neylitalo

An ambulance for a chipped tooth? o.O I chipped the top halves of three of my bottom incisors in a football (American) game, and didn't go to the dentist for a week. Mostly just because I hate dentists, though. And I can honestly say that I didn't cry, either. I haven't cried since... well, earlier this morning. The ending of Notting Hill gets me every time. I'm trying to become more comfortable with the less masculine side of myself. I think it's good for personal growth. (Maybe I need a blog, too? :-\) I think SA's point was that you seem to have a lot of material that you like to share with the world, so you might be interested in starting a blog. And I can think of a handful of your recent posts that you could have used as blog material, right off of the top of my head, so I don't think you'd have to worry about having stuff to put up.

I like the Tango icon set - you can download it as a .tar.gz, extract it, and go through the directories and find the ones you want.

Sorry, we don't do homework.

You say geek like it's a bad thing - there are two fields that you want to get into right now, and they're technology and healthcare. People are always going to get sick and technology isn't going to go away. I used to be an outsider in school, because I didn't have all the traditional toys and hobbies (motor vehicles and girls, respectively), but I realized that it was OK - whenever their computers broke, I could charge them $40 an hour to fix it! And now that I'm slowly building up a reputation in the "system consulting, system service, and internet presence" markets, I can charge even more. (Loosely translated, that means that I help people figure out what computers they want, I fix their computers when they break, and I can make them a website.) I started being a geek at the ripe old age of two years - just old enough to watch in awe as my uncle played a flight simulator game. He paused the flight, hopped down from his chair to take a break, and I hopped up and landed his plane neatly on the runway for him. (I, personally, don't know how much truth is in that, but all parties present at the time swear to it.) After that, it was on to bigger and better things in my later single-digit years - breaking, fixing, and building computers of my own. In my pre-teen years, I was making simple HTML websites using a combination of Notepad and Frontpage, simply because I didn't know any better. I took an A+ Certification course in high school, figured out that I knew far more than the teacher, and switched to programming. A VB 6 class was my first programming experience outside of Javascript, and then I learned a bit of Java, but promptly decided that they were both something to stay away from. I spent six years as a student network administrator while I was in junior high & high school, and worked with an older student who built an amazing website using PHP. I wanted to do that, too, so I bought a book, installed IIS, and went to work. (I'd like to say that I was possessed by the evil spirit of Steve Ballmer himself at the time, and have since seen the light.) And now I've been a professional PHP developer for the past three years.

Why would you suspend your life? o_O So is suicide a SIGKILL? Awful. Absolutely awful.

effigy: I don't know if that's yours, or if it's just an example you used, but either way, it's absolutely beautiful. And on a bit simpler note, that's a lot of buttons.

Just in case you were wondering, it hasn't been locked. I said I would lock it if it got NSFW, and I hardly think that's unreasonable. We have rules here, and NSFW would definitely violate them.

A warning: If this goes even remotely NSFW, it will get closed and removed very quickly. While laws may seem like they're unfair, extreme, or otherwise ridiculous, keep in mind that the law is probably only going to be enforced in situations that warrant it. Any age-related law, in my opinion, is fundamentally flawed. The general idea behind them is to make sure that the people affected have reached a level of maturity to make an intelligent decision, and maybe to prevent health/safety risks - but human nature is that everybody is different. Some people are more mature at 12 than others are at 20. Note that I am not saying, by any means, that the laws should be disregarded due to their flaws. And I hate to get into this argument, but I think your teacher is absolutely right. I can't think of a single situation where almost-15 is a reasonable age. Excluding the traditional "just because", the main reason I think this is that teenagers (under 17-ish) lack the maturity to consider all of the options, determine the consequences, and then handle the consequences when they arise. With so much at stake, emotionally and physically, you really need the emotional maturity to deal with broken hearts, hurt feelings, and any of the physical and physiological consequences that are associated with it. There's precious little more unfortunate than a kid with a broken, twisted view of the world, and potential catalysts like this just aren't worth the risk. And on a completely different (but completely true) note: It's actually really over-rated until you're older anyway. :-\

I wouldn't put a restriction, at least not hard-wired. If you're going to put a limit, I would allow the administrator of the system to set the limit. One of many things that I learned at my last job: Customers (or users) hate restrictions, and love flexibility. But to answer your question, mine rarely gets above 20.

Oh, I don't know about that at all - Python doesn't even make you use "end if", you just un-indent! I know what you mean, though - it's almost reminiscient of Visual Basic. In my opinion, they each have advantages and disadvantages. While the languages with constructs like "end if" (or "if/fi" and "case/esac" in my favorite scripting language ) require more typing and may be more difficult for your brain to split up into chunks, it's easier to learn for the people who know the spoken language that the programming language uses, especially if they have no programming experience. It might be a bit more difficult for people who speak a different language, but I don't know - I haven't had any experience in that area, so I can't say anything for sure. People who have programming or computer experience will be used to the fact that you often have to use parentheses, braces, and semicolons - but people who are just breaking into the field will find it strange, and a more natural language will probably make it easier on them. And, of course, the opposite is true for people with experience - once you've gotten used to the oddities of communicating with computers, you'll probably be more comfortable with the more efficient, easier-on-the-eyes syntax that the special characters provide.

Unfortunately, I don't believe there is a way to make them stop listening on those ports. If you read the GRC page on port 1025 (http://www.grc.com/port_1025.htm), you'll see them describing this as a vulnerability and a flaw. These are Microsoft services, and they don't really have interfaces for you to set properties or settings or anything, so I don't think that it's possible to change the fact that they're "flapping in the internet breeze". (Quote from the GRC page.) I suppose you're right - firewalls are imperfect, since after all, they're only a product of man, and we all know that man is not infallible. Bugs are a very real possibility. However, these bits of technology, whether they're hardware or software or combinations of both, are very effective, and they are universally trusted as one of the premier ways to prevent assaults on computers. I will be among the first to tell you that you shouldn't depend entirely on the Windows Firewall that is included with Windows XP, but also among the first to tell you that it's infinitely better than nothing. If you've got a hardware firewall, that's even better. I suppose we should have explained this much, much earlier, but I honestly believe that a firewall is the only solution to your problem. Multiple firewalls are good, too - for example, I run iptables on all of my machines, and also on the gateway to the internet. You could consider doing something like that.

And I'm sure the height restrictions apply to tables as well, if not more so.

For that, you use the Apache logs. We're not going to help you figure out how to document other people's browsing history and habits. Thread locked.

A firewall.

Only the very talented/lucky ones.

I think the downtime today was something more serious than that - it looks to me like the MySQL server was down for some reason.

Ah, I didn't know Windows XP had a netstat - that'll do the trick nicely.

And I'm definitely sure that I've never seen any search results that hint at answering this one. This would require some very tricky firewalling - and to be honest, I'm not sure that your web server would even work properly with such a rule in place. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the first thing a browser does before sending the HTTP request is check if the port is open.

No, he's not "just flat out trolling." He's asking you those questions because you'd have to be an idiot to follow those links and not see that the information they give you is exactly what you're looking for, so he's giving you the benefit of the doubt. The very first links provided by Google when you search for "port 135" and "port 1025" lead you to the GRC's info pages on the ports - a rather reputable source, I'd say. Have you tried using a firewall? If not, try the Windows firewall, see if it's any good. Note: The unfortunate thing about ports > 1024 is that there isn't really any "official" association between a port number and a service, so you can't really be sure what's listening on port 1025, unless Windows has added a way to tell you the applications that have network connections.

Check out exec and Unix whois.

The IP address will be from a specific country, so you can get an idea of where your visitors are, and the user-agent will probably tell you the language the browser is using, so you can tell what languages your visitors speak.

I don't use Windows at all (Clean for three years and still going strong! ) so it's not really a problem for me, but I suppose virtualization might come in handy if I want to test out a different distribution without actually installing it. I think in that situation, though, I'd probably use Xen, since it's free-as-in-freedom as well as free-as-in-free-beer.

What kind of problem? Unfortunately, I didn't have the pleasant Synaptic-automagically-installs-DVD-decoder experience that someone (can't remember who, don't want to look ) else did. I was finally able to get encrypted DVDs to play under mplayer, but nothing using the xine library (my favorite) would cooperate. Moreso than Slackware? No, Slack beats Gentoo hands down for least amount of hand-holding.

And now I'm having tons of problems with media players, so I'm going back to Gentoo. :/

Last time I checked Gentoo does have a live cd with GUI installer. Yes, they do - but based on all three of my experiences with it, and the experiences of countless people in #gentoo, it has a long way to go before it becomes useful. I can honestly say that I've never heard of anybody successfully using the GLI (Gentoo Linux Installer).