borfast

woooot Yaay! Kick Me Thanks guys! I must say that this was indeed fun. I had a great time making the wallpaper. I also wish to thank Bill for the contest. What other webhosting company would promote such a great contest?? Rock Sign

What if you ask your ex-manager to talk to the big bosses? Maybe he could explain it to them...

In short: Invision Power Board has a lot more features (A LOT) than phpBB. I don't like their template sysyem, though... Not that phpBB's template system is much better but I think I prefer phpBB's to Invision's. I wonder why all these webboard software packages have their own template engine when there's Smarty... I guess people have no better ways to spend their time Anyway, the best way for you to find out which one is best for you, is installing both and trying them out.

OK, while the judges don't give us their decision, let's entertain ourselves with this poll... ok, I admit it, I was bored and had nothing better to do Goof Anyway, which one would you pick? I think I'd pick the Xbox. Not that I'm a great fan of consoles, I always hated them, actually. The thing is that the Treo wouldn't help me much. It's mostly an organizer, I believe, and I already have all I need of an organizer in my cell phone. Besides, there's Xbox Linux... What about you, what will you choose if you win?

car

I like the way you positioned the elements. Gives you room to keep the desktop icons on the left side without anything behind them

I forgot to mention that one, it was also on my initial idea list but I didn't have the time to do them all. Studying for final exames and making up wallpapers all at the same time is a little tricky

I like it I'd change just one little thing, though: the orange color. TCH's color range has a strong yellow, not orange But it's probably the one I like best, anyway

brains

Dave, I'm a ferocious defender of cross platform compatibility, believe me. But this time the objective was to make a wallpaper for windows only. I knew my wallpaper would not work on any operating systems other than windows but since it was not supposed to anyway, I decided to take advantage of the "Active Desktop" feature (or whatever it's called). It's funny, I think the idea is really cool and I really started to like it... except for the fact that I won't see it much, since my main operating system is Linux... ) and the background of the flash animation is not transparent, it's a yucky solid green (which is also strange, because with Mozilla 1.3 on Windows it was working OK). I guess I'll try to fix these problems later, just for fun. I know the wallpaper can't be used as one on any other OS but at least people can open it in a browser and see how it would look. Maybe I'll even throw in the rest of the ideas I had, like having an MP3 player, an option to check if your site is up (maybe pinging it? configurable, of course) and an RSS news feed reader (also configurable, so you'd chose which news feeds to have available).

power puff girls

shampoo

Spoon

vegetarian

big wheels

I've put some underlines on the links. Maybe like this it will be easier to understand they're links. Thanks for the idea, turtle By the way, I also like the blue one with the semi-circle. I intended to replace the others with better ones but I didn't have the time Well, we're approaching the deadline, anyway. Good luck, everyone! May the best wallpaper win! (I still can't believe I spent most of the night awake because of this contest... Rock Sign )

Thanks Have you tried it on your computer? I'd like to have some feedback from someone who tries it. I'm curious as to how it will work on other combinations of Windows/IE.

I just remembered that the rules say we must upload the file as an attachment... Well, the "real" file for my entry is the .ZIP file I mentioned above but just in case, I'll post it here too. tchwallpaper.zip

OK, it's really late here (4:25 AM) and I'm almost falling asleep so I'll just paste the readme file so you guys can know what I've been up to. Keep in mind that I'm posting this screenshot just to give a little taste of my wallpaper. You have to download the .ZIP file and use it on your desktop to be able to view the animations, change stuff, etc... This is a screenshot of my Desktop. It was 1024x768 but I resized it to 800x600 so it would weigh a little less. Here's the link for the ZIP file with all the goodies: http://borfast.com/tchwallpaper.zip And my website, where I have the link to TCH: http://borfast.com - I just copy/pasted the HTML code from the "Links to Us" page. Good luck eveyone! Oh, by the way, there's a bug in the "control panel" - the first time you go to the "Options" tab, the image will appear stretched. It will be fine after you select another image from the drop down list. I couldn't find a way to correct it but if I do, I'll post an update (if I'm still on time Head Bash) There's also another "bug", which I know what it is but didn't have the time to fix it: when you click the tabs, the bubbles will be reset. They all disappear and new ones start appearing again from the bottom. EDIT: The image attatchment was gone. This is probably because of the move to the new server. Anyway, I posted it again. -=[ readme.txt included in the ZIP file ]=- Wallpaper for the TotalChoice Hosting "Xbox / Treo90 Giveaway" contest by Raul Pedro Santos http://borfast.com This wallpaper is a bit different from the usual ones. This is not just an image, this is an HTML file with some images, lots of JavaScript and Flash animation. ------------------ * 0 - Download If you're reading this, you probably have already downloaded the .ZIP file. If not, get it at http://borfast.com/tchwallpaper.zip * 1 - Requirements I've tested this wallpaper on Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to other versions of Win/IE but as far as I know, this should work without any problems with any Windows version newer than 98 and any IE version above 5.0. You also need Macromedia Flash Player 6, which can be obtained for free at: http://macromedia.com/shockwave/download/d...=ShockwaveFlash At last, you need to enable JavaScript and cookies. * 2 - Instalation Unzip the "tchwallpaper.zip" file into a directory where you want to keep it. Just go to "Display Settings" as you'd do to set up a regular wallpaper. Click the "Browse..." button and navigate to the folder where you have these files and select background.html". * 3 - How it works On the right side of your screen, there's a flash animation. You'll see some bubbles going up to the top of the screen. On the top left corner, you'll see a little round button with an arrow inside. If you click it, it will open a "control panel" with 3 tabs. The first one, "TCH", will show you some information about TotalChoice Hosting. The second one, "Links", will present you with quick links (they work, you can click them) to some of the most important areas of TCH's website. The third one, "Options", let's you change the background image for the left side of your desktop. The list of background images is stored in an XML file, "backgrounds.xml". Don't worry, XML is a lot more simple than it's name might lead you to believe The file already has 4 background images (prepared for 1024x768 resolution), so if you take a look at it, you'll understand immediately how it works. Basically, each image to go into the list is represented here by a line with this format: ><background file="FILENAME">DESCRIPTION</background> So if you want to add a background image to the list, you just have to copy the file to the same directory as the rest of the wallpaper files and add a corresponding line to the "backgrounds.xml" file. Please note that these lines should always go between the ><backgrounds> and </backgrounds> tags, otherwise the background image will not appear as an option. When you change the background image, a cookie will be stored in your browser so that when you refresh the desktop (which reloads "backgrounds.html") or restart your computer, the background you chose is still there. When creating images to use as a background, you should also be aware that the image will not occupy the whole desktop, since it already has a vertical bar on the right side, which takes up 250 pixels. This means that if your desktop is at a resolution of 1024x768 pixels, your background image should be 774x768 pixels to compensate -> 1024-250 = 774 You can use an image of any size, though. But keep in mind that if it's smaller than the area you have available, it will be stretched and will probably look strange. On the other hand, if the image is too big, it will also look strange because unfortunately browsers are not very good at resizing images on-the-fly, but you'll also be wasting memory and slowing down your computer unnecessarily.

Here's something for inspiration http://www.pimprig.com/old/modules.php?op=...id=411&orderby= I couldn't find the original article anywhere, though... does anyone know where it lives?

I agree, that would be nice. But I don't know if it fits on the budget...

Search for tutorials on RSS feeds. I believe you can also find some scripts available.

I also know quite a lot more about breaking into computer systems than I should... but let's skip that part of the conversation before Bill starts asking about the incidents at TCH... (just kidding, of course! ) Anyway, I'm not saying I know more than your friends. I'm not even saying that something can be foolproof - it can't. I believe in the old "saying" "The only safe system is the one disconnected from any wires, locked in a safe, burried in a cave some hundred meters deep surrounded by poisonous gas, with a minefield above it and guards and dogs watching over it day and night - still, I wouldn't trust my life to it." What I meant is that you don't break into a computer system just like that. You just don't. If you want to remotely break into a system, it means you want to gain remote access to it. But in order for you - or anyone else, for that matter - to gain remote access to a comptuer system, that computer system must be running a server of some kind. Be it a mail server, an FTP server, a telnet or SSH server... basically, any software that allows remote interaction of some sort. And you do it usually by exploiting a bug in the software or weak security measures imposed by the system administrator. If the system doesn't allow any remote interaction, be it by means of not having any server software running or simply by being unpluged from the network, you just can't get in - unless, of course, you have physical access to the machine, but that's a totally different story. If you can't get in, you can't execute commands. If you can't execute commands, you may go home and watch cartoons. In such a situation, at the very best you can crash the system but you can't destroy it. You could only destroy it if you had a way to remotely instruct the system to destroy itself, by issuing a "format c:" command or something like that, or by executing some software that would erase the contents of the hard drive. Look at it this way - a computer system is a house. Server software serves as it's only windows and doors to the street - the network it's connected to. If the house doesn't have any windows or doors, how do you expect to get in, be it legally or illegaly? Yes, there are other ways, like trojan horses or even social engineering but I don't think they'd want to call up everyone who downloaded an MP3 file and try to convince them to execute "rm -rf / " or "format c:"... Trojan horses would be a possibility but it's already too late and I'm too tired to discuss it. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe never, since I'm already way off-topic, here.... I'll just say something you said yourself allready - if something doesn't work like people want it to work, they'll get a way to make it work as they want. Meaning that if somehow they make up a trojan horse or whatever that screws up people's computers, people will, sooner or later, find a way arround it By the way, I must also say that I'm writing all this in the assumption that by "destruction" they meant erasing all the data on the computer's hard drive or, at the very best, screwing up the BIOS, because if they were talking about physical destruction... well, beam me up scotty and call Fox Mulder

Well, about the being able to destroy the computers or not, believe me, it's not possible. At least not in the way they're trying to make it sound. As for the overpriced CDs and the poor musicians not being able to feed their families... that's the part that pisses me off. Hey, don't buy airplanes, don't buy cars that cost a fortune, don't buy mansions all over the world! And that goes for the publishers too, perhaps even more than for the musicians! If they weren't so greedy, they would be glad by getting paid 1000 instead of wanting 100000 and THEN they could lower the CD prices. But please, note that I'm not saying people should go for piracy! I'm just trying to show my point of view of why this whole story of the music industry is a big fat joke and we don't do anything about it.

As always, I like to look at these things from different angles than most folks do, so I must ask this: how the hell are they going to develop software that remotely destroys a computer??? Unless a computer is wide open, there's no way to destroy it just like that. And being wide open means having no firewall, no anti-virus AND having some way to trigger the destruction of the computer... so unless the computer's operating system already had a way to allow that (Windows, anyone? ), I don't see a way for them to do it. Another way I can think of is they'd build some kind of trojan horse to do their dirty work but come on, who are they kidding? Are they going to stop criminals by turning themselves into even worst criminals?? I don't know what you think but as far as I'm concerned, destruction of private property is far more severe than stealing. And there's also another point to look at in this whole story: why do people steal music?? Is it just because it's fun? I don't think so. This is the big question that the music industry is not looking at. They only think about punishing those who steal their precious money. Why don't they question themselves about the reasons that lead people to steal music? Well, perhaps they're so blinded by the shining coins that they can't see people steal music because people don't want to pay the prices they ask for it! I'm not saying they should just give it away. I'm saying they could reduce the prices and everyone would be happy! Yes, everyone, because if the prices were lower, people would buy more and they'd get more money! But I don't think they will ever understand that... people who only see money in front of them are just like that, selfish and don't care about others. Heck, let's forbid everyone to use CDs. Hey, you can make pirate copies of copyrighted music with those things, you know?! Wasn't that the argument they used when they started the battle against P2P networks?... OK, I guess I'm starting to go a little off-topic so I'll just shut up. I always get excited when talking about stuff like this.