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February 10

Firefox - disabling / uninstalling addons to make the browser faster

Hi. I am having a problem with Firefox being too slow. It needs just too much time to get started. Also, navigating around the browser (opening/closing tabs and such) is much slower than for example in Chrome. I have quite many addons installed, so I guess that is the problem. Now my question: Does it help if I just disable addons, or do I have to uninstall them in order to make Firefox slimmer and faster? Thanks for your help! --Tilmanb (talk) 01:33, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Disabling them should release pretty much all the resources they would take up whilst running. The overhead for having them still installed, but not running is pretty negligible. ZX81 ^talk 02:11, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

What's the fastest browser for the internet?

Hi. I have another question... I have been using Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, but I find them all similarly slow, i.e. I don't experience any differences between them (except that Chrome feels a little bit faster). Is there a browser which starts up clearly much faster than all of those mainstream browsers? Thanks. --Tilmanb (talk) 01:35, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Well in a theoretical situation the fastest one to startup is pretty much always going to be Internet Explorer (which you didn't mention, but because it uses a lot of Windows components which are already loaded this enables it to load up very fast), but in a real world situation it varies per computer and what your hardware is as well as what software you have installed and what plugins/extensions are in each browser. Sorry not a very helpful answer I know. ZX81 ^talk 02:13, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

They're pretty close,opera should have lower system requirements, whereas firefox is a little better at executing javascript. As for chrome and safari...they're pretty good too. Only IE which is a resource hog is bad=/.Smallman12q (talk) 03:01, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

You could try links or lynx. -Craig Pemberton 03:21, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Firefox and Chrome are probably the fastest. I'd recommend that you not install too many addins, pluggins and toolbars. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 03:45, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

See Comparison of web browsers and try some. I personally recommend SeaMonkey. Not the latest version 2.02 but the second latest 1.1.18 version. Or the latest version of K-Meleon. Oda Mari (talk) 05:02, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Google's Chrome is a lot faster than Firefox or Opera in my experience (never really gave Microsoft's IE a try) --Belchman (talk) 01:02, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Extensions for Chrome - Clicking on a tab switches to another tab

Hi. Does anyone know an extension for Chrome which would enable me to switch to another (previous) tab by clicking on the currently active tab? I have not been able to find such an extension but I am desperately needing one, as I got used to this in Firefox. Thanks again for your help :) --Tilmanb (talk) 01:38, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Laptop brightness

Whenever I plug in my laptop, the screen brightness goes up way too high for my comfort. I have to go through the trouble of reducing it manually. I've looked through Power Options Properties and there's no option to just leave it as is when the cord is put in. Is there any way to fix this? Thanks. Vranak (talk) 01:39, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Depending on your laptops brand/model or OS, there might be an option somewhere in the BIOS or hidden somewhere else in the OS. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  05:36, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Frequently, there will be some kind of "power saver" settings, which will let you control the default brightness (and other things), for when your computer's on battery or on AC. Paul Stansifer 13:44, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

What OS are you using? Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:54, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

ASUS laptops and netbooks have it built into the Super Hybrid Engine. But I think changing the mode will also limit the processor. The screen brightness only changes 1 or 2 categories when you plug in anyway, out of ten or so brightness levels. (Hotkey at the top on my netbook.) Never had this problem... Mxvxnyxvxn (talk) 04:17, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

P2P filesharing behind a firewall - Alternatives for Fileai.com

Hi. I've fallen in love with fileai.com as it enables very easy file sharing of big files directly without the need of having to upload them first to a server. However, unfortunately it does not work behind the firewall of some of my clients. Does anybody know a similar service like fileai.com but with less requirements in terms of firewalls? I would appreciate any ideas! --Tilmanb (talk) 01:41, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

How secure is Dropbox?

Do you know / do you have any experience with dropbox? How secure is it? Can I be sure that the files that I upload to their servers are not seen by Dropbox employees? Can I use Dropbox for confidential data? Any feedback appreciated! Last question for today ;-) Thanks, Tilmanb (talk) 01:43, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

If the data is really confidential, why risk it? Even if Dropbox promised to be secure and not let people snoop and etc., you're still just trusting them to have adequate security protocols, the ability to track employee behavior, etc. If the files are really something you'd rather others not see, there are better options out there for sharing confidential files.

Alternatively, just encrypt the files before uploading them to Dropbox. Then it doesn't matter quite as much how secure they are. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:53, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the above. Although we don't know for sure, when it comes to security of the Internet, unless it's your own server and the files were transmitted there securely, then it's better to think from the viewpoint that whoever owns the server can view the files (and unless the files are encrypted then they most certainly can). ZX81 ^talk 02:04, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Adding to my own post, the Dropbox security information is here. It does specifically say that the files are encrypted during transfer and employees can't access them, however this is completely up to you if you trust them. Personally I don't trust anything I didn't write/own myself, but I'm also a bit paranoid [:)] ZX81 ^talk 02:06, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

You could use dropbox with truecrypt portable volumes. (It's not 100% secure as people will be seeing which encrypted bytes are changing...but its better than nothing). Here are two articles to get you started: Maximumpc and a blog. Hope this helps.Smallman12q (talk) 02:47, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm.... I'd like to hear some other opinions regarding this issue. Would you move for example your instant messaging histories to Dropbox for backup purposes? The whole thing about encryption... no idea how that works :D But thanks for the links! Oh and Mr.98, what other options are you referring to? --Tilmanb (talk) 02:55, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Well the encryption is pretty simple. Basically you create a virtual hard drive of x bytes. you put this virtual hard drive in drop box and it gets uploaded. Now whenever you add/delete stuff from your virtual hard drive, only the bytes which you have changed by adding/deleting stuff will be uploaded again. So if you have a 1gb virtual hard drive and you add a 2 megabyte file, the first upload is 1gb, and then after that it uploads those 2 megabytes which changed. It's a simple concept once you get it.=P.Smallman12q (talk) 03:04, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

(ec) The fundamental idea behind encryption (and our article is the best place to start) is fairly simple. The idea is to "lock up" your data, (digitally, in this case) - so that even if somebody can see and read it, they can not decipher its meaning. There are loads of strong, secure ways to "lock" the data - see encryption algorithms for some examples. To the best of our knowledge, these so-called "strong encryptions" are impossible to crack, if the system is set up properly. (Rather, to be technical, they are only possible to crack if the attacker/snooper has a ridiculously long time to wait, e.g. on the order of the age of the universe). However, be aware that many encryption techniques exist that are not strong - and the data can be read because of inherent flaws in those systems, or due to operator-error (i.e., your fault for use the system incorrectly). You can read up on encryption techniques here: Microsoft's encryption technology and PGP for Linux and Unix-like systems (or Gnu Privacy Guard, a totally free-software alternative). Many other technologies and implementations exist. Nimur (talk) 03:09, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

"Other options": if you are just backing things up, you can make local copies (burn them to CDs/DVDs, put them on external harddrives). If you are trying to distribute information to other people, but consider it confidential, using encryption (as described above) to "scramble" the data is much more ideal. If it is a large project where encryption of the sort mentioned above is too cumbersome, it may be a better idea to set up your own secure server than to use a third-party. (Though, on the other hand, if you don't have the ability to set up your own secure server in a way that will make sure it actually is secure, then that's not much of an improvement.)

For encryption, I find TrueCrypt easy and reliable. Nobody is going to be breaking into your TrueCrypt files anytime soon if you do things right (e.g. don't pick an obvious, dictionary-based password). A number of ZIP programs now use professional-grade encryption (like AES), which would also suffice. Remember that security is only as good as the weakest link, though. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:30, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Anything you store on the Internet, or transmit over the Internet, is vulnerable to snoopers reading it, unless you use strong encryption, such as the TrueCrypt idea suggested earlier. E-mail over the Internet is another type of data that is sent "in the clear" (that is, it's unencrypted plaintext) and can be snooped by employees of the companies who own the wires. Similar hair-pulling debates happen often regarding web-based e-mail services like GMail. There are Google employees who have the ability to read all of the e-mail on the service. Do they? Who knows. At my work there is a client of ours who stopped using Google Wave over this concern. It's up to you to make some sort of assessment of (a) how much you would be ruined if your confidential data were read, multiplied by (b) the probability somebody is going to care enough to read it. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:53, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

It's also worth noting the important distinction between random, brute-force, computer-automated snooping; and specific deliberate targeted attacks against your data. This throws a few additional variables into Comet Tuttle's risk multiplication estimate. It's almost certain that at some point, some of your data will be randomly targeted by a brute-force snooper. If the data is plaintext, that snooper will have it. If it is weakly encrypted, he might have it. If it is strongly encrypted, it's safe to say he probably does not have it. A targeted attack on your data (for example, if you are subject to a major federal investigation) will really change the threshold for "maybe" into "definitely". The same is valid for GMail snooping. Are your emails being scanned by an automated system? Absolutely and indisputably, yes (see email for technical details). Are the personal data being processed, deciphered, and used for generating a you-specific profile? Again, absolutely and indisputably, yes (see their targeted ads policy. Does any human ever see the results? Maybe. We're trusting their good faith that they do not. Nimur (talk) 18:47, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I endorse everything Nimur has said in this thread. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:54, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Water simulations

Does anyone know of some good (large scale, if possible) water physics simulation software for macs? Thanks, Shannon^talk _contribs 05:26, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Are you looking for some real-time simulations? if so have a look here.– Elliott(Talk|Cont)  06:01, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

By large scale, do you mean hydrogeology, hydrology or reservoir simulations? There are a lot of open-source and commercial packages for aquifer, reservoir, and fluid flow simulation. What exactly do you want to simulate about water? We have articles on the Groundwater flow equation, the Theis equation, and so on - these link to a bunch of references which might get you started. Our groundwater model article has a very comprehensive list on groundwater modeling software. Many of these packages have their own articles too. MODFLOW is used around these parts, and it is available for free from the United States Geological Survey. Nimur (talk) 06:27, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, reservoir simulations, flood simulations, etc. Shannon^talk _contribs 15:08, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

In that case, this list really has a lot of options. Note that these are numerical physics programs - they don't all have a "fuzzy user interface." If you need help with setting up a FORTRAN compiler, feel free to ask. You can use these precompiled binaries for GFortran. As far as simulating "floods", those are just simulation results that yield above-normal water levels. Finally, since you're interested in streams, this list has a lot of useful software for stream-like flow. Nimur (talk) 15:37, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Well, I was actually talking about simulating surface water (e.g. dam breaks, floods, levee breaches, etc.) Something like this (see #13 on that page). My main point for asking was actually because I know about a lot of software already, but I couldn’t find anything for Macs, but sorry for the confusion. Shannon^talk _contribs 21:45, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

The link you provided is for commercial software that simulates smoothed-particle hydrodynamics. We have a list of software there, too. All of those C++ and FORTRAN programs can be compiled and run on a Mac. Since the Mac operating system is overlaid on the BSD kernel, it's likely that it will be totally compatible with these codes. If you are running large simulations, though, be aware that your desktop or powerbook probably doesn't have the computational power or RAM to handle them very well; consider looking into a Mac Pro. Even still, it's generally easier to find support for such things on more conventional platforms. Our research group uses Macs as dumb terminals to our unix/linux clusters for this reason. Nimur (talk) 03:13, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Excepting certain cookies - Firefox

I just got logged out because Firefox crashed. I have it set so that all history is not saved, which includes cookies, but I was wondering if there's a way to keep this feature on but except cookies from certain sites I visit often: this one and maybe four others. Thanks in advance.--162.84.166.253 (talk) 05:35, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Ah, I should mention that I spent twenty minutes before asking trying to figure out a way by going to options and poking around (I obviously found squat).--162.84.166.253 (talk) 05:37, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

CookieCuller, it's quite nice. ¦ Reisio (talk) 05:51, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

You want Firefox to only save cookies for certain sites? In Windows, you'd go to Tools --> Options, then under "Firefox will:" choose Use custom settings for history. Then, under "Accept cookies from sites," choose "Ask me every time." That's for Firefox 3.5. By the way, I had to read your post five times before figuring out what you wanted. It doesn't matter in this case whether it crashed or not. Keep a clear link with the subject. What is "This feature?" "Oh," I said, "He means site-by-site cookie preferences. I get it now."--Drknkn (talk) 06:05, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Preserving timestamps of folders when moving folders and files

On Windows XP, when I move a folder containing files and other folders to an external hard drive by cutting and pasting, the files' timestamps are preserved, but the folders' (both top folder and subfolders) timestamps get changed to the current time. I thought I could get around this by zipping up the folder (I used PeaZip) and then moving the zip file and unzipping, but it didn't work. What can I do? TresÁrboles (talk) 07:31, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

robocopy should do that; on XP you need to install the WIndows Resource Kit to get it. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 12:04, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

But check that you have the latest version - see Robocopy#Known_flaws. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:46, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Firefox tabs

Resolved

Is there a theoretical limit to the number of Firefox tabs you can have open at any one time? I've managed to successfully open just over 800 tabs, but any more than that seems to crash the browser, regardless of the amount of RAM still available. Is this an imposed limit by Mozilla? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.27 (talk) 14:25, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I suspect that you have run out of memory in a way that the Firefox programmers never expected - perhaps overflowing some statically allocated internal stack or something. Normally such actions are checked - and display an error message instead of crashing - but opening so many tabs is unusual behavior, and the designers probably never completely protected against it. Thus, you crashed the browser, instead of receiving an error message. It you want to consider that a "theoretical limit", you can. The total addressable memory space of your machine is another limit. Finally, at some point, it will be impossible to render all the tabs in a reasonable amount of time, so that would be another limit. Theoretically, one could read the scalability article to find out how computer engineers think about this sort of problem - i.e., what design changes are needed in order to enable an arbitrarily large version of the original idea. Nimur (talk) 15:26, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Ah thank you. So it's me pushing the program too far rather than a pre-defined limit. Thank you

By the way, original poster, you can help the Firefox project by filing a bug on this crash, here. They'll want as much system configuration information as you can provide. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:42, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I realize that this is a few days old and thus probably forgotten, but I'm curious. What reason did you have for opening 800+ tabs? Was this an experiment to see how many you could open or did you have a good reason beyond that? Dismas|^(talk) 17:51, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

http://xkcd.com/214/ 203.206.183.5 (talk) 06:09, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Choosing MS Word print range

Hello,

I'm using Word 2007. I have a long document, separated into many sections, from which I am trying to print (or, more specifically, print to PDF) a number of separated pages and ranges. What I would like to do is use the page number that appears in the bottom-left of the window (e.g. 'Page 24 of 198') to choose a range. However, when I use this, the software interprets some of the numbers entered as actual page numbers from the sections.

For example, typing '24' into the print range box would not print page 24 of 198, but 24 of the main section, i.e. page 44 of 198. This, however is inconsistent.

Is there a way to force word to recognise the numbers in the print range box as global document page ranges? Alternatively, is there a way to tell which section number (and page number of that section) any page in the document is? (to use this method

Thanks for any help, Mike 84.9.145.45 (talk) 15:08, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I may be suggesting the obvious here, but you could select the part of the document that you want to print, then use Print -Selection instead of Print - Pages. Gandalf61 (talk) 15:17, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm... Yes that would definitely work if I were printing just one range, or using a physical printer. However, as I am PDFing, I want all the separate ranges to print together. Your thinking has led me to the potential workaround of cutting out the bits of the document I don't want to print, in a new document. I'll try that. Thanks. 84.9.145.45 (talk) 15:23, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

The page numbers in the print dialog are the physical pages and may have no relationship to the numbers that print on the page. If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can print chunks, then assemble them in Acrobat. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:26, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

How To Find Out When I Started My Current Ubuntu Session?

Is there any way that I can find out how long the computer has been on for? I've been having problems with my laptop suddenly powering off but recently it hasn't happened at all. I've left it on for a while and would like to see when it was last switched on (i.e. the current session start time). TIA. --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 17:24, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

From a terminal, type last and that should help. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:40, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

And uptime will tell you when the system booted. Nimur (talk) 17:49, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

gdm and gnome-session make some temporary folders in /tmp when you start a new Gnome session. So, if your username is kagetora, look at the timestamp for /tmp/orbit-kagetora -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:03, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Excellent, cheers! 8 days it says. Looks like the problem may be sorted. Thanks. --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 23:10, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Problems using Firefox

Does anyone have any solutions to any of these please? I am using WinXP. 1. On revisiting a page, it does not show new content. (Particularly a problem on these pages.) Even refreshing the page is not enough, I have to press Cntrl-F5. 2. Clicking on the X at the top right of Firefox often does nothing, even when clicked two or three or more times. 3. When I move the cursor away from the slider to the right, sometimes the page still moves up and down with the cursor. 4. After not using the computer for several minutes, Firefox cannot connect with the internet, even when I retry. But when I then try Internet Explorer it always makes the connection, and when I close IE and try Firefox it makes a connection too.

When using the SAVE AS box: 5. When trying to save something, clicking on a folder to open it often does nothing, just highlights it. 6. If the cursor is over a file name for more than a tiny fraction of a second, then the name of the file I'm saving is changed to it. 7. When scrolling from side to side, sometimes the scrolling suddenly accelerates greatly. 8. Similarly, sometimes part of the box window goes black. 9. Sometimes I have to click the "Save" button again after the page has been saved, to get rid of the Save As box. Thanks 89.242.159.40 (talk) 22:03, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

What version of Firefox is this? It sounds frustratingly, horribly wrong — I don't have any of these issues using Firefox 3.5.7 under Windows XP. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:35, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

It says its 3.5.7 - "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)" 89.243.177.67 (talk) 00:04, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Have you tried running Firefox in safe mode (if you install normally, there should be an option for this from the start menu). If problems go away, it may be an add-on giving you grief (do you have add-ons/plug-ins? have you tried disabling them?) --Normansmithy (talk) 12:52, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean run the whole computer in Safe Mode, or just Firefox? If you mean just Firefox, how do you do this please? 89.243.182.24 (talk) 14:26, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

If you google "firefox safe mode", it's the first link with instructions by platform. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:37, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I think at least problem number three was caused by having turned on ClickLock in Windows Mouse Properties, which seems to do more than described. I have now turned it off. Update: I still get the same problems, but perhaps not quite as bad as previously. Another problem is that sometimes the cursor will pick up the side of the Firefox "box" and move then edge in with the movement of the cursor. 92.29.82.48 (talk) 20:23, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Mac OS X keyboard backlight drivers

Hello.

Ever since Mac OS X Snow Leopard made the [keyboard backlight quartz composer patch|http://kineme.net/wiki/ThirdPartyQuartzComposerPlugins] stop appearing in the list of patches, (not a clue why, because the screen backlight one still works fine), I've tried to make my own plug-in.

I've been trying to adapt some of the code from [1], [2], and [3] to work on Snow Leopard.

Because the IOConnectMethodScalarIScalarO function has been deprecated, I replaced the line

kr = IOConnectMethodScalarIScalarO(dataPort, kSetLEDBrightnessID, scalarInputCount, scalarOutputCount, in_unknown, in_brightness, &out_brightness);

with

kr = IOConnectCallMethod(dataPort, kSetLEDBrightnessID, &in_brightness, scalarInputCount, nil, in_unknown, &out_brightness, &scalarOutputCount, nil, 0);

Even though it will now compile, all it does is turn the backlight off. Is there something that I'm forgetting? Am I not using the IOConnectCallMethod function correctly? Here's the information from the file "IOKitLib.h" from the IOKit Framework, if that's helpful at all.

kern_return_t IOConnectCallMethod(
	mach_port_t	 connection,		// In
	uint32_t	 selector,		// In
	const uint64_t	*input,			// In
	uint32_t	 inputCnt,		// In
	const void      *inputStruct,		// In
	size_t		 inputStructCnt,	// In
	uint64_t	*output,		// Out
	uint32_t	*outputCnt,		// In/Out
	void		*outputStruct,		// Out
	size_t		*outputStructCnt)	// In/Out
AVAILABLE_MAC_OS_X_VERSION_10_5_AND_LATER;

I know that it's possible to adapt, since the developer of [Lab Tick|http://labtick.proculo.de/] has found a way to do it, and credits Amit Singh (the author of the "osxbook.com" link) for some of his code. Does anybody have any advice?

Thank you very much. 71.247.130.225 (talk) 22:28, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

If this were Linux I'd recommend you run ltrace on Lab Tick and see what he's calling, but it doesn't seem there's a direct equivalent of ltrace on OS-X. You could install dtrace taps on library calls, which should achieve the same thing. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:01, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I used Instruments (application) from Apple's Developer Tools, and it looks like Lab Tick does use the IOConnectCallMethod. So I'm guessing I screwed up somewhere with my code. I still haven't got a clue what I need to do, but I'm a bit closer now. 71.247.130.225 (talk) 23:24, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm really guessing here (I haven't written a Mac app since System 6) but it sounds like there's an existing daemon or cronjob or something that runs in the background, checks the ambient light level, and sets the brightness accordingly. If that's the case, then maybe it's still running when your program is, so you're really succeeding in changing the level, but the daemon comes along a fraction of a second later and sets it back to what it thinks best. In that even then surely Lab Tick either kills or otherwise inhibits that daemon, so the two aren't fighting over the brightness knob. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:31, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Just tried it with the lights out, Lab Tick not running, and the keyboard lights on. It still turned them off, and they didn't come back on until I pushed the button to adjust their brightness again, upon which they returned to their previous setting. So it doesn't look like the daemon controlling them would or could adjust them immediately after I ran the program. I'll try running the program and then turning the light in my room on and off again, to see what happens. 71.247.130.225 (talk) 23:39, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, they turned on when I turned the lights off again. 71.247.130.225 (talk) 23:39, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

And it kills the brightness when Lab Tick is on as well. It looks like Lab Tick only updates the brightness when the user adjusts it. 71.247.130.225 (talk) 23:43, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

VBA Outlook

Can VBA Macros be used to perform tasks in other applications? For example, I would like to explore the possibility of an email coming in with a specific email title that would trigger actions in other programs and maybe in outlook itself, such as sending a response with a specific attachment. Does anyone know if this is possible? 90.221.202.1 (talk) 23:32, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know much about macros in Outlook, but VBA can certainly call other programs, most simply if they have a COM interface. For example you can call Excel like this:

 Dim XL as Excel.Application ' This requires a reference to the Office Object Library
 Set XL = New Excel.Application 
 Dim wb as Excel.Workbook
 Set wb = XL.Workbooks.Open ("C:\log.xls")
 ' wb has all the proerties and methods
 ' of a Workbook object in VBA for Excel 
 ' so for exanmple you could log the email there 
 '.. etc
 wb.close SaveChanges:=True
 XL.Quit
 Set XL = Nothing

AndrewWTaylor (talk) 12:42, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

As above, The VBA macro in OUtlook could be used, to for example, call a program with a COM interface, or more old school, construct and execute a Command line. Where to start placing your code is in the Application.NewMail event (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa171307(office.11).aspx) Microsoft Outlook does also have 'rules and alerts' that could be used to do some automatic tasks without programming experience.Cander0000 (talk) 07:28, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

February 11

Manipulating photos with fractal generating software

Hi,

I've been using various fractal generating programs to create art, and one which I've used a lot is an old form of Spangfract (v1.98beta6). this allowed the importation of non-mathematical images (such as photographs), which could then be manipulated mathematically. Unfortunately, this version was only for classic Mac, and later versions for OSX (such as Spangfract X) - though they claim to be able to do the same process - are very crashy whenever I try to import any photos.

Are there any freeware fractal generating packages other than Spangfract - either for OSX or for Windows (preferably XP) which allow users to import and manipulate photos?

TIA, Steego (talk) 02:28, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

TomTom and GLONASS

Hey everyone, I was just wondering if anyone knows whether or not my TomTom satnav (bought in January) can make use of the Russian GLONASS system as well as the US GPS system, or if I need a software change or something to make it do so? Ditto for the future European Galileo and Chinese Compass systems? Thanks, Colds7ream (talk) 09:06, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

You need more than a software change - those other systems operate on different radio frequencies (among other technical details). You would need a separate piece of hardware to handle that, unless your handheld unit specifically says it already contains electronics to decode those systems. Such multi-system satellite navigation devices are pretty uncommon and expensive. Nimur (talk) 15:29, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough, thanks. Colds7ream (talk) 17:36, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

HP 5940 printer info

I have an HP printer (5940) an would like to know the cartridge number for the color black for my printer. Can you help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.207.249.23 (talk) 09:26, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Compatible HP 96 Ink Cartridge (C8767WN) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.27 (talk) 14:20, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Double-clicking with Firefox

Does firefox require or expect any double clicking? How can I turn it off - I've looked through the variouis firefox menus, and searched on the web, and I cannot find any mention of this. I'm wondering if Firefox's eexpectation of double clicking is responsible for some of the problems listed above. I loath double clicking, it is horrible. 89.240.198.212 (talk) 11:54, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Could you give more detail? What operating system? Double clicking to start Firefox or double clicking when navigating the web with firefox? Most OS use the double click system for starting programs. I'm not aware of any options in Firefox that you could change to enable double clicking of hyperlinks, perhaps this is an OS issue also. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.27 (talk) 14:15, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

WinXP. As I said, I do not like double-clicking. I have re-checked that I already have double-clicking turned off in Windows (by looking at where it is hidden, in start/settings/folder options). So if Firefox expects double-clicking, and my computer is set up not to do double-clicking, might that be the cause of the problems? Thanks 89.243.182.24 (talk) 14:30, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I apologize for sounding like a Dell customer service person on this one, but have you tried a Firefox uninstall and then a re-download-and-install? Actually, a Dell customer service person would end up asking you to format your hard disk and reinstall everything from scratch. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:34, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I can't think of any action in Firefox that would require double-clicking. APL (talk) 22:52, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Some of the problems previously listed may have been due to turning on ClickLock in Windows Mouse Properties, which does more than described. I have now turned it off again. Update: I am still getting the same problems, so perhaps it was not that. 92.29.82.48 (talk) 20:26, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Killer graphics card drivers & Ubuntu recovery

My graphics card:

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT

When I install the drivers from the CD that comes with the card, it's all fine - there are no problems. However, any time I download drivers from online, my computer can't reach the desktop; it crashes shortly after the screen with all the "press F to..." information. This has happened every time I tried updating it since I bought the card in late 2008. I recover Windows (Vista) by using System Restore and carry on as before. For the most part, I've lived fine with my ancient card drivers, but now that I'm trying to switch to Ubuntu, it's a bit more of a problem.

I thought it might be a Windows problem, so I rushed straight in and installed the newest drivers for the card from online...and it crashed Ubuntu same as it crashes Windows. Luckily, I had an older version of Ubuntu in my GRUB menu (due to a mistake I'd made a few weeks ago) so I tried using that to get a working version of Ubuntu just without the drivers. Long story short, I rendered all three versions of Ubuntu on my GRUB menu unstartable.

So...

1. Any idea why my Graphics Card of Death won't let me update its drivers, or anything I could do to solve that problem?
2. How might I go about recovering Ubuntu to make it useable again?
3. ...This one should be easier. Once all of this is sorted, how might I go about deleting the other two Ubuntus from my GRUB menu?

In case it wasn't obvious, I'm not hugely technically minded (I struggled to use Ubuntu, having been a Windows user for ten years). Please bear that in mind :) Vimescarrot (talk) 12:25, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

If it doesn't make sense, the following comment is something of a continuation of a discussion KageTora and I had about this very issue before I came here. Vimescarrot (talk) 12:36, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Ah, something I didn't mention to you before. I'll write it here in case it is relevant, but my Vista laptop never updates the drivers for my 'came-with-the-machine-and-stays-with-the-machine' graphics card. I went to the Intel site to do it myself and this made my system unstable so I had to fall back on System Restore to fix it. There may be a reason why graphics cards are not updating their drivers automatically. --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 12:31, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Getting this working again: rename /etc/X11/xorg.conf to some backup name, and if there's a backup or failsafe or whatever file then rename that to xorg.conf (if necessary you can boot from a livecd and change the file that way; you can also copy the xorg.conf from the livecd to the hard disk. Your new xorg.conf shouldn't have special nvidia lines in it. If things still fail, then you may be running into problems with the nVidia kernel module (but I don't think so, as you're getting pretty far into the boot); if that's the case, boot into single user mode, discover the nvidia module(s) with modprobe -l | grep nvid and then remove them with modprobe -r -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 14:30, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Incidentally I've had no problems, on several machines, with the closed-source Ubuntu nvidia driver (which is now at v185 (185.18.36)) installed using Ubuntu's "Hardware Drivers" application (from the Canonical repositories). I've never found the need to install the driver binaries from nVidia's own website. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 14:35, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll be trying this out later tonight if I've got time, or tomorrow if not. I did use the Hardware Drivers application to get my drivers. =\ Vimescarrot (talk) 18:02, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Finlay's assertion - the closed-source binary that is distributed by Canonical (through Synaptic) has been more stable for my system than the newer versions available at nvidia.com. However, if you need particular features of the newest drivers (or CUDA support), the default Canonical binary is not sufficient. Nimur (talk) 22:54, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Photo gallery plugin for Wordpress

Resolved

Hi guys. I'm looking for a decent gallery/photo album type plugin for Wordpress for our non-profit's website. We've searched Google and several Wordpress plugin pages to no avail. It seems like the free ones are extreme crippleware and the good ones are quite expensive. It's also been a frustrating 2 months installing and testing one plugin after the other. The best we've come up with is the current gallery on one of our articles here, using the SimpleViewer plugin. It is about 50% of what we need, however once the gallery is created it cannot be edited, so we cannot add/remove/re-order pictures, nor does it do captions. You can't even bulk upload or bulk link pictures to a gallery (it only does it one by one).

Long story short, we need something as follows:

1. Free (beer) or very very cheap
2. Photos uploaded and linked in bulk
3. Image captions
4. Auto thumbnails
5. Gallery can be freely edited after creation
6. Gallery can be embedded anywhere in a post. Multiple galleries per post must be possible.

Basically something like the current SimpleViewer but less crippled. All good recommendations appreciated, particularly if you have personal experience using one. Zunaid 13:07, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

The only one I've ever used for wordpress is gallery(2), though I've never really used it for embedding (I guess you want a flash applet or some sort of animation script for that?) I haven't looked at gallery3 yet (probably won't bother) and there seems to be another plugin (wpg2) for embedding gallery in wp posts, but I'm not sure if it does everything that you want it to do. 219.102.221.49 (talk) 00:31, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Now that I think about it... can't google wave do all of that? 219.102.221.49 (talk) 00:35, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

We want to host the images on our own site rather than hotlink them from elsewhere. But nevermind, I found NextGEN Gallery which does everything I want, it's quite brilliant actually. Zunaid 11:05, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

multiple files with awk

Hi, if i have multiple awk scripts attempting to write to the same file at the same time, is there anything in the awk/bash/linux specification that would guarantee that each script completes its write before the next script starts, i dont care about the order that each script writes in, just that each can print its line of text without messing up the previous/next line? ie is there any kind of file locking mechanism in place either implicitly or could be passed as a parameter? Thanks--86.27.192.94 (talk) 23:38, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

*nix has (at least) two file-locking mechanisms, detailed at File locking#In UNIX. But I don't believe awk has access to them, nor that there's a (standard) command-line access to them. So your options include:

• use a regular file as lock; your script checks to see if the "lock" file exists, and if it does it sleep-waits and polls again; if it doesn't then create one. But that has a nasty race condition; you can (mostly) avoid that by creating a symlink named lock that "points" to a (non-existent) "file" named for the PID of your script (that way a script can check if it created the common lock). Doing this properly, particularly on NFS, is rather tricky.
• wrap your awk scripts in little C programs (or whatever language you like that does support file locking) as suggested here
• convert your awk script to a more featureful language - a2p will turn it into a perl script and pyawk does some awk-y things in python. Both languages can use fcntl and flock.
• hack: prepend each line of the output of each script with a prefix (e.g. script1 puts "0001", script2 puts "0002", etc.) and then postprocess with sort --key to order 'em.

Hope this helps. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:56, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) If the files are open with O_APPEND (which includes the ">>" in the shell), and the file isn't on NFS, and the amount written per call to write(2) isn't too large (my guess is a few kB), then you are guaranteed to get the lines out intact in some order without loss or duplication. However, awk will probably not call write(2) for each line separately, but will buffer them until they reach some size (4 KiB is common) and then write that much at once (which will not be an integral number of lines, so you lose). But if each process writes out very few lines, then all of them will get written in one write(2) when the process exits and you win (except that it may look odd that the output has blocks of lines from one process each even though they ran concurrently). --Tardis (talk) 00:04, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Essentially the same assumptions predicate my hack, above, so if Tardis' case doesn't work, my hack won't either. Forget my hack. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:07, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

If you can avoid the problem altogether, you're less likely to run into trouble mucking with file locking. Consider, for example, having all the awks write to different files, and having cat come along afterwards and concatenate them into the same file. (This, of course, requires making sure cat runs only after everything is done, but that might be easier to arrange.) Paul Stansifer 02:45, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

One way to avoid the locking would be to use a program that does the locking, like a logger. If all the awk scripts are just writing text, have them log it instead of write it. The logger will lock the file as necessary. -- kainaw™ 03:10, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

February 12

What is this anti-pattern re pointers called?

I'm curious if there is a name for a certain programming idiom I see occasionaly in C where a particular object is looked up through a series of pointers and data structures. For example, in systems programming where the machine might have to search through arrays or lists to find the object they're interested in. After a pointer to the object is located, several of the member values are read and some result is set in the object. However, instead of handling the struct pointer locally, it is re-computed again and again. Example:

Instead of this sensible code:
obj *pstr;
pstr = j->k->l->m->n->o->p;
pstr->result = pstr->x + pstr->y * pstr->z;


you get this mild exaggeration:
j->k->l->m->n->o->p->result = j->k->l->m->n->o->p->x + j->k->l->m->n->o->p->y * j->k->l->m->n->o->p->z;


Squidfryerchef (talk) 00:32, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't have a name for the act of writing code like that, but please note that, on some compilers, both pieces of code will run at the same speed, due to common subexpression elimination. (The Law of Demeter is probably being violated in both examples, but that's a concept from OO, and very little systems stuff is written in OO style.) Paul Stansifer 02:33, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

That's what's vexing; we have a large category of articles about "anti-patterns" that isn't reflective of the real world. The closest I can find might be cargo cult programming, but the metaphor is pretty weak and I'm thinking of AFD'ing the article.

Yes, it's possible a compiler would essentially optimize the second case into the first, if the optimization is set high enough. But the problem remains of the code being horrible to follow and maintain, as well as to debug. The first case would dedicate a register to pstr, the second case would likely use an "accumulator" register for each step in the pointer arithmetic, making a debugger useless.

As far as Demeter, yes, if this was in good OO style there wouldn't be all these chutes and ladders to get to the object and the object might contain a method to do this operation internally, but I'm thinking of the case where the data structures are legacy and the programmer is patching an existing function. Squidfryerchef (talk) 14:33, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Looking for a program/software

hey guys.. Can anybody tell me if there are any programs that records whatever's coming out of your speakers?? And I mean programs as in softwares, not actual recording devices. And it would be a huge plus if that software was a free one. Thanks in advance. Johnnyboi7 (talk) 00:41, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Audacity can do it if you sound card will let it. If not, it may take getting a cable. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:02, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Audacity is defintely the way to go. The user above is correct, you can set your recording options to 'Stereo Mix' and this essentially lets you record whatever sound is travelling to your speakers.

ffmpeg question

I run into the same problem with ffmpeg a lot. I have a set of photos and a sound file. I need to make a video that fades from one photo to the next for the length of the song. I am left doing a lot of calculations to guess at the frame rate. Then, I have to keep increasing or decreasing it little by little until it actually matches the length of the song. To avoid this, is there a way to tell ffmeg that I want the photos to be evenly dispersed over a specific time period? -- kainaw™ 01:08, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm not aware of a method to do that automatically; perhaps you could write a pre-processor script (python, e.g.), to perform the calculations you want and generate the arguments to FFMPEG explicitly. Alternatively, maybe you could investigate other tools, such as Kino (software), which has neat features for this sort of video editing. Nimur (talk) 05:35, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

There's a -vsync option that nobody really knows how to use. :p It would probably really hurt quality though.
s=$(mplayer -identify -frames 0 input | grep LENGTH | sed s/.*=//); p=$(ls *.jpg | wc -l); secondsPerPhoto=$((${s%.00}/$p))
¦ Reisio (talk) 10:45, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Richard Stallman and Proprietary Software Keywords

I'm looking on Google for articles that talk about how or if Richard Stallman wants proprietary software "banned" or "outlawed" or "repealed" or "not protected" through law. I've tried searching using each one of those terms in a separate Google search:

richard stallman wants proprietary software <insert one of the terms here>

I have not gotten all that good search results I've also tried:

richard stallman codified gpl

but I want to use a more common word than codified. Is there any common word that is more appropriate or applicable than "banned" or "outlawed" or "repealed" or "not protected" that I can use, in the form of:

richard stallman wants proprietary software <insert one of the terms here>

--Melab±1 ☎ 01:38, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't think you'll find anything along those lines. Stallman's position has always been that there should be a free alternative and that people should choose the free alternative. The non-free alternative should be left to die off due to lack of support from the community. He does not suggest banning or outlawing non-free software - just undermining the profitability of it. -- kainaw™ 01:54, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't know why you'd think he wants it banned, outlawed, or repealed... none of those are really his sentiments at all. I have never heard him suggest that non-free software should have any kind of legal action taken against it. It is one thing to not approve of something, it's another thing entirely to say it should be banned. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:41, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

The closest Stallman has come to this sort of thing is saying that software patents are wrong (e.g., GPL3). — Man in shack (talk) 05:14, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the above three, and that's the reason Googling isn't helping you. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:32, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I think the OP's biggest problem is he/she is concentrating on proprietary software. Richard Stallman often talks about copyright in general. There are plenty of articles on his views of copyright in general [4] [5] [6]. For example his view "One important dimension of copyright is its duration, which is now typically on the order of a century. Reducing the monopoly on copying to ten years, starting from the date when a work is published, would be a good first step. Another aspect of copyright, which covers the making of derivative works, could continue for a longer period." while something quite a few people would support is obviously fairly controversial. Also "As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying no to proprietary software." Nil Einne (talk) 20:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Probably not the place but...

Alright, here's my situation. I have AOL, but it's very slow (especially on Wikipedia), and often freezes. Today, I started to use my Internet Explorer 8, however my mouse has broke on me so I cannot scroll at all. Instead, I tend to click the scroll button and scroll with the mouse. However, when I click the scroller down to stop scrolling, I often click the Rollback button by accident (has happened twice so far today). A new tab then opens and says that my rollback was successful. Is there some way I can change the settings so a new tab does not open and I do not rollback quality edits? Any help is appreciated. Thanks, Eagles 24/7 (C) 04:29, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the help desk is probably a better place for this sort of question. I personally use User:Ilmari Karonen/rollbacksummary.js, which, as a side effect, will prevent accidental rollbacks from happening. decltype (talk) 07:44, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, but that script seems to only work when you physically click the rollback button, not when you click with the scroller. Thanks anyway, Eagles 24/7 (C) 14:08, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Analysis of Quicksort

This is a question related to quicksort why is in analysis of quicksort running time of partition function arbitrarily assigned running time theta of n i want a detailed explanationSb122010 (talk) 07:57, 12 February 2010 (UTC) prefix:Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives

The partition operation hits each element once and only once. That is n operations, which is Θ(n). That is not an arbitrary assignment, it is a value based on analysis of the algorithm. If you explain why you believe it to be different, we may be able to provide more of an answer. -- kainaw™ 14:18, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Quake 3 Arena

I've just started playing Q3A again after a long hiatus, and I'm a little bit lost. I'm not really interested in getting all the best and newest mods, I just need enough so that I can try out most of the public servers on my list. So... basically, what do I need other than the latest updates, and team arena? And are there any "necessary" map packs that I should get for either? Thanks! 210.254.117.185 (talk) 09:25, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Seriously, you might be better off asking this on the official Quake 3 Arena forum. Somebody there might know. --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 07:27, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

power efficiency of 27" iMac processor options (core2 duo @ 3.06 GHz vs. quad core i5 @ 2.66 GHz vs. quad Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz)

If I got a 27" iMac I could get it either with 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, or either of two quad-core options: quad-core Intel Core i5 at 2.66 GHz or quad-core Intel Core i7 at 2.8 GHz.

What would the power efficiency difference be between the three models?

(I don't know if it makes a power efficiency difference, but as far as I can tell the only other difference is a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics with 512MB in the i5/i7 options versus a ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics with 256MB in the Core 2 Duo option - you can see the options here by clicking "Buy now" above-right of the pictured iMac.)

Thank you for any information you might have. 84.153.242.184 (talk) 12:42, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

(ps. is there a huge difference in power efficiency compared with the 21.5" option due to the screen size?) 84.153.242.184 (talk) 12:48, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Calculating the 'power efficiency' is going to be rather difficult without significantly more info on what your requirements and expected usage pattern is. Most modern computers are quite good at adjusting speed (both in the CPU and to a lesser extent in the GPU) based on the requirements. (The GPU can definitely make a difference BTW, the 4850 is a lot more power hungry then the 4670.) Different CPUs particularly when it comes to completely different families like the Core2 family and the Core iX family work better in relative areas in some areas then in others. In other words, it depends on things like what applications you're running. Are you running these applications 24/7? Do you turn your computer off when finished or leave it on? A 27" screen would definitely use a resonable amount more power then a 21.5" BTW, everything else being equal. To use a simple example, the Core i7 would probably be somewhat more power efficient at running a highly multithreaded app. However it will also complete a lot faster then the Core i5. If the Core i7 then sits idle this will be different from if you turn off the Core i7 computer (and the i5) as soon as they complete this task. (Of course power efficiency is only one part of the equation. If you are waiting for the computer to finish, the fact that the i7 finishes a lot faster is also likely to be an advantage.) If you don't actually expect to tax the computer much, then going for the one with the lowest idle usage is likely your best bet from a power efficiency standpoint given it will sit idle for most of the time. Nil Einne (talk) 18:55, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

can someone explain what the i7's hyperthreading (HT) means in practice?

So, I have bad memories of hyperthreading, from the Pentium 4 era I think. Back then, it was in many ways WORSE than having a single-core computer WITHOUT the hyperthreading, I think largely because many, many programs, including maybe even windows itself, were not threadsafe. But has that all changed? In reality, what does the quad i7's 8 virtual cores mean compared with the i5's four physical cores? If I write a threadsafe number-crunching app for some parallel problem that easily divides into 2, 4, 8, 16, whatever number of nodes, it's just a linear divide, then would THAT app be twice as fast on an i7 (where 8 threads could each be on a virtual core) versus the i5 (where four threads could each be on a core)? Or, would it be something less than twice as fast? Thank you for any information you might have... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.113.106.96 (talk) 16:18, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Before symmetric multiprocessing was common (i.e. when Hyperthreading first came out, before single systems with multiple cores were remotely popular) the Hyperthreading feature was certainly a niche, you could only really benefit from it if your programs were fully SMP capable, and the time wasted managing two virtual cores was not recovered in speed improvements for many practical tasks. Now, however, since HT has been around a while and full blown SMP has even been in the mainstream for some time, software is really ready to take advantage of it. That being said, back to the benefit of HT. The chief gain is when two threads are running and neither can fully utilize the CPU due to bottlenecks elsewhere such as cache loads from RAM or the HDD. Since these will never be quite as fast as the CPU (especially when considering very high clock CPUs) you can get more out of the CPU during heavy load because HyperThreading gives each thread a very fast way to give work to the CPU.

However, there are a number of other technologies to consider when estimating the advantages of HT. In the past (i.e. when HT was first available), power/frequency scaling was very hard to do at the CPU level, and not terribly effective. So, you wanted to get the most out of that one CPU that you could, since adding a second would not only be costly but it would double your power consumption. Now, frequency scaling is very effective and multi-core chips with low power envelopes are common. This means that having four cores instead of two cores and two virtual, hyperthreaded cores is not very costly. --Jmeden2000 (talk) 17:44, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Thre is any program that i can use to get the average Amplitude of a song?

Thre is any program that i can use on a sound file to get the average Amplitude of a song?201.78.204.108 (talk) 16:19, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if it has the average amplitude feature, but Audacity will show you the waveforms of a song. Ks0stm ^(T•C•G) 16:40, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

If by "amplitude" you mean "volume", normalizers are used to calculate the average volume of a song. Then, the song is increased/decreased in volume to move the average to the volume that the listener wants. -- kainaw™ 16:53, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

FORGET about amplitude, what I meant was frequency. PS:sorry, i am new to this sound related names. 187.89.31.29 (talk) 22:44, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

The frequency spectrum of the entire song can be determined by simply taking the fourier transform of the entire song (or taking the transform of many frames and stacking them). Then you can choose the peak frequency, or you can perform some type of averaging. Do you expect this result to be meaningful in some way? Nimur (talk) 22:15, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Maybe, i want to test, if by creating a database with the EXACT average frequency value of some songs, you would be able to find similar songs, by getting a song and looking the other songs that have closer average frequency values.

Is just a wierd idea that i had. 187.89.31.29 (talk) 22:44, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

See acoustic fingerprint, which is the technical term for it, though it requires much more than just average the frequencies. It is not a trivial problem - there are entire companies that dedicate themselves to developing it. —Akrabbim^talk 22:48, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Averaging volume or frequency isn't going to find you similar songs - period. You need much more sophisticated analysis to do that. Extracting the 'beat' of the song and calculating the number of beats per minute might go some way to do that - but even so, it would be pretty sketchy. Services that do this (Pandora Radio is one) do it by noting your reactions to music and comparing them to those of other people for the same music - when it finds other people with the same likes/dislikes as you - it suggests that you might like the other things that they like. It's amazing how good it is at doing that. But it's not using anything as simplistic as an average frequency/amplitude! SteveBaker (talk) 14:46, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Pandora does more than just compare what you like with what other people like: see the Music Genome Project. Sites like last.fm and services like iTunes Genius are more genre/taste/popularity-based. —Akrabbim^talk 15:08, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I knew that better ideas then mine existed, and my idea would not work most of the time (or every time), I just asked that because of curiosity, i just was curious to see what recommendations, my idea would show. About last.fm/pandora/..... I already know them and use them. They are good.187.89.164.224 (talk) 04:13, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

can I force windiows 7 into a VERY low resolution (e.g. 640x480)

I have an eee pc 1005H and would like to force it into go to 640x480 (windows 7). can I? how? thanks. 82.113.106.96 (talk) 17:26, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Possibly. Go into Control Panel -> Display -> Change Display Settings -> Advanced Settings and click on List All Modes. The list will show all the modes that your graphics card/driver supports (which will include 640x480 if supported). However, your EEE PC has a widescreen monitor so 640x480 is going to look stretched on it! ZX81 ^talk 17:50, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

yeah, thanks, it "worked" - only it doesn't look stretched, instead there are super-thick black borders with a small 640x480 window in the middle (typing on it now). man, with such thick borders screen looks just like an iPad :) anyway thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.113.106.96 (talk) 17:59, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I suspect you will have to fiddle with the video driver software if you want it to "stretch" rather than add borders. --Mr.98 (talk) 03:38, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Scan cancelled; no items to scan

Resolved

This refers to [7].

I emailed Norton about this and was told to use chat support. I was quite busy last week with the weather and didn't take the time to do it. This week when I did, the person, after taking control of my computer and watching the scan I started manually and looking at other things, asked to see the error message.

There was only one way to do that without waiting a week. I scheduled a new full system scan. Well, that didn't work. The scan started normally. Which solved the problem. Like Dorothy, had the power all along. I just didn't know. The scheduling was done with the old software, but this new scan was scheduled with the new software. Problem solved!Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:14, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Apparently my computer does have a backslash key. For some reason I never noticed it. I also realize that shift and backslash produce a piped link.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:52, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Check when a folder was last accessed in Mac OS X 10.6

Is there software that will allow me to check the history of when a particular folder has been opened since its creation? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.208.7.232 (talk) 22:24, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

The last access time (called the "atime") is (generally) stored, and you can see those by saying ls -lu (rather than just ls -l). For an explanation of the different kinds of time stored for a unix inode see stat (Unix). But this has a performance cost - it means every time you look at a file (or a folder) the filesystem has to update its inode, which can get rather expensive. So for this reason it's not uncommon to mount filesystems saying "noatime", which prevents this (and makes the atime field meaningless). If you want every time it's been opened, and not just the last, that's not something a conventional filesystem will do - it'd have to keep a huge log. While I can see a very few applications for super-secure environments like banking or an intelligence agency (and even then, would they want this log at the filesystem level anyway) but not for normal uses. Note that if you wanted to be able to store all the previous revisions of a file then a versioning file system can do that. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:16, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

is there a thunderbird add-on for better split-file downloads from Usenet?

I am trying to download open-source Linux ISO's from usenet with Thunderbird, but naturally these are split into many, many files, and Thunderbird doesn't seem to have any built-in capability to download/collate them all at once. However, it seems to have a robust add-on system.

My question is: is there a Mozilla Thunderbird add-on to better download binary files from Usenet that are split across many messages?. THanks. 84.153.242.184 (talk) 23:09, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea whatsoever why you would ever want to download a Linux .iso with Thunderbird from Usenet (or even how?!), but I can tell you that if you want to download a bootable .iso (bootable from a flash drive) then UNetbootin is your answer - it has all the major distros. If you want it bootable from a CD, then just go to the site in question and download it from there. I really have no idea why you have chosen such a (in my mind) ridiculous way to do something which is really simple. :) --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 07:23, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Haha, okay. I should have said:

“ I'm trying to download binary files from Usenet (only "open-source Linux ISO's" of course) ”

Notice the quotation marks. Now, does anyone have any ideas? 82.113.106.195 (talk) 12:58, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

(He means "porn") SteveBaker (talk) 14:38, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I think that you would think so says more about you than about me. All I'm saying is, how do I get an add-on to make the process of downloading totally Free, open-source Linux ISO's from usenet less of a pain with Thunderbird. Whether this would apply to any other kinds of files is irrelevant. (Obviously it would). 82.113.121.88 (talk) 16:05, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

There may be, but I've never come across them. There are far better binary grabbers of course some of which are free including ones specialised for NZB some of so I'm not that surprised no one has bothered to try add this to Thunderbird. Nil Einne (talk) 18:42, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

MIDI on modern computers

In the old days I bought a MIDI cable that connected my keyboard to the "joystick"-type (serial?) port on my old computer. This old computer even had built-in support for SoundFonts in the Windows Control Panel -- I could download a SoundFont and hear a better piano reproduction, for example, through the audio attached to the computer. My modern computer has none of this capability. How do you connect MIDI these days? Does one need to buy a non-integrated sound card to get the appropriate port, or can you connect via other means? If you accept bonus questions, is support for SoundFonts hiding in all Windows systems with integrated audio or would I again need a sound card that supported it? (The old computer just had integrated audio, but maybe it was really special...) Thanks Llorando (talk) 23:22, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

It's very common to make the MIDI connection over USB [8]; a lot of modern keyboards (etc.) have a USB port themselves, and you're tunnelling MIDI over USB end-to-end. For older, and sometimes for cheaper, equipment you end up with a usb-MIDI bridge, and a normal MIDI port at the instrument end. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:33, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

February 13

Ubuntu format taking forever

I've plugged an external 1.5TB hard disk into this PC here and booted from the latest Ubuntu install disk. I went through the install wizard and the "Installing system" dialog is now showing, claiming "Partitions formatting". It's been stuck at 5% for a really long time. Is there a way to figure out whether it's dead or not? Comet Tuttle (talk) 00:28, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

run iotop (or better yet iotop -a); you should see a mkfs.ext3 process chucking out a fair amount of write iops; no writes means no progress. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:52, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip — iotop isn't installed, so it recommended I do a sudo apt-get iotop, but then apt-get didn't recognize iotop as a package; so off the power went! Thanks - Comet Tuttle (talk) 01:05, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

As can be seen here iotop is in the universe section of ubuntu repositories. Universe isn't enabled by default so you would have needed to enable it to install iotop. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 13:12, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Google Buzz

I've been sucked into Google Buzz just like a horrific number of other people, and, because I don't like the idea (I will save my reasons for another site as Wikipedia is not a soapbox) I want to get out from it. Is there any way that I can exit this intrusive project that came along to my email account with no warning nor any information whatsoever on how to use it? TIA! --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 01:36, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

First off, go to Settings/Labels, and you can hide the "Buzz" label. If you want to completely filter out Buzz, see this Lifehacker Article: Hide/Remove Google Buzz Updates from Your Gmail Inbox. -^Avic_ennasis @ {{subst:CURRENTTIME}}, {{subst:#time: xjj xjF xjY }} / @ 03:10, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

It's not the hiding/removing of the updates that I am concerned about. I don't want people following me. [soapbox] As a case in point, when I opened gmail a couple of days ago and found that I had this GoogleBuzz added to my account, I was automatically already following 6 people, completely without my consent. One of these people was a person who had contacted me a while back about translation of Japanese manga - we talked for a while, but the project fizzled out for various reasons and we both eventually forgot we'd even met. Anyway, now, GoogleBuzz is inviting me to go and look at pictures of his family that he put on Picasaweb (and emailed me the pictures anyway even if I didn't want to have a look), and he probably doesn't even know that GoogleBuzz has done this. This is why I don't want to be part of it and completely out of it. It's a privacy thing. Is there any way to just disable the ability for people to follow me? Also, I've written on here about Facebook and the complete lack of control that you have over people writing whatever they want on your 'wall', and I am thinking that this will become the same. I already know the names and personal interests of many of the friends of the six people whom, by default, I am supposedly following, and really, I don't want my boss looking around and seeing what my mates, and their mates, and then THEIR mates are into. Ridiculous! Email and who I talk to should be my own business and no-one else's. [/soapbox] So, is it possible to disable it completely? --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 07:15, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I noticed this too, and I can't find a way to disable it either. I suggest writing to google and threaten to leave them for another email provider if they don't rectify the situation. If enough people don't want it and complain, they'll have to do something or risk losing their ad-revenue. This is also worth reading. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.27 (talk) 14:51, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Cheers. That link shows there are plenty of people who have the same idea, though there is no information on how to opt out of this feature. Writing to Google may be the only option, and that is what I have just done, but, not surprisingly, in the drop-down menus where you have to select what service you are referring to, GoogleBuzz is nowhere to be found. 'Other' was the most appropriate one. We'll see how long this takes. Cheers. --KageTora - (影虎) (A word...?) 17:07, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

FWIW, I never clicked on any link connected with Buzz and only clicked the "Turn off Buzz" link. Now I can't find any mention of Buzz except for the link to turn it back on. Perhaps that;s the secret to maintaining your privacy. Astronaut (talk) 18:19, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

The first rule of Google Buzz is not to talk about Google Buzz. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:40, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I believe (though I can't be sure) that if you haven't "connected" anything (like Chat status messages, or Google Reader or Twitter) to Google Buzz, no on will be able to see anything from you (if you have connected those things, you can remove them). (There's also a public profile might have set up.) So I believe that everything is private-by-default (except that other people can see that you exist; but the people who can follow you know that already). If my analysis is correct, Buzz is not inherently intrusive, it's just that Google should have been more clear. Paul Stansifer 00:10, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Google has now added a way to disable Buzz completely. Also, it looks like I was wrong -- it used to connect to public Picasa and Google Reader items automatically. Paul (not signed in) 71.174.127.229 (talk) 17:11, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Nice. Thanks for the update —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.27 (talk) 17:46, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Make server think I'm a browser

Resolved

Hello! I'm using Java to query a server (specifically, http://www.rae.es, a Spanish dictionary website), but if I do the exact same query (http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltGUIBusUsual?LEMA=tomar&origen=RAE&TIPO_BUS=3) in Firefox, then copy-and-paste it into my Java code, I get two different responses. For Firefox, I get the proper response to the query, but for Java, I get a response from the home page (http://www.rae.es). It seems like the server knows I'm using a automated program and is refusing my request. Is there any way to make the server think the request is coming from a browser, or otherwise fix this problem? Of course, I know about etiquette and will program a delay between queries. Thank you for any advice!--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 01:39, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Try changing the user agent string. --Spoon! (talk) 02:59, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip, but googling "java change user agent" has only brought up dead threads on forums and incomplete answers. Can anyone help me with an implementation specific to Java? I mean, it should be as easy as calling a method like setUserAgent(String userAgent), but I haven't found something like this by browsing through the java.net package.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 21:24, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Assuming you're using URLConnection then an example is here -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:10, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, Finlay McWalter. This is exactly what I needed.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 03:50, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Better performance tracking than htop

I'm using Kubuntu. Is a free utility available that can track CPU and memory usage for each program over the past few hours (rather than just the past second as htop does) and that can also track time spent reading to and writing from memory and disk, and ideally also GPU usage? NeonMerlin 08:02, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Nagios is great, but may be overkill for your needs (it's usually for monitoring entire clusters, but can be used on one machine). Tracking GPU usage is a tough nut for technical reasons ("GPU usage" is a poorly-defined metric - do you mean bus traffic, GPU utilization, etc)... and it depends heavily on your hardware and drivers, so it's hard to get any utilities that track GPU usage well. Nvidia has some performance monitoring tips and a few tools in their developer area on their website - e.g., PerfHUD (unfortunately Windows-only). Nimur (talk) 20:38, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Seeing the URL of an unclicked hyperlink in Firefox?

Something I found useful in Internet Explorer was that you could see the URL of a hyperlink, that you put the cursor over, at the base of the browser. Is there any way to get the same thing in Firefox? Sometimes the URL is shown in Firefox in a small yellow pop-up, but this is unreliable and you have to wait a long time for it, and it may just be a description rather than an URL. 92.29.55.65 (talk) 12:12, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

View --> Status bar. Friggums (talk) 13:36, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

TalkTalk ISP and eMail timeout.

I have a friend in the UK who uses the "TalkTalk" ISP - she is extremely computer-illiterate and a very slow typist. She says that: "after 20 minutes,my computer sent message to say "your > time has expired" while i was sending you an email and i had to type it all again". I'm guessing that this 20 minute limit is due to the nature of the "free broadband" service that they offer. I assume that there must be a way to compose email offline and use the 20 minute time limit to actually send it - but she's going to need step-by-step instructions on how to do that. Do any of you guys know enough about this service to give me a click-by-click account of what to do? I have no idea what email client she's using - but I strongly suspect that it's one that came with the TalkTalk service. Since I have no clue how TalkTalk works, any help would be greatly appreciated. SteveBaker (talk) 14:34, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Well the obvious answer is simply to open Notepad, Wordpad or another text editor, compose the email in that then copy and paste into the email client when complete. Exxolon (talk) 14:43, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

If it is a broadband service, it will not expire. I'm wondering if she's using a webmail application, which has a session timeout? What she actually got was the mail service saying it had timed out, since she had not accessed any new pages? I'd suggest checking what she actually does for email - it may be possible to save drafts. But, as Exxolon says, she could compose using notepad and paste it in. --Phil Holmes (talk) 15:19, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I have to correct Phil Holmes — I don't know anything about TalkTalk, but some broadband connections do "expire" — I used to be a Qwest DSL customer, and they intentionally disconnected my connection every 2 hours because that was the main inconvenience that incentivized customers to pay more for an upgraded plan. The ostensible reason was to "free up connections" for other users, but, suspiciously, they always assigned me the same IP address.... Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:08, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't believe any broadband connections expire in the UK, which is where Steve was referring to. --Phil Holmes (talk) 11:34, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Some modem/routers will also disconnect after a certain amount of inactivity (this can usually be turned off). In Malaysia time limited broadband (ADSL) packages exist Nil Einne (talk) 18:37, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm a TalkTalk customer and my connection never expires/disconnects/timeouts due to inactivity. I would imagine it's as Phil Holmes says and her site session is timing out. TalkTalk do not package a standalone email client with their installation discs, they do offer webmail though at talktalk.com/mail. Nanonic (talk) 20:40, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

OK - so it's likely to be the talktalk.com/mail server. I'll try explaining how to cut/paste from notepad. Thanks guys. SteveBaker (talk) 23:24, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

No, not the mail server ("Message Transfer Agent"), but more likely the Webmail client, which has the role of a Mail User Agent. But copy&paste will solve it. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:07, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Software Question

Hello, I was looking for a specific software that allows you to take pieces of different pictures and make it look like one. I don't want a morph program, I was thinking more along the lines of what they have at a plastic surgeons office where they could take your picture and change the nose or eyes to show how you could look if you got acertain procedure. Does anyone have any idea of what a program like that is called? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.137.255.212 (talk) 15:16, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what you're referring to, but it does sound like morphing of some sort. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:39, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

there is a specialty software called FotoShop or PhotoShop that professionals use. It's used to make magazine cover girls have impossibly thin arms and legs, among other things. However, because it is specialty software it may be very expensive, maybe as much as several thousand dollars, I haven't looked. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.113.106.195 (talk) 20:27, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean Photoshop? It's expensive, to be sure, but there are free alternatives (like GIMP, which does the same stuff). It isn't the kind of thing where you can just say "make them thin," it's just image editing software. It's not what the original poster is asking about, I am sure. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:37, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

The operation you are talking about is called photo stitching. It is usually used to make wide panoramic scenes. See photo stitching and panorama. Also, a simple Google search of "photo stitching freeware" returns many good free programs that can do this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roberto75780 (talk • contribs) 21:53, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Any decent graphics software should be able to do what you want eg Paintshop Pro and FREE versions are available. This software won't do the job for you, it's more of a sophisticated electronic paintbrush. It requires some practice, and experience with other graphics software helps. Tools to "change the nose or eyes" are definitely included, these allow you to select an area and move it or alter its shape. Whether the result looks realistic is up to the users skill--220.101.28.25 (talk) 03:48, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Article in TFA, ITN, OTD and DYK?

First of all, I did not post this in the help desk because, well, it does not deal with a technical problem on the Wiki. Now for my question: Has there ever been an article which was on the Main Page for TFA,DYK In The News and On this Day?

Regards,

Buggie111 (talk) 15:31, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure about OTD, since we don't seem to keep records of that on the talk pages, but for the other three we can take an intersection of Category:Featured articles that have appeared on the main page, Category:Wikipedia Did you know articles that are featured articles, and Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:ITN talk. Give me a few minutes. —Akrabbim^talk 16:17, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Update: There are zero DYK-FAs that were ITN, let alone featured as TFA. Sorry to disappoint you. —Akrabbim^talk 16:26, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

That's impossible under the current rules, which disqualify articles that have been ITN for DYK. I am sure ITN has a similar provision. decltype (talk) 16:29, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I didn't meen all on one day.

Buggie111 (talk) 19:50, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

We didn't either. DYK and ITN are mutually exclusive. Apart from that, there have been no FAs that were ever ITN, let alone TFAs. There have been 503 FAs that were DYKs, 216 of which were TFAs:

Sorry. I got it. Thanks.

Buggie111 (talk) 23:07, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

—Akrabbim^talk 20:17, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Windows Media Player: removing the delay between repeated playings of a file

Might anyone be able to tell me whether I may remove the delay between playings of a file being repeated in Windows Media Player, such that it is continuously playing; and if so, how?

Thank you in advance,

88.189.248.66 (talk) 16:40, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't think there is a delay on my computer. Perhaps your file needs trimming? Dbfirs 21:36, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

This is the file that I wish to have continuously playing; in between repeated playings, I have a delay which is as noticeable as it is short, whence my query. Do you hear it also? 88.189.248.66 (talk) 23:03, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

I tried with a trimmed file on my computer and noticed placing the same file on the playlist several times in a row results in a slightly shorter delay compared to the delay at the end of the playlist starting the list all over. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roberto75780 (talk • contribs) 21:51, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your helpful suggestion! 88.189.248.66 (talk) 23:03, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes, on checking carefully, there is always a short delay (sorry if I implied there wasn't - I hadn't tried white noise files). One solution would be to use sound editing software (GoldWave is shareware) to create a single file with many copies of the original sound end-to-end without a gap. The delay in Media Player would then not be a problem. Dbfirs 08:36, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Connecting a DVD player into a computer

Can DVD players, in general, be used as a CD-ROM or DVD reader for a PC?--Quest09 (talk) 18:13, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

No. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:25, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

None of them?--Quest09 (talk) 18:29, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

(ec) In most DVD players the digital datastream is converted into composite video and analogue audio by the electronics in the player. I guess that someone with sufficient skills might be able to dismantle a DVD player and intercept the datastream, but it might not work and could permanently break a perfectly good DVD player. It would be a lot of trouble to go to when a computer DVD drive can be bought for as little as $15. Astronaut (talk) 18:30, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

No regular DVD players (for playing movies on TVs) are likely to have the requisite hardware to interface with a computer. They are fairly specialized devices. There is no reason they would have this capability built into them. --Mr.98 (talk) 19:45, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

awk problem

i have this script, where the input files have been sorted over $1 (using sort -k 1,1n in > out.sort), the problem is that is runs too fast, it makes only one output file of ~200k when i would be expecting 60 files each in the mb-gb region. I'm guessing its a problem with the next/exit statements as there the newest bits i added but i cant see whats going wrong. The idea is to split the input files into files of overlapping ra ($1), by looping through the file untill its close to the region is question, printing that out untill its out of the region then exiting and going to the next number in the list.

#!/bin/bash

for j in $(seq 1 1 60)
do
	ra=$j
	ARCSECMIN=$(echo "scale=6;$ra-0.002778" | bc -l)
	ARCSECPLUS=$(echo "scale=6;$ra+1.002778" | bc -l)
	
	PATHOUT="/path/out/$ra.ra"
	
	for i in "/path/in/*.sort"
	do
		awk '{ if($1 < ra1){next}
			else if ($1 < ra2) {print >> "'"$PATHOUT"'"}
			else{exit}
			}' ra1="$ARCSECMIN" ra2="$ARCSECPLUS" $i
	done

done

--86.27.192.94 (talk) 21:41, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

First, general shell script debugging: use the -x option. Add it to the #! line, or put set -x before the part that's not working the way you want.

Now the reason your script isn't working: you put the *.sort glob in quotes, so it's not getting expanded there. The inner for loop is only being run once, with i set to that literal string, including the asterisk. Later, when you reference $i, it gets expanded and globbed so all of the filenames get passed to single awk instance, and it treats them as if they were one big concatenated file. 98.226.122.10 (talk) 04:47, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

February 14

Booting from USB when it's not a BIOS option

Here's an un-lovely question. I've got an old Dell Dimension 8100 with a Pentium 4 in it. I want it to boot from the external USB drive, and I have disconnected and tossed the internal PATA HDD. After formatting the external USB drive with Ubuntu, I reboot to find that the computer complains there's no hard disk. The BIOS boot sequence lists the grand total of boot possibilities as (1) floppy, (2) CD-ROM, and (3) HDD (not installed). "Surely, this being Linux," I told myself, "there must be a workaround such that I can leave a boot floppy or CD in the drive that loads barely enough Linux drivers necessary for it to "boot" from the external USB drive." Any hints? Comet Tuttle (talk) 00:00, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Try SmartBootManager; this review suggests that you can make a boot floppy which pops up a menu that lets you continue to boot from other devices. I've not tried it; please let me know how you get on (assuming you survive). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:09, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Or PLoP, which (unlike SBM) explicitly says it supports booting from USB on unsupported BIOSes. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:14, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Google Books previews

Has Google ever released statements on why some public domain books are available only in part? I just ran across a book that was available only at "limited preview", even though its title page included a statement of "This book is not copyrighted and is placed into the public domain by Harvard Square Library", its publisher. Do they just not have enough server space to display it all? Nyttend (talk) 01:31, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

If the statement was in the book itself, Google's staff may just not have noticed it. Or, the publisher supplying the book may not have provided Google with a complete copy so that they could still try to sell it. If you're outside the US, you might try accessing it through a US open proxy; some countries have weird copyright laws that Google might still be in the process of navigating. NeonMerlin 01:43, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I asked google this question about eight months ago and received a response confirming NeonMerlin's take:

Thank you for taking the time to contact Google Books support. As you have noticed, some public domain books which are available in full view in the United States are in limited display in other countries.

This is because for users outside the U.S., we make determinations based on appropriate local laws. As with all of our decisions related to Google Books content, we're conservative in our reading of both copyright law and the known facts surrounding a particular book.

Please be assured that we are working to include these works in as many countries as quickly as possible; we appreciate your patience.

The Internet Archive very often has avaiable texts for which google only offers a limited preview or no view at all. Right now they have 1,877,231 texts online. I've grown weary of waiting for google to make good their assurance. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:09, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the points. I doubt that non-US copyright law would be relevant here, since I'm in the USA. I've checked for the book (Notable American Unitarians 1936-1961) at the Archive, but they don't have it. It was published in 2007; do they normally have such recent texts? Nyttend (talk) 02:43, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

If it's public domain as you say, they would certainly accept an upload, but of course you'd have to get it from somewhere in order to upload it. 66.127.55.192 (talk) 10:55, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

It doesn't really matter what the title page says if Google doesn't believe it's in the public domain. For example, the Google preview clearly says 'copyrighted material' and the page says "Pages displayed by permission of Lulu.com". Lulu.com is a selfpublishing website, apparently used Harvard Square Library [9] to publish their book and at a guess give an option for their clients to submit these previews to Google Books but Google Books will only display these as limited previews of copyrighted works by default. You could try writing to Google to tell them they can display the full version since it says it's in the public domain. However it's possible Google doesn't even receive the full version in which case telling them is no use and in any case I doubt it'll be easy to get to the right person. A better bet is to write to the Harvard Square Library and ask them if they'll be willing to submit the entire book to places like the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Google Books presuming these websites accept self published books. However for your own personal purposes, from what I can tell the book is simply a book version of the website (it says it began online in both the book and the Google/publisher description) and the book even says there's a colour illustrated version on their website, so it seems to me it'll be easier to just use the website [10] which may be more up to date as well as being in colour as the book itself said. P.S. As a self published book and website, I would be careful about trying to use this as a WP:RS in articles Nil Einne (talk) 21:32, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Why doesn't abs() return unsigned?

In C's stdlib.h, why do abs() and labs() return a signed integer type, given that returning an unsigned type would eliminate the anomaly involving abs(INT_MIN) and labs(LONG_MIN) (and would make it safe to write (long)abs(x) instead of (long)(unsigned int)abs(x))? NeonMerlin 05:19, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Are you saying you want "x = abs(y) - z;" to be a type error? Keep in mind that C's type system is very weak. 66.127.55.192 (talk) 08:03, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

That shouldn't be a type error (though abs(j) < i will get you a warning). There's a discussion at StackOverflow that suggests that C's type promotion rules (which make abs(j) - i legal) are the problem because they'll unexpectedly convert other signed values to unsigned. It's not a terribly strong argument, so I'd be happy to hear another reason. Paul Stansifer 13:54, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

There's a minimal speed gain in not checking for overflow every time. And maybe existing abs implementations were already doing it this way? --194.197.235.240 (talk) 15:47, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

That is a good argument, if you ask me. Consider:

int a = abs(-4) / -2; /* yields 0 if the result is unsigned, -2 otherwise */

On systems where INT_MAX < UINT_MAX, the following becomes implementation-defined:

int a = abs(0) - 1; /* this suddenly becomes implementation-defined */

The same is true for many other expressions involving abs, that would normally yield a negative value. decltype (talk) 20:15, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Apple problem

I have a new MacBook Pro and need to know please how to put a web page up into the tab bar at the top of the page. There are a number of addresses there already but I had a special address up there and it has disappeared. Help will be appreciated please. Thanks in anticipation.--88.110.51.49 (talk) 12:29, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Assuming you are talking about Safari, Bookmarks > Show all Bookmarks, then edit the contents of the "Bookmarks Bar" (which is that tab bar your are referring to). --Mr.98 (talk) 13:41, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for this, but the BookMarks Bar that I wish to add a page to is that one right across the top, and I cannot see how to "edit" that; any ideas please?--88.110.51.49 (talk) 13:46, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean. In Safari (the web browser), there is a Tab Bar which has active tabs only. I don't think you can make them permanent. The Bookmarks Bar is a thin line that you can enable (under View) to show up above the tabs. You edit those in the way that I indicated. Separate from that is a Bookmarks menu (which can be edited in the same way as the bar. If you are indicating that you had a tab open but it has closed, look for it in History. If there are too many tabs open and you can't find the one that should be open, click on the double-right arrow (>>) at the far right of the tabs. Does any of this describe what you are trying to do? --Mr.98 (talk) 14:41, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

SORTED! thanks Mr 98--88.110.51.49 (talk) 14:47, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

mapquest location

Hello I run a business that is located at 450 saint peters howell rd saint charles, mo 63304 when I use map quest it shows my location 2 miles away how can I get location closer to hwy 94 Thanks Dan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.243.156.150 (talk) 16:31, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Their website says that to fix business location errors you should visit www.mapquesthelp.com , where I can see a link about that problem. 78.149.145.203 (talk) 20:23, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

How do I skip (or automatically avoid) the MS Windows XP startup delay?

When booting a PC it is annoying to have to wait the extra 15 seconds or so (it feels as if it were a full 59 seconds!), while Windows is showing the startup screen ("Windows XP ([...] edition))") with the "fake progress bar" below.

1. How do I skip it at the time it appears?
2. How do I configure the system to automatically avoid it at all times thereafter?

(I would prefer a general answer for MSWindowsXP, but one of the computers in question has: Microsoft Windows XP, Home Edition, Version 2002, Service Pack 3).
--Seren-dipper (talk) 18:47, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

There is no unnecessary delay. Windows NT startup process details the startup process - the Windows screen is displayed as the kernel starts, and while it is displayed various kernel services, drivers, and os services are started. If you put /noguiboot into your boot.ini then the screen itself is not shown, and instead you're shown a rundown of all the stuff it's doing; but this doesn't make things go any faster. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:10, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

True, but to answer the question in the classic way: Get a Mac (not that they boot faster, but at least mine is nearly never rebooted). Or install a lightweight Linux, where you can optimize the boot process to your hearts desire. I know 15 seconds total boot time is possible for 400 MHz embedded ARM Linux (because I met that requirement ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 19:50, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

My Windows 7 machine is on in less than a second (from the hybrid power-save mode). I never preform "slow" reboots. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:53, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

If "Get Linux" was considered to be unhelpful I don't see why "Get a Mac" is any different. Both Windows and Linux have not required reboots for at least a decade now (seriously, the unstable Windows image is from Windows 9x, more than a decade ago). Similarly, hibernation and sleep have also been around on PC for almost a decade now (although support was slow to come). "Get a Mac" just for its hibernation/sleep ability is at best unhelpful, and at worst misguided and ignorant. --antilived^{T | C | G} 23:33, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I have the same version of Windows you do. 15 seconds is lightning fast! Mine used to take several minutes. Do to a particular Windows Update which tackled this issue, it is now faster. If you use Ccleaner, then it may be best not to delete the "Old Prefetch data", or so it is said. I imagine the startup screen is just there while windows does things behind the scenes. I can remember computers like the Commodore 64], which started up as soon as you switched them on, so I too miss the quickness and simplicity of such machines. I would check to see which programs start up at startup, and disable those which are not needed. I have the freeware StartUp Control Panel 2.8 by Mike Lin installed, and have disabled everything from running at startup apart from my anti-virus. This causes no problems and the computer seems faster. 78.149.145.203 (talk) 22:28, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Vanilla XP loads very fast; it's all the junk that you've installed that is slowing it down. Windows 7 is definitely much faster on reboot (technical story behind the reasons for this, which you can google), even with all the junk that I've installed... Sandman30s (talk) 09:48, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

How to get Mplayer to work?

I'm using WinXp, with MPlayer already installed. User Reisio has kindly previously given a command which he indicates will record a video from on-screen. (It has to be recorded from the screen, because the stream is encrypted, and no work-around downloader exists.) I can forsee there's lots of room for misunderstanding, as I don't understand a few things.

The command was "mplayer -playlist -dumpstream URIhere -dumpfile foo" and Reisio adds "occasionally you will not want -playlist".

The things I don't understand are: 1) What is "URI" in "URIhere"? Is that the same as an URL? Should I put the URL of the webpage the video is playing in there? Or something else? 2) Do I need to replace "foo" with something, or should I leave it alone? 3) Where will the video file be downloaded to? 4) I tried putting the command string in the Run box (with the webpage URL included) and windows said it could not find "Mplayer". I tried "C:\Program Files\MPlayer for Windows\mplayer.exe....." and then Windows said it could not find "C:\Program".

Could anyone help please? I have Firefox, as well as IE8, installed and I'm willing to instal any other no-cost browser or software if it helps. Thanks 78.149.145.203 (talk) 20:16, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

1) All URLs are URIs; the difference isn't important here. My guess is that that's supposed to be the URI of the stream, (which won't be the URI of the page that plays the stream). 2&3) foo is the name of the file it will save it to; you can change it to something more sensible. 4) Do Run > "CMD" to get a command prompt. First, run the command cd "C:\Program Files\MPlayer for Windows" so that the program name "mplayer" is meaningful to it. Paul Stansifer 22:27, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

^ that ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:02, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

would a full hd screen look better than one with 33% better more pixels in each direction both vertically and horizontally?

ie apple 21.5" vs. 27"? I mean when playing full hd content? thanks 82.113.106.103 (talk) 21:15, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

The displays are both 2D so they aren't better in the 3rd dimension (the screen itself may have different thickness but that's not going to make a difference to playback in itself). It'll also likely depend on what you mean by 'better'. If you simply mean bigger then you should use that word Nil Einne (talk) 21:37, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Um, I meant that the 21.5" iMac has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels which is exactly FULL HD, pixel-for-pixel. If I watch HD content on it, it would be pixel-for-pixel the exact HD source, no upsizing, downsizing, nothing. Now, the 27" iMac is exactly 2560 x 1440 pixels. This is 1/3 more pixels in each directin (2560/1920 = 1/3 and so does 1440/1080). If I watch HD content on that, it will no longer be pixel-for-pixel the HD content; instead it will be upscaled by 1/3 in each direction. So, my question is: as a result of this upscaling, will the viewing experience be worse, despite the larger screen, due to the upscaling artifacts? Thanks for now udnerstanding my question and trying an appropriate response. :) (I've also updated "each direction" in my question to vertical and horizontal.) 82.113.106.103 (talk) 22:18, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

The answer is probably not, at least not because of the size difference. On the 27 inch screen the HD content is just stretched to fill the screen as there just aren't any extra details, so unless you are sitting so far away that you can't see the details on a 21.5" screen the 27" screen is just a blown up version of the HD content and allows you to sit further away. However, the 27" screen is supposedly very good (although I can't tell too much difference from my brief time playing with it) so it may look "better", but not because it has a higher resolution. --antilived^{T | C | G} 22:22, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

what I'm getting at is that it's "blown up" but not by doubling the pixels or anything. Instead, it is blown up in a less natural way. Normally, I can very much tell the difference, on first sight, between content that is playing 1:1 at the resolution of the source, and content that has been "blown up". The only exception is when the pixels are just doubled in each direction, it can look just as good from a moderate distance, at least so far I have seen. My question is whether I would see the same effect on the 27" iMac? Now, I'm very interested in what yu heard about the 27" screen being "very good" -- can you elaborate on that? Is it "very good" in a way that the 21.5" screen isn't? Thank you very much. 82.113.106.103 (talk) 22:45, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

ps you said "probably not, at least not because of the size differences." I really didn't mean the size differences, I mean the resolution differences. I mean, if you're taking - this is a simplifying example - 9 pixels by 4 pixels and trying to display it on 12 pixels by 6 pixels in the SAME size, it's obvious you can't actually do it. Let's look at the first line, you call the pixles ABCDEFGHI. Now you want to go from that, the source, to displaying ABCDEFGHIJKL. What do you put in JKL? If you don't crop, leaving A and KL empty, what do you do? You can't just double any of the existing pixels, it would ruin the picture? So, you have to do something very ugly instead. I feel the same thing must be going on in each line when you go from the source, Full HD at 1920 pixels per line, to 2560 pixels per line. What do you put in the extra 640 pixels? You can't display each pixel in the source twice, and you can't just double some pixels but not others... so instead, you have to do something very ugly, don't you, to blow up by that 1/3? This is my impression is of what would have to happen, and I would just like some confirmation on it. Thank you. 82.113.106.103 (talk) 22:58, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Modern interpolation work pretty well in my opinion. From my experience of playing 720p on my 1200p screen I can't tell too much difference between stretched 720p and 1080p versions. If you want to know more about how they do it, read interpolation and specifically Image scaling. The main reason why something looks sharper when played at native size as opposed to stretched to full screen is that the full screen version now covers a larger area, but there's so many points of information. If you simultaneously stand back a bit so that it occupies the same field of vision as the native size you'll find that you it's not very different to the unscaled version. And the new iMacs (both 21.5" and 27") use IPS panels now, which is similar to the old 24" and much more vibrant than the old 22" or your normal run of the mill TN panel monitors. --antilived^{T | C | G} 23:08, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Native resolution is relevant. I bet it looks worse, yes, inevitably. Whether it's worse enough for you to detect on an ongoing basis is another matter. I'd look in particular at scenes that fade to black, which for me scream "artifacts!" Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:18, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Automatically set formatting options when pipelining

Do any shells or shell add-ons for GNU/Linux have the ability to automatically add formatting options to a command if its output is going to a pipe and won't otherwise match the second command's expectations? (E.g. change ls | xargs to ls -Q | xargs.) NeonMerlin 21:54, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I can't think of anything to do what you specifically want, but you might be interested in the find command, which is a bit of a pain to use, but can often automate a whole complicated operation in a directory hierarchy; something like find . -maxdepth 1 -exec some_command {} \; executes some_command on everything in the current directory, and leaving out -maxdepth 1 makes it recursively visit subdirectories also. Paul Stansifer 22:14, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

CRT vs LCD

I have a normal 15" CRT monitor. It is quite clear and OK. But I heared that LCD monitor is even better. Is that so ? I mean has it more or less or equal pixels. Is overall performance i.e. picture quality real better or does the LCD sacrifice quality for sake of eye-safety, I mean using LCD won't I find things a bit dimmer than CRT ?  Jon Ascton  (talk) 23:49, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

I have used nothing but LCDs for many years now (as have most computer users, I believe), and they are generally far superior. First of all, the picture is stable (Swedish: bilden flimrar inte), and the screen is perfectly flat. In addition, on a LCD each pixel has its own space, so there cannot be any problems with the geometry of the picture, especially if the LCD is connected via a digital cable (e.g. DVI). Furthermore, LCDs are much smaller and nicer, and do not consume as much power as CRTs. The physical resolution (number of pixels per inch) is about the same. However, LCDs have minor drawbacks: First of all I believe that the colour representation might be a bit worse on cheap LCDs (TN panel LCDs) as compared to (more expensive?) CRTs. Also, you often cannot view the image of a LCD at an angle of 80-90° from the normal. (But that you cannot do with a CRT either, because it is not flat.) --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 00:14, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

I mean, for almost everyone, I would strongly recommend a LCD rather than a CRT... --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 00:15, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Yes nowadays the contrast ratios and brightness (compare LED) of most LCD's are good enough. Refresh rates are generally good enough for rapidly changing frames (games, movies) and ghosting is a thing of the past. The future holds exciting prospects such as 3D screens and holographic emitters. CRT's have gone the way of the junkyards and are contributing to landfill problems worldwide... Sandman30s (talk) 09:41, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

February 15

How do I programmatically determine whether a Wikipedia article is disputed?

To help preserve my own sanity, I've created some JavaScript[11] (called from my monobook.js) that blocks myself from viewing any Wikipedia article with a content dispute (such as NPOV, OR, etc.). While researching the various content dispute templates, I noticed that every template used the same set of 10 or so images. So rather than parse through the article text to find the template, my script searches the images to see if there's a match. It's kind of a kludge but it appears to work.

JavaScript function

function IsDisputed() { var images = new Array( "Accessories-text-editor.png", "Ambox_content.png", "Ambox_question.png", "Ambox_scales.svg", "Ambox_warning_orange.png", "Consensus_icon.png", "Edit-clear.png", "Question_book-new.png", "Text_document_with_red_question_mark.png", "Text_document_with_red_question_mark.svg", "Unbalanced_scales.svg", "Question_book-new.svg", "Edit-clear.svg" ); var isDisputed = false; for (x=0; x<document.images.length; x++) { for (y=0; y <images.length; y++) { if (document.images[x].src.indexOf(images[y], 0) > -1) { isDisputed = true; break; } } } return isDisputed; }//end function

Nevertheless, it's the one part of my code that I'm a bit uncomfortable with. Is there a better way to do this? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 00:55, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Both Template:Original Research and Template:POV calls Template:Ambox with the type set as content. That generates so you can look for that instead? The body tag in an offending page, <body class="mediawiki ltr ns-10 ns-subject page-Template_POV skin-vector" dir="ltr">, also has the exact template (in this case, POV) as part of the class, so even a simple CSS .page-Template_POV {display: none} can stop yourself from viewing tagged pages. --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:33, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Just a comment regarding your current code: If you have n symbols to look for, given a page with m images, you have to do n x m comparisons if there are no maintenance templates. This could've been improved by storing the images to look for in a set-like data structure with faster lookup, reducing the number to, say, log(n) x m comparisons. But from what I can tell, JavaScript doesn't have such a data structure. decltype (talk) 04:28, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Spell check problem in google chrome.

Hi all,

The problem is, chrome automatically spell checks the data I enter in any forms like username field in gmail. I need to tell chrome not to do so. Any idea?

It does the auto spell check only in my home PC( Windows XP).

Thanks.ManoharTR (talk) 09:02, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Suggest report it to google via the 'report bug or broken website' option in the google chrome options - As I remember it didn't use to do this, but started doing it with a recent update - (I have also reported this bug) - the same update also introduced other problems such as drag and drop of selected text within the wikipedia edit window doesn't work. (this also used to be ok) - if you really need a fix immediately I'm fairly sure that the last version of chrome that didn't have extensions was ok.

It's a bug - not a feature ! :)

87.102.67.84 (talk) 12:14, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95604 says what you can do to change spell checking options - right clicking on the input box and selecting 'temporarily turn off spell checking works' - but is only temporary.87.102.67.84 (talk) 12:34, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. :)--ManoharTR (talk) 13:12, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Inbox privacy

Hi

Please excuse me for being a complete goof when it comes to computers.

1. When Outlook is open, is there a way to prevent people from from viewing your INBOX and SENT MESSAGES without having to lock your PC or close OUTLOOK everytime you leave your desk?

2. Can't your normal cd drive/optical drive read a clean disk? I've tried to put some pics on cd, but I keep getting the same window that says, "please insert disc". I've tried other pc's here at work as well, but with the same results.

41.193.16.234 (talk) 10:01, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

1. No, there's no official way to lock the Outlook messages except lock your PC. That doesn't mean there isn't an unofficial addon to do what you're asking, but I've never heard of one and considering that you can just lock your PC I don't see why anyone would make one. Can I ask why you don't want to just lock your PC? (since you're obviously requiring some sort of password to be able to view your Outlook).

2. It might be that your work computer don't allow access to the optical drives (I know I personally lock our work ones down to the IT team only and I wouldn't be surprised if most big corporations didn't do similar). ZX81 ^talk 10:20, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi

Thanks for the quick response.

I do data capturing and a lot of times I have to go out on the floor and in the warehouses or go to people to double check stuff and so it's a lot of in and out of the office. We work with production codes and sometimes some folks would just (when they're on the go) find the nearest pc and punch in a code to find information about a particular product. This is not a problem though, the problem is that some folks tend to scratch where there is no itch. Meaning that when you're not looking or not there they maximise Outlook when it was minimized and casually view your inbox and stuff like that. Now to prevent this I have to lock my pc each and everytime I leave my desk and a few times it's happened that I typed my password incorrectly (like any normal person) and before I know it I'd be locked out. I'm getting tired and scared (of the guys at I.T.) of passwords.

Thanks, NirocFX 41.193.16.234 (talk) 11:08, 15 February 2010 (UTC —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.193.16.234 (talk)

What would be the reason for locking the optical drive?

Thanks,

NirocFX

41.193.16.234 (talk) 11:27, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

The main reason for locking down optical drives (and USB flash drives etc) is literally to stop unauthorised software/files from being copied onto the computer. This is from both a legal viewpoint (unlicenced software) and to try and stop the risk of viruses or other system problems that may cause problems for the IT Staff. Another reason (although this more relates to the write part of the optical drive rather than read) is also to protect company data from being copied in bulk to CDs/DVDs. ZX81 ^talk 12:16, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Thanks ZX81,

Having said that...

I have music on the pc that has been copied via Windows Media player's "Copy from CD" feature. -I understand the virus scare stuff, but how come I was able to copy music from two cd's so far?

Thanks, NirocFX 41.193.16.234 (talk) 14:29, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

screen-recorded theora wikipedia tutorials

Hi guys, I'm working on some video tutorials on using Wikipedia; haven't completed anything yet and still exploring the software I'm using for the screen recording, Adobe Captivate. I suppose I have four main questions (sorry!):

• I plan to output in .avi and convert to theora (that way it can be uploaded here). Will there be a noticeable difference in quality/sharpness/resolution? I'm unfamiliar with both formats, having only ever watched stuff with those file extensions from time to time. My research led me to believe that the quality is comparable between the two, but I've since heard otherwise.
• Captivate can record at different resolutions, and I'm left wondering which option is the best to go for. I'm conscious that not everyone will have a monitor of a similar size to mine, and obviously want this to be as usable as possible for everyone. Generally, is it better to record at a lower resolution or a higher resolution; which is more scalable at the user-end? I recorded at a high resolution, and upon viewing the .avi, thought that all of the text looked slightly soft. Is this resolution or quality related? Can I avoid it?
• As I'll have to license these tutorials cc-by-sa, do I somehow have to cover up the Wikipedia icon, top left? If so, does anyone know a quick and dirty way to do this?
• When I examine certain edits as part of the tutorial, should I request permission from the authors of the edits? Or at least let them know that they're mentioned in the video? I'm half-inclined to say it would be the nice thing to do, and the other half of me says it's being a bit anal about it (and would hugely impact on my ability to produce the videos).

Apologies if not all of these questions are computing related, but I was hoping that someone with media experience would have a clue about the last two questions also! Thanks very much for your help, :-) Maedin\^talk 10:03, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

1. (theora) - Theora should be fine (it'd be better if you could record directly to theora rather than have to reformat later, but I appreciate your tool may not do that); make sure the avi has a higher quality than the final theora you're going to make.
2. (resolution) - personally I'd recommend going at a smaller screen size, so that the video fits on almost everyone's screen, and also to keep the file size down. The softening of the text is an artefact of compression - increase the quality (and maybe experiment with other settings too)
3. (wikipedia logo) - this would be a reasonable case for fair-use of the Wikipedia logo (it's used in many otherwise-gfdl screenshots inside Wikipedia). If you really want to suppress it then that can be done fairly easily inside your user skin by hiding it with CSS. Tell me which skin (vector, classic, monobook) that you intend to use and I'll figure out the CSS for you. Personally I think you should go with Beta (Vector), so that the tutorial doesn't look outdated in a few months (when, presumably, vector becomes the default skin).
4. (permission) - it's a matter of courtesy, like you say; if you're dwelling on a specific edit for a while then getting the input of the contributor in question might be worthwhile. BLP applies (if you're uploading the tutorial here) and common decency applies elsewhere (allegedly), so I'd be reserved about how you describe edits you disagree with and particularly careful about how and to whom you ascribe words like "vandalism".

Please drop me a note when you've uploaded the first one ; I'm keen to see how you get on. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 11:12, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

The fair-use discussion goes, I guess, for all images in the article - so it'd be better if you targetted your videos at pages that don't have any fair-use content in them at all. In practice no copyright owner is likely to be upset (or have much of a case), as low-resolution blocky images that flicker past in passing can't really be shown to cause them any actual loss or harm - but there's no reason to go there if you don't need to. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 11:15, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, I appreciate your comments! May I dig a little deeper?

1. (theora) .avi or flash output are my two options. I'll fiddle with the settings and attempt a few conversions.
2. (resolution) I have a modest (though probably standard) monitor size of 17" and resolution of 1280 x 1024; would your advice be the same, knowing that?
3. (logo) The vector suggestion was invaluable, whew! I would have done the recording with the monobook skin that I'm using and, yep, probably would have dated videos fairly quickly. I'll switch to vector for the demonstration account; can I be greedy and have the CSS for monobook and vector, please?
4. (permission) I'll be careful about which edits I select and examine, but your agreement that it would be considerate to inform editors of their upcoming appearance on a tutorial means I probably will. Hopefully there will be few objections.
5. (fair use) Also a good suggestion, thank you. I'll try to avoid fair use (though I agree that it's unlikely to be an issue). And one more question!:
6. (length) What are maximum and minimum reasonable lengths for each tutorial? I say "each" because I've come up with ideas for a whole series, but I don't want to make them too short nor too long. I'm thinking around 20 minutes is ideal, but then I'm fairly good at concentrating and doubt that I'm a good judge.

Actually, if you're amenable, perhaps I could send you a draft before uploading to Wikipedia; no use embarrassing myself publicly if you are willing to provide feedback first! I need guinea pigs, :) Maedin\^talk 12:16, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

XP bootable system image

I'd like to create a bootable (boot loader) (via USB) (no 3.5 drive) image of my computer as it currently is. (I've already got an utility that creates a bootable reinstall disk on usb but this resets everything to day one - removing files etc - and re-adding various bloat pre-installed).

Is there an easy way to do this - (preferably a point and shoot solution) ? 87.102.67.84 (talk) 14:17, 15 February 2010 (UTC)