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If you recently upgraded your Mac OS X to Tiger (10.4), you may have noticed that the new 2.0 version of Safari that came with it may be having difficulties playing Quicktime movies from this site. If all you see is a big blue "Q" and the movie never starts playing, then you will be glad to know that Mr Barrett has found a solution! Basically, you must delete a file called "QuickTime Plugin.webplugin" from the "Internet Plug-Ins" folder in the Library folder that you see when you double-click your hard-drive icon (not the Library folder in your home directory). Only delete this file if you are using Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) because older versions need this file for Quicktime to work properly.

The search capability throughout the site has been much improved by introducing some of the more common advanced search options that you may have used on Yahoo and Google. Although there are a few important differences in how some of the options work on those sites compared to this site, you can pretty much forget about that and use them in the expected way to narrow your search results. If you have never included any of these advanced operators as part of a search query, then please read on for some techniques to make your searching more fruitful, not only on this site but on many other sites as well.Continued...

The System Administrator can now monitor the growth rate of the database tables in a new page available via the Administration module. Included is an option for displaying daily statistics on a particular table for the past three months along with the amount of total free space remaining in the database files. Since it is based on the "SHOW TABLE STATUS" command, only MySQL is currently supported and only for versions older than 4.1 because the output of this command has changed slightly from the 4.0.16 version in use today. Although the underlying script for this page checks to see if the statistics for the current date have been posted, and updates them if they have not, I went ahead and wrote a small shell script to post these statistics every day at the same time for a more complete record. Here is a representative screenshot from a test database using bogus numbers.

PHP 5.0.4 is now the engine powering this web site. After three months running on the G5 development machine, which is about to be upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", it seemed like a good time to apply the final updates to the G4 production server. Although the G4 will most likely continue using Mac OS X 10.3.9 "Panther" until its retirement as a web server, I wanted to ensure maximum compatibility in the scripting environment to alleviate as much anxiety as possible when introducing any new features. And even though I still plan to do at least cursory testing using PHP 4.3.10 on the development server, there could be some problems when stressed on a production server, so as always, just let me know if anything seems flakey. However, please note that for security reasons, PHP versions older than 4.3.2 are not supported.

A new way to peruse the pictures in the database is available. Clicking "Slideshow" at the bottom of a file index will open another window which will display each of the pictures in that index about every five seconds, one after another. The controls at the bottom of the slideshow window work just like Quicktime, so you can pause the playback, restart it, jump to the first and last pictures, and manually step either backwards or forwards through the index of selected pictures. The first time through may be a little slower because most of the pictures will probably need to be scaled down to fit in the slideshow window, which is another reason why you may want to consider choosing a smaller size when you upload your photos. However, after the first pass, the pictures will be properly scaled and stored in your browser's cache, so it will be much snappier.

Well, I suppose it had to happen someday, but a file server application would be remiss if it could not prevent a few users from hogging all the storage capacity. Not that it was strictly necessary because there is still plenty of space available on the benwillies server, only now each user will be allotted a certain amount of space, currently set at 50MB, for storing their files, which you can monitor on the Edit File and Edit Account pages. Should you ever exceed your quota, you have three options: delete some of your files, scale down your pictures or contact Technical Support to ask for more space. The initial default quota of 50MB was arbitrarily chosen, so please do not hesitate to ask for more, but I would like to point out that by scaling your pictures down to "Large (1080x768)" it could reduce your storage requirements by 30% or more. And since most people nowadays have laptops where 1024x768 is fairly standard, your pictures will still fill their screens when viewed closeup, not to mention how much faster they will load. This quota applies only to the actual binary images you have uploaded in the Files module, not including the little thumbnail images or any other file and folder data, so your actual usage is somewhat higher than what is indicated.