Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 August 13

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August 13

Fireworks Cs3 Transparency

Does anyone know how to change the color of the transparent background pattern in Fireworks? The white and light gray checkerboard pattern is difficult for me to use.

Oh, this was me - AMP'd 18:06, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Physics on Graphics cards

I'm pretty sure that nvidia's newest graphics cards (8800 series) have built in physics capabilities. Will Blender automatically use this extra power for fluid and soft body animations? Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.195.124.101 (talk • contribs)

Yes, it probably does utilize the physics, as well as everything else the card has (it'll run just about anything). · AndonicO ^Talk 00:56, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

HTML <object> with a transparent background

I am trying to embed some audio files in my webpage, but I can't get the object's background to be transparent. I used the following code, and the object rendered with a transparent background for a split-second before the plug-in (In this case QuickTime player.) loaded and apparently overrode the transparency and put a (dreaded) white background instead.

<object width="500" height="45" allowtransparency="true> <embed src="audio/somefile.mp3" autostart="true" type="audio/mpeg" allowtransparency="true" width="500" height="45"></embed></object>

does anyone know how to override the QT override? Note: I have asked questions relating to this problem before, and some of you have mentioned using Adobe Flash to embed media in a webpage. It's a great idea, but at 17 years old, I can't really afford to buy it. Thanks for the idea though.69.205.180.123 14:20, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

You could always use the embed tag instead, which works on Firefox and I'm pretty sure on IE (example from my website):

<embed src="filenameofmusic.mp3" width="0" height="0" loop="true" autoplay="true" controller="false" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"> </embed> -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 23:27, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

That is extremely bad practice as you have no way of stopping it if the controls doesn't exist (0 height and width). There ARE pre-made MP3 players in Flash out there, like this (CC-by-nc-sa license) which you just need to tinker with the xml file to play your own MP3 on your own site. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:58, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Unicode usernames

I'm developing a simple user login system for my website. At the moment the database stores usernames in UTF-8 encoding, and using the various multi-byte functions in PHP this seems to be working well so far.

Is there any reason why allowing unicode in usernames would be a bad idea, or otherwise are there any precautions I should take? I'm using PHP 5.2 and MySQL 4.1. ~Inkington 15:26, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

The only real problem I've seen is that users can pretend to be someone else by using unicode for letters that look practically identical to standard ascii letters. It can be difficult for users to type in unicode - but if they used unicode when creating their username, they should be able to type it again. -- Kainaw^(what?) 16:42, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Better to use unicode as this supports all types of foreign languages and characters, rather than a single-byte character set (or even worse, 7-bit ASCII), where your data would be impossible to convert/correct later on. UTF-8 (UTF8-AL32) is recommended in Oracle's latest RDBMS. Sandman30s 17:41, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Nuh uh. I'd say stick with strict ascii for identity-information like login name. As was brought up before, it's easy to impersonate other users or even screw up your administration backend by using control characters. International support really isn't that necessary, and you're certainly not alone if you say "I don't think so" to the supporters of unicode-ization. Support it in the rest of your application so your users aren't frustrated by characters that don't work, but force ascii text for the login name. People won't mind such a reasonable precaution- international users are used to it anyway --froth^t 20:17, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

If so do so, offer "display names" that are customizeable, similar to WpA's difference between usernames and signatures. 68.39.174.238 22:58, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

The simple solution is to offer a subset of UTF8 and exclude characters that can be potentially confusing/less useful/insecure.

I have heard of, but never actually seen implemented, systems that color letters from different character sets different colors (and possibly highlight them with different background colors.) This makes similar characters more obviously different 69.95.50.15 20:10, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. I was thinking of limiting it to a subset of UTF8, as mentioned above, but so far I haven't found an easy way to do this in PHP, apart from using some very ugly (and limited) regular expressions... ~Inkington 17:37, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Pictures

Where can I find pics like the ones shown on these menus. I was planning on making my own menu and wanted pictures that have that "digital" look. I already asked at the Help desk but they misundersstood and told me to copy and paste. I'm guessing they'll be on the commons. Please answer on my talk page - Pheonix 23:25, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

I think it's called the "crystal" icon look. Try here? --froth^t 00:31, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

also --froth^t 00:31, 14 August 2007 (UTC)