Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing

May 20

Fastest Internet Connection

What is the fastest internet connection in the world? 68.193.147.179 00:18, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

That question is almost as pointless as "What is the largest number?". The internet is not at one point. It is a network of hosts. All single lines of this network have a capacity. The total capacity available between your computer and another host depends on the capacity of the lines between them. No matter how fast the first line between your computer and your provider is, you are always limited by the capacity of the backbone.

That's a little unfair, it is not a completely ridiculous question. If he's asking what the fastest standard link is, I believe that's OC-192. Stop being so rude and start signing your comments --Oskar 03:29, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

No, it really is. "Fastest network connection" would be a decent question, since two computers can be connected at insane speeds (I believe we're up to the TB/sec level in labs), so fast that their hard drives can't even write the info they're recieving, but the internet has so many bottlenecks and jumps that your connection really doesn't matter, since there's a 99% chance that whoever you're trying to connect to is on a much slower connection. Sorta like buying a Buggati Veyron, even though you don't have anywhere to use it but public streets. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 04:23, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Don't BITE. (I'm assuming you were the first unsigned comment above as well, apologies if not). JoshHolloway 10:03, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

It wasn't. If it were, I would've signed it when I wrote my second post -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION!

The military networks must be pretty dam fast and they probably ironed out all the bottle necks as well. --Lwarf 10:07, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Again though, these are closed networks, where speed is, in theory, unlimited, unlike the internet, where your speed is based on how fast the systems you're using are. For example, i'm capable of 6-10MBps in theory, but in practice it's nearly impossible to break 750kbps, and i'm insanely happy when I break 1mbps, because some servers don't handle information as quickly as my connection does. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 12:18, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

OC-768 (40Gbps) has been standardized for some time now and is commercially available as a line card for the Cisco CRS-1 system.

The fastest connections for consumers (that is homes) are the ones being provided in Japan by NTT. They are giving 100 Mbps for $30. Verizon also offers such speeds in their FIOS but it costs more that 100 dollars. But if you consider corporations or military, it can be in terabytes and does not make sense mentioning because they may be misleading and not comparable. -Jerry Kim Meanwhile did you mean Internet or internet? -Jerry Kim

Internet Core routers such as the CRS-1 support connections up to OC-768 (40Gbps). Such a connection is intended for to connect two core routers, but it could in theory be used to connect an Internet router to a CRS-1 acting as a customer-premise router in a (huge) data center, or to even to a single host computer if someone can build an interface. A typical host computer's fastest "Internet" connection is "10GigE" (10 gigabit Ethernet) so the aforementioned "customer" CRS-1 would have an OC-768 interface to the internet and several 10GigE LAN interfaces to hosts in the data center. Do not try this at home unless you are Bill Gates: these things are a bit expensive. -Arch dude 23:00, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I've always used this list to find this answer; according to that it's OC-256 13.271 Gbps. Considering we are still discovering the joys of ADSL here in South Africa (albeit at exorbitant prices), I would die a happy death after being hooked up with a connection like that! Sandman30s 12:11, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, looking at the list again, the fastest internet backbone is OC-48/STM-16 at 2.488 Gbps. So this is your answer. Anything faster than that would be used for private WANs or LANs, like Citrix mentioned above. Sandman30s 12:16, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

widescreen or not

1)Wide screen laptop or not? Which one do you prefer? why? What are the things to be considered before deciding whether to go for wide screen or normal resolution? 2)Will there be any problem if we minimize the size of all windows in Windows OS horizontally and use it as a normal laptop? -Jerry Kim

Well if you wanna watch movies on it, widescreen is better. The trend in all visual media displays is towards 16:9 (even photos on NYTimes.com are often cropped to this ratio), so in the future I imagine widescreen will be the only option. --Cody.Pope 11:35, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Widescreen can be more stable on your lap...if you want to take the risk of putting something hot on your crotch. Coolotter88 11:53, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Widescreen all the way. (generally) widescreen laptops have better resolution than non widescreen ones.--Ryan 15:33, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

File:Boing Boing is narrow.png

I love Boing Boing, but I wish it would expand to fill my screen.

Playing devil's advocate here... I went widescreen a few months ago and I noticed immediately that most websites only took up the middle third (or even worse, the left third) of the screen. Also, some have tiny fonts by default because they're specified in pixels rather than points or some other resolution-independent unit (although that's not so bad because I can tell Firefox never to use any fonts under a certain minimum size). If this annoys you, stick to 3x4 displays. 1024x768 is a good resolution. —Keenan Pepper 20:14, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

That's hardly the fault of a widescreen display and rather the fault of the web designers.

@Cody: Aren't most laptops 16:10, not 16:9?? -JOE

For gaming, 4x3 is undoubtedly the best. Personally unless they decide that we need a couple dozen more characters in the written english language, the wasted space on each side of the keyboard is unreasonable. And a full sized numpad is ludicrous (sorry HP) --froth^t 04:30, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

what kind of gamer can condemn a full size numpad on a laptop? That's a GREAT thing! Maybe you've never played them, but plenty of asian games i've played use the numpad for movement. Definitely enough to have me love it enough that I don't want to live without it. That said, my opinion on this, go with the better monitor, which is usually the higher MP count one. You might run your 1920x1200 powerhouse at full res for a good detailed fragging session, and then turn it down to 1280x768 for day to day things to save your eyes. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 11:20, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Yea if your main purpose is to go on websites, get a normal aspect ratio one or one that has very high resolution (like 1600px+ wide) so you can have 2 browser windows side by side. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:49, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Can't you force a 4:3 ratio on your laptop anyway (and have 2 black bars on the left and the right? I mean yeah, you have 2 black bars, but don't a 15 in. 4:3 and a 15 in widescreen have the same height? So in the end, you'd only be losing the option to go widescreen if you bought a 4:3 and just a little off the top?--GTPoompt 12:47, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Well same, you can force a 4:3 display to display widescreen, for example from 1024×768 to say 1024×640 (and have black bars top and bottom). Either way you are losing a lot of pixels, and unless there's any good reason for it.... --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:12, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Solution orientated architecture

Does anyone know what Solution Orientated Architecture is and what its benefits are ? Note that I do not mean Service Oriented Architecture

163.156.240.17 11:33, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I would guess that no one knows what it means, and that in fact it doesn't mean much of anything at all -- it sounds an awful lot like someone's empty marketing buzzword. With that said, the closest you could get to an "accurate" definition would probably be from the marketeer that constructed the term. (Be aware that the proffered definition is likely to be along the lines of "A Solutions Orientated Architecture (tm) is one that maximizes customer value by effectuating streamlined processing of both custom and off-the-shelf application paradigms." If you could get an honest answer out of one of the engineers at the company as to what they did to implement this "SOA", they might say "we added some memory and a faster processor, and put a new splash screen on it.")

When parsing marketing-speak like this, it's often useful to ask what the product in question is trying to differentiate itself from. If this "Solution Orientated Architecture" is so good and so special, does that mean that all of its competitors are trying to deliver something other than solutions? And if so, what? Newspapers? Boat anchors? Doorstops? —Steve Summit (talk) 16:47, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Steve - that's what I thought too - Unfortuately I've got to do a presentation on it for a job interview !!!!!!!!!! 163.156.240.17 17:50, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Urk. Good luck. (And do they really call it "Solution Orientated Architecture"? I doubt I could ever work for such a company...) —Steve Summit (talk) 18:02, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

One possible meaning might be that they custom design each computer for that user's needs. So, instead of a general all-purpose computer, they produce game-playing computers, music-copying computers, video-producing computers, etc. StuRat 20:25, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what it means, but "solution oriented architecture" gets 1300 Ghits. I think it's fully buzz-phrase compliant. -Arch dude 20:48, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Dear All Thanks for your comments - at least I don't feel so stupid as clearly it's a made-up phrase !. I'll ring the company in the morning and try to get some guidelines on what they mean. (Steve - they really do call it orient ta ted )

If any company ever mentioned such a phrase to me in the process of a job interview, I would look for a different company.

I'd have a bit of fun with them first: "You mean you're still just using plain SOA ? I can't imagine working for a company that hasn't yet embraced Fully Actualized Solutions Orientated Architectiture." StuRat 06:59, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Marketroid-speak is definitely Greek to me, but here's a data point: I was in a meeting with a top-level management/sales guy at my small company and he said (about the networking thingy we make), "we haven't decided yet how to market it. Is it a product? Is it a solution? It's definitely not an appliance". I just smiled and nodded in the same way he does when I discuss technical issues. --TotoBaggins 07:19, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

DPI in photoshop?

When importing a raw image into Photoshop, one has the option to change the DPI. The only noticeable effect this seems to have is changing "canvas size/image size" measures. Assuming that you don't down-sample the image at all, and you just bring a large 10-12 megapixel image to a photo place and print it fairly large (10x12) with the right technology, does this DPI measure mean anything practically? Or is it simply superfluous meta-data? --Cody.Pope 11:40, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

It's, simply, the number of dots per inch. When you print, the larger the DPI, the more dots per inch they'll squeeze on the paper. JoshHolloway 12:01, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Maybe, but that doesn't make sense to me in the context I'm asking about. The printer at a photo place has a native DPI, if I'm giving them an image with a resolution above their native resolution (for a given size) they have to throw out data. Alternately, if I give them an image that I've specified as say 200 dpi (in Photoshop), but I want at 10x12 and my camera file has more data than the 200 dpi specification for that print size in pixels, would their printers then throw out data to match the embedded DPI? That's can't be right. I'm looking for the interplay between actual pixels and embedded DPI as specified by meta-data. Is there any? --Cody.Pope 12:20, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

DPI is a tricky measurement. By itself it does not refer to the number of pixels in an image, it only relates to how the image is considered when it is printed. Generally speaking you want to start by thinking about your target DPI — if your printer is going to print at 300 DPI, then if you had an image that was 300 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall, you could only print it at the size of 1 inch by 1 inch or smaller without having the pixels become visible and chunky. The printer will only be able to print up to a certain amount of detail -- if you give it more than that, it won't be reflected in the final print job. If the printer had a maximum DPI of 200, and you wanted to print something cleanly at 10x12 inches, you would thus need an image that was at least (10*200) x (12*200) pixels, or 2000 x 2400. DPI does not affect the number of pixels in an image (unless you resize it according to DPI, as is often done in photoshop) — it is really a guide for how much printed space you can get out of a given amount of pixels (depending on the medium — some printers can go much higher than 300 dpi, while things broadcast on monitors are generally only around 96 dpi) and so give you some indication of how many megapixels you'll need for a given photo, or what settings you need when you scan something, etc. --24.147.86.187 13:53, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, maybe I wasn't clear enough. I understand what DPI is and how it is measured. I'm interested more in how printers interpret embedded DPI data when the specified print size goes against this data. Especially given that some images don't have any DPI meta-data. --Cody.Pope 14:15, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Commercial printers just print it at the dpi that fits for its physical size. If you ordered 6×4, no matter what dpi you've set it's still gonna print 6×4. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:47, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

That means the meta-DPI data is effectively meaningless? Good, that's what I thought had to be the case. --Cody.Pope 06:58, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Well if you just want individual prints, it doesn't matter. But if you want to use the image inside something else like a newspaper or magazine, setting the dpi in Photoshop will mean that the image will display as correct physical size if the software is smart enough to read it (most are). --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:20, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Erg, well QuarkXPress and most if not all Adobe based layout programs allow you to resize within the program. So then what happens to the DPI meta-data? --Cody.Pope 11:56, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't matter, it will be resampled to the dpi of the page itself. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:09, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Gif images

When the animated GIF image moves, how do I stop the image have those fuzzy pixels that move when the object is moving? Thanks, 86.146.170.43 15:58, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Can you show us an example? — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 17:31, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

[1] Those white patches aren't meant to be on his face. He asked me if there was any way to get rid of them. Ty 86.146.170.43 17:53, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

That's a bad optimization problem. It'll be hard to revert that. Your best chance is to open the gif in the same program that saved it, then saving it again without optimization. — Kieff | Talk 04:05, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Problem Writing in Assemly under Linux

For a class, I need to write a program in x86 assembly that, among other things, displays the contents of two 10x10 matrices after initializing them. This is what I've written:

.data
a:
       .space 10*10*4
b:
       .space 10*10*4
c:
       .space 10*10*4, 0
fmt:
       .string "%d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d %d\n\n"
.globl main
main:
       xorl    %edx, %edx      /* row # */
inita:
       movl    %edx, %eax
       imull   $40, %eax
       xorl    %ecx, %ecx      /* col # */
initaRow:
       movl    %edx, a(%eax, %ecx, 4)
       incl    %ecx
       cmpl    $10, %ecx
       jl      initaRow
       incl    %edx
       cmpl    $10, %edx
       jl      inita
       xorl    %edx, %edx      /* row # */
initb:
       movl    %edx, %eax
       imull   $40, %eax
       xorl    %ecx, %ecx      /* col # */
initbRow:
       movl    %ecx, b(%eax, %ecx, 4)
       incl    %ecx
       cmpl    $10, %ecx
       jl      initbRow
       incl    %edx
       cmpl    $10, %edx
       jl      initb
       xorl    %edx, %edx              /* row # */
dispa:
       xorl    %ecx, %ecx
       movl    %edx, %eax
       imull   $40, %eax               /* scaled row # */
dispaRow:
       pushl   a(%eax, %ecx, 4)
       incl    %ecx
       cmpl    $10, %ecx
       jl      dispaRow
       pushl   $fmt                    /* call printf */
       call    printf
       addl    $44, %esp
       /* this is where I would jump to dispa */
       xorl    %eax, %eax
       ret

This all works fine but when I put in code to jump to dispa, it assembles fine, but encounters a segfault when it tries to jump to dispa. Does anyone know why? Paulmunger 19:31, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Are you using a conditional or unconditional branch to dispa (since you commented out the line in question)? I have MASM on my machine, and I'm going to try to assemble this (it's been 2 years since I took my one class in assembly...which hewed strictly to 8086--it's similar, but a few more bells and whistles have been added). –Pakman044 22:11, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it happens with both kinds of branch, as long as the branch is taken--even a straight jmp causes the segmentation fault.Paulmunger 04:30, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

You should step through it in gdb and see which line and iteration is segfaulting. The problem will probably be pushl a(%eax, %ecx, 4) or passing bad arguments to printf(), since they're the only lines down there that deal with memory. --TotoBaggins 07:12, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Is it ever properly executing the printf call? --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 14:49, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Streaming Video

is it possible to save video that you play on the Internet to your hard disk? If so, how do you do it?___J.delanoy 20:07, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Sure, if it's from a video-sharing site like YouTube, javimoya.com could do the trick. If it's like an MPEG or whatever file, use VLC Media Player. Splintercellguy 20:12, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

If you're using Firefox, you could try the UnPlug Extension. If there's media on the page, this will let you download it. Deltacom1515 04:17, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, UnPlug is pretty amazing at that sort of thing. Linky, in case you're interested. --saxsux 16:41, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Need help fixing my laptop keys

Ok, here's what happened. One day, I was typing, when there seemed to be something that prevented me from pressing the "a" key. I gently shook my laptop and I heard a click clack sound, suggesting that there was a rock or other piece of debris under the key. My laptop keyboard looks like this:

• http://www.tabletpcreview.com/assets/456.jpg

This is a photo I found on google image search. It's not exactly the same, but it hs the same logos.

I tried to pull the rock or whatever out, but couldn't. So I had to just pull the key out. I collected he key, along with the pieces which connected it to the keyboard. Right now it's just a metal plating with a plastic round button in the middle, where my a key should be. I've tried to fit the pieces back in, but I have no idea how they go. I'm scared of opening another key to see how it works, for fear of being unable to fix that one too!

Can someone help me?--0rrAvenger 23:37, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

It would be really tricky to describe without pictures, the keyboards I have come across have two delicate pieces of white plastic that fit into each other in a scissor type arrangement, they have tiny little pins on either side, one side of the scissors fits into the laptop part and the other into the key, the unfortunate but common thing that happens is that one or more of the tiny delicate thin "pins" on the sides that the whole mechanism relies on will break, and then there is no fixing it, only perhaps if you try to pilfer the part from a key you rarely use, like the windows key or something. Vespine 05:12, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Are you talking about the Keyboard layout, which is almost certainly QWERTY, or the actual keys themselves? Most keys i've seen can simply be slid and popped into place, but these are desktop keyboards. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 11:15, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Because desktop keyboards can be much thicker than laptop keyboards, they use a distinctly simpler design. Laptops almost always use the "scissors" design that Vespine described. The key caps can be removed and replaced, but you have to be very careful and skillful. And yes, stealing parts from lesser used keys (like that useless "Windows" key) is a common practice.

Atlant 12:29, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Ironically enough, I use my Windows key more often on Mac and Linux than I do on windows. I<3SUPER -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION!

I assume you use it as your meta key?

Atlant 15:59, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

...I've tried to fit the "scissor" things together, but it looks like they are broken. Can anyone recommend an ad hoc method of fixing, preferably involving tape? Aesthetics is OUT of the question at this point.--0rrAvenger 17:57, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Same thing happened to me, except I deliberately took them all off to clean and some wouldn't go back on (oops!) If you still have the rubber cap thing attached (under the scissors design thing) then use superglue - worked well for me. If you don't, get the tiniest piece of Blu Tack and make it fill the sensor-whole, then superglue both ends (the end with the sensor and the end with the key) on. It'll be a bit mushy but it'll work. JoshHolloway 19:14, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Can you detatch the keyboard tray? It might be easier to just get a replacement keyboard off ebay at this point. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 11:59, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

The keyboard is always detachable, although it may take some tools and/or skill to do it. In many laptops, the keyboard also serves as the access cover to the RAM DIMM slot(s) or the hard disk drive. It usually connects via single flexible printed circuit cable that is routed to a connector; operating the connector may require care. Overal, replacing the keyboard is usually a pretty simple task (as they are quite prown to failure).

Atlant 15:59, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

May 21

404 FNF page

Say I have a website, www.whatever.com. Someone types in www.whatever.com/asdfdasohjfqewfpoi and a 404 File Not Found page comes up. How do I make it so my custom-made 404 page comes up instead? I'm using Dreamweaver 8 on Mac OS X, if that helps. —Ignatzmice^talk_contribs 01:31, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

It mostly depends on your current server. If you are using Apache, you can edit your .htaccess configuration file, adding (or changing) a line reading ErrorDocument 404 /misc/404.html where /misc/404.html is your custom 404 page. That should work fine enough. -- ReyBrujo 02:31, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

If you use cPanel or Direct Admin or similar, you'll be able to do that through your control panel. JoshHolloway 13:01, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

iPod Videos

How do you enable/transfer videos purchased from iTunes on one computer to another computer? Deltacom1515 03:09, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Flash drive or CD-R/CD-RW. --R ^ParlateContribs_@ (Let's go Yankees!) 10:56, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Firefox download problems

Why is it that often when I click a link to download something in Firefox, I will get the dialog box that says "you have chosen to open" bla bla bla...and then it asks "what should firefox do with this file?", i select open with Preview and yet it wont let me click ok. Only the cancel button is available.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so how is it resolved?

By the way im on a Macbook Pro on the latest version of OS X, Firefox v 2.0.0.3.

Also BTW it only does this sometimes. and other times, if I wait a while (maybe 30 secs to a minute) it will all of a sudden decide to let me click ok. seems very finicky.

Thanks in advance for the help.Theprizefight 04:06, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like the download wasn't complete, so it couldn't open it. StuRat 06:51, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I think what you're describing is a security thing. Just click on the OK button a few times. It's to stop you automatically downloading whatever crap that some sites might push you.

If the download window loses focus the download button will be greyed out to prevent auto-downloaders, try switch to another window and back and see if it's fixed. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:14, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

To be more specific, click on that window specifically, and wait a few seconds for the OK button. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 11:13, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Powerpoint presentation

How can you put a moving picture on a powerpoint slide?

Dudforreal 07:44, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

If it's a moving GIF image, add it as you would a normal picture. Inser | Image, or just drag it in.--Ryan 00:01, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't move when I insert the moving GIF image.

Dudforreal 06:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Macros in Powerpoint

Is it possible to assign a shortcut key to a macro after you have recorded it?Zain Ebrahim 08:47, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Is it possible at all? It doesn't seem to be possible before, either. Also, there's nothing related to shortcut keys under tools -> customize (as in Word) or tools -> macros -> options (as in Excel). — Sebastian 18:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

GPL?

Say if I want to develop a website system based on PHP, I want to use some existing GPL'd codes such as search engines, do I need to make my code to be GPL'd is well? Or do I need to use an API or something in order to keep my code from being GPL? If I release it as GPL do I have to actively distribute the source code if only I am using it? I don't want to publicly release it yet because it would require a lot of work to actually make it readable and make it easily configurable. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:08, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

From what I know of the GPL (I don't use it), if you're taking code from GPL-licensed code, or you're linking against GPL'd binaries, you must make your entire project GPL. If you're linking against LGPL binaries, you don't have to make your project GPL. I don't know about the API case, however, but I think if you have the GPL'd binary running with some IPC going on between your program and the GPL'd binary, that would be OK.

Well the thing with PHP is that it's interpreted language, and no binary exists. In that case, where does the line go? --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:16, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

If you're not planning on showing your code to anyone else or letting anyone else use your website software, you can use GPL'd code however you want. There is no obligation to release your personal changes to your personal website. If you plan to release your website software as a product or something (distribute it, in other words), then yes, you have to GPL your code if you are using other GPL'd code in it. This is what the LGPL was created for, so that people don't have to do that if they are just using libraries. --Oskar 10:08, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

gnu.org has a nice FAQ page that adresses this question. -- Diletante 15:17, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Bash variables

Following on from my grep anagram question, I now have a general bash question, which I'll illustrate with example:

ls | grep a

when run in my home directory returns

personal

as expected, fine. When I do this:

COMMAND="ls | grep a"
$COMMAND

it fouls up somehow and I get:

ls: |: No such file or directory
ls: grep: No such file or directory
ls: a: No such file or directory

What's going on here? How do I get it to do it faithfully? Thanks. --87.194.21.177 11:10, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Backticks. COMMAND=`ls | grep a`.

Hey thanks but backticks seem to assign the output of "ls | grep a" to the variable, but I just want the actual expression. It works with something simpler e.g.:

COMMAND="date"
$COMMAND

is just like typing "date", and that's what I want.--130.88.84.51 14:58, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

This doesn't directly answer your question but you might want to use an alias.

$ alias lsa="ls | grep a"
$ lsa

--Diletante 15:04, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Use the built-in command eval:

eval "$COMMAND"

You can probably get away with omitting the quotes, even. --Tardis 15:41, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Ah-ha! So the real solution to the problem is:

COMMAND="eval ls | grep a"

to make it execute rather than simply parsing the string. Or something like that. Anyway, putting the eval in there makes it work. --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 15:53, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

The root of the problem is the order of evaluation: the shell first does command parsing, then does variable substitution, then looks for space-separated arguments, and then runs the command. So you start with:

$COMMAND

and bash scans that 8-character string looking for pipes and other redirect characters. It doesn't find any, so it decides that you're just running a simple command. Before doing that, it must resolve any variable references. It therefore translates the line into the string:

 ls | grep a

but the time for looking for redirects has passed, so the pipe is not treated specially. Next he splits up the arguments on whitespace, and ends up with a command of "ls", and arguments of "|", "grep", and "a". He then runs something like this:

 execlp("ls", "ls", "|", "grep", "a", NULL);

which asks the ls program to display files named "|", "grep", and "a", which he'll complain about when he doesn't find them. Running the following program produces the same output you noted above.

#include <unistd.h>
main() { execlp("ls", "ls", "|", "grep", "a", NULL); }

The reason the "eval" fixes the problem is that it runs the parsing on its arguments twice:

# you type:
eval $COMMAND
 
# (1) look for redirect characters, find none
eval $COMMAND

# (2) resolve variables:
eval "ls | grep a"

# running eval on results gets us back to (1):
## (1) look for redirect characters, find one!
ls | grep a
 
# treat it as a redirected command ...

You can eval() any number of times, each time repeating the parsing with the results of the last round:

# REAL_COMMAND='ls | grep a'
# COMMAND='$REAL_COMMAND'
# $COMMAND
-bash: $REAL_COMMAND: command not found
# eval $COMMAND
ls: |: No such file or directory
ls: grep: No such file or directory
ls: a: No such file or directory
# eval eval $COMMAND
a-file
another-file
...

--TotoBaggins 21:26, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that answer, I was curious and I couldn't figure it out from the manpage. Also interesting to learn that bash is a he :D -- Diletante 21:42, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Big thanks to everyone who contributed, especially TotoBaggins for the big explanation. I always get great answers here, and I'm learning - albeit slowly. Thanks again. --87.194.21.177 22:50, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Converting RGB to CMYK in Photoshop

Straightforward, easy to understand info please on the best way(s) to convert image files from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop CS.

Mrskyblue999 11:56, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Image > Mode > CMYK. You might see some change in colours if they're not in the CMYK gamut. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 15:32, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

There's more detailed information here. Looks like it's for an older version of Photoshop, but most of it should still apply. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 15:40, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Excel Conditional Formatting question

Hi there wikifans, can anyone tell me if there's a way in Excel to conditionally format a cell so that if it's returning a year number from another cell, it will treat that value in the year (or normal) number format, and if it's returning a month year value, it will treat it with a mmm-yy number format? I've looked at the standard conditioning formatting options but it doesnt seem to let me switch number formatting. thanks for any help!!!

=IF(LEN(A5)=4,TEXT(A5,"YYYY"),TEXT(A5,"MM/YYYY")) (Where A5 is the cell you are assessing) That should get you something close. What you need to do is 'assess' the length of the cell to see if it is a 4-digit-year, and if so format as that, otherwise format as MM/YYYY. Hope this works. ny156uk 17:40, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks very much for your suggestion, I will try it!

My friend made a JavaScript message for Firefox on a Mac that can't be closed

Hello, I'm at my high school right now in a computer lab, on their eMacs. My friend tells me that he always uses this one computer and he makes Javascript messages pop up when you click the Firefox icon, and this time he went overboard and made this one message that does not go away. He also disabled preferences and I can't see anything that can be done to make this message go away and actually use the Firefox application. Here's a screenshot of what I'm seeing:
File:Endlessjavascriptmessage.jpg
I just keep pressing OK and it keeps reappearing. Anybody know how to get rid of this? Thanks! NIRVANA2764 13:42, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

It appears he made a local web page on the computer's harddrive that pops up a warning in an infinite loop. He set Firefox's homepage to the page he made. So, when you open Firefox, it opens the page he made. Delete the page he made and Firefox will open with a blank page. Or, change Firefox's homepage. Or, click a link on an email or anything else and tell it to open with Firefox. --Kainaw ^(talk) 14:15, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

It might also be a good idea to simply turn of javascript, if you want to ensure that that page doesn't annoy you --Oskar 17:05, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. --24.147.86.187 23:07, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Not if you use NoScript to selectively turn off JavaScript. --cesarb 00:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

NoScript is a good idea. To fix your problem, delete or rename the webpage he made (firefox will start on the page not available error). Then use Edit, Preferences to set your homepage. If you don't know where the file is, try starting Firefox with a specific web page. I'm unfamilier with OSX but you could try dragging a saved webpage or text document onto the firefox icon; or dragging a link to a website onto the firefox icon. If that fails, type firefox http://google.com into the X11 terminal. And if that doesn't work, start in safe mode by typing firefox -safe-mode into an X11 terminal. --h2g2bob (talk) 03:59, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, as the person who did it, I'd like to say that none of you have gotten it yet. I just changed the home page to the following-

javascript:var x=0; while(x<101){alert('I\'m waiting...');x++;};alert('I\'m waiting for you to click \'OK\' 100 times!');top.location="http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=home+page&btnG=Google+Search&safe=active";

--Rainfall10110 14:59, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Wow, that was him. Apparently, javascript DOM is built into firefox, so you can use it as a protocol and set the home page to it. This guy is only 16, mind you. And he had the Wiki reference desk completely stumped. Impressive NIRVANA2764 20:21, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Kainaw said that the home page had been changed and mentioned workarounds. How is that "stumped"? --LarryMac | Talk 20:27, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, age has nothing to do with it. I began programming for cash when I was 8. Of course, my hourly charge has gone up a great deal since then. --Kainaw ^(talk) 00:58, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Nobody was "stumped". We told you exactly what the problem was and how to stop it. Maybe you were a little too "stumped" to follow the instructions. --24.147.86.187 12:30, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

In my original message I outlined how preferences had been disabled. The only way to end the problem would have been to press OK 100 times. There was no page saved on the harddrive. There was nothing to do with NoScript. Who cares any more :) NIRVANA2764 13:02, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Lighten up, 24.147.86.187, this isn't the type of place where we answer everything with RTFM. The problem is easy to state, but difficult to solve: I'm pretty sure this has been logged as a DoS vulnerability for some time now at Mozilla. I think we answered pretty well though. --h2g2bob (talk) 22:36, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Rainfall10110, it's better to use for than while. --h2g2bob (talk) 22:42, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Wireless Router woes

I have a Linksys BEFWS11 router - the generic 4-port wireless router. The wireless connection worked fine when I first plugged it in. Then, it died out. I changed it from channel 1 to channel 2. Then, it worked fine for a few months before it got weak again. I changed it from channel 2 to channel 3. It worked fine for a while. Then, it got a weak signal and I had to change it from channel 3 to channel 4. I'm on channel 9 now. Can anyone explain what I'm doing wrong? I don't understand how the channels keep going weak and unusable when I'm not adding new devices - especially things can interfere with wireless signals. The only electronic thing I've purchased in the last two years is a watch - and it certainly isn't causing this problem. --Kainaw ^(talk) 14:39, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Are you (or is anyone near you) using a microwave oven? They will definitely interfere with 2.4GHz wireless devices including 802.11b/g/n WiFi devices. Also, your neighbors may be getting wireless networks of their own; we now see several networks from my house and we compete for channels.

Atlant 15:32, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. You might check the reviews of that particular router — some wireless routers inexplicably have trouble after awhile, going in and out or just needing to be reset periodically. It's really hard to get a good wireless router that lasts a long time. --24.147.86.187 23:50, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Basic greasemonkey help

Hi,

I'm just getting started with greasemonkey. I have a javascript form that I want to modify. On one specific website I want the following line (its inside a form):

<input type="hidden" name="function" value="f0" />

To have a value of f1 instead of f0. How would I implement a script to do this?

Thanks! St.isaac 16:38, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

It's been a little while for me since I've used greasemonkey. IIRC it seems if you can get a script to do what you want outside of greasemonkey, you're 90% the way there, you then just have to translate it into something that can work with the wrapped objects greasemonkey has to use for security purposes.

javascript:(function (){var s = document.getElementsByName("search"); var z; for(z=0; z<s.length;z++){s[z].value="tomatoes";} })();

In greasemonkey, you can directly assign to s[z].value and it should be fine, iirc. What you cannot do is use indirect assignment.

javascript:(function (){var s = document.getElementsByName("search"); var z; for(z=0; z<s.length;z++){s[z]["value"]="tomatoes";} })();

Root⁴(one) 22:02, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

http://www.diveintogreasemonkey.org/ is a good resource. Root⁴(one) 22:28, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

With regards to this...

The University accidently published about a decade's worth of student IDs, social security numbers, and student names, then left them, fully visible for about 2 weeks. They claim to have contacted google and had the results removed completely. The question, is it actually possible to fully remove that sort of information from the internet after having it sit in plain view for 2 weeks?--Sunyboardhost 20:06, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Doubtful. archive.org may well have picked it up, along with the myriad other search engine crawlers indexing the web. Even if they all remove it, it's probably cached in the computers of anyone who visited the site and could be in the hands of the Bad Guys™ already. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 21:23, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Search engines and archive sites probably have it stored after two weeks, it might be possible to have them remove it from their cache results, but there's no doubt that quite a few criminals have copied down the list. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of those people had to change their SSN -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 04:36, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

If you were one of those people, it's probably not an acceptable risk to just hope nobody's going to steal your identity. Chances are slim that the good guys™ found it first --froth^t 04:46, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

This has happened a few times in the past. The good news™ is that out of the 90 thousand names and SSNs, the odds of any individual person being scammed is low. The bad news™ is that you'll all probably have to have extra caution applied to your accounts of all sorts. Tell your credit card company what happened and get a new SSN to be more sure. In any case it is really atrocious that 1. SSNs are often treated as just identification numbers (rather than as they would be treated if they were, say, medical records), and 2. that universities even both to keep flat files of student IDs, names, and SSNs all in the same place, much less somewhere where they could plausibly end up on the internet. There really is no excuse, it is not exactly rocket science. --24.147.86.187 12:28, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

May 22

Moving GIF images

How can you copy a moving GIF image? When I tried to copy one it became a normal image.

203.88.224.110 06:19, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Try saving the image somewhere and opening it up / pasting from the file. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:22, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

What if you're copying it from the internet?

Dudforreal 06:28, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Most web browsers let you right click, then click Save Image (or something similar). -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:29, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It'll look still unless you view it in Windows Fax Viewer or similar. JoshHolloway 06:42, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

How can you create a moving GIF image and put it on powerpoint?

Dudforreal 06:42, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Powerpoint slide design

Dudforreal 06:26, 22 May 2007 (UTC)How can you use your own image/s as a design template for the slide design for the slide?

Put them on the slide master. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 08:42, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Send e-mail from alternate address to Google Groups

How can I send e-mail from my alternate e-mail address to Google Groups? Currently, Google Groups accepts e-mail only from my GMail address. --Masatran 06:50, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Time stamp in Microsoft excel .xls files?

I'm writing a windows command-line utility for deleting duplicate files within directory trees, and have a problem with excel files. Microsoft excel appears to change a time/date stamp within the file whenever it opens a spreadsheet. Here's sample output of a binary comparison of files that I believe were identical, except for having been opened at different times:

E:\SomeDirectory>for %d in (*.*) do fc /b  %d ..\OtherDirectory\%d

Comparing A.xls and ..\OtherDirectory\A.xls
00008E6C: B0 30
00008E6D: 0A 3C
00008E6E: 22 04
00008E6F: 35 29

Comparing B.xls and ..\OtherDirectory\B.xls
0000A26C: 50 30
0000A26D: FA F2
0000A26E: 10 16
0000A26F: 93 97

Comparing C.xls and ..\OtherDirectory\C.xls
00008C6C: 60 C0
00008C6D: 25 81
00008C6E: B0 86
00008C6F: A9 AD

E:\SomeDirectory>

In the example, the time stamp appears to occupy four consecutive bytes, but at different offsets within the files. I've noticed previously that the time stamp somtimes occupes more than four bytes (six?). Does anyone know how to locate and interpret this time stamp? --NorwegianBlue ^talk 07:15, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Are you sure it's really a timestamp or just information such as which sheet is opened or which cell celected? The latter does get stored; I doubt that you want to keep files just because of such trivial differences. Possible workarounds for that include manually selecting the same cell or exporting the content before the comparison. — Sebastian 22:09, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm reasonably sure it's a time stamp, because

• opening a copy of the file and immediately closing it, without selecting a different cell, leads to such differences as shown above.
• When doing this with older files (like, a couple of months since they've been opened), the differing region occupies six bytes. When the file has been recently opened, it occupies four bytes. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 07:43, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm, I'm not sure that this is what you're looking for, but if you go into File->Properties then onto the 'Statistics' tab, there is a buncha information like that. For example, the "Created" and "Modified" datetime stamps on this tab aren't the same as the MS-DOS stamps on the 'General' tab. There is a 'Accessed' Field - NByz 01:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

They aren't user-editable in excel, but you can test this theory by editing them in binary, and seeing if it changes on that page. Are you up to some forgin'? - NByz 01:11, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I think indeed that you are right in that it's the "accessed" field that's causing the trouble. I was hoping someone knew some shortcut way of looking up its offset. Some googling led me to the OpenOffice documentation of the excel file format and of the Microsoft composite document format, of which the excel format is a special case. Excel files have several internal "streams", two of which might be candidates for the location of the time stamp, "SummaryInformation" and "DocumentSummaryInformation". However, solving this based on the docs plus fiddling with a binary file editor will require a lot of work, overkill for the app in question. I think I'll just settle with allowing the program to ignore a single difference in six consequtive bytes in an excel file, without actually verifying that those bytes are at the right location. Thanks! --NorwegianBlue ^talk 16:48, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Screenshot in Internet Explorer 7

Hello wise wikipeople, is there some way of taking a screenshot of the contents of an Internet Explorer 7 window (ideally without downloading new programs). thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, and you don't need to download any new programs. Somewhere in the top-right of your keyboard is a key labelled 'Print Screen'. Open the Internet Explorer window and press Alt and Print Screen at the same time. The screenshot will be placed on your clipboard; you can now go into Paint or any other image editing program, press Ctrl+V to paste the screenshot and do whatever you want with it. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 08:34, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Cool thanks!

Er, just for curiosity's sake, but ALT printscreen? I just use printscreen, and it works fine. Is there a reason for using ALT, or is it just ignored? --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 07:13, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

ALT printscreen copies the current window only. Quite useful. Printscreen copies the entire screen. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 07:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Sap Bw

I am new to sap Bw. I have some doubts about Performance tuning. So please explain about this topic.

SAP BW is such a massive piece of software that your question is hopelessly overscoped. I suggest you call up your SAP vendor and request some consulting services, read a book or two on this topic, or have your company send you through some SAP training classes. -- mattb 23:58, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

What hardware should I put in my server?

I would like to set up my own server. I have a server hosting at present but I'm dissatisfied with price/yeild. I have no experience setting up servers - I have only made programs/applications in the past so this is new to me.

My needs: I have an application with some 500 users with the potential to go up to 2000-3000. The application is text based, interspersed with medium-sized (30-40 kb) images. It needs to run a rather extensive database as well - MySQL - and do so swiftly. The whole thing is .NET (C#) based.

- What issues should I consider when I invest in hardware for this purpose?

- What hardware is important for this purpose?

- Is Linux the best sollution when I need the .NET framework?

Regards Stan

.NET is a Microsoft framework, so linux will probably not work with it. You might be interested in LAMP though -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 11:56, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

You should think carefully before setting up your first system when you have 500 users to keep happy. Perhaps you could hire a consultant who has done it before to help you out? --TotoBaggins 14:22, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I've probably built a couple of hundred servers in my time, and basically it's all about what you want that server to do. From you description, it sounds like your key considerations are I/O. Modern CPUs are now so fast they are rarely a performance problem (particularly Dual-Core). I normally favour 1GB RAM per CPU. The real nuts and bolts are your connectivity and I/O throughput to your database. You need to consider how users are going to connect (ie over a LAN or ADSL etc) and whether you require two adaptors (a for failover and b for throughput). On a database server your hard disks are the key. Firstly do the disks need to be fast SCSI or can you use SATA? This is bascially a question of cost, as the real performance benefit comes from the disk layout. For best performance use RAID1 or RAID1/0, the downside is these layouts only give you 50% total disk capacity as usable space. If your I/O is mainly reads and not writes I would go for RAID5, which provides good protection and performance, and allows 75-80% usable space from the total capacity. Obviously to run this system you need a RAID controller. So another thing to consider is how many PCI slots your server has and how fast the bus speeds are.

Broadband speed notation

Hmmm. When a broadband internet speed is expressed as something like "2048kb/384kb" - which are the download and the upload speeds? Thanks!

Traditionally the speeds are given as download/upload, so your example would be 2Mbps down, 384Kbps up. --LarryMac | Talk 13:42, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

thanks to you!

At any rate, the lower one will always be the upload speed for consumer broadband, since they don't want you hosting services without buying a more expensive contract. --TotoBaggins 14:24, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

And don't forget, those are in bits, not bytes, so divide by 8 to get the more normal kilobytes. So in your case, 256KB down and 48KB up. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 07:11, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

windows 3.11 games

I'm trying to remember a game i used to play on 3.11 (though it may be very early windows 95, it's certainly from 1st half of the 90s), which was set in the future and involved racing around sort of floating tracks in futuristic metropolises in very fast cars. each race was like it was televised, and before each race there was a sort of build-up with a presenter called Lance something, but that's all i can remember. it may even have been like a game-show format where Lance was the host and you had to win the race to stay in it. can anyone help me? --Alex16z 13:42, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like F-Zero. --TotoBaggins 14:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It is similar, but was for PC. --Alex16z 14:34, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh, i remember this, my dad had it. MegaRace? ~ lav-chan @ 03:47, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

MegaRace"! oh my god, thank you so much! that has been bugging me on and off for years!¬ --Alex16z 08:16, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

php email problems

I am trying to send an email from php in html. The email looks fine in thunderbird but it comes up in code when viewed in outlook express. What could the problem be? Thanks, 89.127.160.227 13:47, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Send the shortest email you can that still exhibits the problem, and post it here (raw!) for diagnosis. --TotoBaggins 14:29, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I'd say you're not doing the content-type correctly. A dude from php.net/mail says: I just spent a few hours working on getting a simple html formatted email to work on outlook. This is the end result:

 <?php
 $body="<em>HTML</em> formatted <strong>Message</strong";
     
 $headers = "From: info@example.com \r\n";
 $headers.= "Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 ";
 $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0 ";
 /*notice there aren't any \r\n after the second two header additions. This is what made this version work correctly*/
 mail("john@example.com", "An HTML Message", $body, $headers);
 ?>

Should do it for you :) (look at the source of this page [edit] to view the code with line breaks). JoshHolloway 15:13, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, consider using as_mail instead of mail. It helps avoid email injection by spammers. --Kainaw ^(talk) 00:59, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

What is the frequency of Paradise?

I have an old MS-DOS pc, 386sx circa 1993, with a Paradise VGA card. It is an early Paradise VGA model, I think, with only 256k memory, I think. The VGA has 4 different selectable horizontal frequencies. Two of the 4 are the standard IBM-VGA-compatible 25 MHz and and 28 MHz clocks. These correspond to bit values 00b and 01b in the VGA's miscellaneous register. The other two are Paradise specific. I want to know the frequencies of these two. The pc has a VGA monitor which is *not* multi-sync, so to compute the correct values for setting the VGA chip registers to generate the correct timings for the VGA monitor I need those frequencies. Can't find it through Google. (I am experimenting with this old system as a hobby, doing some assembly programming etc.)

195.35.160.133 13:51, 22 May 2007 (UTC) - Martin -

P.s.: pun intended in the title of this question.

If you get the model numbers off the actual chip(s) on the card, Google might be more forthcoming. --TotoBaggins 14:26, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It's a bit of a long shot, but if you could borrow a frequency counter or an oscilloscope from somewhere, you could measure it. Btw, what would happen if you fed your monitor with the wrong frequency? —Bromskloss 14:42, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Martin responds: if you feed the wrong frequency to a *non*-multisync monitor, the monitor will not sync, or if the frequency is close it may sync, but overstress/overheat(?) the hardware after prolonged use. It could damage the monitor permanently. I did some trial and error, and I have rough values for the VGA registers, but I would like the precise values to minimise the risk of damaging the hardware. Also just out of curiousity. And I don't have access to an oscilloscope. 195.35.160.133 15:09, 22 May 2007 (UTC) - Martin -

Why don't you try the "suck it and see" approach *with* a multisync monitor?

How come it will overstress/overheat just because it gets a sync signal of an unexpected frequency? —Bromskloss 08:42, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Seconded: a lot of multisync monitors can show (on their OSD) both frequencies of the signal they are receiving. Try using a multisync monitor and see what it says. --cesarb 09:50, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Addendum by Martin: good idea using a multisync monitor to read both the scanline and pixel frequencies. In fact knowing only the scanline frequency that a particular VGA setting produces should be enough to compute the selected pixel frequency. Because my MS-DOS PC and my multisync monitor are 5 miles apart I could not put it to practice yet. So I still have no precise figures for the pixel frequencies. However based on trial and error and working backwards fom the BIOS mode for 132 columns (which uses the 4th pixel frequency) I now have some fairly good guesstimates.

I estimate the 3rd frequency (bit code 10b in the miscellaneous register) to be 44 MHz (give or take maybe two MHz).

And the 4th (bit code 11b) seems to be 35.2 MHz (give or take maybe a half MHz).

195.35.160.133 10:09, 29 May 2007 (UTC)- Martin -

Second addendum by Martin: I have managed to compute the frequencies by looking at a status bit at VGA port 03dah which indicates vertical retrace. By counting Vretraces in real time I can compute the screen refresh rate. Multiplying that by the "vertical total" (1based=register+1) and the "horizontal total" (1based=register+6) and the pixels per character width (8 or 9) I get the pixel clocks.

The four values I got were 25.2 28.4 44.9 and 36.4. The second value (theoretically) should be 28.3, but still pretty accurate.

195.35.160.133 12:48, 5 June 2007 (UTC)- Martin -

Brand new MAC's hardrive crashed - how to recover PROPERLY?

The Problem:
A good friend of mine recently acquired a brand new 400GB external Seagate harddrive and filled it with his film's clips for editing!
Last night someone pulled out its power without realising and this morning the Mac wanted to "re initiate" the hard drive.
My friend stupidly took it back to the seller who "couldn't see anything" on the drive and very stupidly reformatted it!

The Reaction:
I have obtained two different data recovery programs ("Recover My Files" and "Nucleas Kernel Macintosh"), and quite suprisingly the one manages to slowly see the lost files!
The problem is it takes freakin AGES. It took about 3 hours to get to 0.7% completion of scanning the drive!!
The other problem is that it doesn't know the names of the files! So it starts to rename things like "Recovered_Mpeg_203.MPG" - which doesn't really help.

Your expertise needed:
(The Solution):

1. Can you advise as to whether or not it is possible to recover the NAMES of the lost files? OR
   
2. Can you recommend some high-end software that might be able to do the process quicker?
   

If I could do either of those all our work will not be lost!
Thanking you in advance
Rfwoolf 14:31, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

This might not be entirely correct, but: Names are metadata. Metadata was most likely entirely destroyed in the reformat. Sorry. Consider yourself lucky you can recover the files, and just relabel them by hand. That time doesn't seem totally unreasonable to me, compared to the time and cost of sending it in to a professional data recovery service. You have to realize, it's trying to read data that shouldn't really exist. It probably has to read a disk numerous times in order to recover the file. All things considered, you might be able to recreate the clips quicker than you can recover them. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 16:02, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

software for checking broadband speed

Hi,

can anyone suggest/recommend some free (or very cheap) software which I could use to automatically check my broadband (adsl) speeds at regular intervals throughout the day? ie to run for 24 hours - or more - so the speed can still be checked even though I'll be at work.

I'm currently with virgin media on their broadband only package. I'm supposed to be getting at least 1MB but over the last few evenings, when I've checked, the various speed checker websites I use have been giving a result of 70-80k (little better than dial up!!)

I think I read somewhere that some virgin customers have concerns that perhaps virgin are over subscribed and their infrastructure can't cope - making everyone's speeds really slow.

I'm running windows xp on a 6 month old pc, with a speedtouch modem router.

thanks Spiggy 83.104.131.135 14:39, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

You don't say, but note that 70-80 kilobytes per second is 500-600 kilobits per second, which is probably about right for a 1 megabit connection (which is what you have, I believe). It's true that it's lower than what they advertise, but their fine print no doubt covers them for that. At any rate, it's at least 10 times faster than a real modem. --TotoBaggins 15:06, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Go to SpeedTest.net every few hours, I'd suggest. JoshHolloway 15:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

OK. thanks for that. I might actually post a screen shot of my test results - in case I am misreading them. However, my broadband is really quite slow!! spiggy 83.104.131.135 15:52, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Did you run the test on a day when you had used your connection a lot (I mean a day when you've transferred multiple gigabytes of data)? Virgin have publicly said that users who've crossed a certain usage threshold (the threshold depends on what package you're on) in one day will have their bandwidth limited by a factor of 50% for the rest of that day. Annoying, isn't it (but at least virgin are honest about it). Cheers, Davidprior 14:12, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

trouble uploading copyright free jpeg image

I have been having trouble uploading a jpeg image to go with my article under reporter's notebook. I have figured out the image locater coding, which should read

File:Wikepedesketch1.png

notebook

but I cannot get my scanned jpeg file to load to the wikipedia website. It is waiting on my desktop. I am using mozilla firefox2. thank you. Rejoyce99 17:10, 22 May 2007 (UTC)rejoyce99

See Wikipedia:Uploading images. If that does not answer your question, then post a more specific question.

By the way, I am not sure what you mean by "copyright free". The jpeg image format came after modern copyright law went into place in most of the world. And in modern copyright law, copyright exists in all created works, until its expriation, which has not happened yet for any jpeg image (under the laws of most western countries). Thus, copyright exists in every jpeg every created. Informally speaking, "every jpeg image is copyrighted". If the image has been released to the public domain by its creator, then copyright law can generally be ignored, as it pertains to this image. But otherwise, the image is not in any sense "copyright free". --Tugbug 18:30, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

That's a bit of a sweeping statement. Copyright does not exist for Works of the United States Government, for example. That's why we can use NASA's images of Mars without any problems. Thanks to Corel Corp we can also use exact photographic copies of images in the public domain. It's quite misleading to say that every JPEG image is copyrighted. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 18:49, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I think all that he meant is that JPEG isn't a "free image format", like the way PNG is. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 07:06, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Which is fairly irrelevant to the question. --24.147.86.187 12:22, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

No, I meant that copyright exists in every JPEG image. And, as Matt Eason pointed out, I was wrong. I stand corrected. --Tugbug 18:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

And people can release their own images into the public domain if they want to. --24.147.86.187 12:23, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

smart drive

what is SMART DRIVE? what is the use of it?

It would be best if you read our article on the SMART monitoring system found in many modern hard drives. Splintercellguy 20:12, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

binary search tree

can anybody help me to under stand in a very simple way not in a bookish way that how i can find the external path length and internal path length of a binary search tree.

Acer Aspire 5000 power jack

My girlfriend's Acer Aspire 5000's power jack is broken. It looks perfectly normal, but it just doesn't work. How can i fix it? --Shanedidona 20:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Do you mean the jack on the laptop or the one on the power supply? Laptop's generally don't really have any user serviceable parts, if you have no warranty you'll probably need to pay for repair or replacement. I doubt someone here will be able to provide an answer to 'fix it' if you don't know how to do this kind of stuff already. Vespine 01:23, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Video Compression

What is the best way to fit/compress 2 GB of video (MPEG, but I don't know which) in such a way that it can fit on a standard 700 MB CD and still be opened on another computer without any special programs? By special program I mean anything that wouldn't usually come with Windows XP. --The Dark Side 23:49, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

mplayer/mencoder will do this for you. Reduce the size of the video and change encodings to something more spacious (MPEG4? Audio in MP3?)

You should know how little Windows XP comes with. It's surprising you can do anything on a vanilla XP installation. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:25, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Virtualdub is a common way (at least, used to be) to recompress video. If you know how to use it, or follow instructions at doom9.org, you can get similar qualities after compression. But be warned: recompressing video isn't a 5 minute task. --Wirbelwindヴィルヴェルヴィント (talk) 07:02, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

May 23

Recovering video file from cell

Hello, I accidentally deleted a video file on my cell phone. I had saved it on the removable memory card. Since I deleted it, I have not used the memory card in any way.

1. What program is the best to use to recover my file if I put the card in a media card reader?

2. Is there any way to recover my video with out the use of a media card reader?

Thanks, --(Aytakin) | Talk 02:07, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Try PhotoRec. --cesarb 09:45, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I got a USB flash card adapter on ebay. It is pretty cool. It has a second little converted plugged into the SD slot, so it can take miniSD too. It wasn't too expensive. A search for "SB flash card" on eBay should get you what you need. Make sure it'll take either SD, miniSD, or the Sony one, depending on what your phone uses. I hope you're able to get your dirty movie back!! - NByz 01:01, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

name of a PC RTS game that I saw

On most of RTS games when you choose a character and then click on another he just get closer and then stay there shooting on the enemy (without moving). I saw on a games magazine a article about a PC RTS game that was released (or a being done), that when you choose a character and click on a enemy, he not just stay there shooting the enemy he plays like if he was a FPS player, so he avoid shoots and others things, and the enemy do the same too. I not remember the name of this game, can anyone say the name of this game to me?? (I saw this article on 2006 or 2005, and the game was a new game, so the article was not a retro gaming article)

PS: This game may be a RTT too.

Company of Heroes, maybe? -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 08:24, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I think that is this game thanks 201.78.246.222 13:45, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

non english programming languages?

Just a curiousity, but are there any non english based programming languages, or ports of english programming languages into other languages? -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 09:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I can't remember its name, but I read somewhere in Wikipedia about one that was in Spanish. However, it didn't seem to be of any popularity at all. --Taraborn 10:01, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Looking at conlangs, there's var'aq. Any others? -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 10:10, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

As someone else observed recently, many programming languages aren't really english anyway. ;-) And using macros, you can overmap the keywords with your own language.

Atlant 11:52, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I guess Reverse Polish isn't what you want, but I always liked the name. --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 14:43, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

See ... Non-English-based programming languages. --TotoBaggins 16:19, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Ares p2p program

Hi. The program works perfectly in my brother's XP account (where it was installed), but can't connect in mine. Why can that be? --Taraborn 09:59, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you need admin privileges to run, go into control panel and see if you have admin privileges. --Lwarf 10:10, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I do have admin privileges. Some programs made for Windows 9x apparently don't work well in XP in different accounts, but this doesn't seem to be the case. --Taraborn 17:53, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Old versions of the software can't connect to new versions; ensure that yours is up-to-date. That said, I would investigate alternatives to Ares - the top Google hits are mostly ad related, and a sole CNET.au review on the page recommends LimeWire instead. I personally would recommend uTorrent (which is completely ad-free at this time) and use other specialized tools for chat and any other functions Ares offers. --Edwin Herdman 23:21, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. --Taraborn 06:34, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Try the compatiblity wizard, that sometimes works for me with apps made for win 95. --Lwarf ^{Talk to Me!} 04:12, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

MOV to DVD or DivX

A friend wants a - possibly freeware - solution to port his *.mov digital compact camera short movies so he can watch them via his DVD player. Any quick suggestions by experienced people? JH-man 10:50, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

If he has access to a new Mac, iDVD can do that easily. --24.147.86.187 12:20, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, should have mentioned he only has a PC (Windows XP). Any easy-to-use equivalents for PC? Thanks anyway! JH-man 12:35, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

There was a similar question recently. VLC media player is probably a good tool to start with, at least for the conversion from MOV. What program(s) does your friend have for writing to DVD? --LarryMac | Talk 13:04, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm not sure which DVD software he has, but we will figure it out from here.  :) JH-man 13:12, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Reverse MP3 Playback

I have a couple of Mp3s which I would like to play back in reverse. Sounds weird, I know, but apparently there is a hidden message in the track if one listens to it in reverse. How do I play my Mp3s in reverse? I've got Audacity, but can't find a way to do what I want. Any pointers?

Thanks in advance.

Hasanclk 13:30, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

It should be in the "effect" menu on Audacity. --LarryMac | Talk 13:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

The effects menu is blank. Meaning, after I opened the MP3 through Audacity, I can't select any of the options of the effects menu. Both the effects and analyze menus are un-clickable.

Hasanclk 14:33, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

do this in two steps:

• transcode it back to a .wav file.
• play the .wav in reverse.

you need two steps becasue mp3 is "stateful." By contrast, .wav is simply a series of independent samples. (Please note: I've never done this, but the theory is correct.) -Arch dude 16:49, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Windows Sound Recorder, with wavs, can do Effects -> Reverse. Will be perfect :)JoshHolloway 17:31, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

No idea what an MP3 being unstateful means. But I did exactly what you said. Exported the original MP3 to WAV format using Audacity. Then loaded the WAV file(which nearly quadrupled in size btw) on Audacity. But the same problem still exists. Effects And Analyze are unclickable. And believe it or not, I did actually think of doing the Sound Recorder thing, but I don't have a microphone. :)

Anything else I can try?

Thanks

Hasanclk 18:00, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

You don't need a microphone to use Sound Recorder. Start it up and click File/Open and navigate to your new WAV file. --LarryMac | Talk 18:03, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Excellent! That worked! Thanks guys!

Hasanclk 18:13, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

You need to mark the part of the track that you want to reverse in audacity. Like when you mark a part of a text that you want to turn to bold face in a text editor. Didn't you ask that question some weeks ago? I remember suggesting audacity to you.

Excel macros

I have a spreadsheet and I want a macro to delete all rows where the entry in column D is zero. I tired the following but it didn't work. I had to run it about 5 times to get most of the relevant rows deleted and even then about 3 or 4 (seemingly) random zero-rows remained.

  Sub test()
  
         
     For Counter = 2 To 371
          Set curCell = Cells(Counter, 4)
          If curCell = 0 Then
              Rows(Counter).Select
              Selection.Delete Shift:=xlUp
          End If
      Next Counter
              
  
  End Sub

What am I doing wrong? Zain Ebrahim 13:55, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I added additional spaces to the above to prevent the indents from confusing the wiki-rendering. Unfortunately, I can't answer your question though. Davidprior 14:17, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Bit of a wild guess, this one - should it be "If curCell.Value = 0", rather than "If curCell = 0"? — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 14:30, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Any time you have two consecutive rows with value 0, you will end up skipping the second one, because of the shift up. e.g. if rows three and four contain 0. when Counter=3, you will perform the select/delete/shift up. Now row four is where row 3 was. Then you increment Counter, so it equals 4, and the "new" row 3 gets ignored. --LarryMac | Talk 14:35, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I found a way to make it work. It's pretty ugly code, but then again I've never touched Excel macros before today:

Sub test()
    For Counter = 2 To 57
         Set curCell = Cells(Counter, 4)
         Do While curCell.Value = 0
         
             Rows(Counter).Select
             Selection.Delete Shift:=xlUp
             Set curCell = Cells(Counter, 4)
             If curCell.Value = "" Then Exit Do
         Loop
     Next Counter
End Sub

I've replaced the If/Then with a Do While loop. This will process all consecutive zeros before incrementing Counter. The line just before the Loop statement is crucial, or else this macro will run endlessly (causing one's CPU utilization to hit 100% and also requiring the use of the task manager to kill Excel). Also note that I changed the end value of the For statement to 57 because I was just testing with a small data set. Also important - as you step through this macro, the index of the last row will continually be getting smaller, since you will have been deleting rows all along. Thus the final several executions of the For loop will be checking on empty cells. Actually, this is what makes the check for an empty string ("") critical, since apparently when curCell.Value=Empty, Excel will treat it as equal to zero. I also implemented Matt's idea to check the specific property of curCell. --LarryMac | Talk 15:14, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Why not just loop downwards (which is of course upwards in the sheet)? 371 To 2 Step -1 should do what you want. --Tardis 22:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Just a few follow up questions. I'm quite new to programming in excel so bear with me.
1. After I saw LarryMac's first answer I decided to include "Counter = Counter - 1" in the IF..THEN statement. Would that have worked?
2. Whats the difference between curCell.Value and curCell?
3. Why would looping downwards have helped?
Zain Ebrahim 08:46, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I really should let somebody with greater expertise handle this, but I'm enjoying learning about this stuff. (And I do have a programming background, so I'm not just making stuff up).

1) I just tried putting in the Counter decrement, and it works until you get to the point where you're checking on empty rows. Then you run into that "Empty = 0" problem again. Luckily, I was smart enough to run my test by single stepping through using the debugger (use F8 from the macro editing screen), so I didn't lock up my PC again :-) Anyway, a test for curCell.Value="" would need to go in there somewhere. Now, philosophically, it's really really bad to monkey around with the value of a for loop variable within the loop. It can be done (and legions of BASIC programmers have done so), but it can cause confusion, subtle bugs, and other headaches.

2) There really is no difference; curCell and curCell.Value are the same. From what I can tell from my speedy introduction to Excel macros and VBA, this is because you have defined curCell as an instance of Cells, which is a property of the Range object, and the Range object has a default property of Value. So when you say Range=XYZ, it's the same as saying Range.Value=XYZ. However, it's good practice to be explicit. The curCell variable that you've created has dozens of other properties, such as font, width, alignment, shading, etc.

3) Ultimately, the "looping downward" concept Tardis mentions is ideal. Each time you execute the delete/shift up, you are only moving rows below your current pointer (as viewed on the screen), so the problem of skipping rows doesn't even come into play. --LarryMac | Talk 14:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. That really helped. Zain Ebrahim 07:43, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia Bot: CSV

How do you use CSV files In VB.NET? Lmc169 15:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

You parse through it; I don't think there is a special class for handling it. Here is a pretty easy code snippet, pretty straightforward. --140.247.248.120 16:08, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks peeps 89.241.225.141 14:36, 24 May 2007 (UTC)(logged in = Lmc169 14:40, 24 May 2007 (UTC))

3GP (or 3g2) Video Format

Hey All!

I've been looking for a freeware or open source (free) converter from the 3gp cell phone video format to any of the MPEG formats... or frankly any other format.

The Nokia PC Suite comes with a player for them, but no way to convert. There are a few software suites that cost around $40. Any ideas?NByz 17:22, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Look on this website http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html this has a converter for almost anything i've ever tried to use, i use it for the .3g2 format on my cellphone im sure it can convert to and from even though ive only mostly used it to convert to .3g2 200.12.231.42 18:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC) Ag for MemTech

Ffmpeg (windows binaries), or it's derivatives mencoder and vlc, can help. --h2g2bob (talk) 21:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

w00t. Thanks, the Super (C) program is HORRIBLY marketed, but feature rich and free. It does the job. - NByz 04:47, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

µTorrent problem - file system limitation error

I'm trying to download a simple .mdf package. BitTorrent downloaded the first 94% of the file, but then everything started freezing, so I switched to uTorrent. It works fine at first, picks up the file where BitTorrent left off, but then after downloading for a minute or so, it stops and gives me "Error: file system limitation"

What does this mean, and what do I do about it? I'm running Vista 32-bit on a wireless 3Mb/s cable connection. Also, I'm getting this message in the Logger: "Unable to map UPnP port", which is odd considering I have UPnP enabled both in my router settings and in uTorrent. Is this just an occasional error like hash fails, or could it be related to this file system problem? Thanks, —Akrabbim^talk 20:34, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

The "file system" thing might be that you're trying to create a file greater than the maximum file size allowed by the file system. The max file size for NTFS is vast, but if your disk is formatted FAT32 then you might be running into its 4GiB limit. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:40, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

No, my hard drive is NTFS. Besides, the .mdf file is only 3.46 GB, the .mds is only 33 kB, and another 720 B .txt file. —Akrabbim^talk 20:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Filename too long? Pathname too long? File/pathname contains illegal character? NTFS is pretty plural about these too,but you never know. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:11, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Would you post a link to the torrent in question so we could try for ourselves? —Bromskloss 21:10, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Providing it's legal? Don't want Wikipedia getting screwed over for linking to illegal content. JoshHolloway 21:32, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmm... I'll try a simpler pathname. That could be it. —Akrabbim^talk 23:07, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, a simpler filename works, only the problem is I can't figure out how to get uTorrent to save files as a certain filename. The torrent has the .mdf file saved as "Sample [FULLDVD][Multi-Spanish-EN-IT].mdf", and I can get the error to go away if I bring it to something short like "S.mdf", but I can't get uTorrent to change the filename. Can you do this, or is this hopeless to download such a large file with such a long filename? —Akrabbim^talk 00:45, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

DMCA safe harbor clause... --froth^t 18:33, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

May 24

TI Programming maneuvers

Is it possible to jump to a label in a different program?

also Is it possible to archive and unarchive programs as part of another program?

thanks 74.37.228.44 00:09, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, you can only GOTO labels in the currently running program. Using the Archive command from within a program results in ERR: INVALID

PROGRAM:MYPRGM
:Disp "ARCHIVE ME"

PROGRAM:ARC
:Archive prgmMYPRGM

gets

ERR: INVALID
1:Quit
2:Goto

WikiY ^Talk 01:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

What you could do is this: since all variables are all global, save a number representing the label in a variable and then call the other program, and then use that to figure out where you're going. Sort of like this (I haven't my TI-83+ around, but this is kinda how I remember it):

PROGRAM:PROG1
:1729->J
:prgmPROG2
:42->J
:prgmPROG2

and in prog2

PROGRAM:PROG2
:IF J=1729
:THEN
:0->J
:GOTO A
:END
:
:IF J=42
:THEN
:0->J
:GOTO B
:END

I used strange numbers to ensure that J isn't accidentally set to them, and they are zeroed so it doesn't jump the next time you start PROG2. Even if you already have code in your program that you don't want to mess up, you can just add these lines to the top and it will not change how the function works since they will just be skipped. --Oskar 19:17, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Windows XP keymapping.

Is there a RAM-light, freeware app I can use in Windows to map keys to certain functions? For example, I want Numpad 2 to be "volume down", Numpad 8 to be "volume up", things like that. Down M. 00:59, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Try [2]. Several choices there, I have not used any of those programs so cannot vouch for them. I have used quickkeys, it works quite well but is not cheap. 161.222.160.8 01:08, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Automated Google searches: length distribution of written growls

How would I go about writing a C++ or JavaScript program that would create a table (CSV is fine for C++) of the number of Google hits for G followed by n R's, as n increases from 2 to 100? NeonMerlin 03:28, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Here it is in Perl, which should give you the general idea. --TotoBaggins 13:52, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;

# we have to set the user-agent to pretend to be a
# browser, since google doesn't accept robots
my $web_client = LWP::UserAgent->new(agent => "mozilla");

# Google allows query words up to 128 chars long
for my $n (2 .. 127)
{
    # make a string of 'r's, of length $n
    my $arrs = "r" x $n;

    my $url = "http://www.google.com/search?q=g$arrs";

    my $response = $web_client->get($url);
    $response->is_success() or die $web_client->status_line() . ": $url";
    my $page = $response->content();

    my $hits;
    if ($page =~ m#Results.*([\d,]+) for #)
    {
        # we captured the hits in the first parens
        $hits = $1;
        # remove the commas from the hits count
        $hits =~ s/,//g;
    }
    elsif ($page =~ /did not match any documents/)
    {
        $hits = 0;
    }
    else
    {
        warn "Could not parse url: $url\n";
        $hits = -1;
    }

    print "$hits hits for 'g$arrs'\n";

    # be a polite robot
    sleep 1;
}

World of Warcraft problem

I tried asking this on the wow technical support forums but didn't get a response so I thought I'd try here. I recently installed WoW on a new computer. After installing the cds, everything worked fine. However, after i download patch 1.12 (the first patch that automatically downloads after I install the game) I will get multi colored crystal-like distortions on the graphics that jump around change color. The game appears to run fine, and I can log in but it makes it hard to see.

Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440

Here are 2 screenshots of the problem: 1 2 I have enough ram and the graphics card has enough memory.

Does anyone know what could be causing this? 68.231.151.161 03:57, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The second pic looks like screen tearing. Try enabling Vsync, it can for sure be done in game via Video Options. Make sure your graphics card isn't forcing Vsync off by checking its options. If you can't change it in game due to the problem I think there is a .txt file somewhere in the WoW folder you can modify. I am not at home so can't check mine, but someone else may know of it. Also, the game is now up to patch 2.1 I think, so that might be it as well. Oh, and check for driver updates. Happy hunting 161.222.160.8 04:09, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Atleast your version of the game is interesting ;) 213.48.15.234 08:41, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what it is, but it's not a Vsync issue. Is the graphics card overheating? --Carnildo 20:46, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The MX 440 has several unresolved bugs. I was once writing an application for my company and we had tracked done some display bugs to the 440. It was so bad, that we had to replace the cards eventually. You will have to consider the possibility, that the error might be unfixable and you need a new card. But try some cheaper things before doing that.

recognising gif and jpeg images

Please tell me how does a image viewer recognize a particular format as GIF or JPEG?What code is there to identify that?

They check if the file has a header from the GIF or JPEG file formats. Check the articles's external links for the specifications for each of these afile formats. — Kieff | Talk 05:19, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

You can see what Kieff means by just opening up a (small!) GIF or JPEG file in a text editor like vi or MS Notepad. Besides a bunch of binary gunk, you'll see something "GIF89a" or "JFIF" near the beginning, which are part of that header. --TotoBaggins 13:55, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

See also File format#Magic number --h2g2bob (talk) 14:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

In the end, it is a bit of guesswork. A RAW file could start with a valid JPEG header by coincidence. In general programs look at the file extension and the file header and then guess. They are ususally right. You can tell the program which format a file has in the opening dialog of better programs.

GIF

How do you create a moving GIF image and put it on powerpoint?

203.122.76.226 06:24, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Try Unfreez to string together frames into an animated GIF. I would imagine simply Insert -> Picture -> From File would work, assuming PP has animated .gif support. -Wooty Woot? contribs 07:19, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Yep, PP should support animated GIFs without any problems. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 12:28, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The next question is "Do I want to put an animated GIF in my PowerPoint presentation?". And the answer is, almost certainly, "No, it would annoy and distract my audience." --Tugbug 19:07, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

That's not very fair: seeing as he wants to make it himself it's probably got a legitimate purpose (as a moving diagram of some process or other). That said, gratuitous animated GIFs are intensely annoying, due to the human tendency to notice movement much more than stillness. Daniel (‽) 16:52, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Thus the "almost" in my comment, which I stand by. --Tugbug 20:08, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Maple:simple fractions

How to develop something like (s+1)/(s^2+2*s+5) in simple fractions using Maple? --Taraborn 06:33, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

simplify( (s+1)/(factor(s^2+2*s+5)) ) may work, though it may not because there are conditions involved in the division. But come on, this is simple stuff. You don't need Maple to do this.

CSS border images

I'm trying to get the following CSS to work. It won't, for some reason. I'm attempting to use images as left-right-up-down borders, but they just don't show up. Yes, they're in the right directory, and actually exist. Now, I'm thinking that the problem is with CSS3 specifications not working so hot in Firefox - is there an alternative way to do this? -Wooty Woot? contribs 07:14, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

style.css:

div.sidebar
{
border-top-image: url(images/top.png);
border-left-image: url(images/left.png);
border-right-image: url(images/right.png);
border-bottom-image: url(images/bottom.png);
}

sidebar.php:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css" /> 
<div class="sidebar">
   <div> 
   // content 
   </div> 
</div>

You're correct, there is no support for those CSS 3 selectors in the mainstream browsers. Unfortunately, the only way I know of doing that is to have a series of <div>s, one for each background image. It's easier if the side bar has a fixed width as then you can have the right and left borders as one image. →Ollie (talk • contribs) 09:49, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I'll just set it to a non-percentage width (300px or so) and mess around with some divs. Thanks. -Wooty Woot? contribs 21:31, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Themeing Qt

On Linux, is it possible to "theme" or customize the gray and angular look of Qt? –mysid☎◥ 09:37, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Sure, see here and also Oxygen Project and Baghira. --TotoBaggins 14:02, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Mac OS X Paint Equivalent

Is there an equivalent to MS Paint on Mac OS X, or at least somethihg free/cheap that does basic drawing stuff?

Thanks, --Fadders 11:13, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

There are a number of versions of GIMP, which is free, for OS X. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:31, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The shareware OS X program GraphicConverter does what the older versions of MS Paint did. I do not know what all the current MS Paint can do, but I would imagine GraphicConverter would be pretty close. GraphicConverter in spite of its name does lots more than convert file formats.Zeno333

Video card question

Besides which slot a video card may plug into (AGP, PCI-X, PCIe), are there any problems of compatibility between a video card and a computer. For example, will certain cards not function with certain CPU models? Or is the slot type the only thing that I need to check (and having sufficient RAM)? − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 12:40, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

In case of AGP, you possibly also have to take voltage into account (see article) JH-man 13:22, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes. In particular I am looking at AGP cards. I have 4x, but I assume 8x cards will also work with this. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 23:44, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

No, not really. For small form-factor PCs you have to worry whether the card will physically fit and will be adequately ventilated, and for PCs with unusually small power supplies you have to worry there's enough power to drive the card. For paired arrangements like SLI you pretty much have to have exactly the same card in both slots. But other than that anything that fits will work. It's a bit harder to determine what is an efficient, never mind optimal, choice - put a super-expensive card in a PC that doesn't have the IO bandwidth to drive it or the CPU power to supply it with adequate information (cf Amdahl's law). And you may have difficulty obtaining device drivers for 64-bit OSes, particularly on IA64. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:24, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I've just ordered a 500W PSU, so that should keep a new card happy. What do you mean when you say it may be difficult to obtain device drivers for 64-bit OSes?. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 23:44, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The operating system that you are using needs to have the proper driver-software to use the card to its full potential. Otherwise it will use some generic driver, possibly even not offer 3D acceleration! Because 64 bit operating systems haven't made their break-through (not enough software available that exploits 64-bit, no real need and/or wide motherboard support for +4GB RAM as yet), a lot of hardware vendors haven't made the effort to provide up-to-date device drivers. If you're not using or planning to use Windows XP 64, Vista 64bit or some 64bit Linux variety, all this is of no concern. JH-man 08:30, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Don't try to mix Nvidia cards with ATI mainboard chips, or ATI cards with Nvidia chips. Supposedly they work together, but in practice, they don't. --Carnildo 20:36, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I have an AMD CPU in an nVidia motherboard, so an nVidia card will work best? I will look into what sorts of problems may occur if an ATI card is used on an nVidia motherboard. − Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 23:44, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I have ATI card (X800GT) and nvidia motherboard chpiset (Nforce4 ultra) and everything works fine. -Yyy 07:38, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Same here, I have an ATI X800 pro in a Nvidia Nforce 3 motherboard and everything is ok. Only problem I have ever seen with a video card and a motherboard is that the 6000 series of video cards from Nvidia have a problem with the Nvidia Nforce 3 chipset for motherboards. On another note, AGP cards are usually 4x/8x compatible, so there shouldn't be any problem with that.--GTPoompt 17:03, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Coin a name

Hi All.,

can anybody suggest names for a "commercial transaction tracking system/application" that is built inhouse at a devlopment centre?

Thanks

Polevault - Rfwoolf 17:00, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

SideTrack, RaceTrack, Track 'n' Field, Trans Action, TransTrack, TrannyTrack2000, TrackAttack, ComTranTrackSys, DingDing, Star Trak -- the Final N-Tier, Track Star, Track Machine, Sound Track, Multi Track, Trax, Make Tracks, Tracking Stock, Native Tracker, etc. --TotoBaggins 19:06, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

You should go with "Star Trak -- the Final N-Tier", that's an awesome name (although "TrannyTrack 2000" isn't half-bad either). My suggestion is "Crosstown". I have no idea why, but I think that's a REALLY cool name --Oskar 19:37, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

COMTRANACK Sysapp.

BigBro, or perhaps Dr. Eckleburg: [3]. StuRat 19:15, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Call it the Transactions Archiving Recently Developed Inhouse System. Of course, you would only refer to it by it's acronym. --h2g2bob (talk) 22:51, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

XPS 710 H2C

Hi. im wondering if a dell xps 710 h2c computer has a processor core 2 extreme QX6800, physica accelerator, blah blah blah. u no all the BEST enhancments, would it be possible for this desktop to faster than even the mac pro?Jk31213 18:47, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Faster in doing what exactly?

Uh, yeah, that computer will beat the living crap out of a MacBook Pro, considering Macbook Pros have 2.1ghz Core 2 Duos and what I believe is an integrated graphics card. However, why are you comparing an Apple laptop to a Dell desktop - and why would you buy such an expensive computer from Dell?!?! -Wooty Woot? contribs 00:13, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Im comparing to apple because apple, for three years in a row, have produced the fastest computers for the home. now this new dell model is reasonably comparable to the mac pro. (which is also a desktop). i know the price is enormously great but hey, im looking at the advantages to having with that a 30-inch monitor, 1815dn printer, and to top it off, z-5500 speakers which are the best computer speakers of any kind in north america anyway.Jk31213 03:11, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Thought you were referring to the MacBook Pro, not the Mac Pro, sorry. The Mac Pro will indeed destroy the Dell in applications which can utilize many cores such as CAD. However, for gaming and most applications, the Dell will probably actually beat the Mac Pro, simply because most apps can't use 8 cores. -Wooty Woot? contribs 06:47, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

ASUS W5Fe

Where can I purchase "ASUS W5Fe"? 68.193.147.179 19:21, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Various computing outlets? It's a laptop so some laptop shops are bound to stock it if it is new. Otherwise you might want to try second-hand shops or sites like eBay. x42bn6 Talk Mess 21:00, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

May 25

Cannot copy file onto flash drive

I have a 1GB flash drive and I'm trying to copy some files onto the drive. I click and I get a Windows error message saying the "directory or file cannot be created." What can I do? --Blue387 08:54, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

You could try to reformat it first, so the filesystem is recreated. Keep in mind that this will wipe all data from the flashdrive (well, strictly speaking most data could be recovered until it is overwritten, but for practical purposes...) JH-man 09:20, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, maybe first check whether ~the flashdisk simply isn't FULL? JH-man 09:32, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Check you can use the drive on another machine to ensure the drive does work and it's not some problem intrinsic to the computer you're using. If the drive appears faulty try reformatting, though this may not work, or may just be a temporary fix. It's also possible that there's simply not room on the drive for the file (the file could be too big or there may be too much other stuff on the drive) - check file sizes and ensure there's room. --jjron 09:44, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I have only used up 349MB, I'll try the reformat and get back to you. --Blue387 09:47, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Check that the disk isn't write-protected. This may be in the form of a "switch" on the flash drive itself with a picture of a lock or something. Rfwoolf 09:51, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Make sure the directory name doesn't use crazy symbols. Some file systems can't use some characters. --h2g2bob (talk) 22:46, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I formatted the flash drive and it works now. Thanks! --Blue387 07

04, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

DVD format

What is the difference between DVD-R DVD+R DVD-RW DVD+rw??59.92.243.156

-R and +R are write-once while -RW and +RW are rewritable, for one. Our articles on DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW and DVD+RW outline some of the technical differences. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 10:54, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

+ and - refer to different formats. You want to make sure that if your drive only does one or the other that they match up with the right formats. --140.247.240.232 19:06, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Another excel macro question

I'd like to create a macro that looks at each row in a spreadsheet and if column W has "XXXXXX" in that row then the macro must take whatever is in column V and put it into column U. This is what I did:

Sub Macro1()

   For Row = 2 To 125
       Set curCell = Cells(Row, 23)
       If curCell.Value = "XXXXXX" Then
           Set curCell = Cells(Row, 22)
           Selection.Copy
           Set curCell = Cells(Row, 21)
           Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _
           :=False, Transpose:=False
       End If
   Next Row

End Sub

The macro seems to be copying and pasting whichever cell was selected before I run it onto itself. Help? Zain Ebrahim 11:48, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

try this:

------------------------------------------------------------------

For Row = 2 To 125

myrange = "W" & Row

Range(myrange).Select

If ActiveCell.Value = "XXXXXX" Then

ActiveCell.Offset(0, -2) = ActiveCell.Offset(0, -1)

End If

Next Row

-------------------------------------------------------------------

By explicitly selecting the cell you want to look at through Range(myrange).Select you put the focus on the field that you are wanting to compare, and you can manipulate other cells around it through the activecell.offset function. Offset(0,-2) is 0 rows, -2 columns, so if you were on column W then OffSet(0,-2) is the same row on column U. --Czmtzc 12:39, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

It worked. Macros are great. Thanks a lot. Zain Ebrahim 13:26, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

You shouldn't need a macro...It should just be (inside U's formula)... =if(w1="XXXXX",V1," ") Unless you explicitly want to remove the value of V of course. Then just copy the formula down for as many rows as you need. ny156uk 16:48, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Check out the VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP functions as well, as they do things similar to what you are trying to do. --140.247.240.232 17:55, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Whenever I'm working on macros in excel, I keep an extra button handy, and for things like that I will 'record' the macro on the extra button and just copy over the code. It's useful because VBA in excel has a lot of operators and commands and things that are specific to excel. - 24.68.64.122 19:56, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Installing Vista

I'm using Windows XP and I have another partion with Ubuntu. I'd like to install Windows Vista over Ubuntu so I can use Vista but still have XP because I know there's compatibility issues with Vista. When I start the installation for Vista will it be aware of the Ubuntu partion to overrite? and secondly, how do I set up the boot strap loader as I only have experience with the loaders such as Lilo and GRUB. --Kiltman67 23:20, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Vista will probably try to overwrite ubuntu and XP. The best way to do this might be to install a small version of linux, like Puppy Linux, and use that to anchor GRUB, and load XP and Vista with grub. The standard way to do that is XP->Ubuntu though, so I don't know how well installing windows after GRUB would work, Windows isn't very friendly. You might want to ask on Ubuntuforums.com -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 23:50, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Do the partitioning inside Ubuntu (resizing ext3 or NTFS partitions etc.), install Vista, then use the liveCD or the alternate CD to install grub back using grub-install. --antilived^{T | C | G} 00:28, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I want a Dualboot system with XP and Vista, but no Ubuntu. Sorry for any confusion. --Kiltman67 00:53, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Read what I said. The linux is just there to give you a way to use and manage GRUB. -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 02:13, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for making that clearer. Will the partioning tools that come with the Vista installation be able to see the Linux partition even when the OS (at least XP, can't say for sure with Vista) can't? --Kiltman67 03:53, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually if you don't want Ubuntu anymore you can do fixmbr in XP recovery console and then install Vista, which will detect XP and put it into NTLDR. And yes, you can always delete a partition, even if you don't have read support on it. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:04, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

How do I get to the Recovery Console? I'm presuming it's an option in the boot menu when you press F8 but please tell me if I'm wrong. --Kiltman67 15:04, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

I have a related question that isn't really different enough to warrant a whole new question. After installing Vista I know I can access the contents of the XP partition, but will Vista add all the software in there to the start menu as it is in XP or do I need to do that myself, and if so is there an easy way to do it rather then adding shortcuts for everything one by one. --Kiltman67 17:03, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

May 26

Library to convert sRGB to any linear color space

I took some photos of the same scene with different exposures, with the intent to synthesize them into one HDR image. When I looked at the RGB values of the pixels with the Python Imaging Library, I expected the values of the 2-stops-underexposed shot to be close to 4x less than the values of the normally exposed shot. Instead, the ratios were all over the place. Now I realize this is because the JPEG from my camera uses sRGB, a non-linear encoding. Is there a free software library I can use to convert from sRGB into some linear space so I can tinker with the pixels? I found LittleCMS, which seems on the right track, but how can I make it give me something linear? —Keenan Pepper 00:58, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

GraphicsMagic/ImageMagic might well do it --h2g2bob (talk) 03:47, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Animated GIF onto Powerpoint

How do you put an animated GIF onto powerpoint? When I tried to insert picture from file onto powerpoint the animated GIF became a still picture. -Dudforreal 08:07, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

The animation will play when you view the show (Slide Show > View show) — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 10:22, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

World's Best Computer

I heard that the best computer in the world costs only $600. Is this true?--71.185.133.24 13:56, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Define "best". Best for who? — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 14:37, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

That's like asking what the "best" car is. Some people will say it's a Veryon, others a Maybach, and there's the group that swears by Isettas. If your question is "How much should I pay for a computer", then anyone who doesn't play games or do heavy multimedia work shouldn't spend more than 500$ -- Phoeba Wright^OBJECTION! 14:47, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Sideshow

What are some Sideshow laptops? 68.193.147.179 17:16, 26 May 2007 (UTC)