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Forum Index : Windmills : posting pic’s and text
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| brucedownunder2 Guru  Joined: 14/09/2005 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1548 |
Hi Glenn, I'm having problems posting my photo's and text. the pic's appear side by side and the text is too wide. Bruce Bushboy |
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makourain Senior Member  Joined: 19/04/2006 Location: Posts: 111 |
press enter after putting in an image code, or type in between image codes, it will give u the same effect as pressing enter. you can do the same for your text. |
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Gizmo Admin Group  Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
Yeah makourain has got it right. After each image hit enter a couple of times. ie... (IMG)uploads/Gizmo/pic1.jpg(/IMG)(IMG)uploads/Gizmo/pic1.jpg (/IMG) puts the images side by side, if they fit. But if you space them out like this... (IMG)uploads/Gizmo/pic1.jpg(/IMG) (IMG)uploads/Gizmo/pic1.jpg(/IMG) will work fine. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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Megawatt Man Senior Member Joined: 03/05/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 119 |
G'day Gizmo, A similar question to brucedownunder2. Some posts run off my screen. If I was using Notepad, I would ask for WordWrap. I have not been able to edit the text so it fits one screen wide. Is it me, or is it the machine that the "poster" is using to create the post? Megawatt Man |
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| makourain Senior Member Joined: 19/04/2006 Location: Posts: 111 |
what resolution are you using? if you have a pic that is bigger than the regular window, then it will push the window out and make it bigger, this will also make more room for the text so it will go out longer to match the pic. if someone else has posted a pic wider than the window it will do the same thing to everyones posts, making more room for the text and the text will try to match it. you will just have to press the enter button a few times through your post to make it more fitting. if pressing enter doesnt work you can type (br) but with [ and ]. |
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| Megawatt Man Senior Member Joined: 03/05/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 119 |
Thanks Makourain. No it's nought to do with pictures. It's when I open up only some posts. For example, Fibreglass Windmill Blades runs off the screen and I need to use the lower screen scroll bars to read the text. Other posts are within a window completely contained by my readable screen, sometimes even with Google ads in a space on the screen rhs and sometimes with about 30mm of the general screen background on the rhs. Strange really. I wonder whether it's because the word processors used by different contributors don't all feature WordWrap. Megawatt Man |
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| Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
Hi Megawatt Man That is a little strange. If I resize my IE window, the text resizes to suit, unless there are images in there. What browser are you using? The software used for the forums, Web Wiz, is a big improvement over other free forum software programs I've seen. Its written in ASP and uses a Access database to store the messages. I've been watching it to see how it handles the increased traffic over the last few months and it seams to be running good, just the occasional error. The code is VERY hard to follow, I write ASP for a living and whoever wrote this Web Wiz system is way ahead of my skills. The top half of the screen that displays the messages is "safe" code for your browser, but the bottom bit under "Post Reply" uses a lot of java code to handle the text box and functions, and this could be causing problems. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| Megawatt Man Senior Member Joined: 03/05/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 119 |
Hello Glenn, Would rather write this by private message, but haven't worked that out yet. I now have two examples of postings that present differently on my screen, one that needs me to use the lower scroll bar to read the message and one that allows all the message to appear in the window. They both come from one Gizmo and the subjects are "Improved PicLog" and "Anyone in Mackay". Is it something to do with Forum Codes? Megawatt Man |
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| Megawatt Man Senior Member Joined: 03/05/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 119 |
Sorry Glenn, I omitted to reply to your questions. I use IE6 and it doesn't matter whether I use largest or smallest text size, all the info is on the screen for some messages and I have to use the scroll bar to see others. Now that it happens for two of your coincident messages, I reckoned the solution may arise, for somebody more computer literate than myself! Megawatt Man |
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| Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
Is it only posts where there is a image that is larger than the screen? Images do cause that problem. That first message has a photo by Ross that is wider than the screen, so the whole page widens to suit. Let me know. Thanks. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| RossW Guru Joined: 25/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 495 |
Hey, Megawatt Man - can you have a look at that "Improved PicLog" thread now and see if it's "fixed"?? I've just changed my posting to use a smaller thumbnail and added a link to the full sized image. See if it gives us a clue, hey? RossW |
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| Megawatt Man Senior Member Joined: 03/05/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 119 |
Gizmo and RossW, Great work, that's fixed it. Thank you. Ok, I see that Ross has used a smaller thumbnail and added a link to the full sized image. How does one do that please? Megawatt Man |
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| RossW Guru Joined: 25/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 495 |
Errr... in my case, its easy because the raw images I take with my old camera get uploaded into my 'blog. When I coded it, I made it automatically make a standard size thumbnail of any images in the directory which it includes in the blog entry for that day. So, I just pointed the entry in the "piclog" thread at the thumbnail rather than the original picture. That fixed the first part. However, I then needed to add a link to the full image because the little thumbnail doesn't have enough detail, so an html a href= tag let me make a hypertext link to the full image. Its more mucking about, but I'll try to remember to do it this way for you in future. FWIW, I'd chuck that damn internet exploder in the bin and get a real browser. In my "real" job, I own and run an ISP (Internet Service Provider) - and the guys on the helpdesk are forever telling me of the latest "idiot user" to have been compromised by a worm, virus, malware, spyware, trojan, exploit etc through either microsoft internet exploder (I mean, explorer), or lookout (umm, outlook). Between them, these two make up over 95% of all reported exploit vectors. (I'm lucky, I don't have to use winblows and havn't for many years now!). |
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| Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
Big images are a big problem for the internet. Modern camera's and scanners take huge pictures, which make huge files. Some info on how to resize pictures for the forums.... http://www.thebackshed.com/windmill/forum1/help.asp#FAQ19 A real example that happened last week at work. One of the estimators was waiting on a email with a drawing attached. He said his email program kept locking up when he tried to check his email. I jumped into the mail server and found a email waiting for him, with a 25 Megabyte file attached! I downloaded it from the server to have a closer look. It was a BMP picture file, of a simple drawing someone scanned in high resolution. I resized the picture down to 800 pixels wide ( I think it was over 4000 originally ), and then saved it as a GIF file. It was now only 120kbytes, less than 200th the size of the original, but contained the same infomation our estimator needed. People like myself who have used computers for many ( see: way too many ) years know how to shrink images, and why we need to do it. But Jo Average doesn't know. Its not their fault, they never had it explained to them. I think the manufacturers of the Cameras and scanners should take the heat for this one, they need to explain the image size thing better, and show the end user how to resize pictures for internet use. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| RossW Guru Joined: 25/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 495 |
Absolutely! Although, that said... When I started out as an ISP (way back in early 1995), there was a whole one megabit from the USA to Australia, and that was for *everyone*. The internet speeds are now *SO* much faster than then (heck, V32.bis (14K4) modems were all the rage back then, and real cashed-up speed-freaks could get 28K8 if their ISP had the latest V34 modems. (Not long after I started, I was able to upgrade the modems to V34.bis and offer a blistering 33K6!) Unfortunately, "clue" has gone down since then. So while typical download speeds are 10 to 20 times more than they were, as Glenn says, images are disproportionately larger, and most idiots out there don't know (or care) what their 10 megapixel camera images mean to others - as long as they can "drag and drop" it to their mail program, they don't care! Glenn, my poor old digital camera is way past its use-by and only takes 1024x768 images. Sadly, I see this on a daily basis, as sysadmin. It was sufficiently common that I had to write code so our support people could (with a customer on the phone) see who messages were from, the subject and size, and optionally remove an individual message. Glenn, my system receives about 80 messages per minute all day and all night, with peaks to about 2000/minute. The worst offender was an 800Mb attachment (an entire CD (of illegal, licensed software as it turns out) sent by a public servant to their mum would you believe!) Since then, we have implemented a hard limit of 10Mb for any single e-mail message. Right on the money there too Glenn. GIF is quite out-dated now, but still useful. GIF is a lossless compression format with (generally) a limited colour palette. It's perfect for logos, drawings, computer-generated images without gradations etc. JPEG is a lossy compression that can achieve fantastic compression with barely detectable (to the human eye) loss of quality. Lousy for things with fine lines, hard edges or large areas of uniform colour though! PNG is a newer form thats excellent. BMP is a format that has no reason to exist. It should have been put down at birth, and I cannot think of a single reason anyone should use it. Monsterous waste of space! |
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| Megawatt Man Senior Member Joined: 03/05/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 119 |
WOW! I didn't think my simple question would produce such a lot of interesting and challenging stuff. Well RossW, about browsers. A few years ago I established an electric power consultancy from home in the bush. Having no IT experience, except for using word processors and spread sheets, I found I had to learn stuff quick, because I could not afford to have experts visit me to fix stuff-ups. I tried alternative browsers but Windows changed file extensions etc and I spent days frigging about but coming to the realisation that Mr Gates was guarding his empire. In the end, my time was too valuable so I just accepted IE. These days I would like to try something else, but remain concerned at the work arounds that I would have to learn if things go wrong. I run an ADSL modem with NAT, firewalls and Norton on one machine and Mcafee on another. Don't have much trouble, but I think I'd like to try Mozilla Firefox. Would I have to periodically repair stuff because of W2000P conflicting? Megawatt Man |
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| Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
OK, I know this will start "discussion". I dont like Linux. I tried to like Linux, I really did. Installed it a few times, different versions of Redhat, Mandrake, with and without the GUI's. I liked the file structure. I liked the GUI interfaces. But when I needed to actually do something usefull, I fired up the Windows box. I think it's because I've always programmed in Basic, VB and ASP. Yeah I even tried the ASP plugin for the apache web server ( it it was a total pile of junk, slow and poor database access. ). I have used the Linux MYSQL, but found it crashed too often and was dificult to set up, so now I use the Microsoft SQL2000. And I like IE, especially the new IE7. IE has support for VB script, and we use it as our standard browser at work because of this. I do know Java, but VB is faster to develope in, 10 lines of Java can be replaced with 5 lines of VB. We do run Open Office, originally written for Linux but now ported to MS. Its ok, because its free and MS office compatible, but its slow and buggy. I do hate Windows too, but not as much as Linux. I think Linux started with so much promise, but got lost, too many cooks in the kitchen. But I do have one Linux PC at work, its the firewall. Coyote Linux, runs off a floppy disc, easy to use and is a great firewall. No GUI, but has a simple web interface. If I was going to set up a ISP or large network ( 200 plus PC's, not the 40 I take care off )I would have more Linux PC's, but only to command level, no point in the GUI. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| RossW Guru Joined: 25/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 495 |
Is that a euphamism for "religious war"? :) No argument. I never really tried to like any of the linux variants. My wife ran Suse for a while, and Redhat (because it was the only supported *nix platform for Maya at the time), but I hated it. It's a bastardised version. As you say, way too many cooks, not enough attention to standards, compliance, security or consistency. Ahh, there's the problem! <grin> I've been asked to host .asp stuff, and frontpage extensions. I've refused every time and won't change my mind any time soon. mySQL has the potential to be ok, but sadly it lacks too many things a "real" SQL has. Postgress is better. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one Glenn. From a PURELY USERS point of view, I guess it would be ok if you didn't care every time your machine got owned or crashed, or spyware or malware took over. And scripting as deeply rooted as ie+windows would be ok on a secure intranet, but it's *DANGEROUS* outside. I usually code in shell for trivial stuff, C (real C, not this C++ stuff, or <hack, spit> c#) for serious work, or if I need to code for speed or something really tight, symbolic assembler. OO (previously StarOffice) is also bloatware. And its way too german for my taste. But, it works most of the time, and it's not micro$oft, so I make do :) Hit the nail on the head with "too many cooks". I had to run SuSE on one of our co-located servers for a largish customer in Germany. We built it, loaded it, ran it, maintained it and housed it here in Albury. They came out from Germany for 2 weeks early in the project. After nearly 5 years the pain of keeping up with all the patches on it exceeded the value of the project and we told 'em to get a real box, preferably somewhere closer :) Ahh yes. As the corporate firewall/gateway/proxy and mail server is where *nix shines IMO. But ditch linux. It has security holes in it you could drive a B-double through. I sarted out with BSD (the TRUE unix, linux claims to be "BSD-like" but thats where the relationship ends). I used BSDI when I started as an ISP, on a (then state of the art machine) 80486DX at 100MHz, with 32Mb of RAM, 4Gb of SCSI-2 hard disk and a 64-port serial card. That machine is still running! % uptime 9:22PM up 1193 days, 21:40 Indeed, here are 4 of my other machines games up 1193+21:25 giroc up 1193+21:27 starone up 1193+21:25 startwo up 1193+21:25 These are all running FreeBSD. The 1193 days was when we had a critical failure of several things all at the same time - someone drove over the mains pillar box, the generator started but the exciter failed and we only got 110 volts, so of course, the UPS didn't hold up! My "router" box (also running FreeBSD) has shunted 4,962,928,233 packets so far this month (or 1,350,034,219,870 bytes, if you prefer) - and its still mostly doing nothing! CPU states: 7.8% user, 0.0% nice, 1.2% system, 5.4% interrupt, 85.6% idle It's not even a grunty box: CPU: Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon/Celeron (451.02-MHz 686-class CPU) Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0x673 Stepping = 3 real memory = 402653184 (393216K bytes) Try that on a windows machine :) I run FreeBSD with Enlightenment under XFree for my desktop, and for my "traveling" machine, a 17" Apple PowerBook running OS/X (which is basically FreeBSD with apples GUI over the top). There, happy Glenn? <grin> |
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| Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5078 |
Good feedback there Ross I've maintinaed a few web servers in my time, both apache and IIS. ASP is a fantastic server side language, fast and stable, with lots of support on the net. I have used cold fusion / php, but didn't like them. I maintain two servers here, both running their own IIS server and mail server ( MDaemon 8.0 ). TheBackShed and this forum live on one of the servers. As for FrontPage, juk! Its a web designers beginner package, writes horrible code and not used by serious developers. I wouldn't offer support for FrontPage extensions either. Yeah I agree on this. Lucky I have the PC's in a controlled environment, intranet behind a firewall. Most of the PC's dont have any internet access at all. I do like using vbscript for client side form validation, easy as. Development time is a big thing for me. The system I work on has 1200 ASP pages, and a SQL database server. The SQL and IIS are on the one server, a dual XEON PC with 2 Gigs of RAM, and the CPU's are only idle for about 50% of the time. I see them both maxed out often, so its a busy system. Glenn The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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| RossW Guru Joined: 25/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 495 |
I prefer just bare apache and do all the smarts server-side with either shell scripts, C or perl. My wife (also a web developer) uses php (but none of the nonsense code-generators, we both code in a text editor, although she uses a fancy gui based, context-sensitive text editor, I just use vi) Ouch! I'd have to say thats more of a damnation of windows than an indication of a busy system! One of my webservers (I'll pick one that serves a fair amount of content) - mostly large images (up to about 35-40 megabytes each (spherical panoramas)) - has served out 153,725,262,856 bytes of http traffic so far this month, 206,184 pages *TODAY* (in the last 17 hours) on a 650MHz single CPU with 256Mb RAM and is still showing 96% free CPU! And it's ALSO running dns for several hundred domains and serving over a million DNS requests per day, and receiving and forwarding a very modest 6000 emails a day. My "main" mail box is handling over 100,000 emails a day, serving >60,000 web pages a day (many of those are active content) and the poor old 300MHz Pentium with 128Mb RAM can still manage over 80% free CPU. I've never actually counted up the number of hits on my main webserver - but some domains are achieving close to a million hits a month, and that box only has 256Mb RAM and a 400MHz celeron! Part of the "trick" to performance is to spend money where it needs to be spent. High-speed hard disks (minimum of 10,000 RPM), LVD/Wide SCSI, and good network cards. IDE drives are the quickest way to slow down an otherwise decent system - the overheads talking to them are horrible. Multiple spindles (physical disks) and overlapping disk accesses sure help. (edited) And of course, ditching the memory and CPU hog that is "the GUI" means you can run a decent server on an otherwise "scrap" machine! CLI rules :) Still, we're a looong way from the "windmill" charter here, is it time to come back on track? :) If so... does anyone know of a good, reliable, inexpensive, low power air compressor? I'm wanting somewhere in the order of 30-50 litres/minute at lowish pressure, somewhere between 10 and 50 kpa (although more wouldn't be a problem). Ideally, something that could run of 12V DC and use no more than 10-20 watts. I'd settle for other solutions that are smaller too. "The wife" has 7 large bird aviaries and wants water circulation through the ponds (one in each aviary). The small submersible pumps she's been after are just junk. Semi-sealed with nasty bearings, they'll pack up inside a year for sure. I suggested instead using air-lift pumps - no moving parts, ultra-reliable, simple, and will aerate the water too. I just need to find a suitable air source (and a large air compressor won't do - we're off-grid) |
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