Hey guys, I'm starting to feel a little bit better now which is good. I'm still a little sick, but getting there slowly.

I came across a really awsome website StudioTwentyEight which has such an awsome collection of Windows desktop themes and visual styles to give your windows desktop a little new years spruce. Each theme listed has two download variants depending on if you are using StyleXP or WindowsBlinds as your theme manager. There are some really creative and different themes here which really makes this site stand out from the myriad of desktop theme sites around these days.

If you are new to windows desktop themes or aren't really sure how to get them working, try download a program (Windows 2K/XP only) called StyleXP (link above). This program is by far the easiest to use as it takes care of practically everything for you. All you need to do is just download whichever visual style or theme you like (usually in .zip format) then open up StyleXP, click Add New Style, then select your theme. You can organise your themes, apply them and delete them all from this one program.

Have fun guys, take it easy.

Hey guys. I hope you all had yourselves a great christmas. I'm back from my trip and ready to post another session of Monday TechQuestion's for ya.

Q:
Since this is the holiday time of the year, I thought I'd ask you a question about digital photography. I have a simple 4 Megapixel camera and was wondering what differences there were in image quality when I switch to say 3MP, 2MP and so on?
-Anonymous

A:
Ahh it is that time of the year and no better time to take photos. Thanks for such a great question. Differences between different value M (megapixels)  impact firstly image size, and secondly because of that image size either growing or shrinking image quality also differs.

Here are the image sizes for each of the different megapixel values. I'll only include image sizes up to 4M as that is as high your camera goes (which by the way 4M is quite generous for day-to-day photography):

• 4M (F/N - F = better quality / N = default 4M) - 2272 x 1704


• 3M - 2048 x 1536


• 2M - 1600 x 1200


• 1M - 1280 x 960


• 0.3M (most cameras support this) - 640 x 480

Different settings of megapixels will change the recorded image size (or resolution). Becuase of this change, image quality will be better or worse depending on the setting. For eg. 4M yeilds a 2272 x 1704 image which means there are 2,272 pixels by 1,704 pixels that make up your image. More pixels means that more detail can be filled in becuase more pixels are avaliable to be used compared with a 0.3M image (640x480) which is obviously lesser quality.

That's pretty much the major different between different values of megapixels regarding size and quality. Thanks for your question, and again I hope everybody had a great Christmas.

Ever wanted to know how to fly an SR-71 Blackbird? Well, here's ur chance to all you budding airforce pilot's out there. sr-71.org has practically every diagram, schematic view of this plane, inside and out. You can take a look at very detailed diagrams of the cockpit instrumentation with labels outlining what the hell everything does, the layout of the plane, and how everything works.

Thats only just a small portion of some of the diagrams on show here and for any war plane buff, this site will prove to be quite interesting. This site even gives you access to the SR-71 Blackbird's flight manual, which i'm sure is a pretty lengthy document (haven't checked it out yet) and included are dozens more diagrams and shots of the plane. Even the fuel management systems are outlined in so much detail, not to mention this entire plane. lol if you had the $$$ you could probably even build your very own from these schematics their that detailed lol.

Just an interesting snippet I thought I'd throw your way for today. Enjoy!

Ahh, sorry for the delay guys as I have been one busy bee these last few days. Myself and a friend (we're both computer science majors) have started working with two Software Engineering students from RMIT here in Melbourne working on a new project so haven't been home in a few days lol.

This video application I was writing is more or less finished. I decided to leave it where it was, there's still some functionality I could have added but to be honest, couldn't really be bothered. It does play ANYTHING which is cool, playing wmv, avi, mpeg, mpg, ra, ram, mov and even DVD's. The app was just a quick fix for personal use really so the user interface and controls probably aren't quite the best, and functionality such as time seeking we re not added. As I said, it was only a personal project of mine so didn't really bother me.

The other day I was looking around for some really good torrent sites (for any of you who are interested in bittorrent) becuase the one's I was using weren't really all that great. Sites such as isohunt and torrentbox have some torrents there, but most of them aren't really seeded anymore or don't work properly. But I did find one i'm sure many people are using called TorrentSpy. This site is my new favourite torrent site. They have heaps of brand new torrents and seeds aren't a problem and connection speeds on many of their torrents are really great. Just thought I'd quickly share that with you guys.

Check back tomorrow guys for Monday TechQuestion's #6 (Monday tomorrow here in Australia - GMT+10 :)). Thanks Guys.

Last week I read somewhere that the new version of Firefox (which is 1.5) has a bug which causes large amounts of instability. Malicious code on a website can be executed, resulting in large amounts of data filling up in relevent files Firefox uses to track your page history. Becuase of this surge in data being written to these files, when Firefox loads up the program crashes subsequently becuase of this memory overflow caused by the reloading of your history.

I read it, thought it was interesting but then didn't really think anything of it, until last night. I opened up Firefox (as usual) and started going about my usual online business when I came across a site about the exploit. It had a link which would redirect your browser to a webpage with this malicious code in question. I was interested to see exactly what this exploit actually does to the browser, so I clicked the link, and within 10 seconds of redirection, my browser totally froze up then crashed in a firery blaze of 0's and 1's. In the past, browser exploits haven't been much of a problem, usually just disabling certain parts of the browser, but this code exploiting this new bug found in Firefox 1.5 works just like a DOS (Denial of Service) attack, completely rendering your browser useless.

This was very interesting, and the reading I had done before hand was great and gave me a better understanding of how this actually happened. So I had an idea of how you could fix it. I remember reading that this code fills data files that track your history with crap, so I just went ahead and deleted a file called history.dat, and what do you know....good as new.

If you are a firefox user and have come across this same problem, be sure to check up on it here. Mozilla are working on a new patch I think which will fix this problem, but you can just manually delete this file anyway.

Q:
Hey, this is a fairly simple question I guess, but have wondered this for a while.
What is the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R when it comes to recordable DVD's?
Danielle - Sydney, Australia.

A:
Well thanks heaps Danielle for your question. This I know does seem like a fairly simple question, but many people don't really know what the difference is between DVD+/-R so a great question Danielle to point this one out.

DVD+R and DVD-R's are pretty much the exact same thing. They are both recordable DVD's which can only be written to once (just like CD-R's). The only thing that really differs it that Sony originally came up with DVD-R disks and some other company (can't really remember the name) came up with DVD+R's. They are just different naming schemes from different companies. DVD-R is traditionally endorsed by Sony, Philips, Yamaha, HP just to name a few.

Such a great question, simple but something not many people I guess take notice of. Thanks for all your questions so far guys, keep them coming they are much appreciated.

In a recently posted rumor on macrumors.com, it is stated that Apple Computer may bring back their lost 'Yellow box' project back from the grave and call it Dharma.

Initially, Yellow box would have been a development environment that would allow developers who write applications for MacOS to also distribute that same application to Windows based PC's with a standard unififed universal binary which is compiled thanks to Yellow Box. This project was ditched sometime ago.

Supposedly now, Apple are now in the works of bringing Yellow Box back to life with a new name 'Dharma'. Why this project is called Dharma I have no idea, (probably for similar reasons why the Apple Lisa was called 'Lisa') but if this rumor is true, we should expect to see a huge surge in MacOSX applications as this project will give more incentives for developers to develop under Apple. Programmers won't be restricted as to which system they 'have to' develop for and instead, writing a MacOS app will also mean using that same app under Windows will now be possible.

I thought this was quite interesting for all those who believe that Mac users don't get enough decent software, this (if true) will surely turn the tide.

Q:
Have I got a winner for you.

A few months ago I downloaded "download accelerator plus" (DAP) It worked ok for a while, and there was no spy or ad ware that i found, but i uninstalled it for other reasons, mostly to save disk space, and it wasnt exactly wowing me, although it was making a slight improvement.

Well, while it was installed it integrated itself with my firefox browser. Now that it is uninstalled, firefox will not download anything ever.

HERE is the kicker: It is still in my sytem after...
*one reformatting
*uninstalling and reinstalling firefox twice
*changing operating systems

and I acnNOT find the file to delete.
-d!

A:
Well thank you d! for your question and I must say, this is a very interesting one. The problem that your having is that when you installed Download Accelerator, it integrated itself within Firefox and now you can't remove the integration right? This is very interesting becuase you noted that you have even formatted your computer, uninstalled the applications in question and even changed operating systems.

Option 1 - If you format your computer, all information on hard disks is completely wiped clean erasing any remnants of these two applications which should have fixed your problem.
Option 2 - You uninstalled Firefox twice. Uninstalling the application should have remove this problem but also uninstalling Download Accelerator would have helped also then reinstall firefox, but if you took Option 1 before hand, you shouldnt need to do this.
Option 3 - Changing Operating Systems. Doing this will require your hard drive to be formatted, hence all drive information will be lost, hence your problem will be gone. When you load your new operating system (Im guessing another version of Windows) you won't have any applications installed becuase of the format. So just install Firefox again without Download Accelerator.

Even the 2nd Option SHOULD (note the should) have fixed your problem by removing both applications, but when you remove these two applications, you needed to be sure to check their respective folders in Program Files to make sure no more rouge files were left behind after the uninstall. One last thing that could be causing your problems using Option 2 would be registry entries. Possibly when you uninstall these two applications, registry entries still exist and hence when you reinstall them, they still remember all the settings from previous installations. This is where either Options 1 or 3 would help and definately work.

I really hope that was useful to you. When you initially told me about this, I was completely blown away at why it was still behaving in the way you were describing after formatting and OS reinstallation, just didn't make much sense. Thank you very much d! for your question.

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was very vocal on his opinions on the gaming industry these days and how companies like Sony develop controllers that are just "too complex..." to use with all the X's O's and shoulder buttons. According to a recent blog on Gizmodo, he feels that people are developing interface phobia.

He goes on to talk about what Nintendo are doing with their new concept for their Revolution controller and how great an idea it is. I personally feel that Nintendo are doing great things these days for the gaming industry, trying out new and interesting ideas without worry of failure or public pressure. I don't really think that any kind of 'phobia' is a problem with followers of the Playstation 2 (the PS2 is THE highest selling console around these days).

i've felt for some time now that the gaming industry really needs a new kick or jumpstart to bring us back to the hayday of gaming (good old SNES days). The look and feel of games has changed so much over these last 10 years with graphical power growing exponentially over this period. Its a good thing we have spent the time developing better graphical engines to get our games looking better, but I think we've pretty much got it down-pat. We should spend more time now on gameplay and making a game that is as much fun to play as the graphics look.

Sony and Microsoft I think make great games, but many of them have been made with better looking graphics in mind over solid gameplay, but solid gameplay is what a game should be about in the first place right?. I myself own a PS2 (and love it mind you) so I can relate to whats been happening in the industry.

I feel that Nintendo are the only 'true' company around these days that haven't thrown gameplay in the backseat over graphics and will be very interesting to see what they come up with for this next generation. I must admit, Nintendo haven't had the best image over the life of the gamecube with people calling it "a toy for kids" and so forth, but I do believe that they are starting to shake that image and have become a real contender in the gaming market, especially with the huge success of the Nintendo DS.

Developers for the PS3 and XBox 360 really need to take a look around, many of them have been developing some great games (God of War, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3), but the future of gaming I think is GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY!!!

lol, well that's my two cents thrown in. Any discussion or comments i'll be looking forward to reading on the topic. Thanks guys!