Posts tagged pc stuff

What is Open Source?

Mar 4th

Posted by matt in General

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Open Source is simply defined as a collaboration, predominantly online, whereby source code and software is made available under an open licensing structure with the aim of encouraging other developers and users to test it, tweak it and develop it further, reposting their achievements back to the community so that others can benefit from it.

What this actually means is that most generally available commercial software has an Open Source alternative – with the added benefit that these are available freely for anyone to download from the Internet.

Some of the good Open Source software available includes: WordPress, Joomla, Star Office, Open Office, Freemind… these are the obvious ones that spring to mind, that I’ve used, but there are far more!

Wikipedia define Open Source as:

Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials—typically, their source code. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, a new, three-word phrase “open source software” was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

 A main principle and practice of open source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product (and source-material) available at no cost to the public.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

A good list of available Open Source software (top 20)  is available from Trip Wire magazine, HERE.

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Dynamic image resizing in WordPress

Mar 1st

Posted by matt in Design

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Some of the WordPress themes I’ve trialled include a dynamic image re-size option, which initially sounded quite good. However, after trying for hours to get the thing to work and searching countless other forums and WordPress guides, I still couldn’t get it to work.

That was, until, I stumbled across a web site (http://ravidreams.com/2009/10/wordpress-automatic-thumbnail-issue-with-hostgator/) that specifically covered by problem – and it wasn’t anything to do with my directory permissions either. It was a bandwidth protection measure from my host, Hostgator!

Anyway, following the instructions on the site (copied and pasted below, for ease) – resolved the issue nice and quickly… and now I have a fully functioning, image resizing WordPress installation!

Here’s what to do:

1. Login to your Hostgator control panel and contact Live Chat Support.
2. Ask the support technician to white list your thumbnail generation file for mod_security . You will need to give your file name and path.  The file name mostly will be timthumb.php or thumb.php. You can find this file inside the WordPress theme folder. An example file path wp-content/themes/theme_name/thumb.php

This is apparently a known issue with Hostgator’s WordPress hosting and all their technicians should recognize your request.

This problem will be solved by them in minutes.

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How to configure Windows XP to log on automatically

Feb 28th

Posted by matt in Web & PC stuff

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It’s more secure and better practice to not just have your computer log on automatically. Ideally, for security reasons, you should install a BIOS password too – but that may be a step too far for some people. Instead, you can just add that extra layer of security by not running your system as the computer administrator and setting up limited user accounts instead.

Using the Control Panel to set up users is fine, but if you want to be able to force them to log in at the Welcome Screen, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Click Start, then Run to get to the ‘Run’ box
  2. Then in the run box execute this command: control userpasswords2
  3. You will see a check box labelled ‘Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer’.
  4. Ensure there is a tick in this check from this check box.
  5. Click on OK.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to have to log in each time…

  1. Untick this check box.
  2. You’ll then be prompted to enter the user name and password you wish to automatically log on with, and then click OK.

Now anyone with physical access to your computer can use this machine. It makes your computer more convenient to use, but at the same time can pose a privacy / security risk.

If you need to start up the computer but do not want to log in automatically one specific time, then You can suppress the automatic logon by pressing the SHIFT key during the boot process.

If you want to permanently disable the auto-logon, you can execute this command from the Run box: rundll32 netplwiz.dll,ClearAutoLogon

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