secret about a supposed friend of the protagonist or that the main ally is actually an evil overlord. This is that moment, and I am here to tell you a few things about our friend in the Web 2.0 world: AJAX.We seem to have AJAX licked. The Web technology is ubiquitous, and libraries and frameworks make it dead easy for us to create highly interactive Web applications and to spice up our static pages and blogs.After the main HTML document has loaded, AJAX loads content from the server and replaces parts of the document with that content rather than reload the main document. It's as simple as that. AJAX stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" and was meant to load only XML documents, but we soon used it to load everything under the sun, and so the XML part was quickly forg
[Smashing-Magazine]Today we are glad to release a beautiful, simple and clean portfolio WordPress theme — SimpleFolio, designed by Omar E. Corrales and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. SimpleFolio is a portfolio theme that includes a blog and a very extensive option page that allows you to exclude all your portfolio items from the blog page. It also includes a front page slider.It has 2 different widget areas and threaded comments, and also supports paged comments and has 2 different page templates for advanced usage. The control of images is done from the post page. The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. You may modify the theme as you wish. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word.
[thegeek]I use a 2GB Transcend USB Flash drive or memory stick to store my office data. Today when I tried to copy some data from my Computer to the memory stick, an alert popped up with Error 0X80070052, and “the directory or file can not be created”. Here is my experience in fixing the error…
[Photoshop]Working in camera raw gives you the most control over your images. Camera raw eliminates any processing by the camera and lets you set the parameters for each image – parameters such as white balance, contrast, color saturation, sharpening, and tonal range...
[Photoshop]Even the best of us creative types struggle with what I like to call “designer’s block,” staring at a blank canvas in your favorite graphics editing program for hours. It can be downright difficult to find inspiration when starting a design from scratch. I have often found that one great source of inspiration are Photoshop brush sets...
[Photoshop]Photoshop shapes are different than Photoshop brushes, although some people use the terms interchangeably, they refer to completely different tools. Both tools will allow you to easily add custom elements that be stamped out over and over again, used to create patterns, transferred from one design to another, and stored in your Photoshop library for use on your next project.
[Photoshop]Plugins and filters extend Photoshop by providing new functionality and effects that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve or by simplifying a process. There are lots of plugins that you can buy but in the TutorialBlog way we are going to be taking a look at the best of the free plugins...
[guest]Check out The Futtock for the best comic strip ever.
Featuring Star Wars, Married Life and others.
[software-maintenance]HP have a simple page for calculating printing costs based on paper coverage and quantity.
[software-maintenance]The low purchase cost of modern budget printers can make them appear to be a much more sensible investment than their more expensive counterparts…
[Nikolai]These PHP examples will remove all or some characters from a string that are not letters or numbers.
// Strip all non-alphanumeric characters
// This will remove any characters that are not letters and numbers
$newString = ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "", $oldString );
// Strip all non-alphabetic characters
$newString = ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z]", "", $oldString );
// Keep hyphens and alphanumeric characters
$newString = ereg_replace("[^A-Za-z0-9-]", "", $oldString );
[Nikolai]Here is another PHP based PDF generator. It takes simple HTML and converts it. There are some limitations, but if you like table base layouts then this is a good one for you.
Printing webpages is great, but every browser renders a page differently. This can cause problems if you need to be able to print a page that looks the same no matter what platform or browser is being used. Additionally, PDF files can be searched and browsed as a sort of notebook, making it a useful file format for large text files...
[Nikolai]If you want to generate PDFs using PHP then this class is probably the one for you.
FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP, that is to say without using the PDFlib library. F from FPDF stands for Free: you may use it for any kind of usage and modify it to suit your needs
[Nikolai]If you are looking for a great print management software package then Print Manager Plus might be right for you. It is a server based system that tracks, controls and restricts printing on the network. It is not a product for pivate individuals although it is very handy, but priced for the company and many users.
Unlike other print management packages it does not change windows, and runs on just about any windows os.
[Nikolai]I am experimenting with a Fantasy and Sci-Fi social networking site. It is like facebook or myspace but you are your fantasy alter ego instead.
Check it out...
[Nikolai]When setting up a shared printer on an XP box and trying to print from a Vista home machine I got the error 0x800f0214 after having downloaded the vista printer drivers.
The fix was to set up the printer using:
>Add a local printer
>Creat a new port
>Local Port
Then entering the computer name and printer name like this:
\computernameprintername
It worked
[Nikolai]3qwe.com has a sister site called 3qwe.net which is a very cool and free private bookmarking website. You simply enter a list of your favourite bookmarks, and the page will present you with a cloud of them. The size of each link changes depending on the popularity.
It is the perfect and simple homepage, and I encourage anyone to use it.
What is so great is that it is so easy to get to where you want to go. Click the links. Use shortcuts for any site. Use the comand line box for searching.
[Nikolai]The new version is live and testable.
It is not complete, but it is close to a full engine that needs a lot of content to pad it out.
Have a look: http://92.48.103.52/fantasy3/game.php
Note that any accounts created now will be lost soon. The original game is still running until I am happy to switch over at which point I will drop the bomb.
What is the bomb? Not sure yet. One of my tasks now is to see how to make the transfer as painless as possible.
:)
Fenris