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September 3

Backing up .wav Files on DVD-R

Hello. I have Nero 6. How can I back up .wav files onto a DVD-R? Thanks in advance. --Mayfare (talk) 00:43, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Can't you just, 1. put a DVD-R in the drive, 2. open it in Windows, 3. drag your files onto it, 4. click burn or whatever? I'm assuming you want to back them up as files rather than try to burn them in a way that is readable by a DVD or CD player. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 01:32, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I am backing up music files on a DVD-R so that a CD or DVD player can read them. --Mayfare (talk) 01:53, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

There's no DVD equivalent to an audio CD. See this thread. If you just burn the WAV files to a DVD as 98.217.8.46 suggested, it will probably work in many modern players. MP3 or DVD-Audio would probably work in more. -- BenRG (talk) 03:04, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Hate to point this out but the above person is way way wrong. There are no CD players that will read DVDs (that I know of) as they need a different laser assembly. If your CD player specifically states it will read from a DVD then that is fine but I have never seen one. However if you use a DVD player as a CD player there is a good chance it will read wav files straight from the disc, and that would just requre you to drag them onto the DVD in nero and burn it. Also there is a small but good chance your CD player will play MP3s though, but only through a CD. If you encode at 320kbps you shouldn't notice a difference between the CD and MP3 unless you have really good speakers, but you'll be able to fit quite a lot more songs on it. Also the above person mentions DVD Audio but encoding a CD to this is pointless since it uses up almost as much space and you don't gain quality (you never do when converting audio to a higher bitrate) and may actually lose it due to the transcoding from CD audio to DVD audio 88.211.96.3 (talk) 10:03, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

You're right, I shouldn't have said "many players" since it's probably still true that few of them have a DVD pickup. DVD-Audio supports lossless audio at a variety of sampling rates including 44.1 kHz, so it's unlikely that there'd be any transcoding loss. It wouldn't save much space (it would save a little if you used MLP), but that's not the point—the point is that, unlike WAV-on-a-DVD, it's an official standard, if not an especially popular one. -- BenRG (talk) 11:00, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Back to the original question: how about converting your wav files to mp3's? There is a very good chance your DVD or CD player would be able to play them. Sandman30s (talk) 14:42, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Mobile applications and plug-ins

Where does a modern mobile phone store its applications and plug-ins - on its flash memory card (or whatever a mobile uses) or on the SIM card? I would have thought the flash card, but a colleague is wondering if they might be stored on the SIM card. We both initially thought that the limit of a SIM card's storage is a few kilobytes of contact details, but a PowerPoint we've received on some new Bluetooth technology is causing some confusion. Thanks in advance. --81.171.134.226 (talk) 09:58, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

The SIM has a very small data capacity, and it wouldn't be useful to store apps on it since any mobile phone capable of running said apps would have some sort of inbuilt flash memory at the very least. Even if you could fit an app on the SIM I doubt the phone manufacturer would have a way of executing data from it because it isn't needed. It should be noted that the SIM isn't even primarily for storing numbers but is the phones way of authenticating your credentials against the network for billing purposes and allowing you to use the network. 88.211.96.3 (talk) 10:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Woah hold on actually have a look at Java Card. It seems I'm wrong and you can actually run small programs off the sim but it looks to be mostly security stuff 88.211.96.3 (talk) 10:13, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

E-mail

Does deleting a message from your sentbox delete it from the inbox of the person you sent the message to (if they have not replied)? 124.181.254.143 (talk) 10:59, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

No. The recipient's copy is stored on the recipient's mail server (typically managed by their ISP or by Google/Microsoft/whatever). Unless you control that server or can log in to the recipient's account, there's nothing you can do to delete the message. -- BenRG (talk) 11:11, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Not that this will help you if you have already sent the email but if I ever need to send anything that I might need to change I send the message as a link to a .txt file (or if it needs to be visual then a .jpg) hosted on my webspace and for one I can delete the file if I need to and I can also see if the message has been viewed yet via my logs. Gunrun (talk) 12:27, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

If the mail is sent internally in your organization/company/whatever, your system may have functionality that allows you to "recall" a message. Microsoft Exchange, for example, has an option that partially allows you to recall messages (though the recipient may circumvent it if s/he really wants to). I remember eight years ago or so I worked at a place that ran a system called FirstClass and then you could completely recall any message sent to other people in the system even if they had read it (provided it was not moved from their inbox). Jørgen (talk) 19:26, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I've never thought of that Gunrun! Very clever indeed... ;) SF007 (talk) 07:02, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

mobile phones

explain about bluetooth? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.197.196.130 (talk) 11:19, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Bluetooth - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 11:22, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Technology...grr...

I messed up an SD card by taking it out of my camera while it was accessing the card. Now it won't format on the camera or my computer. WTF? 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 16:04, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Maybe PhotoRec can help. And maybe the camera is saying "humans ... grrr...". --LarryMac | Talk 16:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I have formatted "lost" SD cards on my Linux box. If you know someone with Linux, ask them if they can do a mkfs.vfat for you. -- kainaw™ 16:24, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I had a similar problem. I fixed it by booting the pc in DOS, running fdisk and deleting the existing partition then making a new one, reboot the pc, run "format E:" (replace E with your cards drive letter) and then it worked. If you don't have DOS already you can download it here and run it from the livecd. JessicaThunderbolt 17:17, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I did a circut test and found that the card had fried. It's useless. Sorry...31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 13:07, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Mounted filesystem going read-only

I have an external SCSI device that periodically goes read-only on my Redhat system. Is there some way (I don't really care how) to tell it that it can never ever under any circumstances go read-only? I don't care if writing to the disk is going to cause a black hole and destroy the earth. The disk must always be read-write. -- kainaw™ 17:09, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

If the filesystem is going read-only without your intervention, something is wrong. The Linux kernel doesn't change a filesystem write-enabled status without user intervention and without reporting to dmesg. So, there must be something in your dmesg saying what happened. You probably have a filesystem corruption that was detected by the FS layer of the kernel, and it remounted it read-only to prevent further data corruption.

If you don't care for the data, just redirect your writes to /dev/null. --Juliano (T) 19:17, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

For a change of pace, I'll answer the question instead of attacking the motive. The behavior of ext2/ext3 filesystems when a disk error occurs can be altered with a mount option. Look for errors=remount-ro in your /etc/fstab and change it to errors=continue, or add -o errors=continue to your mount command line. If the option is not given in fstab or on the mount command line, it will be read from the disk superblock, which you can modify with tune2fs -e continue. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:01, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I have errors=continue in fstab. I just removed the journal and restored it. Of course, I did another lengthy e2fsck fixing all problems (bad inodes) and scanning for bad sectors (none found). If it goes read-only again, I'll alter the superblock to reinforce that I want it to stay read-write. Thanks. -- kainaw™ 23:37, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I've seen this problem in the past when using an external USB drive as my boot drive in SuSE 9.x or maybe 10,x (I think is was a Seagate drive) - the drive would autonomously decide to power-off after not being used for a while - and for some reason Linux would get really upset about that and mark it read-only...which of course screwed everything up from that point on (because stuff like /tmp and my swap space would be RO) and eventually resulted in the system locking up on me. I never did find a fix for it - it was flagged as a "known problem" by SuSE and plenty of people in my local Linux usergroup had seen something like it. But I'd be surprised if an external SCSI drive would power down like that without the OS telling it to. However, just for grins you might try getting rid of the power-save options and see what happens. SteveBaker (talk) 10:45, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Default "home page" when opening a browser?

Are there statistics that show what web pages or categories of web pages people tend to use as their "default home page" that first opens when opening their web browser? Mine, for example, is set to Google for quick searching, but I can imagine others setting it to their company's Intranet, a weather page, news page, etc.? --142.108.107.93 (talk) 19:32, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I can't find any statistics on the web, but I'd imagine that search engines and browser default homepages would be the most common. Without conducting an extensive survey it's impossible to know for sure. JessicaThunderbolt 19:49, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Mine is set to about:blank — Shinhan < talk > 09:33, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I once used a friends computer and started his browser, and there was a page with many scantily clad young women. I'm like "Dude, every time you start your browser? Seriously, man, that ain't healthy!" 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

My "default home page" is the 50-70 tabs I had open the last time I closed the browser. --Carnildo (talk) 22:38, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

webcomic

I'm trying to remember a webcomic I like.

I can remember the plots of some of the individual strips, and it is done in the style of this one, which I found called Sinister Bedfellows. In the one I am thinking of, there are usually three photographs, and something like newspaper cut out words put over them. It's a poetic webcomic.

• One I remember had the words "my house burnt down yesterday, it feels better everytime"
• One involved sending his heart to someone for Christmas, but he couldn't because it was broken.

Thanks, maybe you can help :) I'm looking through all of the comics listed at List of webcomics, and have been trying to search through Google. I really need to find the site! Mac Davis (talk) 19:45, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

I found it! Sorry about that. The comic was called "a softer world." Mac Davis (talk) 19:51, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

September 4

As Root

Hey y'all. You may recognize me as the n00b who often asks stuff here. ;) Anyways I have a question for being root in Ubuntu. The Examples that come with Ubuntu are owned by root as such I being a normal user(Though I can log in as root), I only have "read-only" access. How do I log in as root(I usually login from the terminal but I don't how to do anything in the terminal other then installing stuff, and getting updates) or do something else to "unlock" files that are owned by root? If I need to clarify my question, please say so.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:06, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

From the command prompt... If you know root's password, just type "su". I personally type "su -" to load root's profile. If you are in the sudoers file (/etc/sudoers in Ubuntu, I believe), then you can run any command as root by appending "sudo" in front of it, as

in "sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf" (don't run that). You'll be asked for YOUR password, not root's. -- kainaw™ 00:32, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Mmmh now how to open the documents in Examples? Or how to enable read+write by a normal user?--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:39, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Once you are root, you can use chown to make you the owner or chmod to allow everyone read/write ability to the Examples directory. -- kainaw™ 00:41, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

ER can you give me the "specific" command?--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:51, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Never mind I did it. I "unlocked" the file. Then relocked it. It's: chown (name of user) (name of file/folder/directory). This changes the owner and thus who can edit the permissions. :D Thanks guys.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 01:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

When I was a noob, I was told, "Learn to use man and check out all the files in /usr/bin." I figured out that you can do something like "man chown" to learn what the chown command can do. I then looked in /usr/bin and used man on them. I found a lot of cool things. I still think the advice was a tad rude, but I'm glad that I followed the advice. -- kainaw™ 01:24, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

You can give "read" access to all users with sudo chmod a+r /path/to/file. And as Kainaw said, use the man pages. -Abhishek (talk) 02:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

D:/ doesn't read discs

Hey guys, I've been having trouble with my laptop (Toshiba, running XP) regarding the CD/DVD drive for a few months now. Ever since I tried to run what I think was a bootleg DVD in it and the software I was using to run it crashed, the drive has been unable to read discs. Well, I think it reads them, but it does a whole load of weird whirring sounds for a few minutes and then does absolutely nothing, and then I can't access the disc via the computer. I have been able to install IL-2 Sturmovik by putting in the disc JUST as the computer boots up, but after this the same thing happens if I put in a disc. I have considered purchasing an external CD/DVD drive so I can play Spore when it comes out, but what exactly is the problem here? I think it's the software, and as far as I know there's no way to remove the drive from the computer. I can't rollback because I never updated the driver. Avnas Ishtaroth _{drop me a line} 01:47, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

A Linux LiveCD/LiveUSB would be useful in here, to test out if it's hardware or software problem. If you don't want to download a Linux iso you can maybe try safe-mode, since it appears that you could access the drive for a brief moment before it goes dead. Laptop optical drives are usually replaceable, sometimes even with different parts, without too much problem. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:14, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

What brand of laptop is it? Most companies will sell you an internal drive thats easily replacable, but this will cost more than an external drive. However it will look nicer. In the meantime if you wanted to get Spore you could always get it off EA Downloader or Direct2Drive, both of which are legal, easy to use, and don't need a CD drive. Both are fairly good although I consider direct2drive better because it lets you download your games forever whereas EA Downloader has a limit of 6 months unless you pay $5 extra. Also if you order before the game comes out you get the Spore creature creator for free I think (not totally sure) TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:29, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh a thought. Have you tried removing the DVD drive and booting the PC without it, then closing the PC down and putting the drive back in again. I had an issue similar to this with a floppy drive and this fixed it. TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:31, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

As I said, I'm not sure if I can remove the drive. There doesn't seem to be a way to. It appears to be quite a crappy old thing, I think it's about 2-3 years old now. Will have to check the model on it though. Anyway, my granny purchased me both Spore and an external drive today, so we'll see how that goes. Avnas Ishtaroth _{drop me a line} 06:56, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

It could be that the "bootleg DVD" used AutoRun to install some kind of malware which interfered with later use of the drive. Sony got in huge trouble for doing something like this a few years ago. SecuROM, which ships with many games, seems to be notorious for causing drive problems. -- BenRG (talk) 15:38, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Bawww, it appears she bought me an external hard drive, which I already have. I'll look into Direct2Drive, but I already have the game, I just need to install it without a CD drive. Would I be able to install it on the external hard drive via the family computer and transfer it to my laptop? Avnas Ishtaroth _{drop me a line} 08:23, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

That won't work. You could copy the entirety of the DVD to the external drive instead of installing it, and run the setup.exe from the external drive on your own PC however the game MIGHT have copy protection to stop that, but Spore runs without the CD so I think the only bit in place is the internet registration. TheGreatZorko (talk) 22:50, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Google Chrome

Is Google Chrome any good? I have no intention to replace my beloved Firefox 3, but I'd be interested in seeing how it is before giving it a roll myself. bibliomaniac15 03:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Fast -Abhishek (talk) 06:05, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

It looks pretty okey. I have been using opera for a long time and I love it. One thing to notice is for every tab on Chrome there is a separate application/instance of
Chrome. I am looking for some developments in future. Ultimately one day you have to shift to Chrome so get used to it. 61.12.10.34 (talk) 07:22, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Why not try it yourself. It doesn't replace Firefox and if you don't like it you can make it go away. I myself like it, especially the way tabs work, and the way it intergrates with Vista's Aero interface. It's also bloody fast and the download manager and incognito mode are great, but I miss adblock. Since the browser is opensource and supports plugins though I suspect there shall be an adblock extension soon enough. TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:22, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Shockingly, software doesn't have to be open source to make it's pluging work... so because it's open source has no bearing on the development of an adblock extension. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 10:26, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but open source means that even if google specifically trys to stop an adblock extention (and they may do seeing as adverts are their main stream of revenue) someone can just fork the code and remove that part. TheGreatZorko (talk) 11:37, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

So true, and if a TV company decides to remove the parts of the TV that let is show channels, you could take the parts and create a new TV. Of course it's not very helpful to the conversation to bring that up, because there is no chance of Google doing that, and you clearly realise your reasons for being supportive of open source are somewhat unstable or you wouldn't feel you had to try and force it into posts like this where it really has no bearing, and your example was just silly. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 11:42, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

How about this: if a browser supports extensions, you can implement an ad blocker as an extension. If it's open source, you can implement it in a code fork. Being open source and supporting extensions means you have two avenues for introducing an ad blocker, so it's reasonable enough to mention both. (Especially since, per the below, Chrome doesn't actually support extensions.) -- BenRG (talk) 15:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Nope, you're (i know you're a different person, i'm generalising cause i'm lazy) still pushing your views on open source like they're more important than they are. If someone uses Google Chrome code to write an ad-free browser, it is no longer Google Chrome. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 22:45, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Not necessarily, Sometimes in open source there are patches or alternative, non-official binaries that add additional features or make changes that the official maintainers won't do. This is a lot of effort, because every time the official project is updated, the patches or alternative binaries must also be updated, but it does occasionally happen.

Usualy these patches are absorbed into the main trunk, but if they aren't for whatever reason, they can be maintained indefinitely in parallel to the software project itself. This is a lot of effort, but it's less effort than creating a total fork.

Whether the patched version would still be chrome is a philosophical question that's really just nitpicking. APL (talk) 01:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Does chrome really support firefox-style extensions, or is that just a myth? I can't find any evidence of that. As far as I can tell Gears isn't useful for making the kind of plug-in we're talking about, here. APL (talk) 15:12, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Not currently, apparently.  :-( --LarryMac | Talk 15:34, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I downloaded Chrome when it came out, and I've been using it as my browser for the last couple of days (I've been using Firefox since like pre-1.0, I figure that it would be nice trying something new), and it's pretty nice. It's certainly lightning fast, it looks nice, and it's got enough features to be useful. Although stuff is missing (like any way to handle feeds and the omnibar ain't no awesomebar, among many other things), it works decently enough. I like it! 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:43, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that Google's idea of a "way to handle feeds" would be Google Reader. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for built-in functionality. -- Coneslayer (talk) 19:56, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

That's not what I meant. When you go to a page with an associated feed (like a blog, or a wikipedia history page), a little feed icon appears in firefox and internet explorer 7, so you can easily subscribe to it. Google Chrome doesn't have that, so you have to either dig up the link on the site or look at the source (where it is in a <link> tag). And when you go to a page which is a feed, both IE and firefox gives you simple ways to subscribe to it (using the browser or Google Reader, for instance). Chrome doesn't do that either. Compare for instance this feed from the New York Times in Firefox and Chrome. Chrome doesn't even render it nicely. It's rather incredible that a Google Browser offers no way to easily add feeds to Google Reader. It's such an easy feature to implement, and so basic, that it's quite stunning. 83.250.202.36 (talk) 21:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I get it now. I thought you meant something like Firefox's Live Bookmarks. -- Coneslayer (talk) 13:15, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

No Linux version....fail. SteveBaker (talk) 03:55, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Have you guys read this recently? Kushal (talk) 14:43, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

advanced Perl help!

On a Perl forum, someone wrote me a perl script to parse a CSV (comma separated value) file. I've saved the code here: User:Nichalp/code. Now I noticed a major bug in that the last line of a CSV file does not get parsed. I tried to contact the author, but he seems to be offline for the past week, and the code is well over my head for me to understand. Please could someone who can understand the code help me? I think it has to do with the eof check. I have put up a sample CSV file content on the page. =Nichalp «Talk»= 04:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yuck. First of all, you should be using the well-tested Text::CSV module, not some anonymous hack parser. Secondly, yes it is almost always wrong to use eof() in perl (the read operators have eof/error return values which you should be checking for instead). And why are there 2 different read loops? Too much of a mess to fix. Kill it, get Text::CSV from CPAN, and start over. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 05:04, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Webpage update monitoring

Is there a program or website that offers the service of monitoring a specific list of other web pages for changes? And then emailing me or something when there is a change? It doesn't have to check all the time, just once an hour or once a day or whenever I tell it to. Kind of like the Wikipedia Watchlist, but for the web. This would save me the trouble of going through the pages regularly to check for changes, which happen infrequently so it is a waste of time. I know that I can monitor updates to RSS feeds; but this is about regular web pages, not RSS feeds. Thanks, --71.141.123.164 (talk) 06:12, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

If you use Linux, it would be trivial to script a sequence of moving a local copy of a page to a backup, wget the current version of the page, run diff on the two versions, send email (or save a local log message) if diff doesn't return null - you can even add the diffs to the email. Add it to Cron. Get creating and have the script read URLs from a file so you don't have to write a script for each page you want to watch. -- kainaw™ 12:16, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Failing that, the page may have an RSS feed for this. Check the website in question for links. — QuantumEleven 12:27, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Not wanting to be picky but, um, they explicitly don't want an RSS feed. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 12:41, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, crumbs - that should teach me to read questions more carefully! Sorry, OP. — QuantumEleven 10:10, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Not that messing around with wget, diff and cron isn't cool and everything, but if you're not into that stuff, there's webservices like Versionista (which I believe was inspired by wikipedia's history and diff functions). I haven't used it personally, but I hear it works great. For instance, if you look at this comparison you see that the McCain campaign removed Tom Ridge from some speaking-thing. Nice, huh! 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:58, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Delete Sarah Palin as non-notable!

Google hasn't heard of her: [1], clearly doesn't exist. :-) So basically, I got this search result about a half an hour ago. I haven't seen that happen before and once I repeated the search, it was back to normal. Do you know what (probably simple) explanation there is? Servers overloaded etc? Fribbler (talk) 16:20, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

That picture is altered. When Google doesn't find ANY results (as the message says), you do not get 10 pages of results below the message. Next time do a better cut and crop. -- kainaw™ 16:40, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Hadn't noticed that. Should have clicked on those before I closed the window. But nay, I have not 'shopped the picture. I swear on my wiki-reputation that that picture is an unaltered screenshot. Curiouser and curiouser..... Fribbler (talk) 16:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I did notice your sig after replying and wondered if some anon was manually typing it in... but, you could still be an anon manually typing in Fribbler's sig! -- kainaw™ 16:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

But I could not alter the page history showing it to be me.... :-) My guess is that, at the time of the search, I was clicking lots of things quickly and I must have somehow cut the search off half-done. But I can't reproduce the result. Fribbler (talk) 16:53, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

That's a possibility. In Firefox, a pretty solid indication of that would be the message "Stopped" rather than the usual "Done" on the bar at the bottom of the window. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 22:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Anyways, not having a Google hit does not mean it is non notable. Kushal (talk) 22:58, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The long list of other pages certainly suggests a poorly faked image...and it's REALLY hard to type anything into Google that sounds remotely like English without getting either some valid hits or a "Did you mean..." suggestion. Just try it! Any combination of believable English names produce hits - and any "almost" real names produce a "Did you mean...". Also, the Wikipedia article on Palin has existed since October 2005 - LONG before you did that search - and at the barest minimum, that would have constituted one ghit. But Sarah Palin is a common enough name - and even if "sarah palin" didn't match for reasons of non-notability, you'd still have gotten some pages that had "Sarah Miles" and "Micheal Palin" that would have matched (there are 2,430 Ghits for "Sarah Miles" and "Michael Palin"). So we KNOW for 100% sure that your search result (as illustrated) is broken.

So can it be a FireFox bug? No! At least not a remotely credible one because the page says "Your search - sarah palin - did not match any documents." - no possible combination of failing to render text could result in that appearing on the screen - look at the search results HTML code - it's a very simple piece of continuous HTML. How would the surrounding text (which Firefox would have to have "dreamed up" somewhere) get wrapped around your search term with all of the boldface tags perfectly in place? For a random rendering bug - that's an awfully tough coincidence. Finally - (albeit perhaps circumstantially) in the Palingoogle image, there are 48 pixels between the bottom of the pale blue bar that says "Web" and the bottom of the "sarah palin" text. When I do it (Firefox 3.01, Google.ie - seemingly the same fonts, etc - but with a genuinely failed search) that is only 36 pixels - and no amount of window resizing makes it come out any different with that font choice.

Hence, I also accuse our OP of faking the image. SteveBaker (talk) 03:51, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

So probably not a Firefox bug. Likely a momentary Google bug. I'm not sure about the pixels. Something to do with my widescreen laptop resolution perhaps. I would like to reiterate that I have not faked the image. Had I have then I would basically be trolling. Not something I would do. Fribbler (talk) 15:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I would like to add that if an article doesn't meet notibility guidelines the non-notable template should be placed on the page to alert other editors, with reasons on the talk page of that article. And if you have questions about this then the Wikipedia:Help Desk is the place for them not the computing reference desk. - Phydaux (talk) 11:55, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I am aware of that. The title was of course a joke. It's the technical bug that I'm interested in. Fribbler (talk) 15:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Most of the top results (except for wikipedia) in google are cloaking sites and google knows about them and just lets them keep on cloaking and getting the top result everytime. William Ortiz (talk) 21:07, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Java

In Java, are classes objects? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 16:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

In Java, a class is the description (the code, the file, the actual stuff the programmer typed into his editor) and an object is the instantiation of the class (the stuff the variable points to). -- kainaw™ 16:49, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

So what's this [2] all about then? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 16:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

It's about a class named Class, from which the JVM creates Class objects. --LarryMac | Talk 17:00, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Is that a yes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.164.115 (talk) 18:09, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

No. --LarryMac | Talk 18:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

In general, try and stay away from "meta"-elements like java.lang.Class (with the exception for java.lang.Object, which you can't stay away from). Concentrate on learning the language, and worry about the under-the-hood stuff later. 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:37, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

It boils down to how you define "object", which can mean different things to different people. My own feeling is that classes are not first class objects in Java, since to manipulate them like other objects you really have to reach around the language's back. For example, to create a new kind of class (not a new Class object), you have to call out to a Java compiler and then load the resulting byte code. Compare that to the kinds of class manipulations you can do in Smalltalk or Perl, where you can dynamically assign new methods to a class. --Sean 19:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

A class is not an object, no it is not, but this does not mean that you cannot have an object named Class! :) NerdyNSK (talk) 14:34, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

2 YouTube questions

Question 1

1. Can you rename your YouTube account?

Question2

2. Can you transfer videos from one account to another?

No, you can't do either, unfortunately. --jh51681 (talk) 18:36, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

All you can do is download the YouTube video and upload it to the new account, or upload the original, if you still have it.--ChokinBako (talk) 11:28, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

How to develop a WIKI portal

I am trying to post a new article on wikipedia but I am not sure how to do it. Can someone please help me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vishnuteja84 (talk • contribs) 19:28, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Your first article. Xenon54 19:50, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Also, Wikipedia: Help Desk. For any other questions you have about using wikipedia. -Phydaux (talk) 11:40, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

firewall log

I looked at my firewall log out of curiosity and saw a lot of text like:

Sep 4 15:00:28 82 Firewall[38]: Stealth Mode connection attempt to TCP 70.215.252.82:49197 from 209.85.147.104:80

What does this mean and should I be concerned? Thanks for your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.215.252.82 (talk) 20:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

You shouldn't be. Whatever it was, your firewall blocked it. Old-school internet worms works by scanning the internet for computers with a specific vulnerability that they can use to infiltrate yet another computer (and thus spread the worm further). They fill the tubes with random noise like this. Firewalls block these attempts so that they can't accomplish this.

I would say one thing though: a much better protection against this can't of thing compared to a software firewall is a NAT router, which will drop these packets before they can even reach your computer. I strongly suggest you get one, since they are dynamite for protection against incoming hacking attempts 83.250.202.36 (talk) 21:07, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The local port (49197) looks like a dynamically assigned port number for an outgoing connection, the remote port (80) is the standard HTTP port, and an RDNS lookup on the remote address reveals that it belongs to Google. So I think what probably happened is that you made a web connection to Google and your machine decided the connection was closed before Google's did. When Google subsequently sent another IP packet, your machine interpreted it as an unrelated "connection attempt" to that now-unused port. Nothing to worry about, in other words. I don't know what "stealth mode" means, but it might mean that the firewall simply ate the packet rather than sending a RST packet back. The RST is supposed to tell the sending machine to close the connection in case the last close request got lost, but it has the side effect of letting the sending machine know of your existence, which some people think is a security risk (since the sender might be scanning for in-use IP addresses). -- BenRG (talk) 21:29, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

"Stealth mode" probably means any packet other than a SYN packet sent to a closed port. The traditional way to see if a port is open is to start opening a connection to it (send a SYN packet), but every firewall and intrusion detection system ever written will spot that. There are other ways of seeing if a port is open (send an ACK packet, send a FIN packet, send a null packet, send a Christmas-tree packet, etc.) that are less likely to be detected. --Carnildo (talk) 23:23, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Firefox 3 Closing Randomly

OK, I never used to have this problem, but all of a sudden Firefox 3 started having issues on my computer. It'll just disappear- close down without any warning or error message. It doesn't seem to matter how many tabs I have open or what sites I'm on, it just happens. Thankfully, if I start it back up, it will let me restore my tabs, but it's really getting annoying. The last time it happened, it eventually started coming up with an error message saying something about how it could not be found (or something, I can't remember it exactly). And then I tried other programs, and they came up with the same message! Even the Task Manager and command prompt wouldn't come up! Finally, I had to completely restart my computer and reinstall Firefox. I really don't want to do that again this time (I've already gotten the "can't find something or other" error message, but haven't seen it since restarting my computer this time around.) so I'm wondering if somebody can give me some insight into what exactly is going on and how I can fix it? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 23:12, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

1. What kind of computer are you on. (I mean, we're not psychic!) 2. Do you have any special extensions installed. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 23:53, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, sorry. I've got a Windows XP. As for extensions... erm... lemme think. I think there's StumbleUpon on it, and I know Veoh's little bar comes up. Not entirely certain. I have tried to start it in Safe Mode, but it still doesn't work. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 00:16, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

If other programs are doing it - then it's probably not a Firefox error - but something more systemic. When you get an error like this - you REALLY need to get into the habit of writing it down. If you had the exact message for us - we'd stand a good chance of being able to diagnose it.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:03, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Uploading files to Google Sites

Google Page creator allows files under 10 MB each and 100 MB in total to be uploaded. Does Sites have this feature? How can I use it and what are the limitations? Thank youKushal (talk) 23:39, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

:( Kushal (talk) 17:00, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

September 5

Online survey websites

I recently came across www.awsurveys.com, which pays for surveying. How much money can anyone earn by way of these websites? These websites dont pay a fixed amount. For example, if I start a website and pay a fixed amount for people to take surveys online, how much would I need to pay survey takers daily? Simply put, if I pay $1 daily for taking a short survey for five minutes, will there be takers?

See Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Miscellaneous#Does_this_look_legit.3F. As for takers—I doubt it. Five minutes of my time is worth more than $1 plus I'd have to go through all the hassle of telling you where to send the check and who to make it out to (and I'd be worried that you'd only be doing it in order to get my address to sell to spammers). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 02:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, What is the payout an average person would expect for spending 5 minutes taking surveys; assuming no spamming is done? Any idea?

Simply answering, yes. There will be takers. Will they be your targetted demographic is an entirely different question. Kushal (talk) 03:24, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Proxy server

I'm trying to use a proxy server to access a website that's only available in the US. I've tried and tried but all the instructions I found everywhere on the internet are so full of computer gibberish that I'm not getting anywhere, and I don't understand how you find a proxy server to use. Do I have to have a computer in the US whose IP address I can use? Surely not. I'm so confused. Please explain to me how to set up a proxy server in the most dumbed-down words possible. Thank you most kindly!!! Cherry Red Toenails (talk) 02:23, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Removing any sort of computerish word I can think of... The site is only available to U.S. computers. So, must have a computer in the U.S. to view it. What you want is a computer in the U.S. that will let you give it a web address and it will return the web page from that address. It is an in-between man. For example, if you are underage and you want to buy alcohol, you get an in-between guy. You give him the cash. He uses the cash to buy alcohol. He gives you the alcohol. It appears that you are asking "how can I be the kid trying to buy alcohol and the guy who is buying it at the same time?" You can't. You need to locate a proxy server in the United States. How? Google. Also, ensure you don't type anything important into it. Back to the example before - assume you give the guy your credit card to buy alcohol. How do you know he didn't copy down the information from the card when he was in the store? Similarly, you cannot trust the operators of proxy servers. -- kainaw™ 02:32, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

vtunnel.com , proxyninja.com there are many just google.. -UnknownIP

Try Tor (download here). In the Vidalia Control Panel click "View the network" and select a node from the country you want, then append the address with it's name followed by ".exit" - so "google.com" would become "google.com.random22.exit". Replace "random22" with the name of the exit node. JessicaThunderbolt 19:01, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Graphing one variable against another in Open/NeoOffice Calc

It's wonderfully easy to make pretty charts in Calc, and to label them prettily. But prettiness aside, I'm having trouble getting them to show what I want them to show.

I have a Calc spreadsheet with "time" running from A2:A21 and "number completed" from B2:B21. "Time" is a regular arithmetic progression: 0, 3, 6, 9, 12.... It's my independent variable. "Number completed", the dependent variable, is of course not quite so neat. The number in B7 (for example) is the number completed in the time in A7 -- you get the picture, I'm sure. So, in the graphic representation, I want "time" as my x-axis and "number completed" as my y-axis. (Just the kind of stuff we were all doing with pencil and graph paper when we were 13 years old.)

Calc tries hard to be helpful. It sees that row 1 contains text and starts by graphing B2:B21 in red (good) and also A2:A21 in blue (thanks but no thanks) against "row". I can easily zap the latter but this means I have unneeded gaps between my pretty red bars. Also, my numbers are plotted not against time but instead against "Row 2 Row 3 Row 4 Row5" etc. Thanks, but I want them plotted against "0, 3, 6, 9", etc.

I've a hunch that I should have named/labeled my rows before attempting to make the graph. In the past I've received spreadsheets with named columns and perhaps named rows too, but I've never wanted to do this and now that I want to try it I can't see how. (Right-clicking the leftmost column doesn't bring up an option to "adopt row labels from the cells of this column" or similar. And yes, I've RTFM.)

So, uh, what very obvious fact have I been too dumb to notice? -- Hoary (talk) 02:40, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what you did but you definitely don't have to label your rows. In Calc, start with Insert|Chart and answer all the questions. for "X axis" write "time" and for "Y axis" write "number completed" and away you go.

I'm no expert in Calc so I'm just guessing that you stumbled on some super-helpful (or not) "wizard" that I've been lucky enough not to stumble on. Just make the chart in the regular way and you'll be OK. Tama1988 (talk) 11:40, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Right. I started from scratch and it all went as you said. Thanks for the encouragement! -- Hoary (talk) 06:28, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Code samples when job interviewing?

I recently lost my job (I'm a computer game graphics programmer) - although I don't anticipate having trouble finding another one. One of my colleagues who was also let go has been asked to produce a "code sample" prior to getting a face-to-face interview. They want to see a piece of C++ source code that came from actual work that exhibits his programming style/ability.

I've been in the programming business since the late 1970's and I've never heard of a company asking for that before. I often see "programming tests" - but never a request for an actual code sample.

Some people have suggested that the "real" test is to see if the programmer will actually produce a piece of code from his previous job - which would show that he's prepared to break confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements and thus be "A Bad Thing". But a tiny snippet out of (probably) a couple of million lines of software that's not really security-sensitive really wouldn't matter to anyone.

Has anyone here ever heard of a company asking for code samples before? Does anyone here interview programmers with this technique? What are they looking for? How big should the sample be? Is this some fancy new interview technique?

SteveBaker (talk) 02:56, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Personally, if I was a coder, I think I would simply say that due to NDA issues, you're unable to produce any code from your previous work, but would be glad to demonstrate your ability in some other way, such as a programming test. Not only is that likely to be true, but I think you're right in assuming that this is a way to test you. If so, it strikes me as a kind of a pointless test, but then that's what tests like this tend to be. If you do want to submit a code sample to them, I think you can reasonably expect them to tell you what the sample should be like in terms of size or function or whatever. -- 213.157.89.9 (talk) 09:59, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, yes - but when needing a job, failing to meet the demands of the company recruiter tends to be a bad thing. Programming tests are a pretty common idea these days - maybe half of the jobs I've applied for demanded one. They are generally rather fun - nobody who can actually come close to being able to do the work should have much trouble with them. SteveBaker (talk) 10:36, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, but surely no company recruiter would expect you to violate a confidentiality agreement? Of course, if you've been working on open source stuff or something, then it wouldn't be a problem, but if not, what else can you do if you can't provide the code sample? Especially if it is a test of your professional ethics, I really can't see you losing by politely explaining that you can't provide a sample because of a non-disclosure agreement. (Oh, and the anon post above was from me; I didn't realize my login had expired.) -- Captain Disdain (talk) 13:45, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree in part with this process. When I had my own company years ago and had to hire a developer, I asked for a little sample of code produced so I could see the programming style, attention to details such as comments and indenting, etc., and guess what - the first person emailed me a whole lot of source code one file at a time, one email at a time! This showed me that the person had no clue how to use a zip archive, just for starters. The next person's code showed a big lump of code without modularization - a big "no-no" in development. I eventually hired someone about ten tries later. I was quite fussy actually, as I asked some questions that I had recently not known the answers to. I wanted to hire someone who knew more than me - lots of recruiters don't want to teach people - and I didn't regret the decision. Sandman30s (talk) 12:13, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

When I was looking for my current job a lot of places asked for code samples, but I was looking for an entry-level job, I didn't think that the practice was common for more advanced-level jobs. One of the justifications for this I've heard is that it helps you find people with a "passion" for programming, because the code has to be code they cooked up in their spare time.

Helexe Games used to have a humorous "how do I get a jobs in games" FAQ on their website.(WayBack Machine Link) that covers this about halfway down the page. Essentially, they want to use it like an artist's portfolio, and they expect that someone who programs for a living would have done some programming on their own at some point as well. APL (talk) 13:24, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I would just write up a generic class to show your programming style (a page or less). When I've interviewed programmers in the past I never did that, but did ask them to code a little something during the interview; nothing hard, just enough to be sure they're not bullshitting me (which is strangely common). --Sean 15:24, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

"(which is strangely common)". This has surprised me as well. Recently where I work we were interviewing for a couple of programming positions. It's astonishing the number of people who apply, talk a good talk, but can't actually write a very simple program. The ones I hate are the ones that ask me for help completing the test as though it were a complex homework assignment that we should all collaborate on. Perhaps asking for a code sample is intended as a way of weeding out these no-hope big-talkers. APL (talk) 17:06, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

At a previous workplace of mine a new guy was hired, and a few days later when he was all settled in he comes into my office, describes the simple utility he was asked to write, and says he's just having a little trouble getting started. I describe the general approach he should take, and he says "yes, yes, I see", and goes off. The next day he comes back and says while he understands how to write the program as a whole, he's having a spot of trouble on what the first line should be. Hmm. I tell him, and he says "yes, of course!" and goes off. Next day, he comes back and says he's having a bit of trouble on ... the second line. He was fired later that day when I discussed the situation with his boss, and the truth came out. A few weeks later I get an email from him: "thank you for your kindness when we worked together recently. I'm happy to inform you that I'm now the director of software development at XYZ Corp. The reason I'm writing is to ask your advice on this system we're developing ...". I wish I was joking. --Sean 17:23, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I wonder if we worked at the same company? ... I was asked such questions a few times by recruiters, and I always said, "of course not, everything I did for my previous employers is proprietary to those employers." --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 02:03, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't at all claim to be an expert in the field or anything, but I suspect what the recruiter heard was "of course not, I don't practice my craft outside of the workplace." APL (talk) 07:44, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

GameCarearGuide.com, which I believe is associated with Gamasutra and GameDev magazine, mentions in several of their articles that programmers should have code samples prepared and ready. (Example [3]) This is more about breaking into the industry than moving from one position to the other, but it's not inconceivable that some places wouldn't differentiate their first-stage hiring procedures. APL (talk) 07:44, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

If you are asked to produce code that was written for a previous employer, or was a work-for-hire, or was under NDA, or in some other way you do not have the right to reveal the code then my advice is: explain to them that revealing such a confidential code sample, even if it is small or does not really reveal any trade secrets, is not something you can do. Never violate any law, regulation, NDA, contract, social custom, or moral code. If they really ask for code written for previous employers and insist on it, then you probably should not work for them. So my advice is not only not to give them confidential code, but actually to avoid having any relationship with people who are immoral enough to ask for such a thing in the first place. But it is possible that this request came from an inexperienced young recruiter and is not company's policy or condoned by the management. If you can, try to negotiate saying that while revealing confidential code written for a previous employer or client is impossible, you can give them some free/open-source code you have written recently, or some code you have written as a hobby at your home for your personal use or enjoyment, or tell them that you would be happy to writte some new code just to show them your skills, or that you can take a programming test. If they insist in seeing code which is confidential, don't contact them again. NerdyNSK (talk) 14:28, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

usb hubs

I have two 4 ports usb hubs and if I plug more then one thing in nothing works, do I need drivers? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.173.10.17 (talk) 09:02, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

No - you shouldn't need drivers.

Does your hub have it's own power supply? Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Does it need batteries? If so, does it have batteries? Are they nice new batteries? Are you really, really sure about that?

If not, it may be that your PC is unable to provide enough power down a single USB cable to power two or more peripherals. The USB spec requires only a very limited amount of power to be provided by the PC host...and all USB peripherals should limit themselves to just that amount - most take far less than that maximum - but maybe not in your case. It's certainly possible that a PC that only produces just enough power (a laptop for example) - combined with two fairly power-thirsty peripherals - would be enough to make everything stop working.

If that's the case, go get a decent USB hub with it's own power supply - and your problem should go away.

The only other thing I could imagine would be if you plugged one hub into another...I've never tried that and it might not work...but it doesn't sound like that's what you're saying.

SteveBaker (talk) 10:33, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I was in the midst of suggesting that you check the power supply, also. I have one or two devices (like a scanner) that will not work if the hub does not have its own power supply. My hub is connected to a power strip as well as to the computer, and I'm able to use it all the time. --- OtherDave (talk) 10:35, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Yep. USB hubs are really pretty dumb machines - power distribution is about the only thing that can go wrong. It's annoying that companies sell the ones with no power supply though - that's a violation of the USB spec and they really shouldn't be allowed to sell them. SteveBaker (talk) 10:54, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Just to add to the confusion: my USB hub will work, in spite of having its power supply disconnected, for some small items (like a USB transmitter for a wireless mouse). It will not work for the scanner, which doesn't have its own power cord. My theory is that the scanner just draws more power than the hub can borrow from the PC. After my initial confusion, I chose to leave the hub connected to its own power source all the time. --- OtherDave (talk) 22:13, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Need Advice on buying a laptop!

Hi I was wondering if someone could help me choose a laptop to buy. I can spend up to £500. I'm off to university this september so I need one that can do word processing and make presentations etc. The operating systems I'm most familiar with is XP/Vista so I'd be happy with either of these. However, I also play a game called Counter Strike Source. The recommended requirements are as follows: '2.4 GHz Processor, 512MB RAM, DirectX 9 level graphics card, Windows 2000/XP, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection' (taken from steam website.)

A laptop I'm interested in called the inspiron 1525 found on dell.com has the following specification:

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T5750 (2.00 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 2 MB L2 cache) Video card - Integrated Intel® Graphic Media Accelerator X3100 Memory - 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024] Hard Drive - 250GB (5400RPM) SATA Hard Drive Optical Devices - 8x DVD+/-RW Optical drive, including SW

I don't know whether this laptop will be good enough to play the game. A friend told me I'd need a laptop with a duo core processor and discrete graphics card for optimum performance when gaming but I've heard these are expensive.

Any response would be great and any other suggestions for laptops I could buy which meet my requirements would be very welcome. Please don't get too technical as I'm not brilliant with computers! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.0.125.174 (talk) 10:58, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

An easy way to do this would be to take the game into Curry's, PC World, etc., and ask the shop assistants there if it will work. They might even let you try it on one of the display machines of the laptop you are interested in. Bear in mind, though, laptops these days are far better than they used to be, but are still not optimised for (modern) gaming, unlike desktops.--ChokinBako (talk) 11:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about the game but I can tell you that for your serious uses you do not need MS Office. Get OpenOffice.org instead. That way you'll save some money and have more to spend on beer, I mean a computer you can play your game on. No, wait, you're going to university. Forget playing computer games, spend your time with other students. With or without beer. Tama1988 (talk) 11:45, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The problem is the calories ... :P Anyways, I am sure beer was just a joke. I don't play many games on my macbook but I still find plenty of distractions if I want to. Unless you must play CSS on a computer, I would suggest you to wait and get a console instead. Kushal (talk) 14:40, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Counter Strike Source is based on Half Life 2 and from what I've heard it either won't run on a computer using integrated graphics or it will run very poorly. Doing any kind of serious 3D graphics whether it be gaming or production graphics on a computer using integrated graphics is not going to result in satisfaction. I would suggest getting discreet graphics. Rilak (talk) 11:54, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

CSS is not quite as intensive graphically, but I agree - Intel integrated graphics is hopeless, rather get something with an Nvidia chip on it. My laptop has a Quadro NVS and has no problenm playing CSS or more demanding games for that matter. Sandman30s (talk) 11:59, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all your your help guys. I see that using intergrated graphics is not a good idea then. But what about this laptop- It is an Acer Aspire 5920H. I wonder if this would be any good. Please give me your assessments/reccomendations!

Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 / 2 GHz ( Dual-Core )

RAM - 2 GB (installed) / 4 GB (max) - DDR II SDRAM ( 2 x 1 GB )
    - Please call 0870 167 0818 for double memory offer
Hard Drive - 250 GB - Serial ATA-150 - 5400 rpm
Operating System - Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Screen - 15.4' TFT 1280 x 800 ( WXGA ) - 24-bit (16.7 million colours)
Optical Drive - HD DVD-ROM - integrated
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS - 256 MB

spec taken from laptopsdirect.co.uk Thanks again to all who have helped —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.0.125.174 (talk) 14:00, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

It wasn't exactly your question, but keep an eye on the maximum RAM for your computer. (I am content with my Inspiron E1505, but I can't take the RAM beyond 2 G. ) You might choose to get 2 G now, as with your Acer example, but that machine can take 4 G. RAM is the cheapest add-on speed boost you can manage; with some laptops, other kinds of upgrades (like graphics) are difficult or impossible. So spend on what's harder for you to upgrade after the fact. --- OtherDave (talk) 22:19, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

That looks perfectly fine to play CSS at a decent resolution (not sure if it supports your native WXGA resolution though, which is always first prize on a laptop), or even modern FPS games at lower resolutions. Sandman30s (talk) 23:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Software glitch; not sure who's responsible

I asked a couple of questions about my new computer here recently. Now I have more.

On several occasions, I have seen a message onscreen stating that I am not connected to the Internet and telling me to connect. Sometimes it still says it won't. And yet when I go to other sites, there is no problem.

I finally concluded the problem was not with my computer or the Internet provider, but it was the fault of a slow web site. The software can't distinguish betwen the inability to connect with the site and the Internet actually being out. In these situations, I know to check the blinking light on the modem and it is almost always blinking.

And the other day, I repeatedly got the message I needed to connect to the Internet, and was repeatedly told I wasn't. Later I discovered, after actually going to other sites, that the address I was using had an invalid character in it; this is supposed to give me a message saying "no such web site" or something like that.

Rather than bother tech support people who are likely to be somewhere in Asia, I'll just see if someone here knows what to do. I found what version of Internet Explorer I had, but I can't seem to access that information now.

Looking at the box the computer came in I have "Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit with Service Pack 1". Hmmm ... given Vista's bad reputation, maybe that's what's causing the problem.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:41, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Okay, Alt-H worked for me. Explorer is Version 7.0.6001.18000.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:48, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Do you have any screenshots of the error? Is it a message within Internet Explorer or a little popup near your task bar telling you that you've been disconnected? I'm just wondering if your problem is with some hardware (motherboard/NIC/Ethernet cable). Laenir (talk) 19:03, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't know what a screenshot is or how to make one. It's a small popup in the center of the screen giving me three choices--Broadband, Dial-up, or Offline. If I click on "Broadband" it almost always gives me a smaller popup on top of the first one which tells me to click on "cancel".Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:09, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Steps to make a screenshot in Windows: 1. Press the Print Screen (PrtSc) key when the screen looks like what you want us to see. 2. Go to Start→Run..., type "mspaint" in the box and click Ok. 3. In MS Paint, choose Edit→Paste, then File→Save. 4. In the Save dialog box, choose "PNG" from the "Save as type:" box and then save the image somewhere. 5. Upload the image, e.g. to ImageShack or Wikipedia itself. 6. Link to it here.

I suspect this is some kind of software provided by your ISP. Does it tell you to click "cancel", or does it just have a "cancel" button and no others? If the latter, it's probably trying to connect and the "cancel" button is there in case you change your mind. Try not clicking it and see what happens. -- BenRG (talk) 21:18, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Me no speak geek, so no screenshot.

Okay, I did it again.

At the top of the first pop-up on a blue background (there is a blue border around the whole thing) are the words "Dial-up Connection" with a red X on the right.

Below that, on a gray background, there is an arrow pointing to the right and a globe. To the right it says, "Select the service you want to connect to".

On the left it says "Connect" with one of the n's underlined. In a box with a down arrow on the right it says "Broadband connection".

There is a box below that with a check in it which has the words "Connect automatically" on the right.

Below that are three boxes to click on: "Connect" with C underlined, "Settings" with one of the t's underlined, and "Work Offline" with the capital O underlined.

At the bottom it says "Dialing attempt 1. Unable to establish a connection".

If I click on the "Connect" box I get a box with "Connecting to Broadband Connection..." at the top on a blue background (and there is a blue border), with no X, only a "Cancel" button under the message "Connecting through WAN Miniport (PPPOE)..." to the right of a picture of a computer.

The first box never goes away. The second one gets covered up with an error message if I don't click on "Cancel". I can't copy and paste the error message, and I'd rather not try to copy the whole thing.

All I did was put an invalid character in the URL.

If I put the URL in correctly ...

Bingo! I'm there!Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 16:18, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Need a javascript bookmark for downforeveryoneorjustme.com please

Using Firefox 3 if that makes a difference. Basically what I'd like is a bookmark that, when I click it, opens the currently selected tab's address at DFEOJM. It would need to strip out the http:// though, DFEOJM doesn't like it. So if I visited http://en.wikipedia.org and it was unavailable, I could click on the bookmark to bring up http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/en.wikipedia.org. I know zero javascript but it seems simple to do.

For bonus points, I set my bookmarks to open in a new tab by default. Is there a setting to make a specific bookmark open in the same tab?

For super-duper bonus points, is it possible to write a Firefox plugin that automatically loads the DFEOJM page whener a "site unavailable"-type error is encountered? Zunaid©® 16:00, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Here's your bookmarklet:

javascript:(function(){location="http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/"+location.host;})()

--grawity 16:30, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Wow, thanks grawity! and bonus points for letting it open in the same tab :) I'll leave this open just in case someone can do part 3 of the request, but part 1 and 2 are resolved. Zunaid©® 19:27, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

You might have hit upon a goldmine with your third request. I am looking forward to having this included in Firefox 3.2 (of course, I would rather Mozilla use a different provider from DFEOJM). Kushal (talk) 03:19, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Copy files in Windows

Hello. Can someone tell me how to do the following in Windows: Given a directory D and a target directory T, copy every file contained in D (or it's sub directories, recursively) to the equivalent location within T, assuming that T has the same subfolders, but to exclude files with a certain name. I'm not sure I explained that well. Another go: we have two directory structures. How to copy just the files from one to another. No directories will be overwritten or created. Some files will be excluded. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 16:29, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

xcopy from the command line can do most of that, but I don't think it can do all of it. For example, xcopy D T /s /exclude:file1 will copy all the files in D (and all subdirectories except empty ones), except the list of files contained in file1. If T already contains files, you might be able to use the /u switch, which will only copy files from D that already exist in T (u for "update"). Beyond that, I think you'll need a short program of some type. --LarryMac | Talk 19:34, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

You could install Cygwin and then run something like this from the bash command line, replacing SRC, DST, and EXCLUDE with your file/directory names (note that SRC appears twice):

     IFS=$'\n'; for i in $(find 'SRC' -not -type d -not -name 'EXCLUDE' -printf '%P\n'); do cp "SRC/$i" "DST/$i"; done

Warning: untested, may destroy the universe. -- BenRG (talk) 20:56, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Not sure if RAR or ZIP etc. supports this, but I remember a DOS archiver called ACE (that works in Windows) that had a switch -x to exclude files to write into an archive. Once you extract the archive using the e parameter it will by default retain your directory structure. You didn't say if you wanted to make this a batch copy, but if so then ACE can be run on the command line. You can investigate WinACE, WinRAR, etc. to see if they support the "exclude" switch. Sandman30s (talk) 23:24, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

If bash seems a bit daunting and you don't mind paying money for software, I think that Take Command will do what you want. -- Hoary (talk) 06:38, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

robocopy will do that, and it's free. —Bkell (talk) 14:02, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

How do you track a website visitor's IP range in IPv6 so if they change their IP you can track who uses the same range?

How do you track a website visitor's IP range in IPv6 so if they change their IP you can track who uses the same range? First there's three different ways to convert IPv4 to IPv6 and the IPv4 in hex sometimes is at the front and sometimes at the back. Plus, I've been trying to understand IPv6 and it looks like IPv6 when changing range isn't like IPv4 where 123.123.123.(changes) will be a range and so it can be predicted. But instead IPv6 looks like ranges will change numbers randomly like someone will have their numbers assigned for the firs 64 bytes and not use the rest and the range will change up there, then some other IPv6 IP will use 96 bytes and the range changes elsewhere, etc. William Ortiz (talk) 21:09, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, if you need to distinguish between two clients on the same netblock, you'll need to use something other than IP address to do it. One way is to assign session cookies. This doesn't help if the user has cookies turned off.

I guess it depends for what purpose you want to "track" visitors: if you're looking to determine the number of unique visitors for marketing reasons (e.g. "Advertise on my site! I get 10,000 unique visitors daily!") then unique cookies plus unique netblocks would be a pretty honest way of doing it. If you're looking to identify specific users so you can block abuse from bad users, it doesn't help much as a determined user can delete cookies and use proxies. --FOo (talk) 19:21, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm making a website and the range tracking will try to detect who might the same people. I basically could do it if ranges were predictable in IPv6 somehow except I'm not sure how ranges will change in IPv6 as it looks like ranges are all screwy and not changing an a preditable way like IPv4. Fortunately my site is not finished or up so I can completely overhaul the database. I seached the web and the only thing I found was that they're putting IPs in hexadecimal format now. Anyway, anyone know how IP ranges will work like in IPv6? William Ortiz (talk) 04:57, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Linux dual boot

I am interested in installing Linux on my machine; I would like it to be able to dual boot. I currently have Windows Vista SP1 installed. My background is short to none with Unix (I have worked with Bash in MacOS X however). My issues are this:

1. I just bought my first computer, and I don't want to gunk it up. It was expensive, and I'm poor. If it is too complicated or risky, I won't do it.
2. I am interested in running a good Linux based system for educational purposes (it's much easier to get an IT job with Linux experience).

Does anyone have any suggestions or a good tutorial on how to install the dual-boot system, and which Linux version I should try it with. Thanks a lot. Magog the Ogre (talk) 21:22, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

[4] is a guide for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a good choice since it is so very often the first Linux distribution that people try and people often dual boot. This means that the amount of material on the web of the "I'm coming from a Windows system and I'm trying to / I just / I want to / I had problems with...." type is huge. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.164.115 (talk) 23:00, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

You can't screw up the hardware with software (well not usually, see Halt and Catch Fire and Killer poke), so if you bought your computer from a computer vendor as opposed to built it yourself it usually comes with recovery options, so if you screw up your software you could always use the recovery wizard to reset the software to factory condition. --antilived^{T | C | G} 01:45, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

As for the Ubuntu interface, it's not to hard to figure out. If you know how to use a computer well, you'll be fine with Ubuntu. Although after you get used to where everything is, I'd recommend checking out the command line.(Applications--> Accessories--> Terminal). It's an easier and faster way to do tasks. To update Ubuntu use Update Manager or the command line. Update Manager: System--> Administration--> Update Manager. However the command line (BASH) is much faster. To update use: sudo apt-get update. Enter the password you use to login and it will quickly update the computer. Also use: sudo apt-get upgrade to upgrade and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu when a new version comes around. To set the root password(Needed for some actions) use sudo passwd root. To add or remove programs try "Add/Remove" found: Applications--> Add/Remove. Voila! You have a list of programs to install from. Or alternatively use System--> Administration--> Synaptic Package Manager to get specific packages or uninstall more than one package. Ubuntu comes with a full suite of programs and you can easily add more. To install from a download: Download the file to(Usually in .Bzip or tar.gz format) Use archive Manager(Pops up automatically as it is the default program) to extract the file. Then go to the command line. Use cd (Name of Directory where you extracted to) then into the program file itself. The run ./configure and the make and then make install. I should note you need to be root to "make" and "make install". Don't worry if it sounds complicated. Experiment! And in no time at all you'll have everything figured out. I loved Ubuntu when my dad first showed it to me and now I use almost all the time using Windows XP Professional SP3 only when needed. And feel free to ask more questions if you need to. A word of warning, do *not* always login as root. You run the chance of completely wrecking the computer if you don;t know what you are doing. Don't worry though, use the man command to get the manual about a command. Good Luck!:D(Did I mention Ubuntu is completely free and is basically comes as a premium system? Compare that to Windows[Which costs quite a bit] where you have to buy ''more'' software just to make it good.)(Everybody else here on the Reference Desk may correct mistakes I made in this quick guide)--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 02:04, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

You might also be interested in getting your toes wet with Wubi (installer). Kushal (talk) 03:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

!AAH! That takes forever! It downloads all slow(It's a big file) and it will take literally days for the download. Just use BitTorrent to get the ISO image from the Ubuntu website, burn it on a CD, and install using the CD.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 04:30, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, Xp54321. I used Wubi on a Toshiba Satellite on Comcast "High speed Internet". (I know we all love to hate Comcast but please read the whole story.) I think I was able to download and install Ubuntu in a matter of about two hours. Probably because I was doing this at night. I did not realize that your mileage may vary. I had been using dial-up for ever myself but lately I seem to have taken broadband for granted. I apologize for any misconception. By the way, Xp54321, do you know if it is possible to instruct Wubi to look for the Ubuntu image locally? I think that would be the best of both worlds, to borrow Miley Cyrus' words. Kushal (talk) 05:12, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I read this somewhere on Wubi forums sticky-- if you put wubi.exe and the ISO in the same folder, it will use the locally stored image for installation. Didn't try it myself though. -59.95.98.102 (talk) 06:25, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I have never heard of Comcast but I use DSL I believe. The ISO image and wubi in the same folder mmh....I'll try that out sometime but I'd probably want to read that forum. Can you link to it?--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 15:24, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

You can't screw up your hardware by installing Linux - but it's perfectly possible to screw up badly enough to mess up Vista by trashing the boot sector or something. This is especially true of laptops that come without Windows CD's that have a sneaky hidden OS restore area on the harddrive. Also, before you start, make a "Recovery/Restore" CD from Vista so that you CAN reinstall it if everything goes horribly wrong!

HOWEVER: If you just want to get your feet wet with Linux, download and burn a "Live CD" version of Linux and use an external USB drive for storage. That lets boot Linux from the CD. You do more or less everything Linux without touching one single byte of your harddrive. You can even install some versions of Linux onto a USB drive and tell your BIOS to include USB in the "boot-chain" so your PC will boot Linux from the USB drive if it's plugged in - and fall back to Vista if it's not. Once you're comfortable with Linux, you may feel more confident about installing a full Dual-boot or (we Linux nuts would hope) you might want to erase Vista altogether and run Linux-only. But take baby steps. SteveBaker (talk) 15:30, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

In addition, I have some other open-source recommendations.:) Don't use Microsoft Office use OpenOffice.Org instead to save some money. Actually a lot of money. The full version of MS Office 2007 is well over $600 and still lacks one program found only in a another version of MS Office! With Open Office you get a full suite and don't have to pay a dime. Don't use Internet Explorer use Mozilla Firefox instead, as you can expand its functionality with addons. These addons are extremely useful and there are millions of them for doing almost anything. Finally, remember Windows is expensive. XP is still about $100-$150 and Vista is about $220! Linux is free! --Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 15:53, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

(I don't see how the previous remark relates to this question - but FYI, I have a "price guide" that relates the price of the most popular Windows applications to their OSS equivalents here [5]).

I'm surprised nobody mentioned a Microsoft Virtual PC or VMPlayer solution... no need to dual boot!Root⁴(one) 03:41, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Google chrome and videos

Hello,

My (prehistoric) laptop is now host to all 3 main browsers. I want to love Chrome, and i'm so nearly there, but why does it insist that I download all of adobe's whizz-bang freeware just to watch a few videos when IE (and to a lesser extent, firefox)can just deal with it? Anyone else have this problem? 82.22.4.63 (talk) 21:49, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

No, it hasn't happened on my computer, but I just installed the new version of Flashplayer (before I installed Chrome mind you). Youtube and any good video site these days uses Flashplayer; the fact that not all videos are working on Firefox shows you are certainly using an ancient version of it. That said, I did already have Flashplayer crash on me once. Magog the Ogre (talk) 22:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

You need the Flash player to watch Flash movies. Firefox and IE can't "just deal with it"—they have the player installed already, you probably just forgot you installed it (or it came pre-installed—which isn't exactly great either). It's not a "problem", it just means the browser isn't installing third-party tools behind your back—which is a good thing. Just install the player and you'll never have to deal with it again, and you'll forget you did it as quickly as you did the time you installed it to work with Firefox. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:18, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't like Flash a lot. It's great and all for movies/videos etc. BUT it hogs a huge' amount of CPU processing power. One (cool) thing about Chrome is that it lets you see what is using how much CPU.(In percentages). I looked. Guess what? Chrome and all its subprocesses were using less than 5% of the CPU(This is on my brother's computer,Specs:2.20 GHZ, 1.00 GB of RAM, 225 GB hard drive plus a second 139 GB hard drive.) but Flash alone was using 20% of the CPU! Google says it improved Javascript's speed on Chrome but Firefox has an addon called Flashblock which blocks Flash elements on a page. You'll find your web browsing speeded up by it. It can be found here. Chrome has yet to have such a feature but I should note Chrome is fast and certainly light and easy to use. However I feel it needs some more features before it can take on giants like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox or Opera or Safari etc.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 02:19, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Would you prefer that those crisp graphics that Flash provides be streamed as an unsharp video file, clogging your connection? Although I can not comment on how well Flash is optimized, it does use the CPU for a reason. =)--mboverload@ 03:56, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I know, I know, but still, Flash should somehow be improved as to not hog so much CPU.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 04:19, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. Also, it could be used a LOT less. Flash is needlessly used when a static image would be perfectly fine, mostly due to crappy marketing departments. Thus supporting both our points =) --mboverload@ 04:30, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Firefox 3.1 will pushing for <video> tags. I'd imagine it does not involove Flash. Kushal (talk) 14:58, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Right, Firefox will use Theora, assuming the feature makes it (it's in the nightly builds right now, and apparently works fine with Wikipedia/Commons videos). 24.76.161.28 (talk) 15:07, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

You can open the Chrome Task Manager, click on Shockwave Flash, and then click on End Process. Simple way for Chrome Flashblock :) — Shinhan < talk > 09:21, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Typing vowels with macrons in Linux

I'm taking a Latin course, and I need to type vowels with macrons, but I can't find a way to do it. Before I switched to Xubuntu, I used Debian with GNOME, and I was able to type them by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+[unicode string, e.g. 0101], but now for some reason it doesn't work anymore. I've tried using an AltGr keyboard layout, but it doesn't seem to have macrons. I also tried mapping the left Windows key to Multi_key using xmodmap, but that seems to revert back to Super_L whenever I close the terminal emulator or restart X. Somebody help please??? --Anakata (talk) 22:20, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you using the same IME as before? --Kjoonlee 00:50, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure. How do I find out which one I'm using? It always worked fine before, so I never paid any attention to it. I have SCIM installed, but I don't think it's the default because when I want to use it I have to right click and select it from a menu first.--Anakata (talk) 02:22, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

That's so silly that they're making you do that. As I'm sure you know, THE•ROMANS•WROTE•LIKE•THIS. They didn't have macrons. But I digress. It's far less convenient, but you can use OpenOffice's Writer to insert a symbol by going to Insert --> Special Character.--Birdsusing nnn (talk) 05:24, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

On my debian installation you can type macrons with AltGr+Shift+] followed by the letter you want (like this: ē). You can get other accents in a similar way, e.g. AltGr+; then e for é. This may work on ubuntu too. 163.1.148.158 (talk) 09:51, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, AltGr+Shift+] then e results in this: ”e. Is there a file somewhere with all the AltGr combinations and what they result in?--Anakata (talk) 13:20, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

There is a command that generates a .ps file showing your keyboard maps at various levels. Check out this page [6]. 163.1.148.158 (talk) 14:56, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

If you find that the keystroke is too cumbersome for fast typing, you could just put an underscore after the vowel like "ma_cron", and then when you're done do a ":%s/a_/ā/g" or however your editor does a search and replace. Another method is to open up the macron page and just cut and paste when you need one. --Sean 17:27, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for the help everyone! Turns out SCIM has a Unicode input mode so I can input the characters by their Unicode number.--Anakata (talk) 13:09, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

September 6

OS Kernels

How can I repair the damaged or lost kernels of Win XP SP2? --Omidinist (talk) 03:51, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi Omi, can you give us the exact error message you are getting? --mboverload@ 03:52, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

CD doesn't play and this message appears: 'The application failed to initialize properly (c0000006). Click on OK to termiante the application.' --Omidinist (talk) 12:01, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

What makes you believe that is a kernel problem? If you had a damaged or lost Windows Kernel, the chances of you seeing anything past boot is very slim. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 15:06, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I downloaded SP3. Then I was forced to delete it because it caused some unwanted effects, like damaging my ADSL connection. I think it may have removed or damaged some kernel. I am not an expert though. Thanks for any help.--Omidinist (talk) 16:15, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

This forum post says it might be a hardware issue. Xenon54 17:00, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Omni, there is no need to "talk technical" with us. =) Talking about kernels without knowing exactly what it is will confuse people about your question. Also, I can assure you that your ADSL connection is not physically damaged. =) --mboverload@ 19:25, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

iTunes problem

hi, ok:

i have itunes on an external HD along with all my songs, however, from what i can tell, all the 'info' about itunes (eg libraries, play count etc info) was stored on my computer (windows XP) so when i 're-set' my computer after a virus problem this was killed. Thus when i open up itunes now, from my external HD, its as if ive just got it. This is of-course a big problem for me. However, because i kinda foresaw an event like this i regularly saved a 'backup' version of the 'previous iTunes library' file on my ext HD. Is there any way that i could load that 'previous iTunes library' up, bareing in mind all the song file paths are the same...? thanks, --81.76.41.196 (talk) 13:52, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, not sure, but I think you could just look for the iTunes library file on your internal HDD, then delete it, then copy-paste the "previous itunes library" file into where the old one was. flaminglawyer^c 18:52, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I am not sure with Windows but that is what I would do on a Mac. Kushal (talk) 16:52, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

If you look through the options there is an "Import Library" option in iTunes. Use this and point it at the backed up library. This will probably solve your issue TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:18, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Firmware engineering.

I have a friend who is a firmware engineer - he's looking for work right now. Is there an umbrella organisation for firmware engineering? He's looking for a list of companies that engage in firmware engineering in Texas (and maybe elsewhere) to get an idea of where to send his resume to.

SteveBaker (talk) 15:01, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Steve, send me a Wiki email. I know of a company that is deep into firmware programming, not sure if they need anyone at the moment though. --mboverload@ 01:48, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Typing in Devnagari Alphabet

I have to type many pages of text in Devnagari font.But I am familiar with typing in QWERTY keyboard only i.e. Latin Alphabet.Is there any software(freeware) that transliterates the text typed in roman to devnagari? Thank you 202.70.74.161 (talk) 16:50, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Here's an online one: http://207.172.130.5:8080/cgi-bin/webitrans.pl . If you're really going to be doing a lot, it might be worth just changing your keyboard layout and learning how to type Devanagari directly. --Sean 17:41, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

RAZR's water-resistance

I am confused. Someone I know's razr (the phone) got dropped in a swimming pool. It was only in there for like a second, then it was retrieved and dried with a large fan. For about a week, its buttons didn't work, then they all started working again, except for the 1 button. I, just recently, "accidentally" sent my RAZR through a washing machine in my pocket. I forgot to move my clothes from the washer to the dryer, but when I did, about 5 hours later, I realized that my phone was in there, so I took it out and dried it with the same large fan. My phone worked, and still does work, perfectly (all the buttons), after only an hour of fanning. Can someone explain that to me? 75.66.48.112 (talk) 18:46, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Assuming that the device doesn't short-circuit and fry itself when it gets wet, the next biggest issue is impurities in the water mucking up the works when the water evaporates. Depending on what exactly is in the water, you might be dealing with a conductive residue or an insulating one. Each causes its own set of troubles for the electronics. Buttons are often a first casualty because of the fact that they often require exposed conductors to work properly.

Probably what happened is that the second dunking dissolved some thin film (of pool chemicals?) that was left by the pool water. Of course, when the tap water from the washing machine dried it probably left behind it's own residue of salt, fluoride, and assorted other minerals, which may cause long-term problems for your device. (Corrosion is a big issue here.)

If you feel comfortable taking the device apart, it would probably last longer if you took it apart and gently wiped down each of the pieces with the purest alcohol you can get. (Sometimes it's sold in really expensive tiny bottles as "electronics cleaner" but I just use the drugstore varieties without any problem.)

As an aside, the battery may have been shorted temporarily while the device was dunked. This could reduce the battery's lifespan.

If you don't feel comfortable taking the device apart, perhaps it's not worth worrying about. Most people get new phones every year or two anyway. APL (talk) 19:10, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Rollover images

I can't figure out how to easily make a rollover image thing. By that, I mean showing image1, but when you put your mouse over image1, image2 replaces image1. Can someone show me an easy bit of code to do this? No Flash, I don't have a flash maker. flaminglawyer^c 18:49, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Here's a super-basic cascading style sheets and HTML rollover:

<html>
  <head>
    <style type="text/css">
      a#foo       {display:block; width:100px; height:50px; background:url("a.jpg"); }
      a#foo:hover {background:url("b.jpg");}
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <a id="foo"></a>
  </body>
</html>

where a.jpg and b.jpg are both 100x50 pixels. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:10, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Without CSS... <img src='a.jpg' onmouseover="this.src='b.jpg'" onmouseout="this.src='a.jpg'" /< -- kainaw™ 21:25, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

If you are going to do a Javascript solution (like Kainaw suggests) you should probably pre-load the roll-over images so that they don't have a significant delay in loading. Google "javascript image preload" for about a million examples.

And it's worth noting that the CSS option is relatively limited in how IE supports it (only supports the :hover pseudoclass with A tags, nothing else). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 21:55, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you all. Your advice has inspired a masterpiece (in training) (the home sign has a rollover). flaminglawyer^c 23:34, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Interview coding tests

Reading the thread above about coding samples at job interviews leads me to ask a question about "Interview coding tests". I'm an Electronics engineer and have interviewed more folk than I have been interviewed. When interviewing, I am usually seeking another electronics engineer, often with a firmware/software skill as part of the job. Generally I ask the candidate to write some code to the following spec: I often have a handful of resistors and need to know their value when connected in parallel. Please write a program to do that. It never ceases to amaze me how many "Senior engineers" with "years of experience" in electronics and C have no idea how to approach this, don't know the equation for parallel resistors, have no idea of how to input values, do conditional tests, loop code, initialise variables or anything. The good ones do it just like that. One chap was good and honest, saying he wasn't into software but would do it with excel and proceded to explain that idea well. Some folk get very hung up on what language to write in (my answer - any at your choice, you just have to explain what it does even if it is a made up language). Some folk insist on doing it with a fixed number of resistors. Most make it far more complex than it needs to be. Anyway, what interview coding questions have you come across? (And if anyone wants to, how would you answer my question...)? -- SGBailey (talk) 20:01, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Remember, SGBailey, we aren't forums - in my honest opinion, here isn't the right place to ask "what interview coding questions have you come across" - because it is so open ended. It's like asking "what is your favourite colour," it has a different answer for everyone who comes along. Your second question (about total value of parallel resistors) would be OK, but it seems like you already know what it is (if you ask it at interviews.89.240.241.186 (talk) 20:37, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I rarely ask people to write code; I find you get a lot more info (and a lot more done in the interview time) if you ask them to read code. If you really look at what most engineers spend their time really doing, it's as much reading, understanding, debugging, fixing, and extending others' code than writing their own on a tabula rasa. So one test I set a few years ago had a small C program and asked them to say why the function didn't seem to return what its comment said it should (it was something like returning a pointer to an automatic or something like that) and determine if a given Java program was threadsafe or not (various versions either deadlocked or concurrently accessed memory without protection); I figure that's a much better test of C or Java skill than "write a C program that reverses a string" or whatever. For algorithms and datastructures I'd just talk to the person - having them actually code it isn't a good use of precious interview time. For anything other than short-term-single-task contractors I think tests that drill down to their specific knowledge of some arcane bit of the class library is pointless (anyone who understands how the memory interface to a memory-mapped modem works can pick up how ftell works by themselves, anyone who understands how a dynamic VM rewrites code to maximise cache locality can read the manual for the collections package themselves). The one thing I've utterly been unable to do (even after a 3 day "interviewing and hiring" class) is Find-The-Jerk; otherwise competent people fail big (and can take whole projects down with them) because of their deep personality defects, defects that they all seem to be able to conceal through the interview and initial hiring phase. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:48, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

And I'm going to confess that I nicked several of the C examples from old ads in Dr Dobbs Journal that advertised a fancy lint by showing some bits of C code that had problems that weren't obvious but that their lint could find. The threadsafe examples were paraphrased from Bil Lewis' pthreads book. And a bunch of the rest were things that had come up over the last couple of years, reduced to the simplest sensible case. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:00, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

It's interesting to hear you say that about the "find the jerk" issue, since I've experienced it myself (to say the least). I'm trying to change jobs now, and near the top of my resume I say "I'm funny, friendly, have broad interests, and am easy to get along with", which is mostly true. --Sean 22:30, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

The interviewing class I mentioned (too long ago for me to remember enough about it) centred around positing scenarios and asking how people would react. It was partially to get out of the rut of the interviewee just describing what they'd done, and the interviewer describing what the project is. It was also supposed to find people would would be a poor fit for the team. But I (and other technical interviewers on the course) found it didn't work terribly well for engineers. Partly because unfunny narrowminds with flat effect can still be valuable engineers. But a major problem (and potentially a significant legal hazard to any interviewer) is that many of the interviewees were non-native speakers and often from cultural backgrounds where job interviews were very formal things - so some candidates were clearly very technically strong but it was difficult to establish a good rapport. It would be foolish, unfair, and quite probably illegal to reject a candidate on that basis. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:51, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Also, there are memory mapped modems??? --Sean 22:31, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

(me not expressing self well; instant interview FAIL) In embedded systems it's quite common to have IO devices like modem chips, sound chips, network control chips wired to their own chip select and thus their control and data registers appear in the cpu's address space like magic bits of volatile memory. It's mostly like Intel's IN and OUT stuff, and entirely unlike a memory mapped file (and so "memory mapped" is perhaps a poor choice of words). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:41, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

I've been through a lot of interviews recently. I'm a Senior games programmer with a speciality in graphics. The procedure may vary in other disciplines. But in 99% of cases, it goes like this:

• You contact them via email, attach a resume.
• Response (within a few days) is a request to do a "phone interview".
• The phone interview is sometimes a programming test - sometimes a general chat about what you did - what they do - why you want to work there, etc.
• If the phone interview didn't involve a programming test, then mostly they'll email you a written programming test.
• Then (if you didn't screw up) you get into a face-to-face interview - and in almost every case they want you to talk to the people you'll be working with - briefly go over incentives, vacation, health care - then goodbye - we'll be in touch. Often they'll want you to write a simple function on the white-board. A binary search or the 'atoi()' function for a "known-good" string or detect whether a given string is a palindrome...something of about that complexity. But doing it "live" in front of a whole room of critics can be painful if you get stressed out easily - you're generally being nudged into making 'off-by-one' errors or failing to detect the special cases (What happens if you ask whether an empty string is a palindrome?). There may be a discussion of the efficiency and legibility of your solution.

The programming tests are all pretty similar - whether done on the phone or in writing. Generally they start with some really simple logic puzzles ("You've got a 5 gallon bucket and a 3 gallon bucket and and unlimited water supply - measure out 4 gallons of water"), then there is a trivial C programming bug to track down (99% of the time the answer is "you returned a pointer to deallocated memory" or "you ran off the end of the array" - but there are variations on the theme). Next comes something ikky to do with C++ derived classes with virtual/non-virtual functions that somehow get messed up in a non-obvious way. After these "bug finding" things we get some short essay questions - usually stuff about linear algebra or how 'casts' work or what an abstract data class is. Then they generally wind up with a programming problem with some 'meat' to it - that takes some subtlety to complete and maybe needs 40 lines of code if you "get it". But it's pretty variable. SteveBaker (talk) 23:56, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Dropdown menu coding

Can someone tell me an easy bit of code to get a dropdown menu effect? Not like a filling in forms dropdown; but like on ebay, the homepage, when you hold your mouse over the "Categories" tab, a thing comes down with a bunch of different links. Something like that.

When I look at examples of it on sites that use this, the only thing I can find is a class="dropdown", or something like that. And little old me with close to 0 html experience doesn't know what that means. flaminglawyer^c 23:40, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

This is a nice article on drop downs using CSS/HTML only (OK you need a bit of javascript for it to work in IE). It might be a bit too complex/technical for you right now but it's far more elegant than the pure javascript way. --antilived^{T | C | G} 00:23, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

MaxDesign has a number of tutorials for CSS-based lists. Under "Listmatic," you'll find examples like this dynamic vertical list and this dynamic horizontal list. Examples and code provided. --- OtherDave (talk) 01:21, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

The horizontal one doesn't have an onmouseout event and so the drop down menu stays drop down even if I move the mouse somewhere else. Hardly a good example (and even less so for something to be learnt from). --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:47, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to have taken your valuable time. Good thing you weren't the OP, huh? --- OtherDave (talk) 19:32, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

September 7

Ubuntu problems

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on one of my old computers i had lying around. Unfortunately, it cant do a very basic thing. Open applications. Given, this is a old Celeron computer from 2002, so it's really stretching Ubuntu's requirements, but i still don't see why things won't open! Any solution? I don't care if i have to reinstall Ubuntu, it's not like i have anything on that thing. --69.127.64.22 (talk) 00:20, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

'It can't open applications' is a very imprecise bug report. What, exactly, do you do in attempting to open apps, and what, exactly, happens when you do it? Algebraist 00:23, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you running Ubuntu off LiveCD? How much ram do you have? When you have very little ram (256MB and below) it will take a while for the system to load the application from the CD into the memory. In that case you should use the alternate CD (or maybe a Xubuntu alternate CD, for a smaller ram requirement) to install and your Ubuntu desktop should be quite a bit faster when it's installed. I have a 2002-era Pentium 1Ghz with 512MB ram running the latest Ubuntu without any problem, so there shouldn't be too much problem with hardware requirements. --antilived^{T | C | G} 00:27, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

forgotten phone unlocking code

how can i unlock or flash my cell phone , sony ericsson w890i —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.9.154.189 (talk) 01:01, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I've found the guys over at http://forums.se-nse.net/ helpful when it comes to Sony Ericsson phones. I must say though, some of them can at times be a little unfriendly to the n00bs. Astronaut (talk) 08:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

cell phone calls

so when I make a call, the tower that I'm connected to is transmitting the voice on the other end in a huge radius, right? It can't just pinpoint my location and beam the call there, b/c radio waves broadcast, no? just curious, thanks, 12.214.21.197 (talk) 01:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Well a directional antenna will need focusing and repositioning whenever you move. For a mobile phone it's far too complex (imagine having a couple of servos controlling an antenna mounted on a gimbal), and mobile standards such as GSM are designed with the low power in mind anyway, so a directional antenna won't bring too much benefit unless you're normally out of coverage. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

If you're asking about how you can pinpoint someone's location when you only have their cellphone, the answer is that you use several cell towers to narrow down your location until you get it as accurate as you want. 83.250.202.36 (talk) 07:59, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Mozilla 3.0: Switch off search for keywords?

I've upgraded to Mozilla 3.0 and don't like their "improvements" (distracting, slowing down URL completion etc.). Is there a way to switch them off? Thanks so much!!!!... --71.232.76.89 (talk) 01:49, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

There is no Mozilla 3.0. You mean Firefox 3.0? --Spoon! (talk) 01:55, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

No. just use firefox 2, or use this extension although it only makes cosmetic changes https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.106.15.180 (talk) 02:09, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

PocketPC Unzip Program

I have a Sprint PPC 6700 phone. It runs Windows Mobile 5. I am trying to find an application that will unzip .zip files and every program I try keeps saying this is not a valid PocketPC application. I don't have the USB cable, so I will need to download the program from the web and install it right on the phone.

Also, my phone is not SprintTV capable, are there any other (preferably free) TV programs that will work with my phone? Thanks! 96.228.97.149 (talk) 02:34, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Google Earth and Ubuntu

How's everybody doing? It's me again, :P. Well, anyways I got Google Earth for Ubuntu ans installed it and all etc. Problem is, it flickers like mad'! It's annoying as hell and doesn't help at all when you're trying to see 3D buildings or see snapshots! I'm not really sure how to fix the problem. My screen resolution is 1680 X 1050 and my refresh rate is 60 Hz. Any ideas?--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 02:48, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Same thing with Celestia, about 20 min ago I tried to fix it by disabling a ATI accelerated graphics driver. Usually it just takes away some cool animations when windows appear and close etc and it deos improve speed a bit but messes up slide shows stuff like that... Problem is...this time it caused low-screen resolution mode on Ubuntu. I couldn't go above 800 X 600. It was annoying but I used the Ubuntu documentation and restored the normal resolution through a series of BASH commands. <Sigh>--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 03:10, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

No the trick is not to disable restrictive drivers, but to disable visual effects in appearances. (although Google Earth works fine with visual effects on for me) --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:37, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

And how do I do that?--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 15:35, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Never mind. I fixed it. Thanks.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 17:25, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft Word 2003 formatting problem

I imported a document from another program (a cheap thing called GSP Write Your Own Novel) into MS Word, and it's generally okay, but there's some kind of invisible border on the pages that limits the amount of text on the page - the available area seems to change so that on some of the later pages I can barely get a paragraph onto the page before I'm onto the next page.

NB - I'm a perennial noob - please keep your answers simple: assume I'm stupid.

Thanks all Adambrowne666 (talk) 03:33, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm working from memory here (I switched to Office 2007 last year) so apologies in advance for any minor errors. Here are some simple steps you can try:

1. Take a look at the page margins. Choose "Page setup..." from the File menu. There you can set the page margins and apply them to the whole document.
2. Make sure the document is correctly split into paragraphs. Ctrl+* will show paragraph breaks and other formatting marks. Ideally, you will want each word separated with a single space ("·" in this display mode) and each paragraph separated with one or two paragraph marks ("¶" in this display mode). If instead every line ends in something else like paragraphs marks, or little backwards pointing arrows, they will have to be removed.
3. Take a look at the paragraph settings; Highlight a paragraph (or many paragraphs), right-click and choose "Paragraph...". Make sure there are small or zero spacings before and after.

If none of those actions are effective and the document is not too big, it might be best to re-style the whole document. The easiest way to do that, is:

1. Print the document so you can see where section headers, bold, italic, indents, etc are in the document.
2. Cut & past the whole text into a text editor like Notepad, then exit Word.
3. Restart Word with an empty document, then cut & paste the whole document from Notepad into your new empty Word document. This destroys all the formatting, page margins, section breaks, etc.
4. Using your printed original as a guide, go through the new document imposing bold, italic, headers, indents, etc. in a consistant and pleasing way.

Astronaut (talk) 09:26, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks so much for taking the time to set all that out, Astronaut; as it happened, step 1 worked a treat - thanks! Adambrowne666 (talk) 02:10, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Head delay and Firefox bookmarks.

Due to a recent quasi HDD crash, I decided to re-install XP onto a new drive in my Presario SR1520NX. So far, it's kinda working, with two minor problems. I'm combining them into one posting. Hope that OK.

1) When turning on the computer, I usually get a "DISK BOOT FAILURE" message. Hitting ctrl-alt-reset fixes the problem immediately.

My assumption is that the new HDD needs a bit more time to come up to speed than the old one did. Several people have told me that I can adjust the spin-up time in the BIOS, but on trying it, I can't find anything in the BIOS choices that even come close to mentioning "HDD delay" or anything like that. Any ideas?

2) I re-installed Firefox, and would love to port over my old bookmarks. However, I never got a chance to export my old bookmarks, and assumed that they would be somewhere on the old disk drive. I happen to have it available, and can read all the files, but have no idea which file(s) to copy over. The one called Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/defaults/profile/bookmarks.html doesn't seem to be the file, much to my surprise. Now what?

Thanks for any help. Bunthorne (talk) 04:17, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

1: Usually there's an option in BIOS that goes along the line of "Wait for HDD at boot up", but not all BIOS have it. But either way this is not a good sign: back in the days you can get that if you're experiencing some cold weather and the lubricating grease solidified and take some time for the drive to spin up to its correct speed, but nowadays they use ball bearings so it probably isn't caused by that. You should start backing up your data to another hard drive just in case your current hard drive fails. Didn't see you say you've installed a new hard drive, and I have no idea why it takes longer to spin up.

2: In Firefox 3 you can use the bookmark manager to import the bookmarks.html file from your previous profile. Otherwise you can try copying over the whole profile directory, start Firefox with profile manager (by adding the switch "-ProfileManager" at the end of the link) and choose your old profile to be default. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:35, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

In future use the Foxmarks extension which syncs all your bookmarks to a web server. You can then always sync it back to your local copy of Firefox. It's useful for restoring your bookmarks in the case of re-installing, as well as keeping bookmarks synced across multiple copies of Firefox on different PCs. Or use Firefox portable which keeps your entire installation self-contained (useful for running off a USB stick). Zunaid 08:39, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Programming for beginers

I have never programmed before, other than a bit of QBasic when I was about 14, but I would like to now learn. I am looking to program an application that employs screen scraping technology to read data from another application, and on that basis compute various formulae. As I have no idea where to begin with this I thought I would ask for some pointers, particularly what language would be most appropriate for this task, and moreover where the best place to start would be. Thanks Flaming Ferrari (talk) 09:31, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm not 100% sure about what you are trying to do, but if you have some experience with BASIC, then you might find AutoHotkey or AutoIt useful. --Russoc4 (talk) 13:44, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

It depends a bit on what you want to do - if you are looking for something fairly simple (as in no OCR), I'd go with something that plays well with a webcam, which is what I presume you'll use for your input. In which case I've had success with both Java and C#, although learning OO might be a challenge. I'd probably lean towards C# for a beginner, all else being equal, simply because Visual Studio is rather nice as an editor, but Java is better if you need cross-platform. Other languages will work, too - especially if OO causes issues. Just check what libraries they have to support video recognition and you should be ok. - Bilby (talk) 13:58, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

If you're talking about screen scraping an application that you have textual access to, such as a command-line application, something you can telnet to, or a web application, this would be straightforward with a Perl module like WWW::Mechanize. If you're talking about screen-scraping a GUI application that you'll have to do OCR on, then that might be too tall an order for a first programming project. I personally would approach it by inspecting the memory of the other app, but again, that's a lot for a beginner. --Sean 16:22, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Or, putting all of the above another way: describe what you want to do in a little more detail. It'll help us figure out what's right for you. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:16, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I completely agree. Making a program that makes sense out of images is a seriously difficult thing for any programmer, no matter how experienced. If you just need some data from another program, it's very possible that there is another way to do that 83.250.202.36 (talk) 19:34, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Please help

Using Babel Fish and Windows Live Translator, there is often a problem when translating into French. This is the problem: Words with "'s" do not translate properly. The word remains the same and the "'s" also stays. Why is it like this? Is there a way to fix it? February 15, 2009 (talk) 13:38, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, you get what you pay for with a free translation, maybe. I tried this text:

Here's an example of English text. It's got lots of apostrophes. Dave's put some in, and the paragraph's going to end up with half a dozen. It's a way to check translation. There's no telling what's going to happen.

And got this in "French":

Here' ; s un exemple de texte anglais. It' ; s a obtenu un bon nombre d'apostrophes. Dave' ; s en a mis dedans, et le paragraph' ; s allant finir vers le haut avec une demi-douzaine. It' ; manière de SA de vérifier la traduction. There' ; s aucun what' indiquant ; s allant se produire.

Looks to me like it just plain can't handle contractions well. Compare with these versions:

Here is an example of English text. It has lots of apostrophes. Dave has put some in, and the paragraph is going to end up with half a dozen. This is a way to check translation. There is no telling what will happen.

Voici un exemple de texte anglais. Il a un bon nombre d'apostrophes. Dave en a mis dedans, et le paragraphe va finir vers le haut avec une demi-douzaine. C'est une manière de vérifier la traduction. Nul ne peut dire ce qui se produira.

Not much help if you have some text from elsewhere with apostrophes, but that seems to explain the poor translation. --- OtherDave (talk) 19:40, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, Google Translate doesn't seem to have this problem. I can't vouch for its accuracy, but this is what I got when I put in OtherDave's first example:

Voici un exemple de texte anglais. Il ya beaucoup d'apostrophes. Dave a mis certains, et le paragraphe qui va se retrouver avec une demi-douzaine. C'est une façon de vérifier la traduction. Il ne sait pas ce qui va se passer.

— Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 22:29, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Matt, that's piqued my curiosity. Any thoughts about the difference? I use Windows XP, and the browser was Firefox 3.0. --- OtherDave (talk) 10:41, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I got the same result as you when I put it through Babel Fish - the one I posted was from Google Translate, which is smart enough to handle apostrophes properly. It seems like Babel Fish can't even handle possessive apostrophes - I put in "Matt's car is black" and got "Matt' ; la voiture de s est noire" — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 16:27, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Babel Fish works if you use curly apostrophes (’) instead of straight apostrophes ('). Don't ask me why. -- BenRG (talk) 23:05, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Kerberos on Windows XP

Is it possible to use Kerberos authentication when connecting from Windows XP?

• Server: Debian, with Heimdal Kerberos.
• Client: Windows XP Pro, with SSPI, my home computer, not in a domain.
• Client app: WinSCP.

I have installed the ksetup.exe tool from WinXP CD, and added the KDC. What next?

--grawity 14:45, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

IP addresses in DNS servers

In DNS servers, in what form are IP addresses stored (for A records)? Are they in plain text (1.2.3.4), or binary (0x01020304)? (I'm asking because I managed to set up a record for 23.75.345.200) --grawity 18:17, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

It depends on the DNS server. DNS servers are defined by the input/output, not by how they store information. -- kainaw™ 19:56, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

However, the format on the wire is fixed. It has to be for the clients and servers to understand each other. And the wire format for A records is a raw 32-bit integer, not text (definition is in RFC1035 section 3.4.1). It's not possible for a server to send an A record with "23.75.345.200" as the address because there's just no combination of bits that means "23.75.345.200" in an A record. Your server may allow that as an address in a zone file, but when sent to a client it'll either be a malformed packet or it'll be interpreted as meaning something else. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Uninstalling Windows XP

Okay, im switching to Ubuntu, but having both OS on the computer has made it too slow to run the full installer (i used the one that you can install from windows, making it a seperate OS without partitioning the hardrive). So uninstalling XP should make it work a little faster, in theory. But i dont know how. Its not in Add/Remove Programs because it wasnt an upgrade from 95/98/nt/me, and using %systemroot%\system32\osuninst.exe doesnt work, it says its missing registry information. any other methods? the juggresurection ^{(>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ)} 18:36, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Maybe try formatting you drive and starting over. Just make sure you get any data you need off before you format. Paragon¹²³²¹ 18:42, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Well i already have all the data i need off of it. Ive been planning this for a while. now, how would i format the harddrive?the juggresurection ^{(>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ)} 18:47, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

When you say "having both OS on the computer has made it too slow to run the full installer", what exactly do you mean? Having multiple OS:s on a computer shouldn't slow down the LiveCD that you download from ubuntu.com. Try putting in the installation CD, and see if you can boot from that. Then just run the installer that's on the desktop.

If your computer is to slow to run the LiveCD (which sometimes happens), you can download the Alternate CD (go to the download page, check the checkbox that says "Check here if you need the alternate desktop CD. This CD does not include the Live CD, instead it uses a text-based installer"). As the nice little checkbox-text says, this is not a LiveCD, so it will not boot up ubuntu from the CD itself, rather it will boot up an installer. This is slightly tricker, but it's not terribly hard. When it comes to the partitioning stage, tell it to erase the entire harddrive and install ubuntu on it, and there you go :) 83.250.202.36 (talk) 19:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

What i mean is when i try to run the installer from the Live CD, it gets to a screen with some kind of backround on it, and then...nothing. it just sits there. So Im assuming its because there are 2 OS on it, but im not the most knowledgeable when it comes to this kind of stuff. im gonna go try the alternate cd.the juggresurection ^{(>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ)} 19:14, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Actually, since its gonna take 8 hours to download, ill just come back if i have any more problems. the juggresurection ^{(>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ)} 19:54, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

You do that :) Way back, I had some sort of similar error with the Ubuntu LiveCD, that the install-program didn't work. I installed from the alternate CD and everything was fine and dandy. Good Luck, and cheers on you for choosing Linux :) We're here in case you need more help 83.250.202.36 (talk) 01:48, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you using Wubi to install Ubuntu? If you are you're not going to be able to uninstall Windows XP as Wubi uses the windows boot loader, and you're going to have to burn a LiveCD and boot from that when you start the PC. Then while you're in the live CD when you run the installer just let it format the entire drive and you should have replaced XP with Ubuntu. TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:12, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

• Out of curiosity, why don't you just create a separate partition for Ubuntu? That way you can use both and you won't have to learn an entirely-new operating system at once.--Birdsusing nnn (talk) 08:25, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

September 8

In firefox (or windows, really), how do I set the option to only have 1 window of a program open at once?

Most people want to get rid of this feature; I want it because my younger sibling doesn't realize that only one window needs to be open at a time (since there's tabbed browsing), and when 57 windows are open at once, the computer sloughs down.

Actually, I'd prefer that I could set a limit, like say three windows, so necessary popups wouldn't be affected. I'm not sure if this is a firefox option, or a windows xp taskbar option, or a third-party program or what. Much help greatly appeciated ! -=- Xhin -=- (talk) 00:30, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

First, why is your younger sibling opening 57 windows? If it's because certain links automatically open new windows, in Firefox, in Preferences -> Tabs, there is an option that says "New pages should be opened in:" with choices of "a new window" and "a new tab"; but I think the latter is default anyway. If it's because he/she doesn't know a good way of opening new tabs, then teach him/her something like that, with the above option set to tabs, one can simply middle-click or Ctrl-click a link to open it in a new tab (add Shift to open tab and switch to it), or press Ctrl-T (or double-click on an empty part of the tab bar) to open a blank new tab. If the problem is that he/she knows how to open new tabs, but likes to open 57 new windows anyway, then that's really his/her own problem. I don't know if Firefox has an option to simply disallow opening more than a certain number of windows; but I doubt it. --Spoon! (talk) 01:31, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I have to say that the best solution would be to simply teach your younger sibling how the program works. If he (I'm making a bold gender assumption here and certainly not using "he" as a generic pronoun) is old enough to figure out how to browse the internet, is the concept of tabs really too complicated for him? I'm saying this because, first of all, I don't think there's a technical solution to this short of something you program yourself, and also because in my experience, teaching someone the proper use of an application (especially when it's a pretty simple thing like this) will save you time and effort in the long run. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 07:39, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

With Tab Mix Plus (a Firefox plugin) you can make your browser into "single window mode" that forces every new window to a new tab. Unfortunately that plugin is not (yet) available for Firefox 3. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:43, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm fairly sure unless you specifically ask Firefox 3 to open in a new window by default it opens in a tab anyway. TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:10, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Reactivate Windows?

If i install a new video card on my computer, will i have to reactivate windows? Everyone i've asked says yes, but i've added hardware to my computer before and never had to activate windows again. I need some help plz... 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 13:15, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Which version of Windows do you use? I have seen cases in Windows XP where activation was not required, however in Vista it is very likely. Activation links your product key with a collection of components Microsoft consider "core" to your system. As part of the Windows license stipulates using it with only a single computer, changing any part that causes Windows to see itself as a new computer will cause need for activation. The most obvious component is the CPU, however i've switched Vista Harddrives to other computers without it complaining about reactivation so there is no obvious answer. Best thing you can do is change it and see. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 14:33, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Its Windows XP Home SP3. And i don't actually have the card yet. Would windows even let me reactivate? 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 16:00, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't want to give legal advise on whether it's allowed by the license, but the license (Windows XP EULA) definetly states you may need to reactivate after changing Hardware. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 16:48, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I've had to re-activate XP SP2 after changing my CPU, hard drive, and memory (one at a time, on three separate occasions). But there was no hassle—entering my license key worked fine, and I didn't have to call Microsoft or anything like that. -- Coneslayer (talk) 16:53, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

And I didn't need to re-activate after changing the mainboard, cpu, RAM, sound card, video card, and hard drive. You never know. --Carnildo (talk) 22:57, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks. 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 16:32, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

File Compression....or Expansion?

Resolved

Thanks everybody. -Abhishek (talk) 05:32, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I am trying to compress a file, but the size is just increasing instead of decreasing :S

• Original file -- 1000.0 MB

• .7z -- 1013.6 MB

• .gz -- 1000.2 MB

Screenshot. The original file's name is "win32", but really nothing related to windows. Its a Truecrypt container. I am using Linux Mint, GNOME. Is there something I'm missing? All I did was Right click-->Create archieve.

Thanks -Abhishek (talk) 13:29, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

File compression relies on redundancy (repeated blocks and patters) inside the thing you're compressing. Truecrypt, like all worthwhile encryption products, uses encryption algorithms which have ciphertexts that have no discernible patterns inside them. So no compression program is going to find anything to compress. Even an entirely empty 1Gb Truecrypt partion file will "upcompress" in this way. The standard solution is compress-then-encrypt - in your case compress inside the truecrypt volume, resize it (can you do that?) to barely contain what you need. Alternatively (better, perhaps) you zip (or tar.gz) the files up and then encrypt that archive with GPG or whatever. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:35, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Nope, can't resize Truecrypt containers. Finlay is on the money, if you can compress an encrypted file then you need better encryption! --12.155.20.214 (talk) 19:46, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Think of it like this. If your file compressor could compress ANY file and make it smaller - then you could take the file that came out of the compressor and compress it again - and again - and again. Eventually, the file would be one byte long. But a one byte file can only have 256 values - how would the uncompressor "know" which of the almost infinite number of possible files to generate?

In most cases, what happens is that if the compressor can't make the file smaller - it just sticks a little note on the front of the file that says "this file wasn't really compressed" - but that note takes up space. In fact, it's mathematically impossible to write a compressor that doesn't either lose some information - or make some files at least one bit bigger. And as 12.155.20.214 says - if you actually can make a compressed file smaller by recompressing it - then you have a poor compression tool. However, there are poor compression tools out there.

SteveBaker (talk) 02:19, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Firefox version 3.0.1

I'm having a problem with this version. If I use a link to a section that is not at the beginning of an article, (eg, Marilyn Munroe#Songs), the tab opens showing the proper section of the article but then Firefox immediately increases the font size which leads to a redisplay of an earlier part of the article. This is a great nuisance as it means using "find" to get the section I want.

I believe it is going to a larger font size because I used Ctrl + to request a larger font (several days ago). Is there a way to have the larger font taken into account in the initial display when the tab opens so there is no need for a redisplay?

Thanks. Wanderer57 (talk) 17:10, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Following that link works for me with an enlarged font size in Firefox 3.0.1 on XP. I have a similar problem when loading articles with large amounts of LaTeX in them, but that is due to the number of images in the articles and doesn't sound the same as your problem. What OS are you using? Any Firefox plugins? « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 23:48, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I have Windows 2000 "professional". No Firefox plugins. Wanderer57 (talk) 13:18, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Malwarebytes.org?

Is this site legit? I can't find much about it on the old internets from reputable sources. A family member wants to know if they should use it. My instinct is to say "no" if I haven't heard of it myself and instead direct them to AVG Free and Spybot (esp. since they seem to do pretty much all you'd need for free, whereas the other one has a lot of features that can only be unlocked for $25 or so). But I thought I'd ask on here, since I'm not necessarily up to speed with the anti-virus world as I am a Mac user. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 17:52, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I myself use AVG and it is an excellent program. In general, only use programs that have reviews that don't say OMG THIS THING GAVE ME VIRUSES. Download.com half of the time is pretty reliable, as it scans everything. Pie is good ^{(Apple is the best)} 20:59, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

And in general, if you pay for something, you should be sure what you'll get out of it. If you pay for anti-virus software and then get a virus, what will the software company do? For 25 dollars, they'll have forgotten about you the second they got your money. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.164.115 (talk) 22:50, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

As I said, I know these things. My question is whether anyone knows anything about this particular site. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 23:20, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/malwarebytes.org says it's legit. ~EdGl (talk) 15:26, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Google Maps and GPS

I have a mobile broadband card from AT&T that has built-in GPS. I was wondering if there was a way to somehow integrate this GPS with Google Maps? I would like to have it guide me to a destination (just directions, don't need turns or anything) and reposition the "location" on the map and have the map follow it as I travel.

Now, I know that you can integrate it with Streets and Trips and Google Earth but those both cost money. I am looking for something free or extremely cheap. The company I work for has a small budget for this kind of thing and I am already spending my money on an expensive wireless card to help out getting my service calls.

Thank you Wikipedia gurus. I'm looking for anything, I don't care how ghetto it is. I have searched for about an hour now comming up empty.--12.155.20.214 (talk) 19:47, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

TIME ZONES ON THE COMPUTER

Hi, is it possible to work on the computer in Eastern Europe, but the time zone to be like Canada? (if I am talking on messenger for ex.) Thank you very much. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Adina40 (talk • contribs) 21:55, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Sure. You can set the time zone for whatever you want, regardless of where you are. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 22:11, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

If you are unsure how to change the timezone:

• Windows: Right-click the clock, hit Adjust Date/Time... then click the Time Zone tab. Use the drop-down to select your zone.
• Mac OS: Go to the Apple Menu, click System Preferences then Date & Time. Untick the "Set date & time automatically" box. Click "Time Zone" and choose your time zone.

Xenon54 22:31, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Does Gears of War for PC have copy protection?

Does it have anything obtrusive like SecuROM or any of that foolishness that could muck up my system? --156.34.76.174 (talk) 23:14, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you suggesting SecuROM could "muck up your system", or did you simply word that badly? I've never heard any case of SecuROM messing up a system, and no Gears of War does not have any noticeable Copyright infringement prevention in place, however who knows if there are any that are not "obtrusive". - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 14:31, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

September 9

Linus without login

Which Linux variants allow you to define a single user environment, where no logon is required ? Is the single user environment the default in any of them ? 68.74.2.210 (talk) 00:51, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

It's pretty easy to change the default runstate from multiuser to single-user in any Linux distro that I'm aware of. In SuSE Linux (for example) you can use the "Yast" setup tool - go to "System Services - hit the "Expert Mode" and select which runstate the system starts up in - and which services run in each state.

If you want to do it "old school" - you can change the default runlevel by editing the file "/etc/inittab" in any system based on Linux (or even UNIX for that matter).

init:5:initdefault

The '5' is the default runlevel - changing that to a '1' would start the system in single-user mode.

The following lines specify which program is run to start the system in each 'runlevel'.

Be really careful though - any error in this file will probably prevent Linux from booting! Make sure you make a safe copy of the original file and have a "Live CD" that you can boot from, mount your hard drive and then restore the default if you screw up!

SteveBaker (talk) 06:13, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Installation went wrong, it stopped halfway, now I have only 50 % of the files installed and it is impossible both to uninstall AND re-install !

Hey, I was gonna install a game on my computer - but something went wrong during installation, when I was gonna swap from cd 1 to cd 2 to continue the last half of the installation.

WHen i put in cd 2 it did not start up again and the whole installation thingy crashed and stopped as a message came up; "Program does not answer". And then when the game was only halfway installed, with only half of the files, it seems the install/uninstall program following with the game was among the files not installed(or i don't really know) and now it is impossible to uninstall the game again or to continue installation. And ofcourse, I can't start from scratch either when half of the gamefiles are still lying in the computers filelist in "controlpanel" and on the harddisk. when trying to uninstall, it says the uninstall-file are corrupted or not valid, so...

What must I do??

I really want to get to install the game properly and get to playing but now it seems this computer vs. the game is "locked", and only way for me to play the game would be on another computer. But of course, I have only one computer ...

AND I DO KNOW FOR 100% SURE THAT THE GAME IS COMPLETELY COMPATIBLE WITH THE COMPUTER'S SYSTEM, and vice versa so that really isn't any problem at all. It was simply really bad luck that the program stopped working during installation. Baddest possible timing :S

Must I turn on "safemodus" or whatever it is called on my computer and delete the whole thing from there?? I don't even know how to start "safemodus"... I've only seen it the few times my computer has crashed and when it restarts it asks if I wanna start windows in "safemodus" or in normal modus. I've never been on safemodus before though, don't know if its a complicated thing. ANd I have no idea how to MANUALLY do this or if this is even the right thing that i need to do to fix this. I'm sure you know of what i speak even though i might not use the correct words...

Any kind of help and guidance about how I can clear up the mess, clear up the files and get to start a new installation from scratch again would be GREAT. I really hope to manage to fix this.

Thank you, hoping for help :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.49.179.208 (talk) 01:19, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

If you can find the files on your hard drive, you could delete them manually, then try to reinstall the game. What sort of computer do you have? If it's a Windows, I could try to help you find the files... I'm hopeless with Macs, though. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 01:45, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Ok i'll do as you say, simply deleting the folder with all the files in and then return to see what you have in mind. although, the file/program-list in contropanle for sure still have the name of the game in the list there. that's not good i think.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.49.179.208 (talk) 01:54, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

In terms of knowing in advance whether the game will work with your computer...No, it's essentially impossible to know for sure. There are hundreds of graphics cards, hundreds of sound cards, hundreds of network cards, dozens of CPU's many amounts of RAM you might have...joysticks, mice, operating systems and revision levels, plugins, disk capacities and configurations, virus checkers...the number of possible combinations is astronomical. The possible interactions between those things is enormous and it's quite beyond the ability of any game manufacturer to actually GUARANTEE that the game will work on any particular combination. We check the most common things - but there can't EVER be a rock solid guarantee. That's why games manufacturers like game consoles. They are certainly slower and harder to program than PC's but because all Xbox360's are one of about four possibilities and all PS-3's are of just a few kinds - and there is really only one Wii, NDS, PSP, etc - it's fairly easy to test exhaustively on all of them and know for absolute certain that your game will work. But with the PC (and increasingly, the Mac) it's just a nightmare. SteveBaker (talk) 02:05, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

To answer you Steve Baker, I know for sure because I have had this exact game installed on this exact computer before, and then uninstalled it again. But I appreciate that you take time to answer me nontheless :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.49.179.208 (talk) 02:12, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

1. Go to Start, then Run..., then type installer.
2. Go to View and click Details.
3. Go to View and click Choose Details.
4. Check Subject.
5. Click on the Subject column.
6. Find the name of the game and double-click on the file. That will run the installer.
7. Go to Start, then Run..., then type regedit.
8. Press CTRL + F and type the name of the game.
9. Delete anything with the game's name in it and keep pressing F3 until regedit can't find any more.
10. Go to My Computer, then Tools, then Folder Options...
11. Click the View tab, then check the option to show hidden files.
12. Go to My Computer, then Documents and Settings, then your user folder, then Local Settings, then Application Data.
13. Delete any folder belonging to the game if there is one.
14. Restart your computer.--Birdsusing nnn (talk) 02:18, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Anon proxy with POST & HTTPS

Can you recommend a free anonymous proxy on the web that supports POST form submissions and cookies, and supports connecting to HTTPS websites? --71.141.145.85 (talk) 01:51, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Isn't that impossible? Cookies (for example) are there precisely to identify your computer to the server. If you put them on some proxy - then it's not going to remember you as you travel around their site. I presume that similar issues arise with HTTPS. SteveBaker (talk) 01:55, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Why couldn't the proxy keep track of which cookie belongs to which session? It's easy to find anon proxies that claim to support POST and cookies if you have a paid account. (Example : [7] ) APL (talk) 02:22, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

However I strongly suspect that you will have a very hard time finding proxies that offer free POST support. That would attract spammers like moths to a porch light. APL (talk) 02:30, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh. Possibly I'm an idiot. These two both seem to support POST. : [8] [9] APL (talk) 02:33, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Encyclopedia Dramatica hosts file entry

I was just in Windows command prompt where I used the "ipconfig /displaydns" command. It looks clean, except that I noticed an entry for encyclopediadramatica that somehow referred to 127.0.0.1 (localhosts) - see image. I then found it listed in my "hosts" file. Only once or twice a long while ago, did I ever visit that site to see what it was about. I regret ever going there. Anyway, how did this ever get added? Aside from the hosts file, are there other such issues with encyclopediadramatica, in terms of malicious spyware or changes to computer settings? --Aude (talk) 02:34, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Setting the IP address to 127.0.0.1 is a technique to keep you from connecting to the site. I know Spybot Search and Destroy's Immunize feature does this. That's not your complete hosts file, just the part loaded into the Resolver Cache. Take a look at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts for the whole story. Sometimes malware will set the IP address of a site to another malicious site inside your hosts file. In that case you'd have a site like Google being resolved to a computer in Russia, for example. But it wouldn't be set to your own computer (127.0.0.1).--Birdsusing nnn (talk) 02:40, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the answer. It makes sense that Spybot is doing its job and probably added it. --Aude (talk) 12:53, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome.--Birdsusing nnn (talk) 16:39, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Plain text in Eudora

I am using Eudora v7.1. I subscribe to a mailing list which supports only plain-text messages (they try to convert HTML, but the moderator tells me it's broken and I really need to send plain text to this recipient). I am unable to find anything about how to do this either under Options or in the program's online help. Ma^t_chups 04:22, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Tools -> Options -> Styled Text -> "Send plain text" and/or "Ask me each time". Saintrain (talk) 12:05, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Computer Lock (physical)

I don't know if this belongs here or in Misc: My computer case (PC tower, specifically a Thermaltake) locks closed. Unfortunately, my case lock seems to have jammed, and I cannot now open it using the key. I can put the key in, but it won't budge. Any ideas on what to do?

• There are no accessible screws in the case door where the lock is nested.
• The case panels cannot be removed without being damaged; they are locked to the case (requiring this lock to open first).

What are my options (apart from sawing through the case)? The Jade Knight (talk) 05:40, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, if the lock is useless anyway - you could drill out the lock mechanism. That's not going to damage the case panels. However, I'd be very nervous about getting metal shavings inside the case. I guess I'd try to prop the case between a couple of chairs or something - with the lock facing downwards so I could drill upwards and make sure the shavings fall downwards - away from the circuitry, drives, fans and other bits and pieces. You'd want to put a collar onto the drill bit to limit how deep you could drill - you don't want the bit going through the case and embedding itself in the CPU or something! SteveBaker (talk) 05:58, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

What kind of a drill would I need for this? The Jade Knight (talk) 09:05, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest an electric drill with a bit suitable for drilling steel and that is a few millimetres smaller than the lock barrel. However, before drilling the lock out you might want to try lubricating the lock first - something like WD-40 might do the trick. Astronaut (talk) 13:01, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Not sure where I'd find such a drill; I don't own anything of that size, myself. Anyway, how does one go about lubricating a lock (and what does it do)? In case it's relevant: I can access one side of the lock (there's a small hole in the case next to it). It appears as solid metal on the outside, however, and I'm not sure what good it does me. The Jade Knight (talk) 13:59, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Given the cost of a mistake and your lack of experience with the required tools, I would suggest finding a locksmith. Gandalf61 (talk) 14:13, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Can you take the key back out? If so, try a very small squirt of WD-40 into the actual key hole. Matt Deres (talk) 16:56, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh - yes indeed - if you haven't already tried lubricating the lock (sorry - I assumed you would have) - then do so. However, don't use oil (even WD-40). It attracts and retains dust and you end up with a gummy mess that'll make it even worse the next time around! To properly lubricate a lock, you need a dry graphite lubricant. Check your local DIY store - they'll have the right stuff. SteveBaker (talk) 17:39, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Need advice buying on a laptop

Hey guys its the same guy who posted a question on 3rd Sep. I've spent a few days searching around for the best deal and I believe I've found it. Just wondering what you in the know think of this laptop's graphics card - most importantly is it good enough to play CSS on? Here's the link

http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.204-4693.aspx

Many thanks in advance —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.10.188.98 (talk) 10:54, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Most computers nowadays will run Counter-strike: Source fine, and that one will run it great. 193.194.132.78 (talk) 12:54, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Image search

Resolved

Does something like this exists -- A search engine that will take an image as input, instead of keywords, and search the web for exactly same or similar pictures. No, I'm not talking about this. I must be able to upload a picture from my computer and it will look for similar or same picture on the web. Does this exist, or is someone planning to make this? (Google?) -59.95.115.73 (talk) 14:23, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

See Visual Search Engine; I think TinEye (in the links) is supposed to do something like what you want (for the purpose of finding copyright violations). -- Coneslayer (talk) 14:31, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! And that was damn quick Coneslayer. -59.95.115.73 (talk) 14:44, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Technicolor Effect

Is it possible to replicate the technicolor "effect" using say, video recorded via iphone? If so, what programs would I look into? What processes? Etc... Preferably something that can work within the iphone,without me having to transfer video into my computer, but I'm easy. This was previously asked at the humanities desk, and I was informed I'd probably have better luck here. Thanks!

Kenjibeast (talk) 23:37, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Squeezing the last from a dying HD

I have a 110 GB HD that is edging towards failure. It's already lost some files due to corruption. Everything has been transferred to a new drive, but since the old one is still more or less functional, I thought I could keep it in service and save my other HD from some wear and tear by copying (not moving) all my music to it and playing it from that drive. That's what I've been doing for the past couple of weeks (after reformatting). What are the likely outcomes when this drive finally croaks? Will it matter? ----Seans Potato Business 15:21, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

You're probably not saving the other HD from wear and tear - google released a survey they'd done a while ago (of their enormous population of disks) and they saw little to no correlation between use and failure. Failure is generally either a snowballing degradation of the drive's surfaces or weird electrical failures (due to weird chemical things happening on chips, wiring, glues, and solders). The drive will either take longer and longer to read (and may eventually time out a given read) or (if it has a smarter drive controller) just give up and power itself off ("spindown"). Nice OSes (and drive adapters) take this in their stride (hello Solaris), but some are jerks about it (Windows Explorer has a tiresome habit of saying "that unimportant disk isn't responding; I'm going to jam up in synchronous-io-hell for ages"). I'd bin the drive now. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 16:30, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Before you bin it, I highly recommend a product called SpinRite. I've had a bunch of drives that I thought was dying, and when I used SpinRite on them, almost all of them continued functioning for a significant amount of time (I'm talking 6 months to a year longer than they would have otherwise). I realise I sound like a commercial, but it is almost supernatural how good it is. It's not entirely cheap, but it's worth it in the long run from the money you save on new harddrives. 195.58.125.46 (talk) 18:09, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Showing owner's name on photo shooting info

There is a field in the shooting info that shows up with my photos for "owner's name". Right now this appears blank on all my photos. I would like to know how to make my name show up in this field, but have been unable to find any setting in either my photo software or the camera itself, to do this. I am wondering if anyone can tell me how it's done. I use a Canon Rebel XT (digital), in case this is relevant. Thanks for any help you can offer. 66.183.142.226 (talk) 16:50, 9 September 2008 (UTC)LMacB

Are you looking at JPG files or RAW files? What software are you using? --LarryMac | Talk 18:03, 9 September 2008 (UTC)