Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

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.

re: paragraph 2. It doesn't seem like THAT huge of a task.

I've never heard anyone ask for this before but you could try using DBUnit, which is really an application for extracting data (as XML) and reloading it into a database to clear it back to a known state prior to running unit tests; however, it would probably work for what you need it to do.

http://dbunit.sourceforge.net/

It's quite clever in that it looks at RI constraints and extracts in the right order so that you can reload without dropping relationships.

I've messed around with my internet security settings as well as the MP "network" settings for streaming media, and while sometimes i get something to work, it's never consistent. also, I do have windows firewall working.

I'll click the DL button on a given webpage, MP will open up, but then i'll get an "unable to open file" popup. what gives? what could this problem be, and how do i go about fixing it?

I want to be able to consistently DL ABBA's video of the day, dammit!

(why, when i cut and paste from firefox into outlook does it paste my buffer as an attachment rather than just pasting the text straight into the email? think it might be a character set thing but it's most annoying.)

it works ok as a file: link from a html document stored locally (even though the file: link goes to a box elsewhere on the network), it doesn't work when same link in the same html document is served up over http from a third box (our wiki). why? seems to be a firefox specific feature because it's fine in IE.

I wonder if Firefox's security could be improved by not letting you browse the web. Or Microsoft could 'beef up' their security by not letting you boot into Windows...

I might try an experiment soon. Given that I've suffered from two, insignificant viruses in the last 26 years, during which I've been running a virus killer/firewall etc. for say 18 months, I might just turn all the security features off and see if anything bad happens. I suspect it won't.

those file: links always used to work - there are older links in the wiki that i'd been using fine (for firefox there needed to be 5 /s after the http: for some reason). they have stopped, i guess since the upgrade to FF1.5

what can i try plz? even working for teh corporate devil i STILL has no £££.

My printer no longer spools the paper into it properly, it doesn't get far enough into the printer for the printing to actually take place. It keeps telling me there's a paper jam when I pull the paper out, but it doesn't register that until after its already tried to print (i.e. I'm pretty sure there isn't a scrap of paper stuck in it) ---anyway, the point is, this has all happened since I tried to print some camera pics for the first time (didn't work, crappy Lexmark shite) and I haven't been able to print anything since. I'm wondering if there is any residue or chemical on some photo paper (probably the cheap sort) that might get onto the spool and stop it working... It does only appear to have stopped working on one side - might be a coincidence.

yeah, so... maybe you can help me, maybe you can't..