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February 11

Programs on Linux (advanced question)

I am interested on something called SFS Technology and other similar software. I am trying to make "portable apps" on linux, (and this program can do that by creating a self-contained executable), my question is: What does a program needs to run on most distros? I heard the worse problem to make "universal linux binaries" is the different versions of libc and desktop environment libraries, So... if I put all the dependencies into one file + desktop environment + libc and essencial libraries, would the file run on most linux distros? the kernel would be the only think to worry about, right? But as long as it is a recent one, it should work, right? Hope someone can clear up my ideas. Thanks SF007 (talk) 00:43, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Every linux distribution I've come across uses a Package management system to install software. If you want your application to work on different distributions, all you need to do is define your dependencies and document them properly. The problem with trying to pack all of your dependencies into a single file is that those dependencies have dependencies - you'd have to pack the entire system into a file. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 09:28, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Statically linking your binaries seems like an easy way to do what you want. --Sean 13:50, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Disable Auto-Paragraph

In Internet Explorer 7, when I click enter in a when editing a html form, it automatically creates a new paragraph. I know that I can press shift+enter to get it skip one line. How can I make it so that when I press enter, it automatically skips only one line? -Wiki131wiki (talk) 02:19, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Tracing a virus to an IP

How may one trace a virus which has infected a computer to an IP or domainin Windows Vista Home Premium? 76.5.24.16 (talk) 03:40, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

In general, it isn't worth the effort (and often it isn't even possible). If your computer is infected, the most important actions you can take are to clean it thoroughly and inform anyone you might have inadvertently infected. Other than that, you can analyze why your computer became infected and take precautions to prevent a recurrence. – 74  04:04, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Viruses spread. Although they almost always originate from one source, an IP address which you may have traced the virus to would usually be a normal computer belonging to a normal user - they've just been infected by the virus! --wj32 ^t/c 07:57, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

So, when the virus we're talking about is a key logger, how exactly do they get the information that they're attempting to harvest if info doesn't go to their own IP? Would the information pass through the botnet all the way back to the hacker? I don't think this is infection is a botnet type virus that propogates to other computers, but rather a trojan horse that came from a pop up ad. PCHS-NJROTC ^(Messages) 17:34, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Typically, a botnet-compromised computer will connect to an anonymous feedback channel (IRC, website, etc.) and post it's IP address and potentially other information. Any other account on the channel (for a successful botnet there will be many) could be the "bot herder". Security researchers will disassemble such viruses to identify these communication channels, then infiltrate them in an attempt to identify the person behind the attack. Since such investigation is a (very) non-trivial procedure that requires specialist knowledge, the best advice I can offer to a typical computer user is to recover and move on. – 74  18:39, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Also, even if you discover an IP, such an IP address is usually worthless. For example, I was once infected with the Vundo virus. All I needed to do was type netstat -ano at the command line to find out what computer was controlling mine. I also saw all of the mail servers to which my computer was connecting to send spam. The controlling server was in Russia. It was hosted by the Russian Business Network, an organization that promises never to take down any server you operate (a practice known as bullet-proof hosting). It was later discovered that the RBN is affiliated with the Kremlin. Thus, if I hadn't removed the virus, it's very possible my PC would have later been used to bombard a computer in Georgia.

Viruses have become incredibly sophisticated, and the idea that you can beat the teams of FBI agents who are also looking for the authors of these viruses is absurd. If you could, you wouldn't find the answer by asking a short question on a site like this. Virus authoring is now an organized crime. I could see the server that was controlling my computer. It ran FreeBSD. It was bullet proof -- definitely more secure than my computer. So, I'd just stop before you hurt yourself.--K;;m5m k;;m5m (talk) 05:47, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Dwight Cavendish versus Macrovision

What technology is being used in Dwight Cavendish System (DCS). How it comapres with Macrovision wrt its protection capability, acceptance by content providers and cost of implementation for a chip / STB manufacturer, operator? Krisfriend (talk) 10:04, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Javascript pull down menus

Hello Wikipedia,

i'd like to use the functionality of this [1] menu, but format it so it comes to resemble my existing (beautiful) one. The style that they use is here:

.menu {position:absolute; font:12px arial, helvetica, sans-serif; background-color:#CCCCCC; layer-background-color:#CCCCCC; top:-90px} #fileMenu {left:10px; width:70px} #searchMenu {left:85px; width:100px} A {text-decoration:none; color:#000000} A:hover {background-color:#000099; color:#FFFFFF}

Essentially, i don't understand where its getting its top border from. (Perhaps the 'Top' attribute autmatically assigns a border?) As the I'm looking to create the 'tab' effect (whereby each tab has 4 borders apart from the 'current' tab, which has the bottom one missing), i'd really like to be able to play around with this -any ideas?

Many thanks,81.140.37.58 (talk) 11:11, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I didn't see a top border? Top does not automatically assign a border. I suspect the appearance of a border comes from the position of the element and its background or something along those lines. When in doubt, try using the Web Developer plug-in for Firefox to identify the styles affecting a given element. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:34, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

(And while I'm add it, can I say that Javascript pulldown menus rarely work as well as intended? I hate the damn things and find them usually to be barely functional, and their use makes it hard to do simple things like quickly search the page for the link I'm looking for. IMO they're not great design practice. Just giving you my unsolicited two cents!) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:35, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I'll second 98's opinion: javascript was great when it was the only way to provide interactive menus, but it has been overly abused and better alternatives now exist (CSS). Anyway, the "border" you noted is actually a <hr /> tag in the page source—removing that should allow you to create true borders with CSS. – 74  13:57, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

That's really interesting! (If not a little frustrating, as i've just spent a week playing around with Javascript!). As an aside question then, is Javascript now becoming increasingly redundant or is it sill worth being familiar with?81.140.37.58 (talk) 11:01, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Array of array

• [2]

Even Applesoft BASIC, a 1970s language created for a 48 k RAM 8-bit CPU 1 MHz computer, has multidimensional array. Why do many recent and much more advanced languages use array of array? Even Cobol and Fortran have multidimensional arrays. Some may need jagged arrays. But most of us may need a simple and intuitive way to create rectangular multidimensional arrays. What are they doing? -- Toytoy (talk) 12:25, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

This doesn't answer your question but in modern OO languages, you generally don't use either. Instead you create a class (or a structure) and then store them in some kind of collection. 216.239.234.196 (talk) 13:39, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I suspect that the multidimensional arrays are more messy, memory-wise, than arrays of arrays, but that's just a hunch. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 13:43, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

But some popular languages started from a primitive non-OO model, such as the old-fashioned C and Perl. Perl was created after the 1980s. PHP is not OO but it has multidimensional arrays. Java, Python and Ruby are OO, they only have array of array. Why doesn't Perl 5 have multidimensional arrays? Perl 1 to 4 were even worse.

On the other hand, I think static 2D arrays are pretty simple to implement. Member (3,4) of a 5 by 5 array (default base = 1) is equivalent to the member (5*3+4) of a 1D array. Even higher D arrays are equally simple to create. Array of array is more messy to use and possibly more clumsy to implement. However, it may be more difficult to create a dynamic n-D array (e.g., from 3 by 4 to 100 by 999 by 30000) using multidimensional array. PHP, VB VB.NET and even ALGOL 68 have multidimensional and dynamic array. -- Toytoy (talk) 14:04, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

What advantage do you gain from a multidimensional array vs. an array of arrays? If you have a multidimensional array of fixed size then yes you can directly index to an element—the same can also apply to a fixed-size array of (equivalent) fixed-size arrays. But, when all your arrays are dynamic the overhead involved in creating a multidimensional array becomes quite excessive: worst-case dynamic addition of an element in a n x m array requires moving (n - 1) * m elements. If a language supplies a dynamic multidimensional array, the odds are good that it's implemented as an array of arrays. On the other hand, arrays of arrays can be unbalanced (saving memory), while multidimensional arrays cannot. The only real downside to an array of arrays is that accesses will require an additional index (often cached), which simply isn't seen as a significant problem. If it really bothers you, I might point out that you are free to store all your elements in a one-dimensional array and do the index calculations yourself. – 74  14:34, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I think the point is that the programming language should do all the allocating of dynamic memory behind the scenes, the programmer shouldn't have to worry about that or any other "bookkeeping" (although the ability to manual manage dynamic memory allocation should also be available). Also, let's say your program is creating a 3D voxel model with fixed dimensions. Isn't VOX(X,Y,Z) a simpler way to refer to each voxel than an array of arrays ? StuRat (talk) 15:06, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Vox(X,Y,Z) as compared to Vox[X][Y][Z]? While the latter might be slightly more complicated to type, I fail to see how it is any more complicated to use. It is also quite possible (in Perl, at least) to declare an array of (unnamed) arrays using syntax very similar to that used to declare a multidimensional array, so I'm not sure why dynamic-memory bookkeeping would be a concern. – 74  15:43, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

You're right. I suspect that many multidimensional and dynamic arrays are implemented on top of an array of array model. I just don't know why wouldn't they provide BOTH models. -- Toytoy (talk) 15:12, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Heh, someone complaining about an alternate way to do something that is missing from Perl? Perhaps if you ask nicely they will include it in their next version. – 74  15:43, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

The point of many languages -- notably C++ -- is that if having a particular type is important to you, you have the tools to make it yourself. The C++ language doesn't provide complex numbers, but with operator overloading you can roll your own (like the C++ standard library does). Same goes for matrices. --Sean 15:59, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

It sounds weird to me that a modern language is without basic mathematical operations such as complex number and matrix. The inclusion of mathematical libraries shall solve the problem. Today, anyone can get the piece of needed software from the Internet. But these languages were developed two or three decades ago, long before the first dotcom bubble and the wide spread of affordable 24/7/365 Internet ... -- Toytoy (talk) 00:25, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

There's no mystery here: Most computer programmers have little use for complex numbers, and most mathematicians have little use for a programming language; the overlap is simply not large enough to warrant the inclusion of complex numbers in the base language. – 74  01:05, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

firefox

Whay is firefox does it say "scanning for virus" even though i have none virus software? it takes a long time to do this, but whay if i have no virus checkers, what is it doing in this time to make the firefox ususuabkle and crash if i try to do other things during this time? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 14:40, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

• 1. In the Location bar, type about:config, and press the enter key
• 2. Scroll down the list of preferences until you find browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone (do a ctrl+f to open search box)
• 3. Double-click on the preference name browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone to toggle the setting value to false.
• — Ched (talk) 15:06, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Firefox has a built in virus scanner... its very limited in what it can do. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  16:14, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

No, the files are only scanned if there is antivirus software on the system: "if a Windows user has an antivirus program installed, it is launched to scan files when they finish downloading...This preference only has an effect if you have antivirus software installed and are running Windows" [3]. Why it says it's scanning when there is no antivirus software installed is probably a bug. There is more information here plus advice on how to disable the feature. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.87 (talk) 20:33, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

When in the software development life cycle are you supposed to create estimates?

It bugs me to no end when clients want hard estimates given sketchy requirements. Assuming a standard approach with phases for business analysis, design, development, testing and deployment, when in this process are you supposed to create your estimates? AFAIK, you're supposed to do it after you completed your design. They want estimates before business analysis has barely started. I'm looking for something so I can explain to them that any estimate prior to business analysis and design is preliminary at best. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 19:27, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

You will need a two stage estimate, first estimate the cost to establish an accurate estimate for their requirement. Otherwise you may give a sketchy answer $1000 to $1,000,000 may cover it. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:53, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Welcome to the club. I was always expected to come up with accurate estimates before the specs were defined, which, of course, is quite impossible. I just gave a really high WAG estimate and hoped it was high enough. If they complained that it was too high I'd say I might be able to lower it once the specs were fully defined. Also, when you break the estimate down into many parts, they are more willing to accept a high estimate. StuRat (talk) 23:53, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Yep - sadly it's a part of the job. I always ask to split the task into two phases:

• PHASE I : Examine the problem, decide in detail how to solve it. Split the solution into modules that could each be written in one 3-week "sprint" and tested in another 3 week sprint. Document the modules and their interfaces. Add more sprints for integration and deployment. Add up the number of sprints and there you have your man-hours.

• PHASE II: Do the work. Make sure that each sprint does actually complete. If a sprint misses a deadline early on - don't be tempted to let that work flow into the following sprint. Instead add the slippage to your final delivery deadline and confess to your customer as soon as possible. That way they aren't surprised when there is a big overrun at the end - and they may be able to help you keep to your schedule by removing features or at least postponing them onto a second version. Because they see the slippage early - you'll be able to down-scope more efficiently.

You can estimate the time to do phase I up-front - then at the end of phase I, you'll have the estimate for phase II. The trick is to fight off your customer's demand for an estimate for Phase II before you've completed Phase I. Point out to them that if they INSIST on you providing an estimate for the cost of phase II before phase I is complete then you will (by necessity) have to put in a much larger estimate to allow for worst-case conclusions from phase I.

SteveBaker (talk) 06:01, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Alternatives to VMware Workstation

If I want to run Windows and Ubuntu in the same computer, what are my alternatives to VMware Workstation? I want to run a normal version of Windows and not one upon WINE.--Mr.K. (talk) 19:55, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm assuming that you are using Ubuntu? VirtualBox offers pretty much the same features as VMware Workstation (plus it's free) where you can set up a virtual Windows system, or you may wish to try a dual boot whereby you install both Windows and Ubuntu onto separate partitions on a hard drive and use a boot loader such as GRUB to select which one to boot.

You can also enable raw disk right-through with VirtualBox. (meaning you can install windows on a real hard drive)– Elliott(Talk|Cont)  20:38, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the answers. I already have GRUB. I´ll give VirtualBox a try.--Mr.K. (talk) 21:00, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Javascript for detecting the browser's language

Hi there, i am looking for a javascript code that can be placed at the top of a html file that will detect the language of the viewer's browser. I would also like this code to redirect the user to a new page based on the language it detects. i.e.:

If it detects English then i would like it to redirect to www.example.com/en/index.html

If it detects Spanish then i would like it to redirect to www.example.com/sp/index.html

If the JavaScript cant detect what language the viewer's browser is or if there is an error in executing the JavaScript (i.e. the user does not have JavaScript support, or it tries to redirect to a web page that does not exist) then i would like it to simply display the rest of whats on that html file.

Alternatively if this can be done in php that would be awesome. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  20:00, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Here is a brief description of how language preference is transmitted as part of the HTTP request. This page shows some PHP code on how to extract the language information; be sure to scroll down to see the more generalized code. --LarryMac | Talk 20:35, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

UK map on a US keyboard

Resolved

Hi. I have two keyboards, both US layout (shift-2 is @). I prefer UK layout (shift-2 is "). The problem is with the key labelled in the US layout with a vertical bar on top and a backslash below. One of my keyboards is already working with the UK layout. This keyboard has two keys labelled like this. One just to the right of the left Alt key, and one just above the Enter key. The one on the left produces backslash and vertical bar with the UK layout as well, as indicated on the key, and the one on the right produces the hash/pound sign and the tilde. In this way I can access all the normal symbols (though the positions are a bit weird).

The other keyboard, however, only has one key labelled like this. That key always produces hash/pound sign and tilde under the UK layout. Thus, I'm unable to type the backslash and vertical bar. The keyboard doesn't have any other dead or unknown keys, so it looks like this keyboard is missing one key from the other one. Because of this I'm unable to remap the key in the OS: there's literally no spare key.

So my question is: which keyboard, if any, is normal? Has anyone else encountered this? Is there any way around it?

Thanks. Amoe (talk) 20:42, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know which layout would be "normal", but perhaps our article on keyboard layouts might prove helpful. My laptop keyboard substituted a useless "context menu key" for the right 'ctrl' key; I corrected the situation using keyboard remapping software. There is a list of free keyboard remapping tools in our article PC keyboard. – 74  21:24, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure you have no keys to spare ? I have 2 ALT keys, 2 CTRL keys, 2 SHIFT keys, 2 Windows keys, 2 Enter keys, and keys I never use, like Scroll Lock and many of the Function keys. Don't you have any of those you can use ? StuRat (talk) 23:44, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

The keyboard in question is actually a miniaturized one, so most of the 'weird' functions are accessible through an Fn prefix key, which would make them a pain to type. I've realized, though, that I do have 2 keys in the Windows key positions (though they're not labelled as such). I can probably remap the left one to the necessary key, since I don't use it. As such I'll close this thread. Amoe (talk) 19:08, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

You can also map key combinations (e.g. ctrl + ⇧ Shift + 2) for your missing characters. The only real problem is remembering where you put each character. – 74  07:04, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Google Cash

What is this Google Cash thing? It's popping up everywhere and really getting on my nerves, some sort of scam? SGGH ^ping! 21:30, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean by "popping up everywhere", as in popups? Try Adblockplus if you're using FireFox. Or do you meant Google cache? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.87 (talk) 21:55, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Seems like a scam to me. This Google search reveals A) Google doesn't appear to have made an official statement, and B) a depressing number of people can't spell cache. I would strongly recommend avoiding "googlecash". – 74  21:59, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

The pound has just fallen to a new low against the Google of 49 Google cents to the pound. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 17:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Keyboard bug

Typing the above quick question has actually reminded me I need to ask a bigger one. My laptop keyboard has taken to jumping the cursor across to another part of the text I am editing every now and then whenever I hit the 'e' key. It is particularly common when typing "have". It can end up with my writing sentences like this:

The quicd over the lazy dogk brown fox jump.

Any clues? I have googled and troubleshooted a couple of times. No help. SGGH ^ping! 21:33, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I had exactly the same problem on an old laptop but only in MSword. Strange. I never did find out why it happened though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.87 (talk) 22:03, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

When this happens to me, it's usually because my palm/wrist is hitting the touchpad and causing an errant click. You might try disabling your touchpad to see if the problem goes away. It's also possible that your keyboard is sending the wrong keycodes (possibly because of dirt or debris under the keys); a program that shows key codes received might help to diagnose that problem. – 74  22:09, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, so either way, the problem could be a nut loose on the keyboard ?  :-) StuRat (talk) 23:37, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

VirtualBox video drivers

I have installed VirtualBox OSE on ubuntu, and from within VirtualBox i have installed WinXp SP3. I am trying to get Microsoft'sWorld Wide Telescope to work. Inorder to do so i will need to install the drivers for my Video card. So my question is this: What type of video card is VirtualBox using and where can i find the drivers? Thank you – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  22:33, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I think if you install "virtualbox additions" it will load the right drivers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.87 (talk) 23:24, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  07:03, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

C: putc is missing characters

I'm having a bit of coding trouble. I've managed to implement an SPN network to function properly on a single message block, and I've managed to get it to work in ECB mode on an array of blocks. However, I'm now trying to get it to encrypt a file and I'm having issues.

I can apparently read a (binary) file as a list of bytes just fine with putc, and I can pair them up into message blocks (16-bit) just fine. However, when I try to write them to file, a few at the end get missed. It's not a consistent number - if I change the message, it seems to stop writing at a different point. I'm using the following code:

outputFile = fopen("cipher.txt", "w");
writeMessage(outputFile, outputMessage);
fclose(outputFile);

void writeMessage (FILE *outputFile, message inputMessage)
{
  int i;
  int heldBitCount;
  block heldBits;
  assert(!(inputMessage.bitCount % 8));
  heldBitCount = 0;
  for (i = 0; i < inputMessage.blockCount; i++)
  {
    heldBits = inputMessage.blockList[i];
    heldBitCount = inputMessage.bitCount;
    while (heldBitCount > 0)
    {
      heldBitCount -= 8;
      putc((char)(heldBits>>(heldBitCount)), outputFile);
      heldBits = heldBits % (1 << heldBitCount);
    }
  }
}

This should work fine - it goes through every block in the message, reads it into a local variable, then writes the top 8 bits to the file (as a char / byte) repeatedly until the block has been written completely. Just for some reason, the output file ends up not containing all the characters. Is there some kind of byte indicating EOF in a plain binary file?

(Also, yes, this is probably horrible code. It was meant to be a proof of concept and was meant to work ,at which point I'd do it nicely!)

92.238.108.207 (talk) 22:32, 11 February 2009 (UTC) (oops Rawling4851 22:33, 11 February 2009 (UTC))

One potential problem is if the null terminator shows up prior to the end of the line, and that may be what's happening for you. In general, one never wants to print out binary characters, as many are, well, unprintable. Instead, print out the ASCII codes of those characters. Printing the ASCII codes and the characters will show you which are not printable. Only ASCII 32 through ASCII 126 are guaranteed to be printable. StuRat (talk) 23:29, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

NO!!! That's a bogus answer...it's not the problem. You can write arbitary 8 bit data with putc. In UNIX systems, it's guaranteed to work - and on Windows machines, it works so long as you open the file in binary mode so that '\n' doesn't get turned into a CR/LF pair. SteveBaker (talk) 05:46, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

It's really hard to read what the heck your code is trying to do here - and we don't have the code for your 'message' and 'block' types - so who-knows-what is going on there. But one thing that seems like it must be wrong is that your 'while' loop first tests that 'heldBitCount' is bigger than zero - then subtracts 8 from it - meaning that it could quite easily now be negative. Next, you down-shift heldBits by that value. But down-shifting by a negative amount produces (I believe) an undefined result in C/C++...or at the very least it's a horribly bad practice - so who-knows-what is going to happen then? Most likely your 'while' loop is broken in some way - but the code is doing some wild and funky stuff and it's hard to know what you're even TRYING to do! However if I had to guess, I'd say that maybe you want to move the 'heldBitCount -= 8 ;' line down to the bottom of the while loop...but I wouldn't want to bet actual money on that. IMHO, you should restructure your code to use a 'for' loop to loop (heldBitCount/8) times - writing out 8 bits each time around - then, in a step after that loop, write out the last heldBitCount%8 bits at the end. That would be much clearer to read and would probably fix your bug. SteveBaker (talk) 05:43, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

The code is somewhat... original, but it isn't that convoluted. True, 'heldBitCount' is required to be a multiple of 8, but that isn't uncommon when playing with bytes (and there's even an assert to check it first). Moving the 'heldBitCount' decrement will *not* fix anything (if you have 16 bits, you don't want to right shift 16 for the first byte). This line may be technically correct: "heldBits = heldBits % (1 << heldBitCount);" (though it looks like there might be an off-by-one error), but it could easily be replaced by a small change to the preceding line: "putc((char)((heldBits>>heldBitCount) & 0x00FF), outputFile);". All of which leaves us with no obvious problems. How are you verifying that all the bytes aren't getting written to the output file? (Attempting to view binary files as text can produce odd results.) Other than that, I would recommend adding print statements to the code inside the loop to verify that each byte is being processed correctly. – 74  07:27, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

To begin with, I knew something was up because I was reading a text file, encrypting, saving to another file, loading again, decrypting, and saving the output - and the output was the input, but truncated. I then used a hex editor (as notepad wasn't opening the intermediate file right) to check lengths, and the intermediate file was shorter than the input, and the output shorter than the intermediate. I can't see why though - I'm going through a for loop a set (and, I'm pretty sure from debugging, correct) number of times, and should be writing a set number of bytes to file each time - they just don't seem to be making it. Rawling4851 08:04, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Hm... SteveBaker, opening the files with "rb" and "wb" instead of "r" and "w" seems to have fixed this, cheer :D ... so I guess I'm going to have to go read up on binary mode, and run some more tests to see where this was happening. Is the "\n" thing always an issue, or only with getc and putc? Rawling4851

OK - well, rewrite it anyway. I find it hard to sleep at night knowing that somewhere in the world is a piece of code that ugly! SteveBaker (talk) 03:47, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Appointments in Outlook

I have two calendars in Outlook, one for Scouting things and one for personal things. Sometimes I need to have an appointment shewing up in both. How can I quickly copy a single appointment from one to the other? DuncanHill (talk) 23:01, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Have you tried copy & paste? ie. highlight the appointment; click the edit menu and choose copy; switch to the correct date and time on the other calendar; click the edit menu and choose paste. Note: I would expect that procedure will create two unconnected appointments; if you were to move one, the other would not move with it. Astronaut (talk) 13:51, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

No, it won't let you copy. You can drag an appointment from one calendar to the other, but of course that removes it from the first calendar. DuncanHill (talk) 21:59, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

But thank you - it does have a "copy to folder" opting in a drop down, which does the trick! DuncanHill (talk) 22:01, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Image scaleup question

For the image Image:Flag of New Jersey.svg, is there a way to scale it up (Preferably without having to edit it) so that it prints to about the dimensions of an 8 by 11? I tried the "Scale:" option in Firefox, but it doesn't work at all. Thank you, 150.250.178.243 (talk) 23:07, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Your best bet is to save the file and open it in a program that supports SVG (for example OpenOffice.org which is free). You can then scale and print it. Make sure you click on the image preview to load the full size file (the preview is a PNG raster file - you want the SVG vector file for printing). -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 23:20, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Firefox seems to work fine for me when I open just the image file, change the paper orientation to landscape, and set the scale to 125% or 150% (though AmosWolfe's recommendation will work even better). – 74  00:52, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

OK, only now it's a little off centered. Can Firefox center it before printing it so I don't have to cut out the extra whitespace? Thanx, 150.250.43.254 (talk) 04:00, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Firefox is a poor choice for printing something like that. IMHO, you should download a copy of 'Inkscape' which is an opensourced/free SVG editor. It has much more comprehensive printing/scaling option. SteveBaker (talk) 05:27, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

You could manually adjust the margins in "page setup" to center the image (which is probably going to be more effort than trimming the excess), but I think you're well passed the point where dedicated image-handling software would be beneficial, especially if this problem comes up often. – 74  16:37, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

February 12

Skiplist search complexity

Disclaimer: I'm still in high school and haven't received any formal eductation in comp. sci., so this is probably a stupid question. Read at your own risk.

According to skip list, the search complexity of this structure is of the order of ${\mathcal {O}}(\log n)\,$, and I don't understand why this is. Big-O notation refers to an upper bound, and a skiplist is basically a linked list with some probabilistic randomness - so shouldn't the upper bound be ${\mathcal {O}}(n)\,$? Isn't this essentially the same scenario as quicksort, which is ${\mathcal {O}}(n^{2})\,$ even though it's almost always much faster than other such algorithms?

Could anyone explain why this is the case?

Thanks a lot, Aseld ^talk 07:11, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

The skip list is already sorted, so finding a particular value is significantly less work than a full sort. A standard ${\mathcal {O}}(n)\,$ search just requires traversing down the list checking each value—in the worst case, we will have checked all 'n' values. A skip search, however, is an approximate generalization of a binary search, modified for application to a linked list. In a simple binary search of an array, we can eliminate half of the array with each test, meaning we achieve better than ${\mathcal {O}}(n)\,$. Linked lists, however, complicate things because we don't know how long the list is, and we can't just pull the middle value out for a test; instead, we create parallel probabilistic linked lists. A search then starts with the shortest linked list, which only contains a fraction of the total values. Once we've identified two values that span our search value, we switch to a more complete linked list and repeat our search on that segment. Once we search the bottom segment (from the original linked list), we are done. Like the binary search, this search method also allows us to skip the majority of values in our linked list, so it's performance is also better than ${\mathcal {O}}(n)\,$. Proving the performance is ${\mathcal {O}}(\log n)\,$ requires somewhat less hand-waving and somewhat more math. – 74  07:55, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, got it - I forgot that skip lists have to be sorted. Thank you! --Aseld ^talk 07:57, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

StuRat (talk) 15:17, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Nokia 5800 problem

OK, so my dad bought himself a Nokia 5800 to replace his old mobile phone. We installed a file manager and some songs on it, but after a few days, my dad got pissed off when the handset can't recieve certain MMS messages (in this case, a downloaded ringtone) properly, with the message "Message could not be adapted for your phone" or something similar. I told him that it may be due to compatibility problems, but he argued that he couldn't believe that "an 8GB phone can't receive an MMS" or something.

Is it due to network problems, or does it have something to do with the phone or the file browser I installed? Blake Gripling (talk) 08:37, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I've always had to phone my service provider when changing phones. They normally have settings for each brand. Sometimes, as in the case of my latest phone, it even requires a secure connection to a local server. Phone customer services and they should be able to help. Sandman30s (talk) 11:31, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Internet on C/C++

Is there any way to access HTTP on standard C/C++? I found something known as Libcurl, but I was looking for something on standard C/C++ preferably. Thanks. Magog the Ogre (talk) 08:57, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

In a word, no. However, libraries like curl (or if you want more control, Berkely sockets) are pretty much ubiquitous these days. --Aseld ^talk 09:11, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Hey, look what I found. Help much appreciated. Magog the Ogre (talk) 05:21, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

tab characters in Safari

I sometimes need to enter a tab character into a textbox on webpages in Safari on OS X. Surely there is some way to do this other than copying and pasting a tab from another program? Googling didn't turn up anything obvious.... --140.247.243.160 (talk) 16:17, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Why won't a number of spaces work ? StuRat (talk) 16:19, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

There are lot of situations where a tab and a bunch of spaces are not equivalent at all, especially involving code of some sort. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 23:09, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

One source suggested ctrl + Tab ↹, though obviously not for your browser/OS. Another option is to use the "personal information" storage capabilities of your browser: set your name as a tab character, then insert it when you want a tab in a textbox. You might also be able to configure a keyboard or mouse shortcut in your browser to paste in a tab character, or use a greasemonkey (or equivalent) script to automatically swap some combination of characters ("<tab>", for instance) for a tab. – 74  16:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Both of these seems pretty silly work-arounds.... (seriously, set one's name as a tab character?) --98.217.14.211 (talk) 23:09, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Cannot Open Pendrive Folder

When I right-click on the thumbnail of my pendrive folder, and click on either Open or Explore, my computer displays an error message saying:

Please insert a disk into drive I:

I tried formatting it by right-clicking and selecting the Format option, as well as from Command Prompt itself. Neither worked. Please help. Is this something to do with autorun.inf?? 117.194.229.146 (talk) 16:45, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Are you absolutely sure that you're right-clicking the correct thumbnail? If you plug it in and then pull it out, does Windows complain? (If it doesn't, this suggests that Windows isn't even seeing it.) And what happens when you plug it into somebody else's computer? Morenoodles (talk) 08:40, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm absolutely sure that it's the right thumbnail. What's more is that, later, I noticed that if I go to the properties of the pen drive, Windows shows used space as 0 bytes, and even free space as 0 bytes, whereas the pen drive's capacity is 512 MB. Windows doesn't give any kind of complain on pulling out the drive. I haven't tried it on anyone else's computer yet. Please help. 117.194.227.183 (talk) 15:36, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

How do you know that it is the correct thumbnail? My windows occasionally changes its mind about which letter drive maps to my pendrive. To check if your pendrive is being recognised, see if it appears and disappears in "my computer" as you plug it in and remove it. Have you tried different USB ports? Dbfirs 20:49, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I've once mistaken a USB-MMC/Mini SD adapter to be a pendrive, and that's what it told me then. 119.111.70.146 (talk) 23:39, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

how to uninstall windows xp and install a fresh windows 2000 professional

How to uninstall windows xp and install a fresh windows 2000 professional. Please give me a step by step procedure to do this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.186.12.219 (talk) 16:48, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

(after edit conflict)Boot off the Windows 2000 cd and choose to reformat the hard drive, however, i am curious as to why you want to use 2000 instead of XP. Windows 2000 forms part of the base code for Windows XP (the other part is Windows NT). I would recommend XP over 2000 any day.  Buffered Input Output 17:19, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree. It's not like the highly questionable Vista, which explains why many people stick with XP. Going back to 2000 really is a step backwards.

Note that formatting the hard drive will also wipe out any other applications or data you have on the computer, but is the best way to remove all traces of XP. Still, I'd highly recommend doing a backup to another disk, flash drive, or DVD first, in case you ever want XP back and/or any of the apps or data. StuRat (talk) 21:36, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

any way to color gmail letters sent to a different mailbox?

I forward a few gmail accounts to a master account, but is there any way to add coloring to see which box each one landed in? I only have a few (3-4). Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.120.236.246 (talk) 17:16, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I do much the same as you, so I use filters. What you need to do is go to the master account and click "Create a filter" at the top. Then there's several options you can fill in (including what email address it's from/was sent to). Hit "Next Step" and then assign it a label (or star it, or whatever you want to do with it). It works very nicely. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 15:15, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Alternative to Windows Briefcase

I use Windows XP and a Windows "Briefcase" to synchronise files on my USB stick with those on my hard-drive. Frequently, something happens which causes the briefcase to declare both versions have changed, even when they clearly have not. Thus I'd like an alternative, perhaps open-source application, that I can use on Windows XP. Does anyone have any suggestion? ----Seans Potato Business 18:24, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

If it's a one-way sync (that is, you'll only change one copy, and the other is a backup) use the excellent rsync. If it's a genuine 2-way sync (where either or both copies of a file can change, and you're willing to manually resolve what is essentially the same as a Wikipedia edit conflict) use Unison (file synchronizer). 87.112.81.29 (talk) 21:04, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I tried to install Unison but it gave an error about the lack of libgtk-blah blah.dll, which I acquired on the internet and then it gave another error of the lack of libgdk_pixbuf-blah blah.dll - I already installed GTK. Are there any programs easier to install? Unison isn't really being developed any more.

I've used Synctoy, which is pretty good. It's not open source (it's from Microsoft) but it seems to work pretty well from what I've seen. - Akamad (talk) 12:46, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Sudden Strike 3

On Sudden Strike 3, when you play the first game in one of the campaigns and get the message 'Mission Accomplished' at the end, what are you supposed to click? It gives two options, 'Continue' (which makes me continue the slaughter in the same scenario), or 'Save and Quit' (which saves the game and brings you back to the Main Menu). How am I supposed to play the second and subsequent scenarios in the campaign? Going back to the saved game is exactly the same as just clicking 'Continue' in the first place.--KageTora (talk) 19:41, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Not having played the game, I may be wrong, but I suspect completing the mission unlocks the next mission, which you may then access from somewhere in the main menu. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 20:25, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps it's less-than-subtle political commentary? – 74  06:48, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Pfft. The game came out before the mission even began. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 08:58, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I left off the smiley on my post above. Technically, according to IGN, Sudden Strike 3 was released on March 31, 2008, while the "Mission" began on March 20, 2003 (with "Mission Accomplished" on May 1, 2003). However, it's quite difficult to believe that a game studio would intentionally irritate its fans just to make a political statement, so I'm still not seriously suggesting it. – 74  13:35, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

(Also, just to point something out, the Mission Accomplished sign was for that particular ship, not for the whole war, so the point's moot anyway.) --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 15:11, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Our article tends to disagree; specifically, Rumsfeld is quoted "...they fixed the speech, but not the sign." – 74  15:57, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I realize you were kidding, I was just being pedantic. But, uh, it's my mistake, actually, because apparently I decided to get stupid: when the original poster asked about this, I looked up Sudden Strike 3 without realizing that it redirects to the article for the first Sudden Strike, and I noted the 2000 release date -- which, of course, refers to the first game, not the third one. So when I said it came out before the mission even began, I was really referring to something that only existed in my head. Sorry! -- Captain Disdain (talk) 09:23, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, I can't believe that any game worth its credibility would create a 'campaign' with only one scenario, especially one where you just sit on Omaha beach and turkey-shoot thousands of Germans. There must be additional scenarios for it to be a 'campaign'. I just have no idea how to access them, and I am not playing the scenario again, because it took me two days to do it in the first place!--KageTora (talk) 15:43, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

February 13

Bizzare SQL

In Wikipedia:Persondata#From an SQL database, the example given passes pages.cur_text FROM INSTR(pages.cur_text,'{{Persondata')) as the first parameter to SUBSTRING. Why is there a FROM keyword here? Why not just pass INSTR(pages.cur_text,'{{Persondata'))? - SigmaEpsilon → ΣΕ 00:05, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, the page doesn't explain what DBMS this example was coded for, but a bit of Googling suggests that the FROM actually belongs to the SUBSTRING, and is actually the standard SQL style SUBSTRING(str FROM pos), as listed in the documentation for MySQL.

Fully indenting the code to see the nesting more clearly gives:

Current code, indented

SUBSTRING(
	SUBSTRING(
		pages.cur_text
		FROM
		INSTR(
			pages.cur_text,
			'{{Persondata'
		)
	),
	1,
	INSTR(
		SUBSTRING(
			pages.cur_text
			FROM
			INSTR(
				pages.cur_text,
				'{{Persondata'
			)
		),
		'}}'
	) + 1
)
AS 'Persondata'

Assuming this is MySQL, the FROMs could be replaced with commas, and indeed the outermost SUBSTRING does use commas, rather than SUBSTRING(str FROM pos FOR len).

Looking at it, I'm pretty sure the first nested SUBSTRING is unnecessary, and this would have the same effect:

Simplified version, using same functions

SUBSTRING(
	pages.cur_text,
	INSTR(
		pages.cur_text,
		'{{Persondata'
	),
	INSTR(
		SUBSTRING(
			pages.cur_text,
			INSTR(
				pages.cur_text,
				'{{Persondata'
			)
		),
		'}}'
	) + 1
)
AS 'Persondata'

Assuming this is MySQL, I think you could also use the 3-argument form of LOCATE instead of the second nested SUBSTRING; replacing the INSTRs with LOCATE for consistency gives you the following (note that I haven't actually tested any of these):

Even simpler version, using MySQL LOCATE function

SUBSTRING(
	pages.cur_text,
	LOCATE(
		'{{Persondata',
		pages.cur_text
	),
	LOCATE(
		'}}',
		pages.cur_text,
		LOCATE(
			'{{Persondata',
			pages.cur_text
		),
	) + 1
)
AS 'Persondata'

- IMSoP (talk) 20:39, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

good PCI GPU

What is a really good PCI graphics card? If I get one, would it interfere with my Intel G33/31 integrated graphics card? Thanks in advance. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 00:10, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

There's no such thing as a "really good" PCI graphics card: all the good cards are either AGP or PCIe. If you do get a PCI graphics card, the most likely effect will be that the Intel graphics will be disabled; it might be possible to run both at the same time, each one driving a different monitor. --Carnildo (talk) 00:56, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

That would really depend on what you want to do. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  02:46, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

For most motherboards, you will be able to select which device (PCI card or the integrated chip) to use. Unless you have a dual-monitor setup, it is more than likely that the integrated chip will be disabled when you use the PCI card. As far as I know, adding a PCI card (installed correctly) will not harm your existing integrated chip. Kushal (talk) 02:47, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Does anyone know if the Intel(R) G33/G31 Express Chipset Family is PCI or PCI-E? Now I'm not even sure. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 04:57, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

PCI-E. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 10:25, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks alot anon editor. I appreciate it. Thanks for the advice and info all.--198.30.180.254 (talk) 00:47, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Keyboard shortcut to switch tabs in Firefox?

I remember knowing how to do it before, but now I can't remember. All I know that ctrl-W closes tabs, so it'd be unusual to have a keyboard function to close tabs but not switch them. 67.169.118.40 (talk) 00:58, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

ctrl-tab and shift-ctrl-tab. Algebraist 00:59, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! 67.169.118.40 (talk) 01:02, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

But these move tabs in the order from left to right. Is there any keyboard shortcut to toggle between two tabs, something ctrl+tab in Opera? Jay (talk) 11:03, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Hmm... I've never realized that one. I always use Ctrl-PgUp or Ctrl-PgDown (maybe because they are still available while my left hand is busy writing.) Freedomlinux (talk) 01:55, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Also, you can use Ctrl+(number here) to switch to a specific tab. For example, I want to switch to the 4th tab...Ctrl+4. Here's an assistance addon for FF: [4]-- penubag  (talk) 03:00, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Or if you have FireGestures installed, you can assign a certain right-click-drag to it. Or left-click while holding down right-click. flaminglawyer 06:03, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but another handy way to scroll through tabs is with the mousewheel- hold the cursor over the tab bar and you can scroll through them quickly. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 15:06, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

CDMA card in ubuntu

I have a CDMA card runing on m y dell laptop (d610). It is running perfectly. It needed no configuration to set up, i simply pluged it in and ubuntu loaded up the drivers and connected. Infact i am writing this as i drive home on I-80. But i do have a queastion: How do i figure out the phone number of the card that i am useing from within ubuntu? (of course i could simply wait till i get home and plug it in to a windows laptop) I have already tried using Verizon's access manager (under wine). Thank you. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  01:18, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Edit, jsut got home, as it turns out all my windows laptops are out at the moment. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  02:08, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

How to make battery last?

I just got a zune and I'm wondering if it's better for the battery if I charge it as often as possible or if I should wait until it's all drained before I recharge. Is it better to recharge battery often? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.187.113.105 (talk) 01:20, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

The battery generally lasts longer if you wait till it's dead. I don't know why this is, but I do know that it is. flaminglawyer 01:27, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but I have to disagree with that. Your advice is good for older Nickel based batteries, but the Zune uses a Lithium-ion battery and Li-ion batteries prefer to be charged more frequently than to be completely discharged. There's more information on the Wikipedia article here ZX81 ^talk 01:57, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm still stuck in the past... flaminglawyer 05:53, 13 February 1998 (UTC)

The memory effect on NiMH batteries is minimal anyway. Nil Einne (talk) 13:13, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

3D Support in xp running as a guest

I am running VirtualBox on Ubuntu, I have Windows XP as a guest OS. This guest OS does not have DirectX 3D acceleration. I would like to enable/install 3D acceleration support. Thank you– Elliott(Talk|Cont)  02:56, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure you can't. This bug was closed in December with "Direct3D support will be added later as well as OpenGL for Linux and Solaris guests". This forum post explains why doing this is hard. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 15:25, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

While not answering your question, I believe VMware has Direct3D support although I'm not sure if it works in a Linux host Nil Einne (talk) 16:17, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Tractive effort curve

I wonder if someone would be kind enough to generate for me a "tractive effort curve" for the article tractive effort which I am intending to improve. (and upload it to wikipedia under the relevent license).

An example of such a curve is found here (first diagram) http://www.twoof.freeserve.co.uk/motion1.htm

For the purposes of the article the graph does not need to be numerically labelled.

Assuming the y axis goes from 0 to 10 , and the x axis from 0 to 20. I would like:

• Y axis labelled "Tractive effort (Force)"
• X axis labelled "velocity"

• A maximum tractive at y=7, going from x=0 to x=4 ie a line from (7,0) to (7,4)
• A continuous tractive effort curve starting at (7,4) with equation y=7/4x up to x=18

• The y axis labelled "T_max" at y=7
• The 'knee' at (7,4) should be labelled - perhaps with a letter such as 'X'
• The x axis should have a label "V_max" at x=18

• Additionally a dotted line descending from (7,4) to the x axis with the point at which it meets the x axis labelled "V_mpar would also be useful but is not vital.

• Using different colours for the lines and axis (or other method of distinquishing) would be helpful

It would be very heplful if someone can do that. Thank you.87.102.43.12 (talk) 03:04, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

You can use an OpenOffice spreadsheet (it's free!) to create a graph meeting your requirements (well, after you fix the formula "y=7x/4" above). Just create a list of x and y values then click the "chart" button and select a line chart. Play with the options until you have something you're happy with, then post the image on Wikipedia. – 74  06:39, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

(corrected 7x/4 to 7/4x thanks) - was trying to avoid having to download and learning to use software for 1 graph - hence the polite and fawning tone..

I'm still open to offers.

OK I used a spreadsheet to create a file

I'm concerned it doesn't display well. Any suggestions as to how to improve it?

You beat me to it. (I had an awful time getting Excel to let me insert arbitrary text.) Anyway, I think your plot does a good job displaying the concept; my only concern would be that it's too big (since shrinking it down to fit in an article causes the text to become very difficult to read). – 74  20:05, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

(I had to add much of the text in a paint program..)

I think I should have used a bigger font - but shrinking the image also 'dissapears' the lines - suppose it needs thicker lines or something - but I don't know how to do that.

I'll mark this questionas resolved as the image will be good enough I think.

I believe the image needs to be vector image svg format to render better at small sizes. If anyone does come up with a better image please post a link on the talk page of tractive effort Thanks very much.

Resolved

FengRail (talk) 20:13, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I am trying to learn assembly and I am LOST

(I am using NASM on Windows x86) I have been getting so many mixed signals. For example, do I need to use the main:, code:, data:, etc. labels? Also, I have no idea why the following program won't work. I am meaning for it to print 2 on the screen.
mov ah,2h
mov dl,2
int 21h

Why will this not work? "ah" is the register of the 21h interrupt. "dl" is the register the output "subprogram" uses, and "2h" is the output subprogram.

Another thing: when writing things in assembly for Windows, is the assembler output a function .exe or does it need to be linked. Thanks much in anticipation, Ζρς ι'β' ^¡hábleme! 03:30, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Update: I got the golink linker and MASM. I haven't tried the above source with MASM, but I got a demo .asm and it assembled it. I, however, don't know how to use the golink program. It errors everytime I try to link. Ζρς ι'β' ^¡hábleme! 04:01, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Why are you using DOS interrupts in Windows? To output text, you must use the Windows API. Or, if you still want to do low-level things, you can use the Native API through sysenter. I don't think your code would work in DOS anyway! dl should be set to the character you want to output. You've set it to 2, which is STX ASCII control code. If you want to output the character '2', use this: mov dl, '2'.--123.243.7.17 (talk) 05:53, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Ok, well how do I implement Windows API in assembly. I have used it before for GUI C++ programming, but I don't know how to implement it in assembly. Also, do I need to link the .obj to anything or is it just an executable (I don't it is, but I don't know what to link it to.)?

Actually, forget the Windows API. Use libc's printf. If you haven't learned how to call functions C-style:

push ...
push arg3
push arg2
push arg1
call function_name
add esp, 4*the_number_of_arguments_you_pushed

--123.243.7.17 (talk) 23:06, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

These days, you almost never write entire programs in machine code. Generally, you write the whole thing in C++ or something - and then analyse it to find out which code sections are taking the most time - and perhaps rewrite those in machine code. Since I/O is S-L-O-W, it's rarely going to be inside the innermost high-performance loops - so learning to write Windows API in machine code is really a waste of time. SteveBaker (talk) 01:34, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. The best way to learn assembly is to use it inline with C. --wj32 ^t/c 04:50, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about the Visual Studio compiler - but the GNU GCC compiler family have a '-S' command-line option that causes it to compile C or C++ into human-readable assembly code - examining that is a great way to learn what to do when you are integrating assembly code into C programs. On the vanishingly few occasions when I still resort to machine code - I write the code in C - let the compiler generate assembly code - then rewrite that code to make it run faster. C compilers are so good these days that it's pretty tough to do better than they do. The other benefit of my approach is that you can stick the original C code into a comment in the assembler. This approach is also a HUGE help when you have to port mixed C/assembler applications onto different CPU's. SteveBaker (talk) 04:22, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

possible to construct 'binary' joke with the word neither?

So there is the old joke there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't. Is there a way to construct a version where the kicker is the word "neither"? Like, there are 10 kinds of people in the world, and neither of them laugh at binary jokes. Unfortunately this version is not funny. Would it be possible to construct a funny version of this same joke? Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.120.236.246 (talk) 05:16, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, and neither of them expected me to use binary in this joke." It's still not funny, but it's progress :\ flaminglawyer 06:17, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

"There are 10 ways to construct a binary joke, neither of which is funny." (Good thing it's not funny, otherwise it'd be a self-contradiction.) – 74  06:46, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

there are 10 kinds of people in the world, and neither of them laugh at binary jokes is funny. No question about it, well done. actually made me laugh.FengRail (talk) 15:32, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Mk 3 there are 10 kinds of people in the world, and neither of them find this joke funny —Preceding unsigned comment added by FengRail (talk • contribs) 16:03, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

74.137.108.115's and FengRail first one are both good (needs plural for "laugh" though). 74*'s has better punch after the comma, and substituting "make" for "construct" would make it even tighter.

Mk 3 is no good; its missing the crucial "binary", but adding it ruins its flow. -- Fullstop (talk) 17:32, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks so much guys!! What teamwork!! With FullStop's addition, I am now settling on the version there are only 10 ways to make a binary joke, and neither of them is funny. Good job guys. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.120.236.246 (talk) 02:04, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

It's still not quite as good as the original - we're left wondering what the OTHER non-funny binary joke is. The original stated what BOTH kinds of people are like so it was 'complete'. But all jokes become horribly un-funny when you over-analyse them! I was wondering if we could work in the fact that it is "a bit funny". SteveBaker (talk) 04:17, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

There are 11 types of people: those who understand binary, those that don't and those who don't realize that this joke is never funny when spoken out loud.

Capture video/audio output

Resolved

You know how on Windows/macs, the Prnt Scrn and the snipping tool (called Grab on a Mac) captures the video output and saves it. I was wondering if there was a similar application available that captures audio output. Is there such a program? -- penubag  (talk) 09:32, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Audacity runs on OS-X. I've not used it on that platform, but on linux and windows (so surely macos) it can be set to record to the "output mixer", which is essentially what gets played out of the speakers. That said, Vista's secure audio path is supposed to allow DRM-enabled players to avoid that "hole" (I don't know if anything really does); I don't know if OS-X has anything like that. Anyway, try Audacity. Mimetic Polyalloy (talk) 12:07, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Wow! Thank you!! It works like magic! Just what I wanted! I salute to you, Mimetic Polyalloy. -- penubag  (talk) 01:46, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Computer Virus

Where are computer virus files located in computer?Is not it possible to delete them? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.70.74.135 (talk) 14:18, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

If you take a look at our article Computer virus you should find the answers you seek. --LarryMac | Talk 14:59, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

They hide from you, they exist in multiple places, they hijack good programs, they mask themselves as things they are not, they watch to see if you try to delete them and then restore themselves—all of these are easy for a qualified programmer. "Just deleting them" is not an easy thing to do. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:52, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Note that if you really mean a computer virus as opposed to other malware like trojans and worms and the like it should always be part of a host file. Often a virus will try to infect every compatible host file on your computer Nil Einne (talk) 15:56, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

A host is required, but some early computer viruses infected boot sectors; more recently, portable storage and mobile electronics are tempting hosts. With the proper OS vulnerabilities, a virus could infect a file system, a directory, any OS metadata, or even free disk space! – 74  16:37, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

PDF > DOC Converter

Is there any software that will put a Japanese .pdf into a .doc? I don't mean a tranlsator, as in language, as that is my job, I mean one that will convert from .pdf into .doc. I have one that does English very well, but not one for Japanese.--KageTora (talk) 15:54, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

What I do for an English PDF, and I don't see why it wouldn't work for Japanese, is highlight the entire document, copy the text and paste it into Word. -- SGBailey (talk) 09:54, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Adobe Acrobat Professional will do it. It comes with Japanese fonts and also is sold as a Japanese version. You just go to File --> Save as...--K;;m5m k;;m5m (talk) 10:06, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Zamzar can do it for you, too. Gary King (talk) 22:16, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

1.6GHz

how good is 1.6GHz for a compuetr? it is enough to play games and watch filmes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 16:33, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Films, probably. Games, not new ones. Part of it depends on whether that is one 1.6GHz processor or two 800MHz processors, though it seems more like that it is the former than the latter. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 16:51, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Even if its a single-threaded player, and a dual core machine, an 800 is more than fast enough for DVD. If the screen resolution is greater than the film's, and the film is being watched in a window (i.e. no zoom necessary), then 800 is even good enough for baseline or main profile DivX/MPEG-4. YMMV. -- Fullstop (talk) 17:43, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

And if you have some sort of hardware video acceleration then you can do pretty well as well. I brought up the core distinction mostly for the question of games. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 01:03, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

You mean like a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom, or Pentium, or AMD semprom type processor? - Good enough for DVD films (with a bog standard bottom of the range graphics chip eg Intel 945 or whatever - the sort that comes for 'free' with the computer)

Probablu not good enough for Hi-Def )eg blue ray films - unless you have a separate chip for this.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by FengRail (talk • contribs) 18:00, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

As for games - what sort - will not run recently made 'full price games' - will run older games, flash games etc.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by FengRail (talk • contribs) 18:01, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

"1.6ghz" is really not enough to tell you anything. See Megahertz myth. Core 2 Duos running at 2ghz can easily outperform older Pentium D chips at 3ghz. You have to be more specific to get a true answer. 67.169.118.40 (talk) 02:17, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

subject line "another option" in Apple Mail

For some reason, I am not able to send a message with the subject line "another option" in Apple Mail, version 3.5. A bit of fiddling has demonstrated that all of the following work: ".another option", "another optionasjkdfl", "another option askfljd", and "another option" (2 spaces). In short, it seems that only this specific subject line causes the message to not send. Anyone know why? Lesgles (talk) 18:30, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean by "not to send"? Do you mean it gives you an error or it just doesn't arrive? I just sent myself a message with that subject with Mail 2.1 and it worked fine. My suspicion, barring more information, is that that particular subject line triggers a spam/virus blacklist on either your server or the server you are sending it to. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 19:27, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

The message goes to the outbox, then opens up again without sending. It could be the server; I know someone else tried it and it didn't work, but she is on the same server. Lesgles (talk) 19:30, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

It could be that the configuration for your SMTP server is set to block messages with a subject that contain the substring "another option". I suggest contacting your computer support about it. -- JSBillings 23:12, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I just tried it on my machine (Apple Mail 3.5 (930.3) under OS X 10.5.6), and it sent fine. So count this as another vote for something on the server. -- Speaker to Lampposts (talk) 09:52, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! We'll see if I actually contact computer support; for now it's easier just to write "another possibility". Lesgles (talk) 06:24, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

VB.net: extra point for football program

I have an assignment where I have to create an American football scoreboard program in Visual Basic .NET. It's very simple: if I click the touchdown button, I add 6 to the label displaying the score and so on. How do I program the two checkboxes for extra points? I want them to be selectable only after a touchdown. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 19:53, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Nevermind. I understand now. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 20:02, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Bluetooth, WiMAX and Wi-Fi - are they Communications protocols?

would like to get your comments, here: Talk:Communications protocol#Technologies? Standards? Protocols?. Thanx, TaBaZzz (talk) 20:04, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I need help

I originally asked the question over at WP:Help desk#I'm a bit confused regarding an edit to Hidden messages#Windows fonts in which certain Windows fonts are used to illustrate an example that can only be understood by viewing them in Internet Explorer, which I made clear in the section. Another editor changed it, but I'm not so sure as to which version is correct. Someone who has a knowledge of this would be really helpful, which is why I'm here. --Whip it! ^{Now whip it good!} 21:37, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Aside from anything else - you should not put content into the encyclopedia that only certain browsers can read. May I suggest getting a screen dump of those strings rendered in the appropriate fonts under IE and inserting that into the article as an image file. SteveBaker (talk) 01:25, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

As I understand it, he didn't; he merely indicated that the content required IE. But I agree it would be preferable to have an image file so the page content is not dependent on a specific browser. Here is an image of the characters 'NYC' in wingdings and webdings (which I, the creator, release under whatever license is necessary) if anyone would like to update the article. – 74  03:11, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. --Whip it! ^{Now whip it good!} 06:25, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Playstation 3 and F.E.A.R. Surround Sound is Wonky

While playing F.E.A.R. (the first one, trying to catch up before I get F.E.A.R. 2), I was sneaking up on a guy who was patrolling. I noticed that when I was facing him, I could hear his footsteps from my REAR speakers. I just put up with it for awhile, until I got to the place where the game plot introduces enemy-placed proximity mines. The mines blew up, and I could see and hear electricity arcing across the hallway. As I turned, I noticed left was right, and right was left.

I don't have this issue in any other game. I have an optical cable running from my PS3 to my audio system (an old Cambridge Soundworks/Creative Labs bundle, a bit like this, but with a different receiver). I have the PS3 set to Digital Out (Optical) as it should be, and I enabled Dolby Digital 5.1 Channel (when I play games the Dolby Digital 5.1 LED is illuminated on the system). I just ran the test function (which plays white noise on all the speakers in this order: L, C, R, RS, LS, SW) and it worked correctly, though I double-checked the rear connections just in case (they were fine). I couldn't find anything searching through Google, so I'm hoping someone out there has a similar set up with a similar issue, and even better, I hope they've solved the issue and can tell me how :).

Thanks. --Silvaran (talk) 22:43, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Have you run an audio channel test on the PS3 itself (ie on a DVD or BD)? 24.76.160.236 (talk) 01:42, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Most PC games have an option to reverse the stereo from left/right to right/left to allow for incorrect speaker setups. Does the audio options on this game on the PS3 have this facility? Exxolon (talk) 15:54, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Screw it. I unplugged the center channel, swapped the front/back pairs, then swapped each of the left/right pairs. It seems to be correct now. :) --Silvaran (talk) 22:04, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

February 14

USB cords

Why do USB extension cables often have a big cylindrical piece about an inch from the plug? My Firewire cables don't seem to have such a thing but many of my USB cables (extensions, mouse cables, etc.) do. What's their purpose? Just curious. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 01:02, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

They supposedly reduce interference.  Buffered Input Output 01:11, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes - it's a Ferrite bead. SteveBaker (talk) 01:20, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Interesting—thanks! --98.217.14.211 (talk) 01:42, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Viewing 'hidden files' on Vista

I have a file that was sent to me, and for some reason it has 'hidden files' on it. I have asked the sender to tell me how to view them, but he doesn't speak English very well and I am none the wiser even after his advice. So, how do I view hidden files on a Vista (Home Premium) machine?--KageTora (talk) 01:58, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know whay you mean by saying that a file has files on it. But perhaps "file" was a typo for "CD" or similar; anyway, you have hidden files. Is the problem one of seeing them listed properly, or of actually seeing their content? If it's the former, and if you're using Explorer, you configure Vista to let you view [the presence of] hidden files. If you can see that they are there but want to look at them (e.g. to view hidden JPEG files) then you'll normally have to change their attributes ("unhide" them, and perhaps "unsystem" them too) before doing this. -- Hoary (talk) 02:25, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

That is what I want to do. Now, how do I do that?--KageTora (talk) 02:36, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

This article, third from the top in a Google search for "vista hidden file", says:

Follow these steps to display hidden files and folders.

1. Open Folder Options by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder Options.
2. Click the View tab.
3. Under Advanced settings, click Show hidden files and folders, and then click OK.

– 74  03:17, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry I couldn't be more specific; I wasn't (and am not) using Vista when typing, so it was from memory. If you're going to follow the procedure described immediately above, I suggest that you also take that opportunity to ask Windows not to conceal recognized file extensions. (I don't know the exact name of this option but it should be easy to find.) Thus myhappyface.jpeg will appear not as myhappyface but as myhappyface.jpeg. When I use Windows, I find extension-hiding most annoying, because when I need the exact name of a file I have to guess what it is (in this example, whether it's JPG, jpg, jpeg, JPEG, or something else). -- Hoary (talk) 03:25, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not accusing anyone of anything - but if I got files via email, and they were tagged with the hidden attribute - I would delete them immediately. (or at the very least treat them as possible virus/malware threats) - Better safe than sorry. If it's just wanting to view various hidden files - see above post. — Ched (talk) 05:23, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

It's good policy to treat *every* file sent via email as suspect, regardless of the hidden attribute. If you weren't expecting the file, or if there is any doubt that it is legit, don't open the attachment. Your computer (and whoever does your tech-support) will appreciate it. – 74  06:07, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

programming in 3 dimensions

will i be able to combine AutoCAD and Visual basic? i want to create a program which can predict the trajectory of an object with a specific velocity that passes by earth. I want to do that in 3 dimensional space. if not, will i be able to create a 3 dimensional space in VB? if not, please specify the application with which i can--Harnithish (talk) 08:38, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

You can simulate 3D space in any Turing-complete language (I don't know VB, but if I recall correctly it supports floats natively as well as classes, so you should be able to do that without too much difficulty). The problem would be rendering it; I'm not sure if AutoCAD will play nicely with VB, but you can achieve your stated goal (albeit perhaps more laboriously) in VB itself (combined with something like Microsoft XNA). --Aseld ^talk 09:02, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

(After edit conflict)Using visual basic to modify the behavior of AutoCAD requires that AutoCAD has an API that you can access with Visual basic. I suspect you can do so through it's .NET API. Visual basic is turing complete, so yes you can program the calculation in it. However both of these solutions are going to be very difficult. If I where you I would seek a program that has built in capability of solving differential equations, and preferably graphing support. Fortunately this is precisely the tasks of a Computer algebra system. Taemyr (talk) 09:05, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. While it's possible in VB, using a CAS as suggested by Taemyr would be much easier. (Didn't think of suggesting an alternative in my original post). --Aseld ^talk 09:12, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Avoiding Element overlap in IE

Hello,

I spent most of yesterday playing around in Firefox and eventually got my menu bar to look (more or less) how i wanted it to.I then opened it in IE and, surprise surprise, it looked really messed up! Basically, for sylistic reasons, different 'items' in the menu bar are styled differently. Orginally, both Firefox and IE made both items overlap rather than sit side by side. to get around this, I put both sections into a separate Div tags, whcih seemed to solve the problem in firefox, but made it 1000 times worse in IE. Does any one know any suitable IE workarounds? (I'm still learning this crap stuff, so please feel free to lay into my code, which is below). Obviously, my valentines day is getting off to a great start!

HTML of the 95% working firefox version:

HTML code
<body> <ul> <li><div id="home"><a href="Home.html">Home</a></div></li> <div id="navbar"> <li id="a">Services <ul> <li><a href="">1</a></li> <li><a href="">2</a></li> <li><a href="">3</a></li> </ul> </li> <li id="a">How I work <ul> <li><a href="">4</a></li> <li><a href="">5</a></li> <li><a href="">6</a></li> </ul> </li> <li id="current">Get In Touch</li> </li> </ul> </div> </body>

and the CSS is here:

CSS code

ul { margin-left: 10%; list-style: none; font-family:Verdana,sans-serif; font-size:12px; font-weight:bold; padding:0px 0; } #navbar li#a { background:#DDDDEE; border-color:#777788; border-style:solid; border-width: 1px; margin-left:auto; padding:3px; text-decoration:none; width:222px; text-align:center; } #home{background:#DDDDEE; border-color:#777788; border-style:solid; border-width: 1px; float:left; padding:3px; text-decoration:none; width:222px; text-align:center; } li#current { position:relative; background:white; border-style:solid; border-width: 1px; border-color: black black white black; padding:3px; text-decoration:none; width:222px; text-align:center; float:right; margin-right: 217px; margin-left:0px } #navbar li { float: left; position: relative; width: 10em; } #navbar li ul { display: none; float: none; width: 50px; margin-top:30px; list-style: none; left: 0; border: none; padding:3px; } #navbar li#a:hover ul { display: block;}

Many thanks, (and apologies for wikipedia's bizarre formatting - i don't know what's going on!)79.121.131.201 (talk) 12:48, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, for starters your html is invalid - you've got one too many close li tags, and you close the outermost div and ul in the wrong order. While browers differ about how they handle correct html and css, they tend to differ much more about how they handle incorrect code. It's always a good idea to check your code with a validator like the W3c one before trying to fix browser inconsistencies. I'll take a further look at your code shortly. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 13:03, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

This is true, but you're actually not allowed a div within a ul at all - the only valid children of a list are list items. You can have a div within a li, though. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 14:10, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

After that, I can't entirely figure out how you want it to look - do you want all the options in a bar at the right of the screen? If you could upload a sketch or a screenshot to photobucket then that would make it easier to help you. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 13:22, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

And if you don't want home to be on top of the other menu stuff (which I guess you don't, given that you float it left rather than right) then don't have it inside the outermost ul at all (if that's what you want, you don't need the outermost ul at all), and you don't need to float it (it'll just be the first thing on the page). 87.112.81.29 (talk) 13:36, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

General advice: IE has two different rendering modes: 'standards-compliant' mode (which is *not* the default, but might or might not be in IE8) and 'quirks' mode (for rendering pages that were designed to compensate for the prior versions' layout problems). If you're designing new code for IE, you almost invariably want to include the magic to switch IE into standards-compliant mode. – 74  13:23, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

That's sage advice; even if you didn't care about IE in particular, the doctype helps browsers and validators understand your html properly. It's always a very wise idea to fix all the warnings and issues that a validator brings up, as even the most trivial things can make browsers behave differently. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 13:36, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I've wrapped your code in <pre> tags to fix the formatting — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 13:54, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I've taken the liberty of rewriting your example without all the ul/li tags (which may be what's confusing both you and IE). For simplicity of exposition I've inlined the stylesheet:

simplified example

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Menu</title> <style type="text/css"> #nav { float:right; background:#ddddee; border:solid #777788 1px; font:bold 12px Verdana,sans-serif; } #nav a { display:block; text-decoration:none; } #nav a:hover { background:black; color:white; } div.framer { margin:5px; padding:2px; border:solid #777788 1px; } div.framer a { margin-left:1em; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="nav"> <a href="Home.html">Home</a> <div class="framer"> Services <a href="">1</a> <a href="">2</a> <a href="">3</a> </div> <div class="framer"> How I work <a href="">4</a> <a href="">5</a> <a href="">6</a> </div> Get In Touch </div> </body> </html>

That appears identical for me in IE and FF. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 14:50, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Concatenating pdf files in LaTeX

Hello, I would like to know what the best way would be to concatenate pdf files in LaTeX without using the PDFLaTeX compiler (For this I would have to convert all my figures into pdf files which is not feasible since I easily have over 100 figures). I have heard about pdfpages but this only works if using PDFLaTeX. Is there a similar package to pdfpages that will work using the conventional LaTeX compiler? Thanks in advance, Jdrewitt (talk) 14:20, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I should post this on a LaTeX forum instead, I just thought maybe someone would have or know of a clever script or package that allows you to insert .pdf files into a LaTeX document using the conventional compiler. Or maybe converting them to an image file such as *.eps would be the better way to do that? Thanks Jdrewitt (talk) 09:28, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Your description is a little confusing. It seems that you want to add some PDF files to a LaTeX document, but do you want to add a few PDF pages to the output of a LaTeX document, or do you want to include PDF files as LaTeX figures? If the former, you can just convert your LaTeX file into PDF in your preferred way, and insert/append the PDF files afterward using tools like pdftk. If the latter, you can convert your PDF files into EPS. Either way, I still don't understand the pdflatex connection. In my experience as a user, pdflatex is just a version of latex that output PDF directly. I don't think it forces you to convert all figures to PDF (that is, native LaTeX drawings are still supported). Converting PDF to EPS can be done using the pdf2ps utility that's part of Ghostscript. If you have bunch of them to convert, you can write a simple shell script to iterate through all the .pdf files that match a certain pattern.

If you clarify the problem and give more information, readers of this Reference Desk may be able to give you more useful help. For example, what version of LaTeX do you use? What's your OS platform? Can you (and do you feel comfortable) installing additional software to get the task done? How many PDF files do you need to insert/append? Do you want them to be part of the LaTeX document (meaning they have page numbers (whether displayed or not), and can have headers and footers)? Or do you just want the pages added as a totally separate section (say, as color plates not included in the normal page numbering)? Or do you want to include the PDF pages as LaTeX figures that have captions and can be moved around? How many PDF pages do you want to insert? Do they need to be extracted from some bigger PDF files first? What formats are the rest of the figures in? Good luck. --173.49.17.152 (talk) 16:30, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Hello, I am using MiKTeX 2.7 under XP with WinEDT as the editor. I would just like to add 3 pdf files, each of which contain several pages, into the LaTeX document whilst maintaining page numbering and the table of contents etc. I have heard that this can be done using the pdfpages package, however this only works if compiling using PDFLaTeX. If you try compiling with the conventional LATeX thingymijig it comes up with an error saying the pdfpages package is only supported by VTeX or pdfLaTeX. I tried using pdfLaTeX but my figures, which are all eps format, do not come out. I don't want the inserted pdf files to be figures with captions, but full page figures without captions and similar margins as in the original pdf's would be ok. I hope that clarifies things a bit better. Jdrewitt (talk) 17:37, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I take it that by maintaining page numbering, you mean that the inserted PDF pages will cause the page number to increase normally, whether or not page numbers are printed on those pages. I don't have a good solution to offer, but maybe you can try this:

• Convert each of your PDF files into single-page (Encapsulated) PostScript files
• Include each of the pages individually as you normally would for any EPS files
• Tweak the page margins of those included pages to make them fill the whole page
• Tweak the page style to turn on/off headers/footers, as appropriate

It may not be an elegant solution, but it sounds like you only have a small number of pages to include. Hopefully it's not too painful. --173.49.17.152 (talk) 19:43, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I think that possibly sounds like the way to go, it might not be elegant but if it works then that is fine by me. Can I just ask what the easiest way is of changing the page margins of individual pages without affecting the margins for the rest of the document? Its not something I generally play around with. Thanks again. Jdrewitt (talk) 20:42, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what would be a good way to change the page margins for just one or a few pages in LaTeX. When I wrote the suggestion above, I was thinking about using \setlength to change the settings before including the PDF pages, and doing it again afterward. A web search turned up this [5] (It seems someone has already thought about it).

There's another solution that might be easier. The idea is to:

1. Use a bunch of \newpage commands (or some other methods) to "reserve" a few blank pages in the PDF file generated from the LaTeX file
2. Substitute the PDF pages to be included for the blank pages, using pdftk or something similar.

The substituted pages won't have headers, footers, and page numbers like the rest of the document, but this may not be a problem for you. BTW, I've found pdftk to be a handy tool for manipulating PDF files at the page level. Good luck. --173.49.17.152 (talk) 00:43, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Brilliant, some sound advice there, thank you very much. Jdrewitt (talk) 01:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Cyrillic typing

How to type cyrillic alphabets on qwerty keyboard? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.70.74.150 (talk) 14:58, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

You install a different keyboard layout—usually somewhere in your system settings you indicate that the keyboard is not, say, "U.S. English" but is instead "Russian." If you have a Mac, "Russian Phonetic" is a great keyboard layout if you are not accustomed to typing on a Russian keyboard (it maps the Cyrillic characters to their comparable English phonemes). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:48, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

If you don't want to do that, run "charmap" (if you're running Windows) and scroll down. You can click on the Cyrillic characters and Copy them to the clipboard, then paste them. Obviously not useful if you want to type more than a couple of words. Tempshill (talk) 06:09, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Unable to access my watchlist or my preference

Hello. I am unable for some reason to access my watchlist or preferences. When I click on them the only thing that comes up is this text: /*generated user stylesheet*/ a. new, #quickbar a.new {color: # CC2200;}. Thanks. Tumblin Tom (talk) 15:32, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

You'll probably get a faster response on Wikipedia:Help_desk - the RD is for general questions about anything, the help desk for Wikipedia specific questions. Exxolon (talk) 15:52, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I have asked the question there. Tumblin Tom (talk) 16:27, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Algorithm for computing biconnected components

Our article on Biconnected components mentions a "classic sequential algorithm for computing biconnected components in a connected graph due to John Hopcroft and Robert Tarjan (1971)" -- does anyone what this algorithm is, and if there's a description of it online? — Matt Crypto 16:42, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Knuth. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 16:47, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

What is a good software application for keeping an address book, from a data portability standpoint?

What is a good (preferably freely available) software application for keeping an address book? Ideally it should support importing/exporting data from/to many formats. I've looked at Thunderbird but its address book is not well designed, plus its import/export facilities seem rather limited. --173.49.17.152 (talk) 20:12, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

How about Zimbra? Gary King (talk) 22:14, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

how do I do this to Paint Shop Pro?

example:

File:Nlr-tjloco-amoswolfe.jpg

OK it's a bit of a cliche but how do I do it? Make the background black and white and something else not. Is there any tutorials anywhere?

Does it have a proper name?

Cheers,

Frank. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.166.234.129 (talk) 20:40, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know the specifics for PSP, but its workalikes Photoshop and Gimp, you a) select the thing you want to preserve, probably using the lasso tool b) invert the selection (so you're got everything else selected) c) probably feather the selection a bit (so the transition is fuzzy rather than a harsh line) and d) reduce saturation (which is colour-nerd speak for "colourfullness"). 87.112.81.29 (talk) 20:52, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

That's a help but I can't get it to work and still could do with a tutorial Frank. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.166.234.129 (talk) 21:57, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

In photoshop/gimp: duplicate the image layer (so you have two layers with the same image on them). on the bottom one, "desaturate" to make it grayscale. on the top one, apply a mask to it and fill it in totally black (so the top layer in invisible). then use the paintbrush tool to color white on the mask, revealing the colored image in all that you expose. it's really very easy but you have to learn how to use a mask tool first. if you know how to use masks then it is trivial—so look for a mask tutorial. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 23:42, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

That will work. The previous suggestion is just as quick - use the hand-drawn select tool (each paint program gives it a different name) and outline the area to stay in color. In the select menu, there is an option to invert the selection. Then, in the color settings, reduce all the colors so you just have black and white left. You could also use one of the many tools that automatically make the selected area monochrome or old-timey looking, or stenciled... I seriously doubt you'll find a "tutorial" for this because it is a 3-step process: Select the color area, invert the selection, remove color. -- kainaw™ 00:16, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The issue I have with the "select" method is it is not easy to modify if you are unhappy with the final product. A masking method gives you a lot more flexibility, as well. "Quick" is not usually what one is looking for in situations like this (and even then, you can use the masks as a way of doing the select version in a way that is far more adjustable). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 00:36, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

February 15

What computer language(s) is wikipeda coded in

I am assuming PHP/Mysql. but what is the official answer?

142.176.13.22 (talk) 03:37, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia runs on MediaWiki, which is written in PHP. The databases certainly use SQL, I believe you're right that it's MySQL. Algebraist 03:43, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

PHP plus MySQL - and to some extent JavaScript. SteveBaker (talk) 04:04, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

What? Nobody is going to come along and point out that both PHP and MySQL are programs written in another rather common language? -- kainaw™ 04:24, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

And then compiled down to yet another language? – 74  06:00, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

That's irrelevent, incorrect and unnecessarily confusing to our OP. Wikipedia isn't coded in those languages - it's coded in PHP and Javascript. You can look everywhere in the sources and you won't find one single line of C, C++ or machine code. Furthermore, it just happens to be that the PHP interpreter that Wikipedia uses runs on some particular server and that the interpreter was written in some other language - but MediaWiki would run just fine on a PHP interpreter written in (say) Brainfuck and compiled to run on a Beowulf cluster of Babbage analytical engines. Please - don't try to be smart - it doesn't work and it confuses the OP. My first answer was both correct and sufficient. SteveBaker (talk) 18:15, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

If you insist on being technical, Wikipedia isn't coded in any of those; it's written in MediaWiki, as Algebraist helpfully pointed out before your own elaboration (although the line is somewhat blurry). Besides, isn't it just a little hypocritical to be complaining about these responses when you've requested a user rewrite working code that you found ugly, and complained that 'Dvorak needs to "just die already"' in response to a request for the number of Dvorak users? – 74  19:45, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki isn't a "computer language" - it's an application program. The previous responses you link to were not confusing - they weren't actively telling someone something that isn't true. By saying (even indirectly) that Wikipedia is written in C/C++/machine code you are directly telling a confusing untruth. As I said before - if you examine the source code for Wikipedia - you'll find PHP, MySQL and JavaScript - and none of the other things. SteveBaker (talk) 04:21, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a program; you wouldn't write an encyclopedia in any programming language. MediaWiki, however, is a program, not an encyclopedia, and unsurprisingly is written in a programming language. So no, Wikipedia (an encylclopedia) is definitely not written in PHP, MySQL, or JavaScript. Anyway, while I certainly don't feel that my comment warranted your rebuke, I'll go ahead and strike it because arguing over the merits of a response to a joke wastes everyone's time. – 74  05:15, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

So in your view, the answer should be "nothing". Great - thanks. SteveBaker (talk) 04:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, another question with a simple answer diluted by people in an endless attempt to be most clever... --98.217.14.211 (talk) 04:32, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to stir the pot a little by saying that the only thing a user ever sees is HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. PHP and MySQL generate mostly HTML that is served to your browser. So, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, and C++, but mostly HTML.--K;;m5m k;;m5m (talk) 05:24, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

HTML isn't a programming language - neither is CSS. There isn't one line of C++ code in either Wikipedia or MediaWiki's sources. So the answer is STILL PHP, JavaScript and SQL. SteveBaker (talk) 04:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

If you are clever enough to comprehend English, you will see that it was derailed by questioning why nobody has attempted to be clever, not by trying to be clever. -- kainaw™ 13:24, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes - exactly. People too often forget that the object here is to tell the OPs what they need to know. SteveBaker (talk) 04:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Safely Remove Hardware

Does Safely Remove Hardware do anything else besides unmount the filesystem(s)? Thanks in advance. --wj32 ^t/c 03:45, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not one hundred percent certain, but I'm 99% sure that unmounting the filesystems is all it does. --Aseld ^talk 03:51, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, before unmounting, it flushes the write buffers to disk, but I guess you could also consider that part of unmounting. If nothing has been written to the disk since it was mounted, it should be safe to remove it without using Safely Remove Hardware. Indeterminate (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 04:29, 15 February 2009 (UTC).

At least on XP, the "Safely Remove Hardware" menu appears to shutdown and disable USB power to the device; on Vista it apparently does not. (USB is designed to be "hot-pluggable", so disabling power isn't critical. Properly shutting down the device, such as parking disk drive heads, would seem significantly more important.) – 74  05:55, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Say I have a USB hard disk that requires 2 cables (one for data, one for power) - will unplugging it without using Safely Remove Hardware possibly cause anything more severe than data loss/filesystem corruption? --wj32 ^t/c 09:37, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Think of all the computers that suffer power failures every day - almost all of those have hard drives, and they survive. While I doubt it's *good* for the drive to cut the power without it spinning down properly, doing it once or twice is not likely to cause any problems. --Aseld ^talk 09:46, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

This may be compounded by moving the drive with the heads improperly parked. On modern drives, however, there is usually a mechanism (a spring, or an electrical reverse feed from the platter motor) to park the heads following a power failure, so no damage would be expected. – 74  20:02, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

On Line Photographs

On some internet pages pictures just have a + on them. How do I view them or what programme do I need to open them219.89.28.66 (talk) 04:25, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Could you link to an example? Indeterminate (talk) 04:30, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you may be talking about the auto-resize feature - if you click on the picture - does it then enlarge to full size rather than fit the window? — Ched (talk) 09:04, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

If you're talking about an "X" rather than the "+" (plus) (and no picture) that can be a variety of things - often the picture doesn't exist at the location the web-pages says it does - or you have some sort of blocking going on. If you right-click, and can pick the "View Image", that may help in some cases. — Ched (talk) 09:08, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Any non-Apple device playback Apple Lossless audio files?

I'm considering ripping my CD collection to consolidate all my music digitally without compression. But are there any non-Apple products that can *use* Apple Lossless songs? I'd like the ability to stream my songs to my PS3 and Xbox. Do they support any lossless compressed audio files? Should I just rip to WAV for maximum compatibility? --71.158.215.154 (talk) 04:39, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Indubitably. Try VLC or MPlayer. --Aseld ^talk 05:11, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Oh, unless you mean on the Xbox and PS3 natively without any extra software. --Aseld ^talk 05:12, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

WAV is obviously the simplest option. If space is a concern, you're more likely to have support for Windows Media Lossless on the Xbox360. For the PS3, perhaps FLAC, but seemingly not [6]. Since the PS3 supports BluRay, Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio may be an option although it doesn't seem like there is any free encoder for either yet. Note that the obvious advantage with lossless audio is whether it's WAV, FLAC or whatever, it doesn't matter what you choose, changing your mind 2 years from now shouldn't be too much of a hassle and you're not going to lose quality, so don't worry about it Nil Einne (talk)

Google Translate oddity

Currently, Google Translate seems to translate the Russian word град into the letters "deg", no matter the destination language. Any idea why this might happen? Bart133 ^{t c @ How's my driving?} 05:30, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Is град a real Russian word? If it's not, it's possible that Translate is just transliterating the Cyrillic. --Aseld ^talk 05:46, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Check out the disambiguation page. One of the meanings is Grad (angle), maybe google picks deg(ree) because of that. 88.112.63.253 (talk) 06:28, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The word град has three meanings in Russian-- (1) Grad (angle), (2) Hail, and (3) a city. The last one is a South Slavic word, so it has Old Church Slavonic undertones in modern Russian. As noted, Google is probably mis-mapping град to degree, due to the meaning (1). Google translate is particularly susceptible because it uses something like Statistical machine translation, which is easily misled by homonyms (and even more so by polysemes). Avram (talk) 08:44, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

(This question would get better answers if you asked it on the Language reference desk. SteveBaker (talk) 18:01, 15 February 2009 (UTC))

You tried RusTran? –  LATICS  talk  18:10, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

New Graphics Card

Hey again. I've asked similar questions before, but now I'm sure what I want to ask. I have a HP A6632F desktop, and I want to replace the GPU. It has 4GB of RAM, 2.4Ghz Duo Core processors, and ~452GB HDD. It has an integral PCI-E intel G33/31 Express family chipset already (integrated). Someone said I could probably put a GeForce series 7 or 8 in it, but I was wondering about a series 9. Can anyone recommend a card(s) that would work in my comp? Thanks. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 07:14, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

That model number doesn't seem to exist. What matters most is whether or not you have a PCIe x16 slot. If you do then you can pretty much use any card that doesn't require an external power connector. This includes a number of GeForce 9 series, as well as a number of ATI cards. In the event the PCIe x16 slot doesn't have 16 lanes, you may find performance is limited but I doubt you'd see much difference except with a very fast card (which will require an external power connector, maybe two). If your power supply has a PCIe power connector, then you should be able to use a card which requires one too. If not, then you may be able to use one with an appropriate molex converter but it will depend on the specs of your power supply. If your computer accepts and uses normal ATX power supplies then you can simply upgrade the power supply (make sure it is normal ATX and doesn't use odd wiring or something similar.) Note there are a few other things you need to check. Make sure you have enough room to fit the card. If your case is small some cards may be too long. Also some cards require the slot on the left of the card be free (two slot cards). Finally if your case requires low profile cards, then you'd need a low profile card and bracket. Note if you don't have a PCIe x16 slot, you're pretty much SOL Nil Einne (talk) 07:32, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

BTW, the ATI Radeon 4670 is probably the bestcard which doesn't require an external power connector Nil Einne (talk) 07:53, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I fixed my model number. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 08:21, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

According to [7] you should have a PCIe x16 slot. From the layour of your motherboard, I don't think your likely to have problems with most cards although there's a slight risk the ram slots may get in the way if it has a very big heat sink which reaches quite far down. Of course, if you want both PCIe 1x slots to be free (or they are already populated) then you'd have to stay clear from a dual slot card. It also looks like your case should accept normal profile cards although I'd verify that myself if I was you. Your power supply however is only 250W [8] and although it should be a decent enough one overall (most branded computer ones are) it's unlikely to have a PCIe power connector and I wouldn't recommend you try using a molex adaptor to get a PCIe power connector since there's a risk you'll be pushing the PSU too hard (it'll probably be fine but personally particularly if you're using an adaptor I wouldn't try). However from my reading your motherboard uses the normal ATX PSU pinout so presuming your case can fit normal ATX PSUs (it looks like it should but I would check more carefully) and the PSU is removable you should be able to upgrade PSU if you do want to use a card which requires an external power connector. Of course you could try a card with an external power connector and see how it goes and upgrade the PSU if you find it necessary (instability etc) P.S. No idea what airflow in your case is like but you may want to look at improving it if you get a card that outputs a lot of heat. P.P.S. [9] may also be useful Nil Einne (talk) 12:24, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I took some measurements, and my case is 5.75inches wide, and it's 6.75 inches from the rear of the case to the nearest RAM card. I have plenty of room to the side, but my modem does extend 2.75 inches from the rear. I've looked up two cards, and neither fits. Do I need a compact card or something?--AtTheAbyss (talk) 03:21, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Abbreviated form of terabyte?

When spoken out loud, "kilobyte" is often abbreviated as "K", "megabyte" as "meg" and "gigabyte" as "gig". What's the short form for "terabyte"?121.72.165.197 (talk) 10:19, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I've always used "T", as in "I want to get one of those 2T hard drives.". --Aseld ^talk 10:26, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I prefer the slightly longer TB for terabyte and Tb for terabit. I'm not sure what abbreve to use for User:Taraborn, however. :-) StuRat (talk) 17:48, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The OP was asking for the short form of terabyte for use in speech. Personally, I'd just say "terabyte". When I hear "TB", the first thing that comes to mind is tuberculosis. --173.49.17.152 (talk) 19:51, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Terabyte-sized things are still pretty rare - so we don't often talk about them and the need to abbreviate never seems to come around - so I just say 'Terabyte'. SteveBaker (talk) 17:59, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

You are behind the times, I believe. One-terabyte external hard drives are rather commonplace these days. --Aseld ^talk 07:50, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

No - I'm not behind the times. 1TB hard drives are certainly becoming more common - but we don't often (if ever) have files that are terabytes long - we don't have terabytes of memory - or data structures that consume a terabyte - or bandwidths that we measure in terabytes per second. So we still don't use the word 'terabyte' very often...not often enough to demand a shorthand form. Really - only in the context of the sizes of hard drives. Also, many of the terabyte hard drives I've seen in Fry's are actually labelled something like '1000 Gbytes' - probably because most people don't know what a terabyte is. SteveBaker (talk) 04:23, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

"Terrs" would follow the form of "gigs", but "terrs" brings to mind for me the line of dialogue in Neuromancer about the "Christ the King terrs", short of "terrorists". Tempshill (talk) 06:04, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I always refer to them as 'terabyte' when spoken out loud, now when written i refer to them as TB (where Tb would mean terabit)– Elliott(Talk|Cont)  17:16, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Spreadsheet - automatic date incrementation: 14 days

I would like a column of dates in a spreadsheet file, starting with a specified date (e.g. 2009-02-12) and then continuing with increments of 14 days (next would be 2009-02-26). How can I achieve this (I have access to Excel and Calc). ----Seans Potato Business 13:05, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

In Excel, type the first few dates in order (two should be enough), then select them. A little black square should appear in the bottom right of the lowest selected cell. Mouse over it (your arrow will turn into a black "+"), then click and drag downwards. A tooltop should appear as you drag that tells you what the current cell will be filled with. Let go when the desired date appears. Xenon54 (talk) 13:10, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay thanks; works in Calc too. ----Seans Potato Business 13:45, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Tables in MS Word 2007

Is it possible to shrink a table of 31 rows so that it fits on one page (in addition to approx. 1/4 of the page above the table being taken up by another smaller table and a few lines of explanation)? The reason I need to do this is because I am working on a translation of a document that is formatted in this way, and have been asked to keep the exact same layout. I have tried to make the font size at its minimum, but it only goes down to 8. Is there anything else I can do?--KageTora (talk) 14:01, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

You can set a smaller font size manually (i.e. type it in the box) but that isn't recommended since 8pt is already difficult to read for some people. You might also be able to change the margins for the table or use a more condensed font to gain a little extra room, and the "AutoFit" context menu might prove useful if you haven't tried that yet. My inclination, however, would be to put the table (by itself) on a landscape page, either the page following the first reference, or in an appendix. If none of those options work, the best bet is probably to change it to a double-line table. – 74  14:48, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Perl, Regex, Capturing groups

In Perl, capturing groups are numbered $1, $2, $3 ...

The script's own file name is $0.

Other serialized items, such as arrays, are numbered from 0, i.e., $array[0], ..., $array[999].

Isn't it kind of weird? -- Toytoy (talk) 15:05, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

No. Numbering arrays from zero is very common and makes a hell of a lot of sense. The number in an array is an offset from the first element of the array. So, the first element is offset by zero. The next is offset by one. Regex groups are not numbered as an offset. They are matches, first match, second match, and so on. So, it makes sense to number them from one. I'm sure someone will argue that it makes sense to number arrays from one and then give examples of languages that do so, but that doesn't mean that numbering arrays from zero is senseless. It just means that someone else did it different. -- kainaw™ 15:39, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

If you think it makes sense to number arrays from 1, Perl's got you covered: set $[ to change the index of the first element in an array and the first character in a substring. If you prefer to start at 7, Perl will presumably accommodate. How many other languages allow you to index from an arbitrary base value? Note: modifying $[ is highly discouraged. – 74  16:25, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Fortran. - SigmaEpsilon → ΣΕ 19:32, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I should've guessed.   ;-)   – 74  19:51, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

There are many - even popular ones, such as PHP. If you declare $myarray[7] = "Hi"; Then, using something like $myarray[] = "World"; will set index 8 (one more than the highest number already set). What does this really mean? Languages like PHP and Perl are not using arrays as defined years and years ago. They are using hash tables with incrementing numeric indexes, but loosely referring to them as arrays. From the programmer's point of view, it doesn't matter. From the computer's point of view, a hash table and an array are two very different things. -- kainaw™ 20:18, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

While I agree that the result may be very similar (or even identical), there is a difference between creating an array whose meaningful values start at "7" and base-indexing all arrays from 7. By the former requirement, any array with the first 7 values remaining unused would qualify (which practically includes every language with array support), while the latter requires all arrays (including the return from functions like 'split') to be indexed from 7 by default. In many respects a per-array implementation is more useful, but allowing modification to the underlying base index value is (to my knowledge) significantly less common, probably because of its questionable value and tendency to confuse. – 74  22:21, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Capturing groups in regexes in every other languages start from 1 (perhaps following from Perl). Group 0 by convention stores the entire match in languages other than Perl (weirdly, in Perl this is called $&). Examples: Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Haskell. --Spoon! (talk) 20:15, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

A glance at our article on AWK - one of the predecessors to Perl - suggests that this special use of "zeroeth group meaning whole match" is closest to the origin of this design decision in Perl. In AWK, $1, $2, etc, refer to fields of the input line, but $0 refers to the whole line. Since "capture groups" in a Perl regular expression are broadly equivalent to AWK's "fields", especially for simple, non-nested groups, it would have been confusing if $1 referred to the second such group. - IMSoP (talk) 23:50, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I am still new to Perl programming. Is there a simple way to retrieve the whole line containing the match. Let's say I want to show all lines (entire lines) containing the word "dog" in a long article, how do I do it? I know I can use \n to mark the boundaries of a full line. With a little extra programming, I can get the sentence containing the word. I just want to know is there a magical way to do it. Because regex expressions are difficult to read and debug. I always want to keep them as short and simple as possible. -- Toytoy (talk) 00:50, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Normally you're working a line at a time anyway, so it would look like:

while (<>) {
  print if /dog/;
}

--Sean 14:29, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

AM2+ cpu

Hi, how new is AM2+ compared to AM2? Is it only now released? Was it available last summer? ~ R.T.G 15:37, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

AM2+ is an upgraded AM2. I don't know when the very first AM2+ motherboards hit the market, but there were plenty available last summer. -- kainaw™ 15:44, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Kainaw. Anyone with some good reference material might want to give a bit of attention to AM2+ as it is very short and barely 50 edits since over 2 years ~ R.T.G 17:46, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

AM2+ mobos will let you use AM3 CPUs. That's pretty much the most useful part. 24.76.160.236 (talk) 10:30, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Web hosting

I'm looking for a cheap web host (around USD 60 per year or less — though free is good too :-D) that provides the following:

• At least 200 MB of server space
• A decent amount of bandwidth (however much that is)
• The ability to upload already-coded HTML files and maintain an existing folder structure
  • For example, I have my HTML files in a folder called 'web', and the code points to the path 'images/thumbnails/filename.jpg' — I want to be able to maintain that and not have to re-code it
• CSS and JavaScript functionality
• The ability to use a picture for the background (specified in a separate CSS file)
• The ability to use a domain name that I already own, not a subdomain

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks, Hermione1980 16:51, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Have you looked at godaddy.com? — Ched (talk) 17:40, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Any worthwhile hosting package will do most of those (only the first two vary); only toy things, which are gnerally free, won't. Dreamhost will do everything you specify, for roughly your target price. That said, you'll find people who are unhappy with Dreamhost, and indeed with godaddy. $60USD is a very small amount of money, so I'm pretty much impressed with what you do get for that. 87.112.81.29 (talk) 20:23, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Bluehost is also a pretty popular cheap web host. And yeah, you'll find people who are unhappy with everything, but personally I've never had a problem with Bluehost, and I've been using it for years for manage tons of small sites. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 20:31, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Generally speaking, the cheap ones will have slower hosting (especially slower SQL, and slower scripting). Otherwise, they'll work fine. The things you've asked for (CSS and JS?) are pretty such impossible for a web host not to offer, considering they're all client side... 24.76.160.236 (talk) 10:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

You should read the comments on web hosing review sites and see they have been in business for a few years. I've everything you say plus multiple domains SQL and python and a few other goodies for less and the host is fast and very reliable and response time for problems is very good, so you're not asking for too much. The one I used till a couple of years ago though I just got the cheapest and it was not worth even that small amount. And yes avoid the free sites. Dmcq (talk) 13:46, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Heh. Really the only reason I specified the CSS/JS was because I started with Google Apps...did not realize until after I signed up that they have virtually zero features for actual web design. :-( I'll definitely be reading the reviews. Thanks, guys. Hermione1980 15:29, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Just an idea, but if you have access to an internet connection thats always on, then you maybe able to host the webpage your self. Even if you dont have a static IP address... Just Throwing it out there. – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  17:13, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Space between lines on Word 2007

I have noticed that between each line on Word 2007, there seems to be enough space for another line. Is this the default? I never noticed it on Word XP or 2003. I am wondering if my settings have been changed, as I made a table with eight rows on it, then merged the rows. After doing this, I could only fit 4 lines of text in. Is there any way to change this?--KageTora (talk) 18:44, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

This is called "line spacing" and it's fully configurable. (It's located under "line spacing" on the "Paragraph" context menu on an older version of Word.) – 74  19:55, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Similarly, hitting return ends a paragraph (a hard return), whereas in older versions Microsoft Word) it would add a line break (a soft return). Cycle~ (talk) 21:44, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm 99% sure that's not true. The return key always added a paragraph break, denoted by ¶ (a pilcrow) if you enabled "show hidden characters"; a soft return could be entered by holding shift, and would be denoted by ↵ (the symbol on most carriage return keys). I imagine this is still the case.

The difference, I imagine, is in the default paragraph styles - since most versions of MS Word default to not adding extra vertical space above and below paragraphs, users commonly hit return twice to artificially produce vertical space between paragraphs, in fact creating an empty paragraph in between.

Incidentally, the awkwardness of changing this and other style behaviours in MS Word is one of the reasons why I have come to actively prefer the interface of OpenOffice.org, which has a floating tool palette for selecting and editing the named styles. (Exactly the same is possible in MS Word, but the interface is more cumbersome.) - IMSoP (talk) 23:42, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that is the default style. If you look at the ribbon of buttons, one set is marked "Styles" and the first (ie. default) style is "Normal" which is defined to include 1.15 line spacing and a 10pt gap after each paragraph. To change the style of the current paragraph, click the "No spacing" style which is on the ribbon next to the "Normal" button. To change it permanently, you will need to modify the "Normal" style and save it in the "default.dotx" template. Astronaut (talk) 02:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

A simpler way to get back those settings that many of us are used to is to look for the Change Styles option on the Home ribbon, click on it, select Style Set, and then choose Word 2003. -- Tcncv (talk) 06:42, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

How to extract URLs from a Wikipedia article?

I would like to get a list of URLs that are being used as references within a Wikipedia article. Since references are inline, manually going through the text would take some time. Wikipedia is very popular so I'm wondering if anyone has already made some sort of utility or script that does the parsing? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 20:43, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

All properly formatted articles have a "references" section near the bottom that places all the references in a very easy to cut-n-paste section. If you are looking at an article that does not have a references section, please let us know so we can fix it. -- kainaw™ 21:57, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Opera provides a table of links on the current page, which might be what you're looking for. It seems like this functionality would be a relatively simple Wikipedia special page, but we don't appear to have anything equivalent. (The References section, if properly present, provides a list of links, but not necessarily a list of URLs.) – 74  22:18, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The article I'm interested in is this. Yes, there's a references section but most of the references displayed on the page show the article's name, not the URL. I'll give Opera a try. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:21, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

You're talking about the Tools | Links feature, right? Hmmm...it gives me a list, but it looks like Opera is using a list view control and I need text. There doesn't seem to be a way to save this list as a text file. I don't know anything about Wikipedia special pages but I can write a C# app that parses the text. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:33, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Once you get the list page, Select All and Ctrl+C, otherwise Select All, Right click and choose "Copy link address". Then paste the contents to a text file. I got 890 links for the article you mentioned. I'm using Opera 8. Jay (talk) 08:50, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Alright, here's a simple javascript function that collects links and throws 'em at the end of the page:

function link_find() {
	var linkss = "";

	for( var i = 0, j = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); j[i]; i++ ) {

		if (j[i].href && !j[i].href.match(/en.wikipedia.org/) && !j[i].href.match(/javascript/)) {
			linkss = linkss + '<br>' + j[i].href;
		}
	}

	var mydiv = document.createElement('div');
	mydiv.style.position = 'relative';
	mydiv.style.top = '0px';
	mydiv.style.right = '0px';
	mydiv.style.border = '1px solid #000';
	mydiv.style.backgroundColor = '#fff';
	mydiv.style.color = '#000';
	mydiv.innerHTML = linkss;
	document.body.appendChild(mydiv);
}


document.addEventListener('load',function addButton() {

	// throw a link up in the corner

	if( !document.body ) { return; }
	var mydiv = document.createElement('div');
	mydiv.style.position = 'fixed';
	mydiv.style.top = '0px';
	mydiv.style.right = '0px';
	mydiv.style.border = '1px solid #000';
	mydiv.style.backgroundColor = '#fff';
	mydiv.style.color = '#000';
	mydiv.innerHTML = '<a href="javascript:link_find();">links</a>';
	document.body.appendChild(mydiv);

},false);

This code is intended (and tested) to run in Opera, but I'm sure it could be adapted to greasemonkey with a minimum of effort. You can modify the regex checks to exclude any certain URLs you desire. – 74  00:01, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone for their help! A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 14:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

February 16

Strange error with norwegian characters!

I have a game that i made that allows users to unscramble letters to make norwegian words for points....

The problem is, the norwegian letters end up goofy most times! This is a list of 16 letters:

giæuvvgføfmbyøaå

it looks like this, but the 'æ' character combo is the norwegian character 'å'. I paste the two characters by themselves and it comes out fine, but when i run the program it likes to keep switching between correct and goofy characters.

I wrote the program in mirc script, and use the $read function to get the norwegian letters from a text file. Does anyone know what is going on? is UTF-8 broken or breaking my script?

Many thanks in advance!

137.81.40.122 (talk) 00:17, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, it's a little hard to know what's going on when we don't have the source code and it is in a relatively obscure language. But why don't you try it with English words and see if you get something similar. That'll at least let you know if it has something to do with the Norwegian character set. If it is indeed something related to the language handling Norwegian characters, you're almost certainly going to have to get in touch with a more specialist community of mirc script programmers to get any useful advice. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 01:25, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I do think this is UTF8-related... "breakup" of a character in two is typical. Is mIRCs language UTF8-safe? HardDisk (talk) 01:53, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - that would be my best guess too. For characters that lie outside of the ASCII set - there is frequently a multi-byte representation. When you 'scramble' your letters, you need to keep all of the bytes that make up these 'special' characters together or it will do exactly what it seems to be doing. SteveBaker (talk) 04:13, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Merge contacts in WM6

Hi all,

how do I merge contacts in the Contacts app of WM6, if there exist 2 contacts (one MSN, one Outlook) for the same person? Do I have to copy all the 45 double contacts and all their info by hand or do there tools exist?

Thanks,HardDisk (talk) 01:39, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

There's only 45? Just do it by hand. Tempshill (talk) 06:01, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Not really... that'll take me a lot of time to sort out this mess by hand... HardDisk (talk) 14:48, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

unistalling programmes

I have sevsral pprogrammes which I would like to uninstal, one is a music player called "KMPLAYER" the issue is that it's not included in the list of programmes in the add/ remove programmes list in the control panel neither does it has an option in the startup programmes list for uninstal. Is there a way of removing the programme and all its content from the registry? Regards! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.9.197.28 (talk) 08:11, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

nirsoft had a program at one time called Myuninstaller ... let me look ...yep ... try this link ... now that I look, mine copy is an older version - guess I should update. — Ched (talk) 09:41, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

This link might provide advice on removing the KMPLAYER program.

I am a little puzzled by Ched's advice - why install something else just to uninstall a program?? Without an entry in add/remove programs and no uninstall option on the Start menu, it would be just as easy to delete the program's folder from "c:\program files" and delete the Start menu entries associated with the program. Astronaut (talk) 21:31, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Those steps won't clean up the registry like how the OP wanted. Jay (talk) 03:56, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

re: Astronaut - Actually, the program is a standalone/portable - no need to install it. I have it on a thumb-drive, and only use in the rare cases when there is no unwise/uninstall entry for a program. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it does seem to remove a little more than just deleting a folder from "Program Files" There are some brute-force uninstall tools as well, but they tend to be a little more complex. Wasn't my intent to mis-lead or provide faulty information. — Ched (talk) 09:07, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

opening files

Hi! I do come across several files including system files plus other files which I would like to view or change their contents but when you double click to open them you get the notification" windows cannot open the file" is there a software which one can use to open such files? Thanks in advance —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.9.197.28 (talk) 08:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

These would be files which are meant for use by the operating system or applications running on your computer, and not meant to be viewed or edited by the end-user. Programmers use an IDE to open some of them. Jay (talk) 09:12, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

To directly answer your question: yes. A hex editor will open these files. Word of warning though: be careful. You can kill your system with one of those things, very very easily. --Aseld ^talk 09:17, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I always use Notepad to open such files. If they're garbled then you may be able to figure out what program created the files by Googling the 3-letter file extension (like ".hex"). Tempshill (talk) 16:21, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

linux!

Halo there!

I want to explore linux os. I have downloaded fedora 10 and burnt it to a disk. I have never used linux before. I basically use my computer for playing music, doing school work which include programming, database management services, webdesign etc, also playing games plus other stuff. would I be able to use the softwares that av always used in windows like Netbeans, Visual Studio; music players like VLC etc. And if possible pliz refer me to a link where I can be able to get sufficient beginners tutorial on using linux esp fedora 10. Would you recommend another version of linux?

Thanx in anticipation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.9.197.28 (talk) 08:22, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

While NetBeans can run on Linux, Visual Studio, being a Microsoft product, will not. However, there are equally good *nix alternatives available; for IDEs you can use Anjuta, KDevelop or Eclipse. In general, software made for Windows will not work on Linux, but there are almost always alternative solutions available. Fedora is a good enough distribution for beginners, however if you have trouble adapting I would suggest trying out Ubuntu. --Aseld ^talk 09:00, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

It is true that you may not be able to use all windows based software directly on Linux, but there are some solutions that make it so you can use this software while running Linux. Basically what you would have to do is create virtual environment in which a windows program can run. There are several programs out there that do just that, the best known one being Wine (software). Another solution that you can try would be in install a Virtual Machine like VirtualBox and install windows under that, there are some limitations to both Wine and VirtualBox, I am unable to go in to much more detail on those limitations (mainly because i don't know them). But since your 'new' to Linux, i would suggest that you try Ubuntu, It has an option to install it self under windows and allows you to dual boot to it when ever you like. And it does this without the need to make a seperat partition on your Hard drive. I use Ubuntu and i have to say that i enjoy it a lot, i supose the best thing i like about it whould be the extensive reposotoryies. Making the finding, downloading and instalations of programs very easy. (generly all three is as easy as typing in this command: 'sudo apt-get install VirtualBox'). I hope this helped – Elliott(Talk|Cont)  17:10, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Wine is a set of libraries that link to the Windows program and convert all of the system calls into the equivelent calls under Linux. It doesn't work 100% perfectly for all Windows programs - but it's pretty good. The result is that your Windows program runs like other Linux programs and the GUI's look a lot like Linux programs under whatever window manager you've chosen. VirtualBox and other similar programs work by actually running an entire copy of Windows as a program running 'inside' Linux. In that case, you have an entire Windows desktop - and all of the benefits of switching to Linux are lost because the 'virtual' Windows computer is just as vulnerable to all of Window's issues as a 'real' Windows computer - it can even be infected by viruses and malware. However, I'd strongly advise you to try to use 'equivalent' Linux programs rather than trying to stick with Windows tools in a Linux world. There really are very few applications programs for Windows that don't have some sort of Linux equivalent. SteveBaker (talk) 04:10, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Cutting the junk in Mac OS 10.4

My "iBook G4" has just four lousy GB of space, even after I moved piles of jpegs and videos elsewhere. A program called Duplicate Files Searcher does what its name proclaims, but I'd like to do more, without spending too much of my time on it. My guess is that this Mac has video tutorials for software and miscellaneous other junk that I could easily remove. Is there software that would guide me through this?

("System Profiler" tells me that I have a "27.94 GB TOSHIBA MK3025GAS" drive and I suppose I could replace it with a drive of ten times that capacity; however, the procedure seems alarmingly intricate; I might break something. And come to think of it I've no idea of limits imposed by the filesystem, by power consumption, etc. etc.) Morenoodles (talk) 09:42, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Your best bet is to remove the (normally) un-needed and pointlessly big language-tools thing. These pages (http://ogasawalrus.com/blog/node/233 or http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/22127-uninstalling-unneeded-options.html) should give you an idea. OS X is a pretty big OS on a laptop with that kind of storage so your best bet is to reduce down what is installed from the OS - there'll be plenty of stuff you don't need. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 10:37, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

As it happens I'd like to keep one or two of those bulky drivers. But yes, printer drivers! Thank you for the links. Morenoodles (talk) 10:43, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

The procedure for replacing an iBook G4 drive is alarmingly intricate and takes well over an hour or two just to do the hardware swapping. (Apple appears to have realized the limitations of this approach as the next model, the MacBook, is comparatively simple by comparison—one little hatch removed and you just slide the drive in.) I don't recommend undertaking it yourself unless you have had some experience inside computers (there are a million tiny screws that can easily get lost and a few moments in which you have to do rather delicate things).

When I clean out my hard drive I find a disk visualization tool useful — it shows me what's actually taking up the space. Disk Inventory X is the one I use but I'm sure there are others. Printer drivers are a big thing you can drop; so are sound files for Garageband if you don't plan to use it ever. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:46, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I suppose the alternative is to buy an external USB hard drive (I presume those work with MacOSX). You can pick up drives that are not much bigger than a credit card and less than a half inch thick for pretty low $$$. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveBaker (talk • contribs)

They work fine with OSX. And as you say, they're cheap. But they're more stuff I'd have to remember to cart around. It's a possibility, but not such an appealing on. Morenoodles (talk) 09:03, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm just an old cynic -- I assumed that making hard drives hard to get at was deliberate, deterring people from upgrading (and driving up the price of upgrades by others) in the hope that they'd buy replacement computers. Yes, I'll zap as much of Garageband as I can find, and also the program for making DVDs. Thank you for these new ideas. Morenoodles (talk) 09:03, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

You can run du / | sort -n (that's a Unix command) to see which directories are heaviest. —Tamfang (talk) 17:00, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

iBook battery retention

Another iBook G4 question, sorry.

We have two of these things at home. One's due to be replaced, and one of several reasons is that the plastic ring that's part of the coin-operated battery-locking mechanism has shattered, meaning that the battery springs out, meaning no battery, meaning that if you unplug it even momentarily it forgets everything.

Today I noticed a crack in the same plastic ring of the second machine.

I asked about having that fixed. Response: the entire underside of the computer has to be replaced (presumably with one including the same terribly designed plastic washer). Estimated price: about half what the entire computer cost me four (?) years ago. Ha ha no thank you.

Is there a cheaper fix? I googled but was unsuccessful. Morenoodles (talk) 09:55, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Cheap but ugly fix - Sellotape the battery in place. Cheap less ugly but potentially less strong fix - double-sided sticky-tape on the underside of the battery to hold it in place. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 10:32, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I assumed that sellotape wouldn't be sufficient but I'll certainly give it a go. (I really don't care what the result looks like.) Thank you for the tips. Morenoodles (talk) 10:45, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately the labor is really the cost here—you could probably get another iBook bottom shell without too much trouble by buying a dead iBook on eBay or something like that. But removing the bottom shell takes some time. It's not as hard, though, as replacing a hard drive, though it's still no walk in the park. The iBook has a lot of irritating little design flaws like that (has your little hook holding it closed come out yet? my wife's did and there's no way to replace that without removing the whole screen chassis—not really worth the effort). --98.217.14.211 (talk) 15:50, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

No, that one hasn't happened yet. Apple does put a high percentage of its effort into pretty packaging for the showroom, doesn't it? If I want OS X again, I think I might get some rival company's machine to run it on. Unless I'm reassured that Apple's newer machines are, mechanically as well as cosmetically, better than this "iBook" thing. Morenoodles (talk) 09:12, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Self-taught programmers

Are most programmers self-taught? I assume that since someone could learn seamlessly through actual programming (computers... with the help of the Internet) and that because it's mostly sbout experimenting (there's not much theory that's formally taught, is there?) do programmers usually learn at university or such? And if not how do they prove themselves if they want a job? 94.196.67.254 (talk) 12:38, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I taught myself a few simple computer languages. But in my experience, it's much too hard to learn a complex language on your own. (The same goes for human languages, too, by the way.) For example, I taught myself JavaScript and HTML, but I had to learn VB.NET and Java in school. A friend of mine taught himself PHP, another easy language. Another friend of mine was taught Java and C++ on the job, although that's definitely less common. In other words, you need a firm hand to keep you on track when you have a lot of learning to do. I've talked to other people who just lied and said they taught themselves C++, but when we sat down to code, it turned out they didn't know squat. They just read part of a book and declared themselves gurus. It doesn't work that way.--K;;m5m k;;m5m (talk) 12:54, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Much of programming is essentially a craft, and is mostly self-taught. Little of what computer scientists and software engineers learn at university and college could be called "programming", programming is the language it is taught in. Instead they learn formal, theoretical stuff - lots of math, operating systems, database theory, graphics, hci, signal theory, abstract algebra, algorithms and datastructures, analysis, functional programing, linguistics, artificial intelligence, formal methods and verification, and the (rather nebulous) "software engineering" (which can be everthing from specifications and testing to teamwork and a bit of product marketing). While it's certainly possible for the dedicated autodidact to pick all this stuff up too, but you won't chance upon 1st order predicate calculus or formally verifying VHDL designs when hammering out another php site, so it'd take a dedicated programme of study. The downside, I suppose, of this is that graduate CS/EE/SE are often initially not terribly good programmers (that is, they really haven't written all that much, particularly on preexisting systems and with teams of people); a year or two of graft will fix that because (bluntly put) engineering is hard, but programming ain't no thang. 84.45.132.96 (talk) 12:56, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, there is lot of theory that is taught, there are courses in universities, and there are programming certifications. See Category:Computer science education and Category:IT qualifications. There are also many self taught programmers. Some consider programming to be a skill, some consider it an art, some consider it a mix of both. Jay (talk) 13:21, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

"Are most programmers self-taught?" I don't have any statistical data, but it seems that way.

"there's not much theory that's formally taught, is there?" Actually, there's quite a bit. I have a 4 year degree in Computer Science and in retrospect, that's probably enough. After graduation, I went on to read another 100 or so books subject which helped me a great deal. Even still, I know very little about design patterns so even my knowledge is incomplete. It's funny. All day at work I think to myself about all the things I don't know. Then I interview someone and I'm amazed at all the stuff I do know.

Here's my 2 cents. In my experience, most developers suck. Even worse, they don't know that they suck. They think that what they're doing is perfectly fine when it's not. I've recently become active on Microsoft's MSDN forums and the amount of code that should never reach production is staggering (at least on the VB.NET forums). You try to help these people but sometimes their code is so bad, there's only so much you can do.

Personally, when I look over a stack of applications, all things considered, the ones with a Computer Science degree carry more weight. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 13:36, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Personally I learnt everything myself and wasn't taught anything. However you must be willing to continuously learn - something I'm afraid many programmers do not do. If you want to prove yourself you could try an open source project or just do your own thing and sell it as shareware. That's an apprenticeship route and will take just as much effort or more as a course but you might get through quicker if you're good. Dmcq (talk) 14:02, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

You say "(there's not much theory that's formally taught, is there?)", but that's completely wrong. There is a large amount of theory. If you don't mind me generalizing a bit, theory is what the self-taught programmers are usually (but certainly not always) very weak on. It's virtually impossible to pick that up by "experimenting". Instead you would have to intentionally research it. "The Art of Computer Programming" is often mentioned as a good tome to learn from, but it's a bit heavy. There are any number of easier books.

Incidentally, when I went to college, there was very little instruction on programming languages beyond the first semester. After that you were expected to pick up language and syntax more or less on your own. APL (talk) 15:52, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Before studing software development in college, I created probably the worst sorting algorithm of all time. It was only later that I learned formal sorting algorithms (quick sort, shell sort, hash sort, etc.). A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 16:40, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

• Most programmers I work with enjoy programming as a hobby, so all of them are self-taught at least to some degree. As for demonstrating their ability without having a degree, that comes out in the technical job interview, and by showing off demos. It would have to come out in the interview, anyway, because you can't assume a coder is proficient at the particular specialty that's being sought just because they have a degree. Tempshill (talk) 16:24, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I am completely self-tought. I began programming when I was 12, and today I write quite advanced Delphi applications, using Win32 API. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

You can teach someone how to program - but they'll NEVER become great programmers unless they (a) love doing it and (b) write lots and lots of code. Truly practice is the only thing that makes anyone good at it. Part of that is being able to use your language of choice without having to think about it - so it's as natural as speaking in English - the other part is that you need this big 'library' of code snippets in your head. You should be able to program something like a circular buffer or a linked list or a hash table without having to think about it - and you should be able to have it work first time. So I believe that a little initial teaching is valuable - but it's only practice that'll get you good at it. SteveBaker (talk) 03:57, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Loud buzz from computer while hard drive very busy

It only lasted less than a second. Does anyone know what it signifies please? I'v never heard it before. I've been looking for this article: "Defective Hard Drive Noises" by Marc Erickson, but it and the sound files that go with it no longer seem to exist.......or do they? Thanks 89.240.213.147 (talk) 22:01, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Is the buzz coming from the hard drive itself or something else ? If it's from the hard drive, it's probably on it's last legs. If it's from something else, perhaps it's a wire/cable hitting a fan. Vibrations from the hard drive could cause the wire/cable to move into the path of a fan. In this case just move the wire/cable. Removing the case will make it easier to identify the source. StuRat (talk) 02:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Not sure. Is it the noise the hard-drive makes when the thing-that-reads-it hits the suface? 78.149.164.211 (talk) 11:55, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion for a small web-browser?

My IE7 browser will not display most .png images - although it will some. There seem to be various reasons or solutions for this problem, but I have not found the solution that works on my computer despite trying several. Therefore, please can anyone suggest a small web-browser that does not take up much room, and that does not get deeply imbedded in the computer, that I can use when I have to see a png image, when for example I have to type a security code that is given in a png image only - such as that required to register Avast anti-virus for example? 89.240.213.147 (talk) 22:10, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

What's wrong with Firefox? Algebraist 22:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Google Chrome is much smaller and faster than any other (not IE based) browser I have ever tried. The installation wizard will not even write to the Program Files folder! However, IE7 should not have any problems reading PNG images... --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 22:19, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Can I take the oppurtunity to plug Opera? It's the lightest browser I've ever seen, and can do pretty much anything out of the box. CaptainVindaloo ^{t c e} 22:30, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Note that Firefox, Opera, and Chrome are not bulky and do not mess with the operating system. However, the Windows installers for them will ask if you want a bunch of extra garbage. If you fail to say "No. Absolutely not.", you will get a lot of bulky junk that can easily mess with the operating system. -- kainaw™ 22:32, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I have to say, out of all the web browsers that I have tried, Google Chrome is by far the best. Easy to use, fast, small. Its just amazing. I haven't found a problem with it yet--Dlo2012 (talk) 22:39, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

About a month ago, I asked myself a similar question. In terms of memory usage this is what I found:

I fired up each web browser and opened a single page, the Google search page. This was the memory usage:

Firefox 21,412
Opera   24,072
IE      26,012
Chrome  27,944
Safari  50,008

Then I opened up 3 pages I use frequently and this was the memory usage:

Firefox 40,358
Chrome  41,360
Opera   41,636
IE      62,696
Safari 100,736

It pains me to say this because I've been a long time Opera fan, but Opera is buggy. It crashes all the time for me. But granted I'm a heavy web user so I expect it to be able to have 10-15 pages open at any given time. If your web usage is less, you might have better luck with Opera. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 00:39, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

EDIT: The above looks much better in a mono-space font. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 00:40, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

One space preceding whatever you're typing, and it monospaces it. Example:

this is monospaced

24.76.160.236 (talk) 00:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you so much! I didn't know how to do that. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 01:40, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Many of us learn it by accident! —Tamfang (talk) 17:09, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

On one of my computers, I have Opera 6 (2001). I wouldn't use it for SSL, and of course it doesn't handle much CSS as intended. However, I do use it whenever Firefox is unhappy. It's compact and its few noticable bugs aren't the crashing/freezing kind. Morenoodles (talk) 09:18, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

How to selectively download Windows Updates?

Windows Update will only let me download all or none of a group of updates. These total 285mb, or which 284mb is an update to NET. Is there any way to avoid downloading the NET update for the time being, and just download the other updates please? I have XP SP3. 89.240.213.147 (talk) 22:20, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Are you updating by going to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com ? If so, you should be able to do a custom update and select each package one at a time. Note that some packages depend on other ones and will force you to install all dependencies. -- kainaw™ 22:29, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I have not been given the option to choose things, although I was in the past. I think I will uninstall NET completely, since the various versions and updates total about 600mb, which is a lot for something that is seldom required. 78.149.164.211 (talk) 11:58, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I think it's worth mentioning that if you uninstall the .NET framework it might stop some programs from working. Obviously I have no idea what you have on your computer, but quite a few things use the framework now so it's just something to be aware of. ZX81 ^talk 12:19, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Maybe I should have clicked Custom rather than Express. 78.151.117.148 (talk) 18:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

HVAC administration software for Linux?

Is there such a thing? I was wondering if there are free, open-source HVAC administration software for Linux distros... Blake Gripling (talk) 23:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

cad software

I need to find software that converts 2d line drawings to 3d drawings for use on printers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.144.94.62 (talk) 23:51, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Convert 2D to 3D in what way ? If you mean taking two views in an engineering drawing and combining them to make a 3D solid model, that's going to be extremely difficult to do automatically. Human interaction is required to do such a conversion, to tell the computer which lines and curves should be "married". StuRat (talk) 02:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

February 17

Communication software

I'm planning to setup a 802.11n network. What's the best communication software (like Skype) or the easiest to setup that could work in the 802.11n network? The software should support video telephony. Thanks for the answers. roscoe_x (talk) 09:01, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Marketing Research survey software

As a small charity we need to conduct some MR on why people visit our town. Recommendations on low cost or free software to download to Mac will be appreciated.86.216.250.162 (talk) 10:08, 17 February 2009 (UTC)DT

We need more info here. Do you intend for people to fill out this survey on this Mac ? Do you intend for them to fill it out on other computers via the Internet ? Do you have paper surveys and just want to enter the results on the Mac ? Does this survey include text answers or only multiple choice ? How many surveys do you expect to have ? StuRat (talk) 15:05, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. We plan to have paper surveys, and so need to be able to set out the questionnaire, and then to process the responses. I can set up an Excel spreadsheet easily enough to crunch the data, but would like professional style questionnaires. Also, of course, if a processing package is up and running I'll use that. There will be multiple choice, ranking, and brief text answers. Expect to issue about 1,500 and get a 10-15% response.86.216.250.162 (talk) 16:46, 17 February 2009 (UTC)DT

32 -> 16

is there ways to convert 32bit modern windows programs to 16bit so that might work on older windows 3.1? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.80.240.66 (talk) 12:03, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Short answer: only if you have the source code for the program.

Longer answer: yes, but if you don't have the source it will require so much work to be not worth it unless it's absolutely critical. --Aseld ^talk 12:09, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Conveting numbers into telephone letters

I know that companies often choose a telephone number along the lines of 555-PILAGE or whatever. I have a telephone number and I would like to know what possible words would yield the same number when dialed. Is there an application online for this? ----Seans Potato Business 12:27, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

You could try either PhoneSpell or PhoNETic. There are also a few more in there references of the Phoneword article. Hope this helps! ZX81 ^talk 12:49, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It isn't all that hard to do it manually, just write down the possible letters for each digit and try the various combinations. Yes, if you tried every combination that would be a huge list, but most possibilities can be quickly eliminated due to a lack of vowels. You might want to start with the vowels and see which adjacent consonants you can use to make words. Unfortunately, most of the words you can form will have missing or extra letters, which makes it not all that useful as a mnemonic device. StuRat (talk) 15:01, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

For example, I once had the number JEDI KNT; my sister apparently had trouble counting to seven, and kept trying to dial JEDI KNIT. —Tamfang (talk) 17:14, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

word 07 amd figure numbering

in word 07 (may be possible in other versions i dont know) when i insert a picture i can add a figure caption, with a anumber that auto-updates if i say add another picture before it,which is good but is there a way to then reference that figure in the main body of my text so it updates as well, ie i insert a figure 1 then talk about figure 1 in my text,i then insert another picture before it,and the caption updates plus the number in my text updates as well?--137.205.21.59 (talk) 13:43, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

You can highlit the text "Figure 1" beside the image, and then save it as a bookmark (use a meaningful name, not Fig1 since it may become Fig2 etc). I suggest something like "Fig2008SalesGraph". Else where you can then insert a field of type "Ref" with the option of the named bookmark. If it seems to be old data, refresh the field with Ctrl-A then F9. -- SGBailey (talk) 14:26, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Cross-References. This is what you are looking for. You can find the button for this either on the Insert or the References Tab of the Ribbon. They dont update automatically, just highlight everything and rightclick, and chose "Update Field." I just used these for a 40 page document and they worked very well.--omnipotence407 (talk) 20:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

HTML Help

I use Visual Web Developer 2005 Express to make my web pages. I use a tag called <BGSOUND> to have a sound play in the background. VWD 2005 insists that <BGSOUND> must be placed within a parent tag, but complains when <BGSOUND> is within the <HTML>, <HEAD>, or <BODY> tags. What tag do i use to enclose <BGSOUND> to stop the complaining? Also, <BGSOUND> seems to not work in Firefox; how do i do the same thing in Firefox? Thanks.  Buffered Input Output 14:13, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Take a look at this tutorial. Also, seriously reconsider whether your web-page really needs background sounds. They are very distracting to a lot of web users. Nimur (talk) 16:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Normally, i would agree with you, but this web page is for entertainment purposes only, so distractions are not a worry. Thanks for the help :)  Buffered Input Output 17:29, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

GIF Question

I am trying to make animated gifs of movie clips. But, the delays i set in the program (Advanced GIF Animator 3.0) do not seem to work in the browser (IE6 and Firefox 3.0). The animation is 173 frames with a delay of .2 seconds per frame. The browser animation speed is .6-.7 seconds per frame with many, many graphical errors. But, an animation of 20 or less frames plays properly. I have seen animations on the web with 200+ frames and quick delay times that play perfectly. What am i doing wrong?  Buffered Input Output 14:24, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

My first instinct is to say that it's not you, it's the browsers. Specifically, I bet they are still viewing an animated GIF as a series of pics. That is, they wait until the time interval has elapsed, then they start loading the next frame, and they just don't have the time to do a decent job of it. What they should do, instead, is read ahead and properly load the next frame so it's ready to go when needed.

This seems to be part of a greater failing in browsers, they don't appear to have much intelligence in how they load things. When loading a web page, for example, they seem to randomly load parts of different pics on the page, causing the text to jump all over the place as the pics appear. What they should do is first load the size of all pics, allocate the sizes on the page as empty boxes, render the page with all text and boxes for the pics, then load the pages from the top to the bottom (unless you are returning to a previously viewed page, where they should put you at the same part of the page you viewed last and load those pics first). StuRat (talk) 14:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Microsoft Office Live Workplace for Linux users

I'm moving this to the Computing Desk from the Science Desk... Nimur (talk) 16:30, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Somehow Microsoft don't let Linux users use their Microsoft Office Live Workplace. Probably due to technical problems made on purpose. Is there any work-around this? What are the alternatives?--Mr.K. (talk) 12:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

The obvious reason is that they don't want Linux to take market share from them. There are Linux equivalents to each item in the Microsoft Office suite. Which items are you interested in ? MS Word, MS Excel, MS Access, MS PowerPoint ? StuRat (talk) 14:31, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This question will get more responses at the Computing Desk. Nimur (talk) 16:29, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Principally, I need an online Office version. When a group can upload and share their (Open) Office documents. It is not only the tool in itself.--Mr.K. (talk) 16:48, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Have you tried out Google Docs? And it works on windows too :) Dmcq (talk) 18:27, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Creating DVD menus

You know those fancy menus you get on DVDs?

Is there any free software which will allow me to create my own?

(I have access to both XP and Vista). Thanks! Dendodge Talk^Contribs 18:25, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

On Mac OSX, you can use iDVD to do it. I have no idea about Windows, though... flaminglawyer 18:28, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It's not free but I've found Ulead VideoStudio to be the best (most flexible and powerful). ConvertXtoDVD is 'free' (for a period at least) but limited in what you can do to create DVD menu's. Sandman30s (talk) 19:11, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Never mind, it appears that Windows DVD Maker can do it. (I've not tried, mind, so it might not be very good, and I would love other suggestions). Dendodge Talk^Contribs 19:14, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

pixels on computer screens

Hi..

Just a really dumb question about pixels if you don't mind...

I thought that a pixel was, in effect, a relative measurement. I.e. an element on a webpage (if inputted in pixels) will take up the same proportion of the screen whether the screen is 13" or 19 (i know that you can change your screen setting manually, but assuming most people don't do this...) SO i guess question 1 is.. is that true?

Ok, so now, when i open up IE, it opens in 'small screen' format so the website i'm building looks a bit messed up until you swtich it to full screen. I'd like to know whether a similar thing will happen on a small screen (say an 8" screen or even a mobile phone) or whether its just doing this becuase it knows its in 'half-screen' mode and is doing weird and wonderful things? thanks!81.140.37.58 (talk) 18:35, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

The word "pixel" can be used in 2 different senses. Computer screens have pixels. They physically exist, and cannot be changed in size. Operating systems tell browsers and other software how big a pixel is so they can display properly. If you have a 42" HD TV set up in Windows as an 800x600px monitor, then Windows (and all the other software) will think that a pixel is reeealy big. So everything will take up more space on your screen, because the software is using the wrong measurement for a pixel.

When your IE opens in the small-screen mode (not maximized), everything isn't displayed right. It's like setting your screen to a small setting (like 800x600). Mobile phones and/or small-screened comps might do this, depending on how they're set up. Some mobile phones (like the iPhone) open a web browser with a large screen setting, then make you double-tap an area to zoom in. Other phones just use a really small (like 100x200) screen setting. Most small-screened comps have a small screen setting (like 800x600) as the default, because the OS knows that it's using a small screen. If you set it to a larger dimension, everything on the screen would be really small and hard to see. flaminglawyer 19:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

(after EC)It sounds like you are assuming that a 13" and a 19" display will have the same horizontal pixel setting. This is possible, but seems unlikely. For example, an Asus EEE netbook with an 8.9" screen has a native resolution of 1024x600 pixels, while the HP notebook sitting next to me has a 15.4" screen with a 1280x800 resolution. Thus, an image that is declared in a page's HTML as being 500x500 pixels would take up roughly half the width and nearly all the height of the browser window on the Asus, but not nearly as much on the HP (41.6% of the width, 62.5% of the height). You can, of course, use CSS to set proportional sizes for the elements, based on the size of the viewport. One way to control how a site looks on a mobile device is to have a "handheld" stylesheet which is specifically designed for mobile devices. However, there's no guarantee that the browser on the device will actually use that stylesheet. More info here. --LarryMac | Talk 19:42, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Recover ICQ6 password

Hi all,

where exactly does ICQ6 store the user's password? Network sniffing and hours of googling brought to me that the password hash is quite difficult, if not impossible, to reverse-md5 (http://code.google.com/p/joscar/wiki/LoginPasswordHash). Registry search for "ICQ" or "Mirabilis" didn't give out anything useful.

Or is there still some legacy way one can send his password to the mail address attached to an account? Unfortunately, I don't have any clue in what way I spelled the answer in my security question, this is the problem.

thanks,HardDisk (talk) 19:52, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Have you tried this. I created a simple MD5 hash using Sneak and then reversed it with that program with success might be worth a try. BigDunc^Talk 20:29, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Salted MD5, no way to RE. HardDisk (talk) 21:15, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Graphics card upgrade part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I had asked about upgrading a graphics card on a Dell Inspiron 531s running Windows Vista. I received some very helpful replies, and I've done some more research. I'd like to check what I've learned against what you knowledgeable folks know and see if it makes sense...

One of the issues that arose is that the Inspiron 531s is a "slimline case", meaning that any card I buy would need to be a low profile one. User:CaptainVindaloo recommended an XFX GeForce 9500 GT Standard card, saying that he had upgraded a 531s using that (and a low profile bracket kit). The link he provided was to the UK version of Amazon.com, but since I'm in the U.S., I did some research of my own to find the card in a place a little closer to home. I found it on Dell's website. However, the description didn't say anything about it being low profile.

Being the cautious and paranoid person that I am, I decided to chat with a Dell representative to make sure this would work for me. The rep indicated that this card was NOT low profile because "...it has 2 DVI ports. Slim towers have 1 DVI port only". As an alternative, she recommended the ATI Radeon HD 4550.

TL;DR version of the above: A) Is it true that low profile cards only have 1 DVI port instead of 2? B) How does the ATI Radeon HD 4550 compare to the XFX GeForce 9500 GT? Both seem to be 512 MB. Thanks again for your help! Dgcopter (talk) 20:11, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Not really. It always depends on the cooling solution what profile a card has. Try to walk to your local HW store and ask the dude there; if you're lucky he already has a sample card for you. HardDisk (talk) 21:17, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, the problem I'm having is that there don't seem to be any computer hardware stores around where I live. There are chain stores like Best Buy and Circuit City, but I'm not convinced that the people who work there will necessarily know more than the rep at Dell I spoke with today ... 12.43.92.140 (talk) 21:41, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

MS Word Equation Editor

I am using MS Word 2007 in order to type up my math work. When I am working on it, I click Shift+Enter in order to go to the next line and start another equation. For some reason, after too many equations, I click Shift+Enter and word goes into draft view. It will not let the user get out of the draft view and some of the notation in the final lines is lost. In addition, one can no longer save the file as a *.docx, only as a *.doc. Are there any solutions out there? Please don't give me solutions such as "dont use MS Word," that is not helpful. Thanks!--omnipotence407 (talk) 20:35, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Looking for a bookmarking site that can organize like Wikipedia

So I've been all over the Google indexed web on a quest for a bookmarking service that fulfills my apparently unusual needs; I feel like I've tried every major one out there, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for. So I'm entering this as a last resort before I give up completely…

All sort of web sites allow to to enter pieces of information and then categorize them in something like a file directory. Among the hipper such places are the major social bookmarking sites, for which the cool thing is tags. I started to like tags when I first got into them, but lately they're an unweildy drag, and I've gone back to preferring folders. But plenty of bookmarking sites also do folders, so what's the problem?

The problem comes from Google Docs and Wikipedia (or more specifically, MediaWiki). Thanks to having used both of these services extensively, I've come to see the ideal category system as one in which categories can themselves be part of multiple parent categories — SO AWESOME. Yet it seems that only these two sites actually do such a thing. I really really really want to do this with one-click bookmarking, but the only ways I know are awkward: making a new Google Doc (or page on my personal wiki at [wiki-sites.com], and pasting the link (plus any text or images I want to keep from the page). At this point, I'd be plenty jazzed if there was a one-click way to add the current URL to a new Google Doc, but even that seems out of the question.

I know this is a pathetic "peel me a grape" sort of question, but still… any ideas? Anyone know of a very well-hidden site (or downloadable program) that can do this? The only necessary ingredients are the whatever-you-call-this-kind-of-category-scheme and one-or-two-click action. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.169.163.106 (talk) 21:02, 17 February 2009 (UTC)