Posts by Mushy-pea

Hi. DLL files are dynamically linked to a program. If you want to statically link functions to your program they will probably go in a .lib or .obj file, or in your programs' own .exe file. I believe that linking either static or dynamic libraries is a job for your compiler, so what you need to do will depend on which one you're using. Check the documentation and something should show up.

Steven.

Hello everyone. A few months ago I got a cheap new mobile phone with video recording. I'd just heard about Youtube at the time. So, the obvious came to mind (video myself playing a tune on the guitar and post it :p ). What resulted from this became an object lesson in bad video material to me :rolleyes: :twisted: :lol: :-| . The poor picture quality: breathtaking. The scratchy soundtrack: unlistenable. It is even the wrong way around, so you have to turn the monitor through 90 degrees to see it properly (an graet touch, I feel :p ). Have a look if you're interested. If you're feeling nice, maybe post some deservedly insulting (to the video) comments. If it gets slagged off enough it might get recognised for breaking new ground in rubbish. Thanks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVQmPmy392Y

Steven.

Hi. When you say a column of numbers I'm thinking you mean one number per line. If I was doing this problem I would try this:

1. Split the column into it's component rows using the split function.
2. Do a foreach loop to perform each necessary operation per column.

However, it would be neater to feed your program the column of numbers in a file and read them into a string first, rather than read them from the keyboard (more scaleable). So, how about ask the user for a file to read the column from and then read them in i.e.

use strict;
use warnings;

&main;
exit(0);

sub main {
my($filename, $column, @data, @line);
print "Please enter the file containing your column: ";
$filename = <STDIN>;
chop($filename);
open(file1, "<", $filename);
@data = <file1>;
close(file1);
$column = join("", @data);
@line = split(/\\n/, $column);
foreach (@line) {
#Your code to process each line in the column
}

}

A few things to mention here:

1. It's a good idea to start your Perl programs with use strict and use warnings. See here: http://perldoc.perl.org/strict.html
and here: http://perldoc.perl.org/warnings.html

2. For information on opening and closing a file see here:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlopentut.html

3. The split function can come in very useful when processing text files. Also, regular expressions are a good thing to learn if you're interested in Perl. See here: http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/split.html
and here: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html

…

If you're really worried about cached pages like that, you can add a custom header that says the page expired sometime in the past. (1969 would be a good year.)

Just as a side note (seeing as you seem to have solved the OP's problem), setting an expiry date for things that is before Jan 1st 1970 may cause the integer representing that date at system level to wrap around and become something close to 2038.

See here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question75.htm

It usually best to use 00:00:01 Jan 1 1970 to make objects expire instantly. Just a helpful tip :) .

Steven.

If the backslash is used to start escape sequences in Lisp, the compiler will remove it and replace it with whatever \u (for example) represents (which may be nothing). Try escaping each backslash with a backslash i.e.

(load "c:\\users\\documents\\john\\schoolwork\\cs\\3600\\project3.lisp")

If this fixes the problem it is likely this rule wil apply in all quoted strings within the language.

Steven.

Wow, I didn't realise this site was so....well, advanced :) . Catagories that create themselves hey? Still, it might be a while before one appears. So far my best Haskell program multiplies a list of numbers by 2 and prints them :-| . Not so advanced. Thanks Dani.

Steven.

Hello again. I browse through the code snippits section every so often, so I'm aware it's got an impressive collection of language catagories. However, something I think would benefit this section is the inclusion of a Haskell catagory. I've started learning this language recently (when I get time), so I would hopefully be able to contribute the odd snippit soon. Alternatively, perhaps there could be a catagory for pure functional languages (Scheme, Haskell, etc) that brings together snippits from these languages, as they are not very popular on their own. What do you think Dani?

Steven.

OK, I've had a longer look at your code this time. First, user defined functions (i.e. function name () { } ) should all be inside a <script> tag within the document <head>. I've re - formatted your code so the semicolons are in the right places as well:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="description" content="Welcome To Reptile Planet">
<meta name="keywords"
content="Reptiles">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0">
<title> Credit Screen</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
function initialize() {
startit();
}
function scrollwindow() {
if (document.all)
temp=document.body.scrollTop;
else
temp=window.pageYOffset;
if (alt==0)
alt=1;
else
alt=0;
if (alt==0)
curpos1=temp;
else
curpos2=temp;
if (curpos1!=curpos2) {
if (document.all)
currentpos=document.body.scrollTop+1;
else
currentpos=window.pageYOffset+1;
window.scroll(0,currentpos);
}
else{
currentpos=0;
window.scroll(0,currentpos);
}
}
function startit() {
setInterval("scrollwindow()",2);
}
</script>
</head>

<body background="http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a345/Instar/escher_background.gif">
<script type="text/javascript">
var currentpos=0;
alt=1;
curpos1=0;
curpos2=-1;

/*This script block will be run when the page has loaded anyway, so no need to use the window.onload handler*/
initialise();
</script>

<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>

<p align="center"><img src="http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a345/Instar/rp2-1.jpg" width="371" height="35"
alt="logo (5979"><br>
<small><font face="Verdana">Credits Page</font></small></p>

<p align="left"><strong><font face="Verdana">~Main credits~</font></strong></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong>Creator and main operator: </strong>Inny</font></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong>Co-Admin: </strong>Gecko Girl</font></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong>Design: </strong> Inny</font></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong> Main Affiliate: </strong>TheHerpHouse.Com</font></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong>Address: </strong>http://www.theherphouse.com/</font></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong>Banner Creator: </strong> Scaleman</font></p>

<p align="left"><strong><font face="Verdana">~Additional credits~</font></strong></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong>Ambassador: </strong>Dragon</font></p>

<p align="left"><font face="Verdana"><strong>Footer Banner Creator: </strong>Poppette</font></p>

<p><strong><font face="Verdana">~Misc credits~</font></strong></p>

<p><font face="Verdana"><strong>Web host provider: </strong>WWW.Forumer.com</font></p>
<p><center><image src="http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a345/Instar/spashapic.jpg"></img></center></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</body>
</html>

A few points to mention here:

1. The <!DOCTYPE> …

Try putting semicolons at the end of each statement. Also, check whether you are using any IE specific extensions in your code. Hope this helps.

Steven.

I read an article in Computer Shopper once (that mag where 70% of the pages were adverts) about one of the staff writers trying to install NT 4.0 on their home PC. This was in the days when NT 4.0 was the "only serious OS available for PCs". He was concerned about the stability of Photoshop and wrote:

Perhaps Photoshop will be capable of biting NT hard enough to draw blood and lock up the keyboard.

Back then, I thought a computer keyboard could really be locked by the OS so you couldn't press the keys. However, I do remember seeing computers in my dad's office in the early 90s that had manual locks on the case. You could actually turn a key to block keyboard input, as a security measure. Anyone else seen PCs like that?

Steven.

Surely you're not the oldest member at the moment, but perhaps you will be soon. I mean when Daniweb becomes a teenage hangout zone like Myspace and all the IT pros who know what they're talking about drop it like a hot potato :p . Then Dani will be left to answer all those homework question on her own :twisted: . Oh, maybe I shouldn't have said that....oh well. Before you try to shoot me down for this one Dani remember, I'm older than you, so take my words seriously :) .

Steven.

First, it would be highly advisable to start your Perl script like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -T

use strict;
use warnings;

I know you used warnings with the -w flag already, but adding strict will help with debugging as well. Also, you "MUST" use the -T flag as shown to enable taint mode, or mistakes in your code could turn into gaping security holes. DO NOT leave all your folders and files at the 755 permission setting. Only a CGI script you want to be executable by a HTTP request should have these permissions. All other files should not allow anything else but read permission to "other" or "world" users (i.e. 4 as the last permission digit).

If there is a file called something like "cgierror.log" in the "logs" directory on the server, compile and run time errors may be collected here. You have not validated the user input sufficiently before passing it to open. This

$filename =~ s/.*[\/\\](.*)/$1/;

means, match some stuff then capture anything any number of times and set $filename to this. This means someone could pass virtually anything into open(FILEHANDLE,....). Including of course ">my_file", which will delete the contents of any file a hacker chooses. Instead try,

my $filename =~ /([^<>]*)/;
$filename = $1;
open(FILEHANDLE, "<", $filename);

The regex will remove any shell meta characters (<>) from the name supplied. I think it's best to use the three parameter form of open shown, as it's safer by not allowing user data to set the …

Hello everyone. You might or might not have heard of these poeple, namely the Bulletin (of the Atomic Scientists):

http://www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/

Their publications monitor how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction at our own hands and, (presumably to scare the hell out of us :p ) maintain a symbolic clock that represents this closeness. Midnight represents our destruction and they've just advanced the clock to 11:55 PM. Does anyone have some comments to make before we are all cruelly vaporised? If I sound flippant about this idea then let me say this: I guess I just finds the idea of humanity "destroying" itself somewhat funny :lol: . I mean come on, has anyone here watched Dr. Strangelove and not laughed themself silly?

Steven.

Hello everyone. I've got the stuff working I talked about here ( http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread68292.html ). Now, I am working on this problem; I need to check if a cookie is present on the client machine. It's presense will indicate the user is logged in. If it is there I need to read a username and hashed password from it and set two form fields with these values. If it isn't I need to do what I mentioned in that other post (read a password, hash it and replace it in the form).

So, a user will be able to verify themself manually or by cookie, depending on whether a valid cookie is present. I have this code:

function read_cookie() {
var user_data = document.cookie;
if (user_data) {
var big_crumbs = user_data.split("=");
var small_crumbs = big_crumbs[1].split("~");
document.getElementById("username").value = small_crumbs[0];
document.getElementById("password").value = small_crumbs[1];
}
else {
pwd_hash(0);
}
return true;

}

function pwd_hash(action) {
var password = document.getElementById("password").value;
var pwd_hash = hex_md5(password);
document.getElementById("password").value = pwd_hash;
if (action == 1) {
document.getElementById("confirm-password").value = pwd_hash;
}
return true;
}

The cookie looks like this:

user_data
steven02~15b21c00a3627133fbed027637b0f902
www.mushy-pea.org.uk/
1600
773815424
29836681
373550016
29836679
*

Notice that I've separated the username and password hash with a tilda(~). But when I submit the form only the password hash is sent and not the username. I've fiddled about with it for a fair while and I can't work out what going wrong. Could anyone suggest some possibilities here? Thanks in advance.

Steven.

Nice :)

Any possible chance that we can see the logo that Matty designed for you? I'd very much like to see it.

Just check my home page again, it's now in place. Be warned that a broken link lurks behind that image, under no circumstances click it (yet) :) . What it will link to soon will be a project profile page stating my goals for the software and giving credit for any other peoples code used (and Matty's logo of course).

Steven.

Well, version 0.5 is now installed on my home page. The following features have been added over version 0.4:

• Threaded discussions
• User registration

The front end still looks a bit shoddy but you know....patience dear Watson. Also, the user registration is hidden from public use until I can get password hashing working. If you have any more comments or questions about the project, you could try starting a thread on my home page. Sorry Dani, not supposed to say that here I know. But I think you'll understand in this case :) . Thanks go to Matthew Diefenbacher (mattyd), who's artwork will soon be the official project logo.

Steven.

Hello everyone. Is it allowed to have a "use" statement inside an eval that is compiled separately to the enclosing program (i.e. eval EXPR, not eval BLOCK). The reason I want to do this is, I have modules of code that I don't want to be compiled every time my script is run as they will not be needed very often. One of them contains Digest::MD5 which is quite bulky. I tried running these modules as child processes with:

$pwd_hash = `perl password_md5.pl $field[1]`;

This worked on my test server, but not on my host server which doesn't seem to allow this kind of behaviour. I'm looking into that issue. I came up with the solution of loading the modules from a file at runtime and passing the code to an eval EXPR. This works with one of them and should be more efficient as it avoids the overhead incurred from starting a new process or thread. The other module includes:

use Digest::MD5;

and this seems to be causing a problem. Is it possible to use "use" inside an eval like this, or will I have to include the MD5 :: Digest code manually? Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

Well, I've got the bit I just mentioned working. The next thing I need to do is set a cookie on the client machine once the user has logged in. My server side script serves a page with this code in it:

<html><head><title>Logged in</title><script type="text/javascript">
function redirect() {document.cookie='user_info=Mushy-pea~ad38488e6ea5e40358afc6fc4870575a;
expires=Sat, 27 Jan 2007 21:59:29 GMT;
path=http://localhost/restricted';
window.location="http://localhost/restricted/forum.cgi?display_page+1001"}</script>
</head><body><script type="text/javascript">setTimeout("redirect()", 5000)</script>

This is an example. The specifics are generated dynamically of course. However, I can find no evidence that a cookie is created on the client. Does it look like I have done something wrong here?

Steven.

From what you say, it sounds like your stored proceedure is a server side script that returns some stored information about a user's preferences when the user logs in. If this is so I would advise the following. Get the stored proceedure to serve a page with a script in it that sets a cookie:

<body>
<script type="text/javascript">document.cookie='user_info=my_style_sheet;
expires=Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:08:00; path=http://your_domain.com';
setTimeout("set_link()", 2000)</script>

You can find info about how to correctly set a cookie here. So, the server side script generates the correct javascript code to set a cookie when that code is run on the client machine. Then, make your javascript app. read the cookie and set the link based on this:

<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
function set_link() {
var cookie = document.readCookie('user_info');
var crumbs = cookie.split(=);
var style = crumbs[1];
var file_name = style + ".css";
document.write("<a href=\"file_name\">Your style</a>");
}
</script>

A couple of things to note here:

1. This is a rough sketch of what you might need to do. I'm not an expert so there might be mistakes in there.

2. Remember that your server side script will need to generate the correct javascript code to set the cookie in the first place, or this won't work.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Steven.

I was wondering whether anyone else has experienced this. When a script I am working on got above a certain size, the line numbers quoted in the compile and run time error messages started to be inaccurate. The line numbers now seem to always be before where the error actually is. I've seen this so many times now it can't be my imagination. Has anyone else seen this happen?

Steven.

Thanks Matt. I'll give that a try.

Steven.

Hello everyone. I am currently working on the HTML / Javascript front end of a web forum system (perlBB). I have a couple of questions that would I would like to ask.

1. Is the way to include an external javascript file in a page like this?

<head>
<link href="md5.js" rel="text/javascript">
</head>

2. On my login page I need to get a username and password from the user with a form. I then need to read the password field with Javascript and pass the value to a function that will return the MD5 hash of it. Then the plaintext password gets replaced with the hash on the form and the form is submitted. Will this work?

<html>
<head>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
function process_form(form) {
var password = form.password.value;
var pwd_hash = hex_md5(password);
form.password.value = pwd_hash;
document.login.submit();
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form action="forum.cgi?login+1" method="post" onsubmit="process_form(this.form)" name="login">
Username: <input type="text" name="username"><br>
Password: <input type="password" name="password"><br>
Save a 1 hour cookie please <input type="checkbox" name="cookie"><br>
<input type="submit" value="Login">
</form>
</body>
</html>

Note: I'm using an open source MD5 javascript implementation, whose function are not shown here.

I am of course already testing out this approach. If someone could point if I've gone wrong somewhere and how I should be doing this it would be really usefull. Any advice appriciated.

Steven.

The upshot of this entire "massive political issue" will simply be that Jade, Shilipa and the channel 4 bosses, who are now "seriously considering" axeing the show, will all be shot

For a minute there I thought something good might come out of this whole thing. Jade Goody, shot? Along with Shilpa and the C4 bosses :p ! Now that's a reality show that would be worth watching. Unfortunetley, you actually said

The upshot of this entire "massive political issue" will simply be that Jade, Shilipa and the channel 4 bosses, who are now "seriously considering" axeing the show, will all be shot to further glory because of the ridiculous public exposure which this whole incident has been given.

Oh well. Guess I'll have to get my sick pleasure from somewhere else ;) .

Steven.

Hello everyone. I need to write a Bash script to remove blocks of text from a given file. The idea is, the text to be removed will be marked by appearing between certain delimiter characters i.e.

Here's some text and ~this bit gets removed~, where tilda is the delimiter.

Could someone tell me the kind of commands I need to research to do stuff with text like this? I can work out the rest. Any help appriciated.

Steven.

I think what might be wrong here is that Perl treats both single and double quotes as string terminators, whether you started the string with a single or double quote. My advice is try escaping the single quotes in your string with back slashes ( \ ). So the line in question should be:

my $sql = "INSERT INTO movies (TITLE, MEDIA, YEAR) VALUES (\'" . $title1 . "\', \'" . $format1 . "\', ".$r_date1."\')";

I might be wrong but it's worth a try :) .

Steven.

5. Watching cartoons: It is always good to laugh and keep away from depression. It's only when you start deriving hidden meanings from cartoons, could you be certain of need of external assistance.

Ah, I see you have seen the dark side as well. I started thinking the words in various songs were talking about me for a while once. As for seeking professional help, I've had mixed experiences. I've met some people in that line where it's been obvious they're right for the job. When I met with such people while I was delusional about a year ago I was rather unimpressed. All they seemed to do was ask me a few screening questions to work out whether I was schizophrenic or not. After a while they concluded I wasn't and put me on anti depressants.

To be fair the treatment did kind of work. But I never got the feeling they had an incling why I was experiencing what I was. But to get back to your problems flaco. Get those suicidal thoughts out of your head. You're 18, which is really quite young. You've got plenty of time to go chasing girls yet. Stick with it.

Steven.

Hello everyone. If you live in the UK and you watch the news this will not need explaining to you. But....that rubbish reality TV show Big Brother on C4 has caused a diplomatic crisis. Why? Jade Goody has been bullying the **** out of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty (using the occasional somewhat racist comment, apparently). Gordon Brown (UK Chancellor) found himself explaining to Indian politicians why Britain is not a racist country, instead of some rather more important stuff about British / Indian trade. Does anyone else have a comment to make about this ridiculous TV show becoming a politcal issue?

Steven.

Radiohead - "OK Computer"
Sigur Ros - "Takk"
Flaming Lips - "1983 - 1988 collection"
Nirvana - "In Utero"
Mars Volta - "Deloused in the Comatorium"

Just some that I like. I don't tend to rank music in terms of "greatness" usually.

Steven.

That's impossible to do. Domain squatters are companies, so they can buy those domains...
It's cheap and easy to set up a company in most countries, and a fake office in another country is almost as easy (most countries require just a PO box number for you to register as a company).

See here: http://www.names.co.uk/order/domains/suffix.php?suffix=.plc.uk

Steven.

No.

Why don't you plan out how to do your homework problem, work out the answer, and reply me with the solution; Now.

:lol:

The solution may lie in the field of "scale free networks" rather than Chinese postmen. If you have a specific question about a coding problem there are several forums on this site for such queries. But the same applies as Matt said, it is you who needs to tell us the answer. Preferably, now. Good luck.

Steven.

Great! But get a laptop or something, if you haven't already, or we'll miss you sooo much D=

Perhaps I should have said in the OP, I'm not actually moving house. The mill is just outside my village. Still, a laptop would be nice if I could afford one. At the moment I'd rather spend my spare £s on trips to see my friends, who all live miles away :sad: . Does anyone who posts here live near Shropshire or Powys by the way?

Steven.

Hello everyone. I'm working on getting threads of replies to work in my forum system. I'm using this function:

sub read_fields {
my($offset1, $offset2, $offset3, $offset4, $this_offset, $result, $n, $dbase, $data, @field_name, @name_length, $num_fields, $m, $check, $check2, $primary_key, $action, @passed_array);
($offset1, $offset2, $result, $dbase, $num_fields, $m, $action, $primary_key, @passed_array) = @_;
@field_name = splice(@passed_array, 0, 6); @name_length = splice(@passed_array, 0);
# $action is always 1 in the cases where things go wrong.
unless ($action == 1) {
$field_name[0] = $field_name[5];
$name_length[0] = $name_length[5];
}
for ($n = 0; $n < $num_fields; $n++)
{
$field_name[$n + 6] = "</" . substr($field_name[$n], 1);
$offset3 = index($$dbase, $field_name[$n], $offset1) + $name_length[$n];
$offset4 = index($$dbase, $field_name[$n + 6], $offset3) - 1;
unless ($n != 4) {$this_offset = $offset3}
@$result[$n] = substr($$dbase, $offset3, $offset4 - $offset3 + 1);
}
return $this_offset;

}

to parse an XML file with fields like this:

<record>
<links>#either some text or just spaces</links>
<post_id>000000048</post_id>
<subject>#some text</subject>
<author>#some text</author>
<data+time>#some text</date+time>
<content>#some text</content>
</record>

So, the read_fields() sub is passed the number and names of fields to read and an offset telling it where to start searching in the file. This works in most cases, but in some situations it gets the <date+time> field wrong, while getting all others right. It either reads the field from the wrong record or comes back blank. I've started planning a work around to deal with this, but I'm troubled that I can't see where the bug is in there (and a patch …

Hello everyone. After 15 months without a job I have been offered a trial run in a......flour mill (water wheel included, but they don't use it). If I get the job I'll as close as matters be "Living off the land", something that has become somewhat rare in my country. I'll finally be able to follow my hippy ideals :p . Nice one, hey?

Steven.

Now, take a look at an alternative view point:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html

Steven.

You might be able to do this using the IPC tools built into Perl. This page describes how to open a child process and connect pipes to it's standard input and output: http://perldoc.perl.org/IPC/Open2.html

You can find more in depth information on interprocess communication in Perl here: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlipc.html

Steven.

Hello everyone. I read a couple of tutorials on x86 assembly a while ago. It was made clear in these that certain instructions need to be included at the end of a program to make it close properly. However, there was some inconsistency about how a program should be terminated. Could anyone tell me how a process should be closed on a win32 system and is this proceedure OS specific? Thanks.

Steven.

What, what? Am I missing somthing here? :confused: . Maybe you're talking about someone with a similar name.

Steven.

There are some applications whose developers claim can (in some cases) retrieve a C - like representation of the original source from a .exe file. It is generally believed that reverse compilation of 3rd level languages is difficult bacause there may not always be a one to one mapping between source and compiled binary. It is certainly impossible to retrieve C++ code from a .exe because all class structures are thrown away before the binary is produced.

Steven.

If someone does pay over the odds to one of these so called domain squatters, its their own fault. A company having a good sounding address for their website can't make up for good business management. Also, some domain suffixes have restrictions imposed on them by the DNS database maintainer, presumably to stop the squatting that has been mentioned here. For example, Nominet UK only allows companies registered in the UK to aquire domains ending with .plc.uk. At the end of the day, the organisations that maintain the DNS services are the only ones that can be expected to regulate the allocation of names.

Steven.

I agree with Ancient Dragon. Where would we be without Earth? No, seriously, where would we be? Would we be on Mars? Would we be Martians instead of Earthlings?

None of us would have been born, so we would be nowhere. Which raises an interesting question

Does it feel the same to have never been born as it does to
have once lived and now be dead?

can_of_worms.open(now);

Steven.

Hello everyone. I always run Perl scripts on a web server with

#!/usr/bin/perl -T

at the top (i.e. taint mode on). I try to do the same when testing scripts on my local machine and this often works fine. But somtimes (when running from the command line) I get:

"-T" is on the #! line, it must also be used on the command line at forum.cgi line 1

I have tried using the T flag on the command line like it says but this has no effect. This happens whether I use #!"C:\Perl\bin\perl -T" (the actual location of Perl on my machine) or the UNIX style #!/usr/bin/perl -T. Does anyone know why this happens? Any help appriciated.

Steven.

EDIT: I do most testing of the app I am working on with apache on my machine. This reports a server error when I try to use taint mode as described above, which I assume is the same problem manifesting itself.

Hello everyone. Has anyone heard of Sigur Ros (the band from Iceland)? I got their last album for Christmas and its A - mazing :p . They even invented their own language to sing on the songs. If you don't have a clue who I'm talking about, think of the trailer music for the BBC Planet Earth show.

Steven.

Hello everyone. I had an idea for an encryption system based on irrational numbers a while ago and wrote down a rough specification. It is basically like this:

1. Decide on an irrational number to define the encryption, e.g. pie, e or an irrational n root of a number. It must be possible to construct an algorhythm that can compute the digits of this number with no limit.

2. The input file can be any sequence of bytes, i.e. this system is designed to work with a 256 character set.

3. Use the algorhythm (the key) to produce a series of hex digits twice as long as the sequence of bytes in the file. Then perturb each byte in the file with the corresponding 2 hex digits generated by the key. You now have the encrypted file.

4. Decrypting the file requires the algorhythm used and the parameters that were fed to it. The bytes that contain this information are slotted into the encrypted file in one byte chunks in a series of random locations. The random number sequence used is a one time pad shared between the two parties by non - computer network means.

So, what I was wondering is: does this system sound secure or insecure. Would the use of an indefinetely long number sequence generated by deterministic means be an strength or a weakness? Any comments appriciated.

Steven.

Well, I saw the new year in in Bristol with a primal scream. I was in a pub garden with my sister (and loads of others, obviously) and some guy we knew started screaming "aaarrrhhh....". Soon others joined in and it built up until it was like "AAAARRRRHHHH!?!?...." :p :p :p :p . Everyone was screaming in unison. It was almost surreal.

Steven.

Thanks for the feedback Joe. I agree the HTML front end does look a bit ropey. The thing is, the main reason I put an early version online is to see if it can take the heat. If I came back the next day and the thing had started doing weird things when the posts began to build up I'd know I had some serious fixing to do. That said, I realise that proper software testing is a bit more of an exact science than simply sending an app to the wolves and seeing if it gets eaten :) .

Steven.

Hello again. Well, its taken over 12 weeks, but I've finally released an early version of perlBB (my open source forum system). Version 0.4 (codename Field Mouse) just works as a simple message log (no replies). I'll add full thread capability as soon as I can get the code for it to work. Check out my homepage if you'd like to see a demo. If you'd like a peek at the code just search sourceforge.net for perlBB. Any comments appriciated.

Steven.

Thanks for the advice guys. I have rewritten the part of my program that contained the empty block to avoid it, as I agree its not good aesthetically.

Steven.

I'll give you another reason why logic isn't always correct. Think about all the physics laws, such as The Law of Conservation of Energy, and the Law of Conservation of Mass. How did we come across such laws? We of course, first observed objects and their movement in our everyday world. We had to percieve. In fact, all of our logic comes originally from perception. If our logic didn't include these originally, and following the rule given previously, we would never believe that everyday activies were actually happening, which of course would also be foolish.

This is what it all comes down to for me. You percieve things about how the world behaves and "build" a logical framework that helps you to think you understand the world. We all do this without even thinking about it constantly. But somtimes, whatever it is a person is percieving goes "Hmmm, that's nice. But what would you think if I were to do THIS!?!?:!: :eek: :evil: :twisted: " <very weird things kick off>. Suddeny that lovely little framework you've spent years crafting starts to look as fragile as a house of cards. That is a rather disturbing feeling, I can tell you.

Oh, great debate by the way.

Steven.

Read it and....errr....:cry: (weep)....is that what you American guys say somtimes?

Steven.

heheh and didnt I look geeky? hehe

Actually, you looked like you were posing for the cover photo on your upcoming new album. Sorry, couldn't resist that one :p .

Steven.