Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with computer and web

Web Browser Woes

mahoganyslide — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:39:23 -0800

What is the best Web Browser for an intel Mac in terms of low CPU and RAM usage? I currently have a Macbook Pro (2009 unibody) with 2GB of RAM. Everything runs fine otherwise, but I'm having trouble with the web browser.

I tend to open and close a lot of tabs in the course of a day (research, recreation, school, etc) and do not regularly restart my browser/computer. After a few days, the activity monitor will show that both Firefox and Safari have 40-50% CPU and 500-600MB of RAM usage. This of course slows my computer down considerably. Once I exit the browser and both the CPU and RAM are freed up, my computer starts to behave once again.

Are there other functional browsers out there that do not strain my computer as much? Or should I simply restart my browser/computer at the end of every day and recover all of my tabs?

Photo Contest Set-up Help Needed

SuperErin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:30:40 -0800

PhotoFilter: I need to create a monthly photo contest for my clients to participate in. Help me find the easiest way to do this. I've already seen this question, but it is from 2007, and I know things have changed many times since then. I looked at the two programs suggested, but would prefer something online that I don't have to upload to my website.

I'd like to just set the thing up, give out a link, and have my clients upload photos of their dogs and vote on the best each month. I'd prefer an actual voting mechanism, rather than just writing "vote" in the comments.

I'd prefer free, or at least inexpensive for me, free for my clients to use.

I've googled this, but there's a lot of junk to slog through, so I was hoping to get some Mefite expertise!

Thanks in advance.

How do I get my files from Point A to Point B?

reenum — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:10:14 -0800

I need to move several gigs of music files from one external hard drive to another. But, there are a few problems... I have a 250GB WD HD in an enclosure and recently bought a WD Elements 640GB drive. I now want to back up all my music files from the 250GB to the 640GB drive. They total about 33GB.

Problem is, my computers do not have USB 2.0 drives. Every time I begin the backup process, it goes for a while, and then terminates due to an error in writing from the 250GB drive.

Is there an easy way to do this backup?

Machine, point me to food

klangklangston — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:45:20 -0800

Where's my food? How to make a web ap that tells me how to find vegetarian food easily? Ok, so, first off—I'm not tremendously programming savvy, so don't be afraid to talk down to me in simple terms (seriously, don't assume I know anything).

Here is what I want: I want to be able to go to a page (either on a computer or a phone) and see where the nearest vegetarian food is (vegetarian restaurant or just a place that has veggie food). I would like to make this open, so that I don't have to find every vegetarian dish everywhere (crowdsource).

I assume that what I need will be some sort of database that accepts submissions easily, and that will work with google maps; and some server space to run it from.

Given that—if I want to build something that does this, what do I need and what do I need to know? Is this something that can be built by a programming novice (I haven't done any programming since high school and that was still mostly basic. I have a moderate grasp of HTML, but little CSS)? How hard will this be? What should I know when I start to build it?

How do you disable access to a root directory on a web server?

jrholt — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:14:15 -0800

How do you disable access to a root directory on a web server? We have individual files that we're happy to let people download, but we don't necessarily want them going to the root directory to download all the files.

e.g.

http://www.example.com/files/filenumber1.jpg (okay)
http://www.example.com/files/ (not okay)

Can anybody point me in the right direction so that a user who tries the second URL is denied access? Should we be looking in httaccess? cpanel? Somewhere else? I was surprised to not find an answer after Googling around.

How to get my posts from Wordpress.com to Blogger?

reenum — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:07:18 -0800

I want to migrate entries from Wordpress.com to Blogger. Is there any easy way to do this? I made the Blogger to Wordpress.com switch a few years ago, but love the new Blogger interface. I find that being able to label posts is a lot less restrictive than Wordpress's categories.

Migrating to Wordpress was a flash. But, going the other way seems to be a problem.

I've tried to Google this, and most of the info out there seems to say that at the moment, this is impossible to do. I've found a couple of tools like blog2blog, but none have worked this far.

Oh technically inclined MeFites, please help.

P.S. I'm not technically inclined, so I really don't have a way to write a program or anything to do this.

How to stop torrents at work?

numlok — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:13:20 -0800

I'm sure this question will not make me the most popular student at the dance, but is there a way to identify (via IP) machines running BitTorrent clients within an internal network (ie. work)? My company has around 50 employees, and the old, "Please don't torrent at work" doesn't seem to be doing much good anymore. It brings our email and web browsing to a near standstill, and dropping by the "usual suspects" is not only tiresome, but doesn't seem to find all the sources of traffic any longer. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Live AIS data is a web browser

kaozity — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:55:58 -0800

Hi, Another oddball question... I have a live data stream of AIS data and I would like to take the data and ultimately display it on a world map through a web browser. The problem is that I have no clue as to how I would display live updated information on a map. I would like the map to update as the stream of data is coming in. This might be an ambitious project for someone who is weak on web programming, but i figured it would be worth looking into.

Make Apache recognize Perl!

kaozity — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:49:15 -0800

How can I get my web server to interpret perl I am playing around with perl for the first time in my life. I am using a fedora core 8 machine. It seems to ave all the essentials installed already (apache, php, mySQL, and perl). However, I make a file called perl.pl and it does not seem to translate correctly. Here is what is in the file:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/html \n\n"; #HTTP HEADER

# DEFINE SOME SCALAR VARIABLES
$number = "5";
$exponent = "2 ** 8";
$string = "Hello, PERL!";
$stringpart_1 = "Hello, ";
$stringpart_2 = "PERL!";
$linebreak = "
"; #HTML LINEBREAK TAG

# PRINT THEM TO THE BROWSER
print $number;
print $linebreak;
print $exponent;
print $linebreak;
print $string.$linebreak;
print $stringpart_1.$stringpart_2;

When you go the the browser, you see the following
http://[ip address]/perl/perl.pl

As you can see, you prints out exactly what I type. Am I doing anything wrong? Am I suppose to enable a perl service or change a configuration file?

Where does autofill come from?

M Edward — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:38:34 -0800

Firefox Filter: Is there any way to view the autofill lists outside of Firefox? Where does Firefox store the autofill information? Like previous google searches? Is there a way to view them with a text editor?

I am looking for something I googled a long time ago but going through the entire history of my searches line-by-line with only 4 at a time showing is driving me batty.

Sending E-mails with PHP

kaozity — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 06:57:35 -0800

How do I get PHP to send an e-mail. Is there a way to do it without recompiling PHP/Apache. If not, how do I recompile PHP/Apache on a linux system to do this? How do I get PHP to send an e-mail. Is there a way to do it without recompiling PHP/Apache. If not, how do I recompile PHP/Apache on a linux system to do this?

Ideally, I would like to find a way without recompiling my software, but if there is not other way, I can recompile the software.

Does anyone know of a way to create a line graph using html or javascript?

kaozity — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 06:43:57 -0800

Does anyone know of a way to create a line graph using html or javascript? I need to create a line graph with html or jave script without paying a company $99 for their javascript it (e.g. swiftchart). The graph needs to handle multiple trends in the same graph... meaning that I would like to see 3 or more lines going accross in one graph.

Any Help?

How do I access my SVN repository through the internet?

kaozity — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 06:38:44 -0800

How do I access my SVN repository through the internet? I set up subversion on a windows machine and am running it as a service. I set up C:\SVNRepo os my repository. Now, I would like to have access to the reposiry through the internet. I have no problem accessing it over the local network.

I was under the impression that I should be able to type svn://www.example.com/SVNRepo and have the TortoiseSVN browser come up and that would be it, but that does not seem to work. Am I doing something wrong?

Help will be appreciated.

Windows File Repository System?

kaozity — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:31:30 -0800

Is there a windows file repository program that is simple to install? I need a file repository program installed on a windows machine so that any computer on that network can acces its files accordingly. If one machine is using a file, the other machines will not be able to edit that file.

I am looking for something with a straight forward installation. I would liek to run an installer and have it pretty much ready to go.. or close to ready.

How do I get an automatically generated line graph from a text file with a list of numbers?

kaozity — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:44:44 -0800

Is there a program that can automatically create line graphs from a text file with a list of numbers? Is there a program that I can have running in the background of my windows machine that will take a text file with a list of numbers, formatted as follows...

121
324
53546
4343
2342
etc...

and produce a line graph in jpeg, jpg, bmp, or any other common picture format?

Help with iPhoto

triolus — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:44:32 -0800

How can I use iPhoto to put my photos online? I want to make a web album of all my pictures. I have everything sorted out the way I want it to be, but iPhoto only lets me export to a .mac account I don't have and don't want.

Since everything is already laid by and sorted into album, I pretty much want something that will create the HTML, dump it and the pictures into a folder, and scale the images back for me a bit. Being able to mess with the templates would be nice, as well. I don't want to have to sort everything out again (by using something like JAlbum).

web-based business

bethrossrn — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 04:28:17 -0800

I have an idea for a web-based business and not only need a web page but a program to keep track of units/credits, no money involved. It would involve marketing/advertising which I have experience in but no experience in computer programming. Where do I go from here?

Small Virtual Transportations

Miko — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:40:32 -0800

Inspired by this thread, I'd like to build a virtual collection of atmospheric web-based art sites like this one. Do you know of any? Even if these things aren't the most brilliant creations of Western art, I love the way they function in daily life. I'd like to gather a list of these that I can send people links to, as an unusual 'hello', or a pleasant distraction from reality on a boring day.

If it helps, some of the things I like about this:

-it's non-commercial
-it's atmospheric
-it incorporates motion, images, and music
-it's interactive
-it takes a few minutes to fully experience
-it's stand-alone; you don't need to make a project of registering, paging through a number of choices or thumbnails or lists, you just direct link to it
-it's beautiful.

If you know of other sites like this, please list them here. Searching hasn't been helpful, because I can't find terms specific enough not to return web design firms, art exhibits, flash games, and commercial sites. Thanks in advance.

CSS Issue in Win IE. Help please!

Timen — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 04:38:59 -0800

I run a website and am having a little difficulty getting the CSS to work properly in Internet Explorer. I am trying to implement the search field into a little 'pop-up' in the navigation. It works properly in FireFox and Safari, but in IE for Windows the pop-up shifts diagonally instead of directly below. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Web page updates for the musically-inclined

purplefiber — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 20:55:58 -0800

Help me update my group's website without pulling my hair out... I play with a musical group that is presently (though hopefully not for much longer) doing all its own admin: finances, promotion, management, and website. We are trained in music, and untrained in everything else, so we end up spending WAY too much time trying to do tasks that, for the more technically savvy, should take just a few minutes. For example- simple content updates and revisions to our website.

Presently I'm using an html template and plugging in the relevant details of upcoming events, etc. However I find html code very tedious and dizzying to look at, so I would love to find a program (I know they exist) into which I can type normally and it will convert into code. The catch (and I'm not sure if this is much of a catch) is that we want to stick with the same layout, fonts, etc that we have already, so something like Google Page Creator, where you have to use their layouts, wouldn't work. Can you recommend any applications (bonus points if they're free) that would allow me to do this more easily, freeing up hours of my time for practise and surfing AskMefi?

Thanks!

Python or Ruby for learning to program?

djgh — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 18:52:20 -0800

Python or Ruby? Help me decide! So, I'm aware that there are previous similar questions. However, I'm pretty sure I've narrowed it down to two - I just can't choose which!

I'd basically like to learn how to program, and in a way using best practices - I've heard object-oriented programming is good, for example, so would like to learn what it is and how to best program in that way. I've got a bit of experience with PHP, but have mostly forgotten it all by now (last time used? 6 months ago), and was never particularly proficient in the first place. Plus I've heard it's very difficult to write good code with PHP.

I'd mainly use whichever language on the web, although if it can do cool things with my computer (either my Mac (OSX) or PC), that would be a bonus. But learning good programming practices, writing clean code etc is my main priority. I'm not looking to learn a framework, I'd rather learn how to program and how to work with the language before doing so.

So, which one is best for me? And any recommended books for someone who will basically be an absolute beginner? Or is there a better language for what I want to do?

Dreamweaver= Evil?

miss tea — Tue, 30 May 2006 15:01:40 -0800

Why does Dreamweaver 8 (mac) show my cursor insertion point in the wrong spot in design view? I use Dreamweaver 8, and do a lot of hand coding, but when I am editing copy I like to use the design view. However, when I click on a word, Dreamweaver 8 shows the insertion point 1 to 2 letters over to the left from where it actually is. Needless to say, this is frustrating and has completely confounded my google-fu (disturbingly, searching for "dreamweaver insertion point" comes up with porn). I've tried changing the font preferences, no dice at all. Any advice?

Wireless Connections Failing

gilsonal — Sun, 28 May 2006 19:16:59 -0800

Help connecting to the internet needed! I'm in a new house and the internet all of a sudden stopped working. My wireless can "see" several networks, have a strong signal and good speed, but I don't get assigned a network address. (the networks are unsecured.) Sometimes I'll connect yet have "limited or no connectivity". Why would my connection suddenly stop working? I have no viruses, I checked. Also, can I run two routers at the same time? I'd like to use my secured network at the place, but there are only four keys and five girls. Can I run a connection from a modem to a router, then to another router? Would that work? Any info you have is appreciated!

Network tech support brain-twister

frenetic — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 08:02:38 -0800

Riddle me this: there are two Windows XP computers (desktop and laptop) on the same Internet connection, behind the same router, connecting wirelessly to it. The laptop often (but not every time) takes a really long time (30 seconds+) to send email and connect to certain websites. The desktop never has this problem. What's going on? Here are a few things I've checked:

- Wireless signal strength is fine
- When the laptop is taking a long time connecting to sites others work fine at the same time
- Scanned for spyware/viruses with MS Anti-Spyware and Spybot Search & Destroy (clean)
- Has the web problem in three different web browsers (IE6, Netscape 7, Firefox 1.5)
- Has the email problem in both Netscape mail and Outlook Express
- Windows firewall is disabled
- Disabled Javascript/Java/Cookies in Firefox
- Disabled any virus checkers/resident anti-spyware
- Cleared everything out of the tray
- Checked network setup, it's identical to the desktop

One of the sites that's reliably slow (though again, not every time) on the laptop but not on the desktop is tremblant.ca.

All I can think of at this point is that something's been fundamentally hosed and the laptop needs a full XP reinstall. But I'd love to know what the heck's going on if anyone knows.

How much should I charge for computer repair.

stilgar — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 16:20:29 -0800

How much should I charge per hour as a computer repair person? How much should I charge to set up a website for someone? I recently went to an interview for an office assistant job, however when i got to the interview the lady wanted me to become the IT person for the office. She specifically wanted me to prepare a presentation for her with the answers to the following questions.

how much would i charge per hour for computer repair

how much would i charge to set up a website (domain and hosting) and "maintain" it per month

how much would i charge per month to "maintain" her website.

this is for a large real estate company so i figure i wouldn't have have to charge bare bottom prices also for the startup websites they would be for Realtors entering the field. The reason I ask is because I want to get an average, I live on Cape Cod, so figure "Boston" level prices. They currently have a IT guy but i guess they don't like him much and are looking for someone new. I put "maintain" in quotes because what they really want me to do is once in a while add some content, and give them weekly stat updates as well as do a little SEO.