Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 October 15

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October 15

OC question

I'm currently overclocking a E6400, motherboard is a MSI P6N SLI Platinum. I can change the FSB speed, but it's rated as quad-pumped in BIOS (for example, it'll say 1066mhz rather than 266mhz). I accordingly multiplied my changes accordingly (for example, if I wanted to change it by 20mhz each time, I'd increase it by 80mhz total). It was fine up to a FSB of 1180, I took it up to 1260. Multiplier is x8. The motherboard supports 1333 FSB. On startup, I'm getting the following message:

"A 266 MHz system bus processor is installed. This system bus speed is not supported on this system board. The system will run at a reduced processor clock speed and system performance will be impacted."

This is confusing me. Is the motherboard somehow throttling my overclock? Should I keep going regardless? (CPU-Z and Windows are both telling me I'm running at 2.48 anyway) Reviews of the motherboard say overclocking does extremely well on this board, and I picked the processor for the same reason (even though it's only got 2mb cache /mumble)

EDIT: Aha! A known issue, or so it seems!. Still, the article really doesn't clear up whether or not the board is actually limiting the OC or not. Anyone (froth!?!) know the answer? -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 06:36, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Are there wiki software that support structured records?

Are there wiki software that support structured records? By that I mean support for records with predefined structures, such as enforcing data types and supporting queries of the form:

(field_1 = value_1) and (field_2 contains value_2) ...

--96.227.90.4 07:06, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Could you extend MediaWiki (something like a much more complicated version of Extension:SQLselect)? --h2g2bob (talk) 23:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

K&N air filter

how good will it be if one uses a K&N air filter in a 2 stroke Yamaha RX 135 bike? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.225.130.100 (talk) 13:30, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

This is a computing reference desk, not a motorcycle reference desk. -- kainaw™ 15:58, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

In other words, you might be better off asking this question on this misc desk. Algebraist 21:24, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

multiple wireless profiles

I have a wireless router at home and use two laptops there. While at home I find it convenient to have a static IP address for port forwarding purposes (it also has me connected faster - no waiting for a new IP on bootup). But when I leave the house and connect to other routers, the settings I use at home might not work. At this point I go in and select "obtain ip from server", which isn't that hard but I am a little lazy.

Is there a way in XP to associate different tcp/ip settings with different routers? I don't see this option in the control panels I've looked at, are there third party programs to do this? If I could also do this in Ubuntu also that would be cool, but I mainly boot into XP. Thanks, Man It's So Loud In Here 16:36, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

This page describes how to use the "netsh" command inside batch files to somewhat automate the process in Windows. disclaimer - I've not tried this out. I'd imagine something similar could be done in a shell script with Ubuntu. --LarryMac | Talk 17:52, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

For Linux you can have two (or howevermany) versions of the netconfig script (in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices or similar, depending on dist) and your "go to DHCP" and "go to static" scripts do a ifdown, cp in your script, ifup. One word of warning - some dists leave dhclient (the DHCP client software) running after an ifdown (to my mind they shouldn't, but figuring out when to do so safely in a multihomed machine is, granted, rather hard sometimes), so you may have to pkill that. There is something on the Ubuntu Ip config panel labelled "enable roaming" or something (I don't have one to hand to check), but what that actually does I don't know. -- PrettyDirtyThing 17:59, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

flash player

Ever since I saw Animator vs Animation, I've been interested in flash. But I don't know how to make it! I downloaded flash player from the site in the article here, but after I downloaded a flash game on my computer, I can't even find the program to actually run it! What do I do? --Jeevies 17:56, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure to actually make Flash games or movies, you have to buy it from the official website. The Flash Player just runs the code in your browser. NASCAR Fan24^{(radio me!)} 22:36, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Second that. --Kushal^t 23:21, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

While the traditional way is indeed to pay a heap of money for Flash (a trial is available to get you started), there are cheaper alternatives. If your project is more of a program than an animation (like a game) you can program the whole thing in a script, and compile it into a flash movie using a free compiler. You can code in Actionscript 2 and use the MTASC compiler (no longer maintained though). Or you can code in HaXe (which looks like actionscript) and compile to an swf that can be played in any flash player. You can use swfmill to roll any pictures you may need into the swf. There is also an effort going on to create a full-fledged open source flash alternative, but I'm not sure it's usable yet. risk 23:45, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Aww..so I have to pay "a heap of money"? Well, how about just playing flash games/movies outside of my browser? You know, like in my hard drive? --Jeevies 04:09, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Save the SWF file to your hard drive and you should be able to open it in your browser or in the free Flash Player you can get from Adobe.com. Try just opening it in your browser once you have it saved (File > Open) like it was any old file, and it should work. --24.147.86.187 14:14, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I opened it on IE and it still asks for the application. --Jeevies 16:30, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Do you guys think the OP needs to install a Shockwave player from Adobe? I think some games need Shockwave player. --Kushal^t 22:31, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Never mind, I just upgraded my IE 6 and I was fine. So is Actionscript, HaXE or MTASC free? --Jeevies 16:00, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Perl and XML

I am trying to write the values in a certain array to an XML file, I used the code present in this page under the title of "Writing perl structures into XML". The problem is I dont want the <anon> tag to appear,instead I'd like something else to be written in it. I want my output to look like this

..<whatever>
......<country>england</country>
......<capital>london</capital>
..</whatever>
..<whatever>
......<country>norway</country>
......<capital>oslo</capital>
..</whatever>
..<whatever>
......<country>india</country>
......<capital>new delhi</capital>
..</whatever>

Any ideas ?

NB: I used the dots to show tabbing —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.219.146.147 (talk) 19:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Basically it looks like the XML::Simple library doesn't support very complicated XML output. I don't use Perl but surely some mucking around with one of the other standard Perl-XML libraries will come up with one that supports more rigorous output. XML::Simple seems to be used primarily for parsing XML for very simple things, not for forming it. (whatever you do, DON'T treat XML like it was just any old text file!!) --24.147.86.187 20:30, 15 October 2007 (UTC)