Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

I also notice Sarah's PC, while working okay, isn't exactly fast tonight. Could there be any connection?

The full set of options used by an invocation of mount is determined by
first extracting the options for the file system from the fstab table,
then applying any options specified by the -o argument, and finally
applying a -r or -w option, when present.

oh! i was just coming to ask about this! so, instead of using fstab to automount, how should i do it?

sudo bash.

Never mind Deano: I'll bear that in mind if I have any X.25 issues in future. In the mid '90s weren't you firmly rooted in the mid '80s?

Down in London soon, by any chance?

Sony VAIO WinXP laptop happily communicates with the Livebox using its internal WLAN (no need for the supplied Wanadoo USB dongle) and the desktop did have broadband when wired into the Livebox with the supplied ethernet cable. But now the desktop is upstairs (where it will stay) and wireless connection for both is required.

Desktop plus Belkin adaptor worked OK into the next-door neighbour's unsecured network at the old house, so I know it works in principle. Livebox shows up in the AP list but when I attempt to set up a profile with the 128-bit WEP key and then connect to it just sort of sits there, with a little red cross next to it.

Might go back to trying the Wanadoo USB dongle with the desktop (which didn't work before)...

128 bit key eh Mike? You must have something worth stealing!

and i've been trying to send an MP3 file for the past ten minute via yahoo, it's still trying to attach it...

my wireless speed is 11.0 Mbps

What's more I now know the 26-character hex string off by heart as I've typed it in so many times...

HOWEVER, as this post verifies, it's now working. I gave up on the Belkin adapter (I'll sell it on eBay or something) and gave the Inventel adapter that came with the Livebox another go. No good at first until I manually reinstalled the drivers for it off the CD-ROM; still no good until I uninstalled all the Belkin crap and rebooted. Now all is well and we have broadband upstairs and down...

(yes keith, i will be backing things up to floppies, 8" floppies)

> my wireless speed is 11.0 Mbps

48,000 here.

Does this computer have USB2.0 or 1.0 slots, or a mix of both, or something?

It should fit into one of these: http://www.corestore.org/370168-1.jpg

Keith Emerson's very own computer. From the days when IBM could teach Apple a thing or two about 2001-style aesthetics, although Apple didn't exist I suppose.

I'd hoped you'd have gone for the classic S/370 reel-to-reel tape system

Here's an even older one, from an IBM 705:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/images/1950b.jpg

new question, how do i write a profanity filter? i need to check a stream of words against a lexicon of rudity but how do i do it so as not to annoy the good people of scunthorpe by blocking references to their no-doubt lovely town? (um, have a whitelist and a blacklist, check the incoming message a word at a time against both, full word check against whitelist, accept if matches, substring search all the rude words in the current text word, reject if matches?) how do i stop people f u c k i n g about with spaces? or using pretty average words to describe rude things (ie 'your mother blows goats')? interesting. (java btw, not my choice)

If it were me, I'd not be wanting to write this, but buy one in. Though, I've just had a look on the usual places and can't find one off hand, at least not one that's not tightly-bound to something else (message board software, typically). What bad design.

I can tell you've never been ;-)

Also, how much RAM do you have?

I have 10GB of space left and 512 RAM and this past week is the first time I've had these types of problems. I fear you naysaying diagnoticians are right. The only okay part is that it is still under apple care, but such a pain to lose all my data. (I'm not really sure how to back up everything--I don't have an external hard drive.) Okay, I'm gonna stay out of iTunes for awhile and see if it can survive enough to do the Dublin Core part of the project. Thanks everyone. The weird thing is when OSX dies it doesn't even give you a clue, besides the whirring and not working, that is. When my black powerbook died at least it had the decency to let me know its days were numbered, with little messages.

Get a cheapo external firewire drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner (freeware) to clone your machine to it weekly. It uses an rsyncish thing so it runs in like 20 minutes usually once its initialized. If your drive dies, you can boot off the fw drive until you replace the laptop drive. This saved my ass once.

Also, is there an audio equivalent to Youtube? A place where I can link to low-quality soundfiles that are hosted by that site (apart from myspace - unless there's a way of embedding a myspace songfile into a normal webpage)?

Try http://www.fontifier.com/

What about if we embedded the text into the page as an image file? (Sorry if I'm using silly terminology here, I'm new to this). It'd mean the text couldn't be copied but it'd show up fine wouldn't it?

Also, has anyone ever registered a website in the Cook Islands? I know, I know, it's terribly childish. It's for a friend, honest. A site I found stated 30 euros for activation and 344 euros (!) for 2 years hosting. This seems ridiculous.

You're right there. If you want an image of some text, or a line drawing, you probably want either .gif or .png, not jpeg.

i want to set up a shared resource ftp site, whereby people can email files to me to be automatically uploaded to certain folders on the webspace, based on certain words or codes in the subject line or filename.

Is this possible?

(would it be a big job? i know a computer dood who owes me, but only a small favour)

another question. database data. how do you keep decent copies of the data in your databases under versioned source control (svn here)? we used to mysqldump the data out to text files, one or more per table, and stick these in cvs (mysqldump writes data out as sql inserts so re-inserting it is a doddle). but then we moved to Oracle. we also have, much to my chagrin, binary data in the various tables (images, which start off as files anyway, ffs).

the problem isn't really the binary nature of the data. the binary stuff makes it more difficult but the main problem is just getting db info into and out of svn the same way you would with code. it strikes me as an obvious thing to want to do but i can't find much in the way of solutions (googling 'svn database' gets you the wrong stuff). we've written our own scripts 3 or 4 times now over the years and are fed up of wheel reinvention.