I like the Firefox browser (only as a friend) but I hate its search bar. By default it gets installed right next to the URL address bar on the Navigation toolbar and it's shrunken down to a miniscule, ridiculous size and it doesn't support History. Needless to say I had to tweak it. Read the rest of this entry ...
Every guy with a webpage eventually gets really curious about who is reading his website and whether he's doing anything worthwhile or if he's just entertaining himself. Serious webmasters will ensure they get server logs so they can analyze their traffic thoroughly. The web package that I purchased through my host gives me some standard web site statistics (produced by Report Magic) and these reports are great as summary information. But if I want to look at my actual server logs I'm out of luck unless I want to pay an extra couple bucks a month for them.
Ok, so I'm cheap. Instead of doing that, I thought I'd brush off my PHP manual and figure out how to do it myself. It wasn't that hard to do. Consider that it only took a couple hours time, I wasn't testing it locally (had to FTP every time), and my PHP knowledge is maybe just a notch above novice (though my familiarity with C/C++ certainly helps). Read the rest of this entry ...
This entry will be the first of a series that describe in fine detail how I transferred video from old VHS tapes and Laserdiscs to brand-spanking new DVDRs. It includes the video capture, the MPEG encoding, some audio engineering, DVD title/chapter/menu creation and burning. Get ready... Read the rest of this entry ...
Today I decided to upgrade my neglected 5-year old installation of Mandrake Linux. So I downloaded the 3 CD .iso images from their site. This took a good chunk of time as I have to wait on public FTP servers, but still it was finished by noon.
Then, and you just gotta love this...once I get the iso images saved to hard disk, Roxio's Disc Copier has associated the .iso extension, so I right-click the file, open Disc Copier and click Burn at 48x...
Elapsed time: 2 minutes 43 seconds
Can't be much simpler than that! Ok, I'm still geeking out about having the power to make optical media, but hey - I held out for a LOOONG time.
Read Part One for a refresher first. We left that article with the hazy outline of how we can implement a state machine from an application's perspective by deferring state transitions and behavior to State subclass objects (which we still need to write) and have these objects swapped in/out depending on our requirements. We now get into some more detail on this and show a full (yet trivial) example. Read the rest of this entry ...