Entries Tagged 'Requests' ↓

I really like Dreamhost web hosting. Featurewise they provide more than any other shared hosting provider I’ve come across, and the freedom you get to install your own programs (trac, PHP, SpamAssassin, Django & Rails) is something I’ve only previously seen on dedicated servers or VPS web hosting (not that I’ve done many of those things, but hey - it’s nice to know it’s possible!).

In recent weeks Dreamhost has been having some problems. Actually that’s an understatement. They’ve been having big problems. Not as bad as the problems my last hosting company had which drove me to leave (at least Dreamhost always have backups to restore), but enough to make me question hosting commercial sites with them.

Is there an alternative to Dreamhost web hosting, that matches the features and freedom available? I’m happy to pay more… although obviously the cheaper the better! I cannot justify the cost of a dedicated server (it’s also too much hassle) and I’ve been put off Virtual Private Servers because the RAM isn’t burstable (I can see myself running out of this fast - many databases and concurrent visitors).

Some of the freedom is unnecesary: if Dreamhost configured their SpamAssassin carefully there’d be no need to run my own instance, so I can live without that.

Some other hosting company must have seen the need for geeky/techie hosting - if not there’s a (demanding) market out there!

Have you managed to get “Opera’s”:http://www.opera.no/ news reader to post to the “PHP newsgroups”:nntp://news.php.net ? I have not been able to figure out what settings to use for the outgoing server - Opera implies my mail server, but this doesn’t seem to work.

I need to post to the PEAR list, but can’t subscribe to the email list and get so many messages
Help!

Anyone come across a good *free* membership database manger for a club or society? Currently a society I’m in uses an Excel spreadsheet, which is fine until more than one person wants to edit it. It only needs to be as fancy as ‘Automatically upload when saved in Excel’ or something, or a desktop program that synchronises to a file stored on the website. I’ve suggested an online web-based membership database, but the hosting doesn’t support it, and I don’t want to code it either

“Matt”:http://photomatt.net/ has a “list of software”:http://photomatt.net/archives/2004/03/04/software/ he uses enough to consider indespensible. The comments make for interesting reading as well (I’ve found one or two more pieces to try).

My question is: is there any software out there that will build a list like this automatically for me? I guess by monitoring my system, and every time I run an @.exe@ file it increments the count for that program by 1 (no doubt you can think of a more sophisticated method). I’d find it interesting to see what I really do use a lot. The start menu on XP goes some way towards this, but isn’t enough - without resetting it I can’t see how my habits are different now.

I’ve got a set of very crap Computer Science notes in PDF that I need to print and learn. Because I don’t want to waste 35 sheets of paper, and because each page is just a Powerpoint slide, I want to print 4 pages on a page (like many lecturers do with Powerpoint slides).

But Adobe Acrobat’s print dialogue doesn’t have an option to do this. Neither does my printer driver. Is there another program I can use to do this?

Hoping someone can suggest a program to do this…

I will hopefully (if I take enough photos) have the need to set a slideshow to music for a presentation via a video projector. Never having done this before I’ve no idea what software to use, and googling hasn’t turned up anything that looks suitable.

I don’t want a package that just plays the slides every n seconds - they need to be fitted in with the music (or just fixed at certain points of the track, then evenly spaced until the next point, if that makes any sense).

Something free would be useful as well!