Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

here's a bunch that i haven't used:
http://www.videohelp.com/convert#4;13
this looks promising:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=259841
as does this:
http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1271288#1271288

(if only because the mention libraries i recognise - tmpgenc and ffmpeg respectively).

So we send these photos to our website guy each month. He scales the pics down each time, to about 13kb so they're usable for a website.

The first time, the photos all went up fine. The second time, all fine again. The third time, we checked the pics on the site and they were real crappy. All blocky and ugly. I mailed him and asked why. He said it was because we were taking the pictures at 72dpi. Either that, or when we were taking them off the camera, the program we used was converting them to 72dpi. Thing is, we don't use a program to take them off the camera, we just drag them off. And the settings on the camera haven't been changed ever, they're all taken at the best quality.

Plus, saying that we take them at 72dpi doesn't make sense because surely this would make the jpegs much smaller than 3mb?

So, I'm confused. Is it the camera at fault? The website admin guy says that pictures can still be taken at 72dpi and be of a large file size, but this doesn't make sense. These photos can be printed on an A3 sheet of paper and still be great quality so saying they only have 72 dots per inch sounds mighty wrong.

We sent the most recent batch of photos over and he said that when he opens them, they're 72dpi again.

Here's one of the pics: http://s49.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2BGUVE28MVREY2VZ9FOJ1DZF33

Does anyone have an explanation for what might have happened here?

> The third time, we checked the pics on the site and they were real crappy. All blocky and ugly

this sounds like either a compression problem ie they are too compressed or like he has them one size and is forcing them via img height and width in the code to be a different size.

http://home.clara.net/koogy/photos/01s.JPG = same image resized to 300x450 (75dpi, jpeg quality = 50%, filesize = 21K, done using gimp) (50% is quite low)

Thanks again for clearing that up.

ok, Java. i have a list of things (for a particle system), only some of which are currently active. i've currently got them in an array and everytime i want to draw them i go through the entire array and draw the ones where the state is ALIVE. when i need another particle i go through the array until i find one that is DEAD and re-initialise that. this strikes me as bad and i'd rather have a list of ALIVE elements and a list of DEAD elements and swapt things between the lists as the state changes. in C (i am a lot more comfortable with C) i'd malloc a bunch of space and modify pointers as required. what happens in Java? can i change pointers? can i switch things between lists (Vectors? Arrays? what) without having to recreate them? will the vm be continually deallocating and reallocating memory? how fast will it be?

(can i just say in advance: threadkilla! thanks)

I would consider using a linked list rather than an array (you could even store the linked list in state order, hence dead ones could always be at the front of the list, so you'll get O(1) performance on re-initialising dead particles).

if i use an ArrayList can i add ALIVE things to the front and DEAD things to the end? i guess so (array is fixed size (at the mo). i never need information about DEAD things so i can delete them without worrying). if i add things or delete them will that bollocks up the indexing for the rest of the list i'm iterating over? i remember vaguely having to make a copy of something because i couldn't modify it whilst iterating over it. (maybe that was j2me only.)

in C you had to write all this stuff yourself (until glib came along) but at least you then knew how it worked 8)

class ParticleWrapper {
    int id;
    Particle p;
}

with a unique id.

if i'm trundling through a list, processing the alive ones, and get to element 4 and decide it's now dead (due to aging or collision or whatever) so i mark it as such and move it to the end. but what is element 5 now? is it what used to be element 5 before i deleted #4 or is it what used to be element 6 because everything's moved up to fill the gap?

i think i need to write some tests...

I've got a 300gb C: drive (Windows XP, 1gb ram, 2.21ghz) and foolishly chose not to partition it when I first set up my PC. Now the hard drive is about half full and running r e a l slowly, so I guess I need to partition it. But how do I do it without wiping everything off my pc and starting again from scratch? Do I have to download a new program or can XP do it quickly and easily? (sorry for sounding like a st00pid newbie moron)

ed is this what i need to do?!?!

Right click on my computer
choose properties
select the advanced tab
Click on the performance 'Settings' Button
Click on the Advnanced tab
Click on the virtual memory change button
select custom size
Set the inital size and the maximum size to the same value, minimum 1.5 times installed RAM, maximum 3 times installed RAM

The memory card is inserted properly and we've tried a different card and that works fine. We've put the card back in the camera and it says 'no pictures', but we took another picture and it said '1 out of 60' so that suggests there are pictures still on there. It recognises any new pictures we take, but not the old ones.

Probably grasping at withered straws here but does anyone have a magical solution for making these pictures come back to life? It's seriously important as there were a lot of vital shots for people on there. The camera is a Canon EOS350D (similar to yours Ed, I do believe) if that's any help. Has anyone had this happen before even?

I've got the username, password and ftp details. I'm getting hold of Fireworks (for the photos) and Cuteftp to upload the photos to the ftp server. But I'm clueless as to where to begin with actually sticking this stuff up on the site.

I guess it's all there in the help file but there's so much to wade through I thought I'd try here first. Is it a simple task? (I only need to add some text to a few pages and upload some more photos to a gallery). Can anyone give a quick idiots guide on how to begin?

failing that you'll have to modify the html to include links to the new pictures.

do you have a url we could look at, to investigate a bit?

well, the next two pictures will be easy enough to add as there are already spaces for them in the table (look for [td width="90"]@nbsp;[/td]* and replace the @nbsp; with a modified copy of the line above). after that you'll need a new table row which is a bit harder (but again just a modified copy of code that's already there).

* i've changed the triangle brackets to [ and ] here and the ampersand to an @ because otherwise the ilx software will throw a wobbly. you should keep them as they were)

the actually gallery pages (the next one will be gallery13.html) can just be modified copies of the pages that already exist, updated for new pictures. ditto the http://www.clubclique.co.uk/gallery_pages_jan06/11.htm type pages. none of this is difficult as long as you're ok with editing files and uploading.

i once wrote something (www.koogy.clara.co.uk/page74/) that had a clever javascript main page and which just let you modify a simple secondary script (http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/page74/routes.js) and upload that day's image and it'd regenerate itself on the fly. might be an idea for your site.

> Would you say it's too difficult for a complete newcomer to work out?

the tables can be messy if you nest them (yours look ok). look into simple table stuff. and, like i say, as long as you're ok with editing files and uploading then it's fine. the ftp client will typically work just like a file manager. try downloading a copy of what's already there and modifying it locally. point the browser at the local copy and edit it until it looks ok. if it messes up just download it again. rinse, repeat.

what you could do is change the a:active colour so that links don't disappear when you click on them 8)

I went back to the shop and the shop guy told me that all it means is that the BIOS needs updating, an easy enough job. I've just tried to update the BIOS now and it says 'You do not need to update BIOS'. So now I'm stumped. Have I wasted £40 on a useless bit of plastic or can I sort it out so my laptop can have 1gb of ram? Is a laptop from 2003 likely to be capable of managing 1gb of ram?

You may not be able to get that far, in which case you could run a hard drive recovery utility to harvest the data. I can't think of any good ones that are free, but they may reveal themselves to you after a google search.

Sym Sym, not sure if a hard drive works the same way but I had a memory card full of photos that became corrupt. I downloaded PHOTORECOVERY 3.07 and it retrieved them all no probs. This probably wouldn't work for you but it's worth a try - try Emule for a 'demo' version..

How useful are these data recovery services? Can these people do things that average computer user cannot?

The other is when there's physical damage to the drive (i.e. it makes horrible sounds and won't appear in the BIOS as a bootable device). Then you can send it to a company like Drive Savers and prepare to spend $600-1700 for recovery. Even if they can not recover files, you're out the $$$. They do have capabilities that the standard user or your company's tech guy don't, in that they can scrape the data off layer-by-layer and reconstitute it into something usable. Sometimes. I would never recommend this option unless you seriously can not live w/o what you have on your computer.

However, it can't actually access it. When I try and set it up, it gets stuck on "renewing IP address" and fails to connect to it. Anything I can do to make it connect to our wireless network successfully?

That means it's trying to find a DHCP server, and can't. Giving it a static IP address on the same subnet will work, but if you're trying to use a DHCP server it might cause clashes in the future.