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November 25

Spybot is blocking me from connecting to my wireless router

I have a wireless router, but I can't connect to it. I know the problem isn't the router, because my other computers can connect to it without any problems. I can also connect to other wireless connections without any problems. The problem only occurred after installing Spybot. 98.221.84.235 (talk) 00:14, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Spybot does have the feature of blocking registry changes (it prompts you to deny or accept each change), so, if the wireless router for some reason requires a registry change, this could, indeed, be the prob. StuRat (talk) 01:31, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

So if you turn off all of Spybot's features, can you connect? --128.97.245.27 (talk) 03:35, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I uninstalled spybot, but I still can't connect. Can there still be protections active that prevent me from connecting? 98.221.84.235 (talk) 14:36, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

You did reboot after uninstalling, right? Assuming the answer is yes: I have often found it helpful to first connect to the router's web-based administrative interface when there is trouble connecting to the web. If you type "ipconfig" from the command line on one of the computers that are connected, you'll get some lines of information, in which the IP address of the router is presented as the default gateway. If you type that address in the address bar of your browser, you will either see the login window of the router's administrative interface, or get a message that the connection is not working. I have several times experienced that first connecting to the router, gets the connection to the web working, for some reason. Typing "ipconfig /renew" from the command line might also help (if you are using DHCP, which is the default). If you are able connect to the router, but not to the web, there is probably a DNS problem. You can diagnose that by typing the IP address of a website directly into the address bar of your browser. You can find the IP address of a website (say, en.wikipedia.org) by using the command nslookup en.wikipedia.org on one of the computers that are connected. Comparing the network settings in the control panel of the computers that are working with the one that isn't, might also be helpful. As might checking whether a wired connection works. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 21:07, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Laptop Overheating

Lately my laptop has been overheating. After an hour or so it shuts down. The green battery lot [LED?] blacks out and doesn't reappear for several hours. I need to pull in and out the AC cord to get the battery light back. The battery was used up a month ago and I've been using electric power since. But I only had this problem recently. --Gary123 (talk) 02:22, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Some suggestions to prevent laptop overheating:

1) Don't use it on your lap, put it on a metal table (which conducts heat) or on "rails" so air can circulate underneath it.

2) Point a fan at it.

3) Keep the room temperature low. Wear a sweater. StuRat (talk) 03:14, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I've learned about #1 the hard way. --Crackthewhip775 (talk) 03:20, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

The fan may be locked with dust or may have failed. There may be a BIOS update that better. manages the power. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 14:51, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Wow, StuRat, where do you live? :o) I'd almost think that late in November most Wikipedians either 1.) live where it's getting so cold outside that you do have to wear a sweater inside anyways (unless you're overheating your room, which is a waste of energy anyways), or 2.) live somewhere where it's so warm outside that you can't cool it down without using an AC (and I sure hope you don't suggest that for the sake of a computer--that'd be a bit too much of a carbon footprint for any thinking person in the 21st century)... but well, 3.) = who knows... :o) --Thanks for answering (talk) 04:25, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm a man for all seasons, and so is my advice. I can further customize it for winter (if the Aussies and Kiwis will forgive me) by saying they should use the laptop in a cooler room, such as one with lots of windows, as opposed to an interior room with a roaring fire (hopefully in the fireplace). Using the laptop near an exterior wall within such a room will also help keep it cool, especially if their home insulation is as pathetic as mine (I think my new windows are actually better insulated than the old walls). StuRat (talk) 01:28, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree with StuRat - but I'd add that there are several companies that sell laptop coolers that sit under the laptop and get rid of the heat by one means or another. My laptop sits on a leather-topped writing desk for much of the time - and because leather is a pretty good insulator, it had terrible overheating problems until I made a little aluminium stand to put it on that allows air to flow underneath - and has a big black bit sticking up behind the screen that acts as a radiator.

Oh and incidentally: In Texas we are in the brief time each year between air conditioning on full and heating on full - when you can turn off the thermostat and even sit out in the back yard in shorts and a T-shirt and not die from some climate-related disaster. This season started about 10am this morning and is scheduled to end in the next hour or so. :-)

SteveBaker (talk) 18:26, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I thought such temps were viewed as an open invitation by tornadoes and/or hurricanes. :-) StuRat (talk) 01:20, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Google results being redirected

About 1/4 of the time I click on a Google result it redirects me to different ad or filler sites tangentially or not at all related to my search. If I hit the back button my browser then I am able to click the link again to get to the actual site. This only happens for Google results. I have tried deleting the cookies of the site I get redirected to, but that does not help at all. I ran my anti-virus (AVG free) and it found nothing. Is this just one cookie wrecking havoc or something more serious? Any help is appreciated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.84.49.100 (talk) 03:23, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

One of the many problems by brother-in-law has had with his PC sounds almost exactly like this. Something had hijacked his network settings, replacing the DNS IP address with a different DNS based in Ukraine and began taking him to sites that had a keyword in common with the site he expected. IIRC, this one was particularly resistant to removal because it was protected by a rootkit which hid two programs working in tandem to ensure the DNS was always the ukrainian one.

Test the IP addresses of each DNS with a whois service - DNS's usually belong to your ISP or a bigger ISP company in your country. If you use Windows XP, I would then recommend you run one or more of these rootkit detectors which should show what is being hidden, then halt and destroy all trace of the malicious programs from your disk, the registry, the list of services, etc. Unfortuntely, I'm yet to find a detector that works with Vista. BIG, BIG WARNING: there is a high risk of seriously messing up your PC so, before you start, back up anything you can't replace.

Astronaut (talk) 05:14, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

You probably have some sort of spyware or adware. I would get adaware or spyspot search and destroy software ASAP and run them (google them).

Windows 9x on logical partitions?

Dear Wikipedians:

Much to my delight I was able to successfully install Windows NT 5.0-based operating systems (2000 advanced server and XP to be specific) into logical partitions and have them boot off of a neat little DOS primary partition I created at the start of the hard drive (which actually contains an instance of genuine MS-DOS 6.22, yes, I'm still somewhat of a DOS afficionado). I think Microsoft really did a great job designing the booting mechanisms of NT 5.0 operating systems.

However, I'm not so sure if they have done as good a job with Windows 9x. So my question is: could I install Windows 9x into logical partitions and still have them boot properly, or do I have to install each instance of a Windows 9x operating system into its own primary partition (which is a scarce resource, since I'm allowed only 4, whereas logical partitions are unlimited). Or is there some tricks that I can employ to fool Windows 9x into installing and booting off of logical partitions?

Thanks,

70.52.151.100 (talk) 04:11, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

With some boot loaders like GRUB you can swap partitions around so the operating system thinks that what should be the F: drive (for example) is actually the C: drive. --wj32 ^t/c 06:00, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Irritating animated ad that won't go away

I hate being distracted by animations (usually ads) when I try to read something on a site. So I manage flash with Flashblock. and since other animated ads usually come from a different site, I can just block images from that site (a Firefox option that the msWindows version doesn't seem to have, by the way), without missing the images I want to see. Thus I have happily led an almost ad-free surf life for quite some time now. But now there is an ad that often appears at the top of the IMDB site, which Firefox doesn't seem to recognise as an image. Right-clicking on it doesn't give me a list of options. Can anyone tell me how to get rid of this? Note that I don't mind the ad itself quite so much as the animated bit. Here's the section of the source code that appears to be responsible (yes, it's from the old fiend doubleclick).

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
document.write('<iframe src="/images/a/ifb/doubleclick/expand.html#imdb.consumer.title/maindetails;tile=2;sz=468x60,728x90,1008x150;p=t;coo=za;g=dr;m=R;tt=f;coo=uk;id=tt0388364;ord=' + ord + '?" id="top_ad" name="top_ad" width="0" height="80" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true" onload="ad_utils.resize_iframe(this)">');
if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Gecko")==-1)
{document.write('<script language="JavaScript" src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/imdb.consumer.title/maindetails;tile=2;sz=468x60,728x90,1008x150;abr=!ie;p=t;coo=za;g=dr;m=R;tt=f;coo=uk;id=tt0388364;ord=' + ord + '?" type="text/javascript"><\/script>');
}
document.write('</iframe>');
//]]>
</script>
<noscript><a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/imdb.consumer.title/maindetails;tile=2;sz=468x60,728x90,1008x150;p=t;coo=za;g=dr;m=R;tt=f;coo=uk;id=tt0388364;ord=914168639324?" target="_blank"><img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/imdb.consumer.title/maindetails;tile=2;sz=468x60,728x90,1008x150;p=t;coo=za;g=dr;m=R;tt=f;coo=uk;id=tt0388364;ord=914168639324?"  border="0" alt="advertisement" /></a></noscript>

DirkvdM (talk) 08:45, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Add the following to your chrome/userContent.css:

*[src*="doubleclick"], *[href*="doubleclick"] { display: none !important; }

Leave a word on my talkpage if you need more. -- Fullstop (talk) 12:02, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I have an extremely low-tech solution to banner ads which I can't otherwise block, I turn the dial on my monitor to increase the vertical size of the display until it no longer fits on the screen, then I turn the other dial to push the display upward until the banner is off the screen. StuRat (talk) 15:07, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

StuRat, I find your unique solutions to computer problems endlessly amusing. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 17:48, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I have an even lower-tech solution to an analog TV displaying digital TV (from a converter box that puts random blinking crap on the top 8 lines) ... a piece of black electrical tape over that part of the screen. Perhaps duct tape would have been even more apropo ? :-) StuRat (talk) 01:07, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

At work, where they force me to use msbloodyWindows and I can't install anything, I use something similar for ads at the sides: I 'minimise' the window, but make it screen-wide, move it sideways so the ad disappears off-screen and then when I want to see the whole page I maximise. Thus, I can toggle between full-page and ad-free. Alas, this doesn't work for ads at the top. Or can one grab a window without using the top bar with msbloodyWindows as well? Haven't bothered to find that out actually. What's that called anyway? DirkvdM (talk) 18:45, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

What, a title bar? You can move windows on Windows with the keyboard: select Move from the control menu, and then use the arrow keys. I think that will let you move them at least partially off the screen. (Also, the usual terminology is to "restore" or "unmaximize" a window; "minimize" means to reduce to an icon or other small object (a button, commonly) that isn't a window at all.) --Tardis (talk) 18:18, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for correcting me. I should learn to remember the words for things. That makes it a lot easier to look things up. :) But what I meant is, what does one call that 'grabbing' of the window? You mention a method to move it with the arrow keys, but I once stumbled upon a way to grab it (anywhere on the window) with the mouse while holding down certain keys, and then moving it about. DirkvdM (talk) 08:34, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't know a name for it (except something obvious and cumbersome like "drag anywhere in the window"); what keys (if any) enable it depend on your window manager (or version of Windows) and can probably be customized. --Tardis (talk) 15:59, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Fullstop, thanks. Took a while, but I found /home/Dirk/.mozilla/firefox/bk2jnqo3.default/chrome/userChrome-example.css. Good thing they put an example there, because else I wouldn't have found it. So I made a new file, with the name userChrome.css, with just your line in it, in the same location. Is that the right place? I ask because at the top of the example it says: "Edit this file and copy it as userChrome.css into your profile-directory/chrome/". Annoying that they never say what 'your user profile' means. Anyway, I've tested it, but the ad is not always there, so only time will tell if it works. Btw, when I studied html some years ago, I wanted to play with the browser's css because users should always decide themselves how sites are presented. So now I know where to do that. Too bad my knowledge is a bit rusty. The first thing I would like to do is stop ads from taking up (blank) space on my screen. Any idea how to do that? DirkvdM (talk) 18:45, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Damn, no it didn't work (completely). The ad is there again. Now the TOP_AD section in the source has changed a bit:

<iframe src="/images/a/ifb/doubleclick/expand.html#imdb.consumer.title/;tile=2;sz=468x60,728x90,1008x150;p=t;g=th;m=R;g=co;tt=f;id=tt0362526;g=cr;g=brc;g=dr;coo=usa;ord=[CLIENT_SIDE_ORD]?" id="top_ad" name="top_ad" class="yesScript" width="0" height="80" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true" onload="ad_utils.resize_iframe(this)"></iframe>
<noscript><a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/imdb.consumer.title/;tile=2;sz=468x60,728x90,1008x150;p=t;g=th;m=R;g=co;tt=f;id=tt0362526;g=cr;g=brc;g=dr;coo=usa;ord=590984622936?" target="_blank"><img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/imdb.consumer.title/;tile=2;sz=468x60,728x90,1008x150;p=t;g=th;m=R;g=co;tt=f;id=tt0362526;g=cr;g=brc;g=dr;coo=usa;ord=590984622936?"  border="0" alt="advertisement" /></a></noscript>

Oh, I now notice the comment and the div section are only visible in the source. How do I stop it from rendering? I thought that would work with the <nohtml> tag, but apparently not. Anyway....
The last lines are the same, with the <noscript> section. But the script above it has been replaced with an <iframe> section. Can't I make Firefox ignore any lines with the string 'doubleclick' in it? Or, since I only have the problem here, any div with id="top_ad_wrapper"? I believe that is possible in css, but it's been many years sice I looked into that and I barely worked with it, so I remember very little. Googling things like ' css id "not render" ' did not help. DirkvdM (talk) 08:34, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Install Adblock Plus and Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper. When you next browse to the offending screen hit Ctrl+Shift+K, highlight the ad or frame you want blocked with your mouse (it will show a red rectangle around the element) and press "s". You can also play around with "w" and "n" to enlarge or reduce your selection. I find ABP:EHH extremely powerful, it can block literally ANYTHING with you having to know regexp or examining the page source code. It successfuly blocks evrything that I don't want, including TEXT ads. I now search Google and use Gmail complately ad-free :) Zunaid 10:56, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

DirkvdM: ~/.mozilla/firefox/<somehash>.default/chrome/userContent.css (not "userChrome.css"). For your continuing enjoyment ;), I've pasted all the ad-blocking bits of my userContent.css to User talk:Fullstop/Sandbox/T2. There is also some stuff at http://www.floppymoose.com/userContent.css you may wish to take a look at.

SigmaEpsilon: *= is CSS 3, see "6.3.2. Substring matching attribute selectors" of the CSS 3 spec. -- Fullstop (talk) 18:03, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

-- Fullstop (talk) 17:26, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Ah, silly me, I should learn how to read. :) And thanks for the links, it's getting me interrested again. But I have installed Adblock Plus and that appears to do the trick. Zunaid, thanks for that. I surfed around the imdb site for a bit, noticed an empty space at the top of one page, looked at the source, and indeed, there's the doubleclick top_ad section. Which doesn't bother me anymore now. Thanks a lot, guys!

Now, all that is left I could wish for (well, concerning this anyway :) ) is for me to get my screen space back again. The ad still takes up space. Imdb has recently forced itself into a frame straight jacket that leaves half of my (wide) screen unused (anything I can do about that?). As a result, vertical space has become essential. For example, when I look at a 'user ratings' page I sometimes have to scroll down. If the ad space weren't there that would not be necessary. Btw, in Firefox I have already put the menus, location bar and buttons on one bar. Now if I could only integrate the status bar at the bottom into the title bar .... :) DirkvdM (talk) 10:34, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Update: it turns out I had to do a little more, namely put it on the blacklist (through 'open blockable items'), where I found the frame in which the ad resides. Removing that (not just the image, but the frame) gave me back my screen space. Second problem solved too. Brilliant! DirkvdM (talk) 09:03, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Web-hosting with Perl and PHP, program in C++

If I have a web-hosting plan with Perl and PHP (like many out there) and a program written in C++ that generates html (like doxygen), could I run this C++ program so that users can generate docs dynamically? Mr.K. (talk) 10:02, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

With Doxygen it is simpler to generate HTML and upload it to the server where it would be served statically. If a web-hosting plan allows running custom CGI scripts, and gives access to a C++ compiler, it may be possible to run a C++ program designed for CGI. MTM (talk) 19:04, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Could you do it? Depends on the CGI settings of the server. Should you do it? Depends on the situation, but in most cases I'd say, "stick with Perl or PHP, they're a lot more straightforward for this sort of thing." If you're using it to generate something that doesn't change that often, definitely don't have it render everything from scratch each time, that's a huge waste of server resources. (Even a site as dynamic as Wikipedia uses a huge amount of caching.) Generate the page in a database and then just make a database call. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:58, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Many web hosting services simply don't allow you to run CGI programs (that's anything that compiles down to machine-code basically) because of the risk of you doing something horrible to their server. That's not universally true (my web hoster allows it) - but you shouldn't be surprised if they say "No". If you are allowed to do that - then it's a matter of sticking the binary in the appropriate CGI directory (where Apache looks for it) and making sure that it provides a web interface. Basically, your C++ code has to read the data the user entered either on the standard input or through the commmand-line parameters (depending on the method you selected in the HTML form through which your user launched the program) - and anything that comes out of the standard output ends up being sent to your end-user as if it were an HTML document - but you have to be very careful to provide EXACTLY the right header stuff. SteveBaker (talk) 18:06, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

PDF built-in font set

I'm creating some PDF reports through code. I'm using the built-in fonts (Times, Helvetica, and Symbol). I need to print a lowercase alpha and beta. I can't find those characters in any of the built--on font sets. They also don't appear to support high ASCII, just 0-255. Can someone point me to some information on the built-in PDF fonts? -- kainaw™ 12:56, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind. I just made jpegs of the characters and pasted them in. -- kainaw™ 14:38, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't they be in the Symbol font without any difficulty? --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:45, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I printed every character in the Symbol font. It didn't have any symbols that I'd ever use. -- kainaw™ 18:38, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I discovered that since I'm using PDFlib-lite, it is extremely lacking in symbol support and has no unicode support. -- kainaw™ 23:55, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Networking for Dummies?

I've tried to resist this, but I think the time is near when I have to have a second Internet-connected computer in my house. (Technology-wise, I've only been on DSL for a couple of years, and this upgrade will certainly take me beyond my comfort level.)

So, can the experienced home-network-builders gently point me toward "Routers for Dummies" or some such very basic reference? Questions I have start with: I have one ActionTec DSL modem; do I still use it, or does it get replaced? What's the minimum amount of hardware I have to buy, and install, and maintain? Same for software. I'm on WinXP, and don't plan to upgrade that yet. Also keep in mind that I was perfectly happy for many years writing letters on a typewriter; that should give you a good measure of my tech savvyness! --DaHorsesMouth (talk) 21:44, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

You just need a router. The modem will plug into the router, and the router will split the connection so multiple machines can use it. The only other hardware you'll need is ethernet wiring if you are going to make it a wired connection. (None of if you are doing wireless, unless your computers don't have wireless cards.) You don't need any software other than the software that comes with the router.

Basically what will happen is that you will plug the modem into the router, and plug a computer into the router. The router will come with very basic instructions as to how to find the router setup screen from the computer. Then depending on your internet service provider, you may or may not have to input settings so that your router can use the internet. In some cases the router can figure it out automatically, but sometimes you have to put in account information. Once you have that in there your router should be ready to go. If it is a wireless router there are issues relating to setting up the wireless signal (whether to use encryption or not), but other than that it's basically the same thing.

Does that make sense? It's not too hard. The most difficult part is sometimes the router will have inexplicable problems connecting through your existing internet connection, due to settings your DSL people won't have necessarily told you about, and you might have to get them on the phone. But that's really it, usually.--98.217.8.46 (talk) 22:41, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

If all you need is WIRED ethernet (ie no laptops - no wireless) - then go to anywhere that sells computer stuff (WalMart for example) and buy a router. Don't pay more than $25....if you do then you're probably getting more than you need. You'll need two more Ethernet cables - and you're done for probably under $30. The router has one cable that goes to the modem (where your computer is plugged in now - and probably between four and six outlets for you to plug your computers into. It's that easy. No software...nothing. Think of these things as being like a dumb multiway power outlet - but with the Internet instead of 110volts!

If you think you might want to provide a wireless access point (probably because you have a laptop with WiFi) - then you need more expensive router. I'd buy a LinkSys box - I believe they are around $100 - but other brands may be OK too (I have four of these beasts right now - and they all work GREAT). These function just like your regular router (as described above) - but also put out Wireless internet signals for maybe a hundred yards around the box itself. If you are in anyway concerned about other people 'stealing' your bandwidth ("Yes Steve, I'm VERY concerned" is the only correct answer here!) then you'll need to turn on wireless encryption. This is actually very easy - and still doesn't need any software. Just connect up your PC to the wireless router by plugging it into the back - open up your web browser - and somewhere in the manual it'll tell you the URL of the wireless router itself. Type that into Firefox (or whatever you use) and you'll arrive at a little web site that's served from inside the router itself (that's *SO* cool!) - and from there you can turn on the security stuff really easily. The Linksys manual explains this better than I can. If you want to save money - you could probably pick one up on eBay for less than new - if it doesn't come with a manual - don't worry - you can download it from the Linksys web site.

SteveBaker (talk) 17:53, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Caution: The "router" Steve is talking about is not the "router" you have for DSL (aka your DSL "modem"). A router is a thing that routes data from one network to another. What you have for DSL is such a router, in the case of DSL, routing between WAN and LAN. What Steve refers to in the second paragraph is another kind of router that routes between wireless-LAN and wired-LAN. What Steve is referring to in the first paragraph is actually a "switch" (it "switches" the data packets back and forth), not a router.

There are devices that have multiple functions in one unit. For example, a single unit could be both a DSL router and a wireless-LAN router in one. What you need to buy depends on what you already have, and how you intend to connect the second PC to the net. If you had nothing at all, and you were connecting via a network cable, you would need a DLS router and a switch. If you had nothing at all, and you were connecting via wireless, you would need a DLS router and a WLAN router.

So, depending on how you want to connect the second PC, and what functions your DSL router already has, you may either need to buy a new DSL router, or add missing features with other thingies, or buy nothing. A new DSL router with integrated WLAN and switch costs $50+. Just a WLAN access point costs about $30, and a switch about $10. You didn't say which ActionTec model you have, so we can't tell you what you need. -- Fullstop (talk) 01:01, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Blackberry Storm/YouTube

I recently purchased a Verizon Blackberry Storm. Along with it I have a $30 basic data plan (e-mail and web). The upgrade to that plan is the unlimited data plan for $45 a month. The sales rep did not recommend this plan for me. However, I cannot find how much data I am eligible for. Truth be told, I dunno even know what they mean by data. During train rides to work, I would like to watch YouTube video. But if I access m.youtube.com too much will I go over my data plan??? Is there any way to calculate how much data I have use? Thank you in advance --209.183.190.77 (talk) 21:52, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I believe YouTube uses flash video which can have pretty large file sizes (several MB) - though maybe the .3GP format files used by the mobile version of YouTube are smaller (I'm not sure how much smaller for the typical files you might watch). All the same, I suggest you get back to Verizon to clarify how much data is included in your plan, and upgrade to the $45 plan if downloading a few MB every day will cost more than $15 a month in extra data charges. Astronaut (talk) 12:19, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to say but the sales rep was probably not looking after your best interests. I second Astronaut. You should go back and clarify with VZW what the exact terms of your contract are. <speculation> It is most likely well below 5 GB per month. </speculation> Kushal (talk) 15:31, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

X11 in minimal Debian installation

I'm experimenting with a really minimal Debian installation. I installed from a net-installation CD, and unchecked absolutely everything. Then installed openssh client and server, sudo and xorg. When running startx, I got the default background, and an xterm window in the upper left corner, no border, no possibility to move windows around. So far, everything as expected. Next, I installed metacity, and voila, the xterm window gets a border, and I can move it around, and spawn other xterm windows. However, when I now exit and re-run startx, I only get the background and the mouse pointer, no possibility to start a program (without switching virtual screens). So obviously, the behaviour of startx has changed, it now starts metacity instead of xterm. So my question is: what configuration file has been modified? I've looked unsuccessfully in various /etc subdirectories. The behaviour is the same whether I run as root or normal user.

I need two virtual displays, so what I would like to do is something like this:

startx -- :0
export DISPLAY=:0
xsetroot -solid "one_color"
xterm
startx -- :1
export DISPLAY=:1
xsetroot -solid "another_color"
xterm -e ssh -l myname 192.168.31.16

(Correction after posting: corrected "setxroot" to "xsetroot") NorwegianBlue ^talk 22:11, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Except that I would like the X session to terminate when I exit the last active application. The code above works (when I switch between a console screen and the X11 virtual screens and type ctrl-Z and bg as needed), but is rather awkward, and I suspect there is a "right" place to put such code. And I would very much like each X session to terminate when its last active application terminates. I definitely do not want to install a desktop environment like gnome. Any suggestions? --NorwegianBlue ^talk 22:31, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

You should look into using a ~/.xinitrc with whatever applications running that you'll like. -- JSBillings 02:56, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I read the man page of xinit after posting this. There were no .xinitrc files in the /root or /home/myname directories, but I could of course create them. I also tried to locate the system-wide xinitrc file, but didn't find it. I was looking in /etc and /usr/lib/X11. Googling now took me to this page (Slackware's implementation), which says that the global xinitrc is under /var. Since the behaviour changed after installing metacity, there's got to be a global xinitrc file somewhere, so I'll have a look there (or else search the whole filesystem). The page I linked to also says that exec is the way to go to make the X-session terminate when the xterm exits. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 09:19, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Solved

Just for the record, here's what I ended up with. I called xinit directly instead of startx, to bypass the xauth security mechanism, which I don't need (I'm on a small home network behind a firewall), and which makes remote X a lot more difficult. Wrote these scripts, the last one is run as root:

start1:

xinit /usr/bin/sudo -u myname xterm -- :0 &
export DISPLAY=:0
xsetroot -solid "#ee9966"
metacity &

start2:

xinit /usr/bin/sudo xterm -e ssh -l myname servername -- :1 &
export DISPLAY=:1
xsetroot -solid "#66aaff"
metacity &
xhost +

Yes, I'll change that xhost + to an xhost +(ip-address).

gui:

/home/myname/bin/start1 &
sleep 1
/home/myname/bin/start2 &

Switching between the two virtual screens by ctrl-alt-F7 and ctrl-alt-F8 works like a charm, and remote X works beautifully, the only manual step is to set the DISPLAY variable:

myname@servername:~$export DISPLAY=localmachinename:1

--NorwegianBlue ^talk 12:39, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Powering down HDDs

Hi, if you power down a spinning (but idle) hard drive, does it have any effect on the lifespan of the drive? My guess is no, but I've seen people claim otherwise. Some insights will be very welcome. :) --Kjoonlee 22:33, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm not talking about drives that are on 24/7, but external USB drives. --Kjoonlee 22:34, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Should matter little as long as the Disk read-and-write head is parked. Kushal (talk) 15:28, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

There are theories that say that the stress on the bearings when spinning the drive up to speed - or slowing it down to a stop - cause it to wear out more rapidly than simply leaving it spinning all the time. However, almost all hard drives spin down when idle nowadays - and I haven't seen any abrupt worsening of drive life. If you care about the life of your hard drive - This amazing Google survey of 100,000(!) of their hard drives is by far the most careful survey done to date. They found that the failure rate doesn't depend on the amount of use a drive gets - except in very young (<3 month) and very old (>4 years) drives. SteveBaker (talk) 17:36, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

One thing that survey doesn't cover is the impact of spinning a drive up and down: as it says in section 2.2 of the report, all the drives studied were always on and spinning. --Carnildo (talk) 22:08, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft Word

Hello guys, I am having a little problem handling my microsoft word. I added a custom watermark and chose it to be a picture, with wash out. Now whenever I type text on the page, my text replaces the watermark line by line. What I mean is, as I type, the watermark keeps getting overwritten and invisible, but isnt a watermark supposed to be there completely? Like now i write half a page and it looks as if half my page is filled with letters and words and the rest half with the watermark. What do I do? Please advise. I have microsoft office 2007. Thanks a lot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.117.188.79 (talk) 23:02, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure that isn't just how it's displaying it to you? Try saving it as a PDF and see if the watermark comes through. My bet is that it is just erasing the watermark as it redraws the screen with the text on it, but when you print it, it won't look like that. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:44, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree. I also suggest printing a page to see what that looks like. StuRat (talk) 01:00, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

November 26

Combining multiple files into a single executable

Hey, I'm looking for a (preferably free) program that is able to combine multiple files such as DLLs, EXEs, files in subdirectories, etc. into one EXE. I'm not looking as to run them all at once, but rather still have functionality for a certain program. For example, if I had a game file whose location had 6 subdirectories (containing data files), several DLLs, other EXEs, and game.exe, the program would be able to combine all those files into a game_full.exe, where the functionality would be the same if I'd just run game.exe. Does anyone know of any program that would be able to accomplish this? Again, free preferably. Many thanks to helpful answers. Vic93 (t/c) 01:27, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Winzip and some other file compression programs let you make an "executable archive" which compresses a large number of files into one handy executable program. However, you must then run that executable archive to unpack the files at the destination before you can use the files again. However, I suspect that what you really want to do is something like how Busybox makes some flavours of Linux work. Astronaut (talk) 11:44, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

ILMerge does this on the .NET Framework. Chemical Weathering (talk) 12:48, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

There is no that you could do it without some sort of background virtual drives. If you want programs to be installed to 1 file, the best way is to use a program like truecrypt, create a container file and amount it as a drive, install to that drive, so on your file system you will have one file, and on the mounted drive you will have the game.--Dacium (talk) 04:17, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Sandboxie probably does what you want; it saves everything in one container, including your saved games and settings. -- Fullstop (talk) 08:47, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Yahoo

How do I turn off the marketing e-mails from Yahoo? I've asked this question several times on Yahoo Answers. I've done what the answerers said - go to the e-mail page, click "My Account", and choose "marketing options" - but there is no such option on my My Account page. So now what can I do? JCI (talk) 04:12, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

footnotes in Word: page breaks

I'm constantly having issues with footnotes in Word: Page breaks occur in the middle of footnotes, sometimes several in one footnote (spreading the footnotes over three pages!). And sometimes, for no apparent reason, footnotes simply aren't printed on the same page as the text they refer to, but at least one page later. That's not just the case for footnotes near the end of the page--sometimes, a long paragraph follows the passage with the footnote, but the footnote is still moved to the next page.

I'm using simply text, no tables, no graphics, nothing else that seems to prevent footnotes from just appearing on the page that they refer to. I'm using a Word version from 2000 (strangely, I can't remember having had any issues like that until relatively recently). Switching to a new Word version is not an option, nor is switching to OpenOffice (sorry, not at the moment).

Any recommendations would be welcome--if I cannot make Word automatically do it right, what's a way to at least manually correct this mess (except not using footnotes, which isn't an option either)? Thanks a million (!), Thanks for answering (talk) 04:13, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I've often had such situations. Word seems to balance...something...to keep the footnote region from getting too large. I've never seen a footnote get pushed onto a different page than its antecedent unless putting it on the same page would not fit (though sometimes it took me a while to recognize those situations!). Only solution comes to mind and only aimed at one of your issues: adjust the Footnote Text style paragraph-formatting to "keep lines together". DMacks (talk) 06:05, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

google maps

How accurate is google maps, in terms of measuring the distance in certain segments (e.g. point A to point B to point C.) when looking up directions? --AtTheAbyss (talk) 04:57, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

In my experience, not very accurate at all, though I'm sure it varies. --Sean 14:04, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Do not count on Google Maps giving an error of less than ±200 meters. Your mileage may vary. Kushal (talk) 15:26, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Their street addresses are occasionally extremely off. If you have a short street, that's obviously not a concern, but when it's a long street, I've had some "surprising" locations. Their distance should be calculated based on these false locations, so they can be very off. I don't know if there distances between intersections etc. have the same problem. --Thanks for answering (talk) 18:00, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

One further complication is that Google apparently places addresses based on postal codes (ZIP codes, in the US, I guess). That's normally not an issue, but renders my address very inaccurately as I don't get home delivery of the mail; the mailbox is actually two blocks from my house and that's where Google thinks I live. The people across the street from me have their mailbox in front of their house, so Google would presumably show our residences as being perhaps 200m apart from one another. Matt Deres (talk) 19:03, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

If you have a Google account, you could correct this error. Click me for details! Kushal (talk) 21:01, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I find yellowpages.com more concrete in giving directions, IMO. --Crackthewhip775 (talk) 21:55, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I have found that when getting directions it can give a distance of say 6.8km, then when using the pen to write your own path, the same path gives a distance of 7.8km, then when using google earth instead of maps and going from the exact same places I get a distance of 8.6km.Dacium (talk) 04:14, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Address in google maps, and basically all addressing mapping applications, use geocoding methods based on interpolating addresses between known numbers at street corners. At least this is the case in the United States, where address numbers for intersections are easily available, but actual parcel data with corresponding address numbers is much harder to come by (and involves more data and processing effort; plus there are privacy issues regarding parcel data, or should be at least). Geocoding is "good enough" most of the time, but there are some cases where it fails miserably. Also, while the streets are fairly accurate, spatially, for most of the US, they can be way off and highly simplified in other parts of the world. It depends, I expect, on what data is available. And, even in the US there are numerous minor mistakes in the street data that can radical change driving directions. As an example, all computerized street datasets I've seen, including google maps, show a very short street segment near my house that connects two other streets. There is no such segment, but if there were it would be an excellent way to get to my house. I've informed the local governments who made the data, and google as well, who acquired the data from them, to no avail. I suspect the error originated with the US Census Bureau, which creates and freely released geospatial street data and address geocodes for the US. The fact that the segment is exactly on a county line probably makes it trickier for local governments to fix it. Anyway, these kind of minor errors are quite common. Combined with address geocoding.. well... results may vary. (Looking at the geocoding WP page now I see its intro is misleading and perhaps plain wrong. The "Address interpolation" section describes what I'm talking about. Pfly (talk) 07:02, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

The reason I used google maps was because it has walking directions, and I'm trying to map out distance for my run. It says the distance from point A to point B is 1.1 miles, but now I'm not so sure...--AtTheAbyss (talk) 07:05, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

[squeeze] There are also walking distances on maps.ask.com - they've actually had them before Google. Just in case you don't want to use Google anymore for everything... --Thanks for answering (talk) 22:56, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I just looked it up on yellowpages (thanks for the idea), and it stated the distance as 1.9 miles, so I guess it's close enough. Thanks all. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 07:11, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Image size

Is there any image format that takes up more size for a given image dimension than bmp (assuming a single (flat), non-vector image)? Thanks :) 203.122.33.194 (talk) 13:51, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Uncompressed TIFF Chemical Weathering (talk) 14:00, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. However I went to that article and it seems TIFF incorporates layers and vector images. Can you please shed some light on this? 124.30.235.62 (talk) 14:04, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

TIFF can incorporate those but it doesn't have to. It is a versatile format, though it is usually used for flat, bitmap images. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:16, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

OK, so if I understand correctly, TIFF uses somewhat higher number of bytes even when storing an image as a flat bitmap than the BMP format, and that's because it has extra information attached (like whether layers/vectors/compression has been used or not)? 125.21.165.158 (talk) 14:56, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Not always so… Uncompressed TIFF may be larger because it may contain extra records: physical resolution, author's name & used software, etc. On the other hand, BMP requires each pixel row to be multiple of 4 bytes, padded if necessary – and that means up to 3 extra bytes per row. For example, 999×1000 24bit BMP image has 3000 bytes wasted for padding. Skarebo (talk) 16:12, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Strictly, TIFF is a 'tag file' and it can contain any set of tags with associated data whatever. Since you're allowed to make up your own tags (and many software packages do exactly that) - the file could be arbitarily long...it could even contain a BMP image. So for sure, BMP isn't the most inefficient image format. Probably the largest would be one of the high-dynamic-range (HDR) image formats - where the image could have more than 8 bits per color component. But then there are also images (often stored as TIFF varients) that are used for satellite imagery that may contain infra-red and ultra-violet "image" data and other color samples as well as (or instead of) the usual R,G and B. Also - it's untrue to say that compressed images such as PNG ALWAYS take up less space than uncompressed images. It is provable mathematically that no lossless compression algorithm can squeeze data out of every possible image - so it's theoretically possible in some extreme cases for (eg) a compressed PNG to come out larger than the BMP. SteveBaker (talk) 17:20, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

That's not only theoretical. Just compress pure random noise. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.187.106.12 (talk) 02:05, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Try the ASCII variants (P1–P3) of the PNM format. Doesn't get much more bloated than that. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:21, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Buying advice for macbook hard disk drive

Hello, I was looking into the possibility of upgrading the hard disk on my macbook. Here is some information from System Profiler. According to toshiba, this hard disk seems to have "ATA7/Serial ATA 1.0a/Serial ATA II 1.2"as its interface.

What would be the best value for money replacement drive? Would something like this NewEgg drive be good? I welcome any suggestion and criticism.

You guys are awesome. You helped me with the HP Compaq laptop among many other stuff. Thank you very much in advance. Kushal (talk) 15:25, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Hamming distance

How many errors in a single code pattern could be corrected when using an error correcting code in which each code pattern is a Hamming distance of at least seven from any other code pattern? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.29.211.122 (talk) 16:25, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Please do your own homework.

Welcome to the Wikipedia Reference Desk. Your question appears to be a homework question. I apologize if this is a misinterpretation, but it is our aim here not to do people's homework for them, but to merely aid them in doing it themselves. Letting someone else do your homework does not help you learn nearly as much as doing it yourself. Please attempt to solve the problem or answer the question yourself first. If you need help with a specific part of your homework, feel free to tell us where you are stuck and ask for help. If you need help grasping the concept of a problem, by all means let us know.

(You might try reading Hamming distance and Error detection and correction - the answer you seek is definitely in there - but you're going to have to learn something to find out!) SteveBaker (talk) 17:10, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

gmail doesn't work with google chrome??

This is the weirdest thing in the world! I uninstalled google chrome, reinstalled it. this is a fresh computer with windows xp and the latest service pack. gmail used to work until they introduced themes, now it works fine in every browser except Google Chrome! am I the only one with this difficulty? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.217.99.209 (talk) 17:00, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Works fine here (Chrome 0.4.154.25 on Vista, Gmail with the 'Planets' theme). What happens when you try to access Gmail? Does the basic HTML version work? — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 01:12, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Video Cards

Should a PCI video card work (inserted in a PCI slot of course) on a motherboard that has a dedicated PCI Express slot? I have a mother board I'd like to use but no PCI Express cards. I have several cards that look almost like PCI Express cards but don't quite fit. So I'm left with a PCI card, but it's not producing any video signal....69.180.160.77 (talk) 18:02, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure if the PCI card will work if you have PCI-E slot, but I think the other cards that don't quite fit are probably AGP. Useight (talk)

It should certianly work. However, your bios might be set allow it. If its not working try to reset your bios by removing the battery or read your motherboard manual for more info. Usually the motherboard should know that it can't find a video card on the express slot and try a PCI slot. --Dacium (talk) 04:11, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Of course, if you are not getting video, then it might be hard to change BIOS settings. Also, maybe you can just try to wait a while and see if anything comes up after the OS loads, because most OSs can probably use PCI video cards. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 05:55, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Borrow a PCIe graphics card, enter the BIOS of the computer, and finding the option "Init display first" change it to PCI. It helped me on one occasion. MaxVT (talk) 22:53, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Soft reboot

How do you soft-reboot on Windows 98 if your Ctrl key isn't working? And is there any explanation for why both my Ctrl keys aren't working while all the other keys are fine? --120.138.100.154 (talk) 18:52, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

• If you press (but not hold) your power button, often this will force a soft boot. Seems less often this works on laptops, for what that's worth. Holding the power button will force a hard reboot. Other than that, if you download psshutdown you can use that to do a soft boot. --Kickstart70TC 01:47, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't have a way to test it, but you might open a command window and try "shutdown.exe /?" to see it exists and what options are available. If it doesn't exist, this site lists several commands that might help, such as "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,SHExitWindowsEx 2". I have no ideas regarding the Ctrl key problem. -- Tcncv (talk) 02:01, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure it is not a hardware problem? 121.72.170.238 (talk) 12:04, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Am not sure, but this problem just developed overnight and my keyboard hasn't fallen down or anything for it to be damaged. And like I said, it's only these two keys specifically that have stopped working, while the rest of the keys work just fine. Anyway, is there any alternative key combination for Ctrl-Alt-Del? I need something for closing individual programs that have stopped responding without having to do a complete reboot? --120.138.100.99 (talk) 09:04, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

November 27

RCA DRC628 dvd player

I have a RCA DRC628 dvd player...it has a USB port on the back. I found this page which seems to say that music and photos can be played from the port, but I was wondering if there was a way to get videos to play from my USB thumb drive as well? If so, how can I tell which video formats will play? I've tried a few (WMV, AVI, MOV) but it doesn't find them at all. Thanks in advance, Kickstart70TC 01:44, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

If it can play video at all it would probably only play mpeg files, probably only mpeg that is encoded same as a dvd.--Dacium (talk) 04:07, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I owned an RCA DVD recorder a few years back. It had an USB port that was used to playback JPEG images in slideshows. I would imagine the USB port on your does the same. --69.149.213.144 (talk) 05:37, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

big number calculator software

I'm looking for a downloadable/online calculator that has little/no truncation and has adequate accuracy. This is will help in my ongoing quest to calculate e to a large number of digits. Don't say "Google search it, noob!" and point at link1 or link2, because I've already googled it and found those (which don't work for my purposes). flaminglawyer^cneverforget 08:58, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Did you check out the links in the External Links section of the Wikipedia article on e? One of them has e computed to at least 2 million digits. Another (supposedly) has example code for computing e to arbitrary precision. If, despite these, you're still looking for something that would allow you to do large integer arithmetic, you can try Python. I don't know if it's efficient enough for your purpose, but large integer arithmetic is a built-in feature of the language. --173.49.12.59 (talk) 10:39, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Every programming language has support for arbitrary length numbers. Usually, the numbers are represented as strings - so you are actually limited to how long the language allows a string to be. -- kainaw™ 18:56, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

See the answer here on the mathematics reference desk. -- Tcncv (talk) 06:11, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Reinstalling Ubuntu and extras in a new computer

How can I best clone my Ubuntu installation into another computer? Is there a command that would list all my presently installed programs? I would have no problem installing a new version of Ubuntu, but what about cloning the settings?Mr.K. (talk) 11:19, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I asked a similar question on linuxquestions.org a while ago, the answers there might be useful. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 14:45, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that is exactly what I have searching for. --80.58.205.37 (talk) 17:43, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

would the mac mini support some weight?

Could I put my LCD monitor (a very old and small one, like 15 inches) on a Mac Mini without problems? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.217.99.209 (talk) 13:54, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Not recommended according to Apple -

Don't put anything on top of your Mac mini or stack Mac minis on top of each other either. If your Mac mini is configured with AirPort or Bluetooth, you could hamper the signal strength since the antennas are located in the top of the computer.[1]

. Buy a stand instead. Exxolon (talk) 22:38, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but only if your goal is to produce Apple sauce. :-) StuRat (talk) 06:49, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Television and xbox 360 region encoding

Are televisions regionally encoded?

If so, then I would assume that televisions in South Korea would have PAL encoding. In that case, is it true that my xbox 360 will not work with such a television? If all of this is not a false belief, then is it possible to buy a converter?

Thank you! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.190.163.91 (talk) 14:45, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

NTSC/PAL are analog television transmission formats, not "region encoding". All modern TVs are multi-system and handle both NTSC and PAL. The distinction is historic and originally had to do with 50Hz/6Hz AC current, with NTSC designed for 60Hz current, and PAL designed for 50Hz current. South Korea is 60Hz so their analog television transmissions are NTSC (in SK's case, "NTSC M"). In addition to NTSC-PAL converters (ca 30$), there are also CDs for consoles that allow you to switch the TV format. Search for "xbox ntsc or pal". -- Fullstop (talk) 17:54, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Algorithm

Hello there, My name is Arslan Yaqub.I m the student of BSIT in Sargodha University Sargodha (Punjab)Pakistan. My question is "What is the Algorithm?"''''Bold text' Please send me or show here exact defination with examples. thanks a lot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Arslan 26r uos (talk • contribs) 15:00, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

See algorithm. Algebraist 15:02, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

that addresses what algorithms are, but the user's question was what is the algorithm. I humbly submit that the algorithm is RSA. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.217.99.209 (talk) 16:07, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I would need to see what the teacher put directly above the question to answer the question. Though I've been trying very hard for many years to learn how to use ESP to view all Pakistani homework assignments, I'm not that good (yet). -- kainaw™ 18:54, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

November 28

SQL query from win32 command line

Does anyone know of a free self contained program that can run on winxp, which can be controlled from the command line, which allows of sending of basic queries to an SQL server and outputs the results of the query?--Dacium (talk) 02:16, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

MySQL and PostgreSQL both have a command-line client. --Sean 12:37, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft SQL Server Express includes sqlcmd, a command-line tool. You type sqlcmd inside cmd.exe and a shell is spawned.--Rjnt (talk) 13:04, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

AND, OR Gates

How can I represent AND, and OR gates as decimal equations, can include if loops. Like these

NOT=MAX-1-Input1
XOR=(Input1+Input2)%MAX
Max equals a power of 2 like 2^8 for a byte

--Melab^±1 02:39, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

If you can get each bit first it makes it easy:

bit8input1 = input1%(MAX/2)
bit7input1 = (intput1 - (bit8input1 * (MAX/2)) % (MAX/4)
bit6input1 = (input1 - (bit8input1 * (MAX/2) - (bit7input1 * (MAX/4)) % (MAX/8)
and so on and so on (use loops and more temp values to make this easy)

When you have bit for each input then its easy to do AND:
bit8Anded = (bit8input1 + bit8input2)/2

OR would be:
bit8Ored = bit8input1 * bit8input2

Then reconstruct again:
AndOutput = (bit8Anded * (MAX/2)) + (bit7Anded * (MAX/4) + ... etc. etc.

--Dacium (talk) 03:03, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Without breaking it into bits. That's what I'm trying to overcome. If you can' t get an AND gate but you get it for a NAND gate tht's fine too.

$XOR=($A+$Z)%$MAX
XOR=(5+12)%16=1
$NOT=$MAX-1-$A
NOT=16-1-7=8
LIKE That

--Melab^±1 04:12, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

What are you doing exactaly? Your XOR seems to be wrong, eg. 15 + 51 = 66, but XOR it should be 60.--Dacium (talk) 04:26, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

This:

function XOR (A, B, MAX){
if (A==B){
XOR=0
}
if (A!=B){
XOR=(A+B)%MAX
}
return XOR

Or something like that. --Melab^±1 19:36, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Interactive Website

I am competent in Visual Basic, Delphi, C and C++ but have only basic internet/website skills. I want to run a visual basic 6.0 program with special hardware, which will try to predict in advance which of two form buttons are about to be pressed by another person across the Atlantic, and show both him and myself the score and percentage (which my stand-alone program already does.) I am on a slow dial-up connection. What would be the easiest way to do this, for example using e-mail and two separate vb6 programs each end to communicate, or some sort of web client- server? And what language, ie vbscript ect, would be best? I would prefer to use vb6 from my end as I do not wish to spend time rewriting my program. Keep it simple. p.s. Also Tesconet's email seems to mess up SendEmail programs-how do you set outlook express as the default? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Trevor Loughlin (talk • contribs) 03:00, 28 November 2008 (UTC)Trevor Loughlin (talk) 03:03, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

If it were me I'd write a small script in another language (like PHP) and host it on a server, and have my VB6 programs communicate with that via HTTP GET requests. It would be a lot easier than futzing around with e-mail (which is really added about three extra layers to it) and it'll let you do almost everything in VB6 (the script just has to take commands, record states, and give responses when queried). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 06:50, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

If you wanted to build a web interface, you'd actually use ASP (not ASP.NET). It's pretty easy to use -- a lot easier than learning an entirely new language like PHP. It uses VBScript code embedded in HTML to communicate with the server (i.e., your computer?). You can also use C++ via ASP.NET. In that case, you'd have a standalone file containing the C++ code, referenced from the HTML page. You can also send e-mail using Visual Basic, and you can create an app to connect to your friend's computer using C++ or Visual Basic. All of the methods above would probably be hard to code, though.--Rjnt (talk) 08:31, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree that ASP is potentially easier for someone with VBscript knowledge to learn but it's not all that smooth a ride, and it requires having a server that can host ASP. Personally I think learning just enough PHP for the job would not be that hard—look into how PHP handles form variables and then learn how to make VB send form variables. If you know C and C++ you should find PHP a relatively simple thing, easier than trying to put a skin on e-mail (which requires all sorts of mucking around) or establishing direct connections with a dial-up. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 01:41, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

TV Question

I'm sitting here looking at TVs and I'm a little confused. I've been looking at this Samsung LCD HDTV monitor model T200HD (http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/features.do?group=computersperipherals&type=monitors&subtype=lcd&model_cd=LS20TDNSUV/ZA Hope that link works) and I don't know if I can watch over the air TV with it unless I have some sort of other antenna or not. Any help would be really appreciated.

RedStateV (talk) 04:41, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Depending on where you live, you might be able to get channels with just rabbit ears. However, there was no mention of any antenna included, so I'd assume you need to supply that yourself. The same rabbit ears from an old TV should work with the new (with the possible need for a TV balun). There were a few other things which concerned me:

1) The TV claims to have a digital tuner, but not an analog tuner. If that's really the case, that means you won't be able to get analog stations.

2) It claims to support 1080p resolution, which is 1920×1080, but then lists the resolution as only 1680×1050. Something's not right there.

Also, what they listed as "specs" was pathetic. I'd look for the same model at a better site to get better info on it. StuRat (talk) 06:28, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

This site seems to give better specs: [2]. As near as I can tell, it has a 1080p digital tuner, but then downconverts the 1920×1080 frames to 1680×1050. StuRat (talk) 06:38, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Website Development

Dear Sir, I want know about Website Development .. If i want to be a Web developer what should i study and how should i do?? Actually i know about computer basic concepts and some basic programming languages like C++ and C#. But i need to know what to study for website precisely. Please answer to me . Yours truly, Thaw Thaw —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.81.72.200 (talk) 04:59, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

What precisely are you wanting to develop? Language-wise you might want any of: XHTML, HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Java, ASP, ASP.NET, SQL, ActionScript, and... others. Plus, for just about anything you'll want at least basic relational database knowledge. 24.76.161.28 (talk) 06:25, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

An abbreviated start is HTML for markup, CSS to make things pretty, Javascript for dynamic pages, PHP for server-side scripting, SQL for database queries. These days I would wager most people who call themselves "web developers" know those at a bare minimum. It sounds like a lot but HTML is super simple, CSS is just a matter of learning a few basic things, and PHP and Javascript are very simple scripting languages, so it's not that bad. SQL is just for database queries and for most of them it is nothing much at all to worry about. Once you know a handful of these sorts of things, you can start to do very rich applications. It's not any one technology that makes it work, it's how they work in concert. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 06:58, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Great suggestions. I would also take a look at http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp if I were you. You're going to have to start small at first. Make a dynamic web page, then make a page with a login, etc. and build it up as you go along. --Rajah (talk) 20:01, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Is Yahoo down?

I haven't been able to access any of their sites in a day or two, but I also can't find anything online about it being down, so I'm worried it's my computer. Thanks, Bleeding Blue 11:30, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

It's you: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ --Sean 12:39, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, any idea what would cause this or how to fix it? All other sites are fine and my laptop is having the same problem (though they both use the same router). Bleeding Blue 13:01, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Try pinging it. See if it is able to find the site's IP (looks like it should be 68.180.206.184 or 206.190.60.37), and if you're able to communicate with the site. How exactly you go about that depends on the OS, but it should be ping yahoo.com from a terminal or 'command prompt' window. If you get the wrong IP address, you might have an odd entry in your hosts file or in your DNS cache; if you get the right IP but can't ping it, then someone funky is happening, somewhere. In the latter case, try tracert yahoo.com or traceroute yahoo.com, see where the communication stops. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 14:53, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

grep a file with lines from another file

I have two text files. I would like to grep the first file by looking for the string that is on the first line of the second file. And then grep the first file by looking for the string on the 2nd line of the second file, etc. e.g. target file, target.txt, is:

A bunch of lines
Of everything
etc. etc.
blah blah

the 2nd file is:

the
of
something
green
apple
etc.

I'd like to $grep the target.txt, $grep of target.txt, etc. Does anyone know how to do that easily from the command line? Like a one liner or sh script? (I'm using bash on linux.) Thanks, --Rajah (talk) 18:02, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

I have three ideas for you, a for loop, brace expansion, pipe the second file to read in a loop, convert 2nd file to grep commands and execute it

for i in `cat file2`; do grep $i 1stfile; done

for i in `<file2`; do grep $i 1stfile; done

sed -e "s/^/grep /" -e "s/$/ file1/" file2|bash

while read i;do grep $i file1;done <file2

Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:59, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Awesome, that worked perfectly. Thanks so much! --Rajah (talk) 00:15, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Graeme, just for my own edification, wouldn't the third option (sed) need some contortions for the case where file1 contained text of the form "-x" and "$x" (and ">>", etc. etc.)? Or would:

sed -e "s/^/grep '/" -e "s/$/' file1/" file2|bash

do the job easily enough? Thanks! Franamax (talk) 00:37, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Most of my suggestions will have similar problems things that mean special things to the shell. with Your idea about including the single quote is a good one, but whatever we do there is probably an extra complication, such as what if the search text had a single quote in it? And by the way I could not get the brace expansion to work, command execution and brace expansion occurred in the wrong order. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:24, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, now that I look at it, my way might just pass an invariant '/" -e "s/$/ to the shell. Not to mention the possibility of passing backquote-arr-emm-minus-arr-dot-dot-slash-star-backquote, which could produce "unexpected" results. Franamax (talk) 01:36, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Scanning in UK

I would like to buy a scanner in UK, to scan numerous A4 printed pages, my main requirement being speed. Any recommendations please? Kittybrewster ☎ 19:29, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

It sounds like you need one with a stacking sheet feeder. You can get networked scanners with ethernet ports, or you can buy a box that connects a USB scanner to a network, This has the advantage that you can scan collections of documents and have them available as files to copy, in an asynchronous mode. When scanning I often find that the most time is spent operating the scanning software. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 20:28, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Is this a one-time job or a long-term thing? In the US you can usually find photocopiers that have scanning hardware, so you put it on the auto feeder and zing, all the files have been e-mailed as one big TIF or PDF to your home address. Then you just chop them into individual files. But the actual photocopiers are very expensive, so it is easier to find a place that has one (like an office supply store) and just use theirs. My understanding is that the document feeders for home scanners often suffer from jamming, but maybe that has changed since I looked into it. The fastest option though is the photocopier one I mentioned—you can scan loose papers at the rate of one every couple seconds or so without paying it much if any attention. You can scan a whole book (turning the pages manually) in about an hour or so. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 17:52, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Default font list for Ubuntu / Kubuntu Linux (+OpenOffice)

I'm looking for a list of the default fonts present in the basic installs of Ubuntu Linux and Kubuntu Linux (if different). I would also like to know if OpenOffice installs any additional fonts. I would imagine a simple list of fonts would be up on Ubuntulinux.org, but none found so far; Google and Ubuntuforums.org aren't leading me well either. / edg ☺ ☭ 20:21, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Speeding up and slowing down audio

Is there any simple freeware out there that can easily speed up and slow down songs? Windows Media Player can do this, but I'm looking for...erm, a different kind of speed change. What WMP does when slowing down a song is give a really digitized sound, as it extends the amount of time each "second" of audio is played. When speeding up, it's almost as if the tempo is increased. The higher the song is sped up, the more gaps there are in playback (at 8x, only every 3 or 4 seconds of audio were played back).

The kind of speed change I'm looking for seemingly changes the tone along with the speed, so that when sped up, the song sounds "chipmunked," and when slowed down, the song sounds (as I've heard it put once) like its being sung by "ogres in tuxedos." Any programs that can do that? Forgive my lack of knowledge.--The Ninth Bright Shiner 22:50, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

You might have difficulty finding that, as most software would probably carefully avoid the pitch change, since many people find that to be an unwanted side-effect of the speed change. Perhaps there's a "special effects" option to do what you want. Or, you may need to change the speed in one step and change the pitch in another. StuRat (talk) 23:57, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

You should use a real audio editor for things like this. Audacity is freeware and easy to use, generally speaking, and can easily do speed and pitch changes. You can even change the pitch without changing the speed, wahooo. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:56, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd just like to second 98.217.8.46's recommendation of Audacity for this job. It is the best tool that I'm aware of for speeding up or slowing down audio, and I've tried several audio editors for doing this. I've used it a lot -- you enter the tempo (beats per minute) of your audio recording as it is before the transformation, and the tempo that you want to transform it to. I've used it mainly for transforming songs to 180 bpm (I listen to this when running), but also for slowing down music to figure out exactly what is being played (used it for the guitar intro of The Boxer). Excellent results when transforming music in the range of 155 to 210 to 180 bmp, no annoying artifacts. The pitch is preserved, no chipmunking. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 01:30, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

As I understand it, they actually want the chipmunking effect. StuRat (talk) 14:22, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Ok, Audacity has three options:

• Effect|Change pitch: Pitch is changed, leading to chipmunking or "ogres in tuxedos", without changing tempo.
• Effect|Change tempo: Tempo is changed, pitch is preserved. This is the one I referred to.
• Effect|Change speed: Both tempo and pitch are changed, i.e. when you speed a song up, it gets chipmunked at the same time.

--NorwegianBlue ^talk 17:19, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Woo-hoo! Now if only I could work around my ever-incompatible file types...thanks, everyone!!!--The Ninth Bright Shiner 04:56, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh, but wait...when changing tempo (like what NorwegianBlue was talking about), how do I figure out the song's original tempo?--The Ninth Bright Shiner 05:00, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Neevermind! I found a wonderful program to do it. Thank you!--The Ninth Bright Shiner 03:08, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

November 29

OS X mail application

I've been using Mail.app for e-mail on my OS X machine for ages now but it's been driving me a little batty. Basically it doesn't have any ability to do an "advanced search" -- I can either search by to field, from field, subject field, or entire message. What I want is something quite simple, like search entire message by only those with the right from field (there are a few people in my life who send me a ton of e-mail).

So I've been thinking about alternative approaches. One is to set up a smart mailbox for each of those people who send me a lot of e-mail, and use that as a way of sorting out things (I can limit searches by a given folder). Another is to get another mail client, like Thunderbird. I've never used Thunderbird before, and would want to make sure it could do this. I've searched around a bit and it seems like Thunderbird has more advanced search possibilities but nothing as simple as a single "advanced search" screen like one expects out of search engines. Is this correct?

(I'm so frustrated with mail applications in part because I receive maybe 20 e-mails a day, aka 140 a week or 560 a month, and keeping track of all of them in a major, major issue, and yet the ability to search and sort them is so rudimentary on most of them that I've seen...) --98.217.8.46 (talk) 01:02, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

This is not a solution, but what I have been doing with a similar (but in a MUCH smaller scale) problem of mine is that I rank messages by name of the sender. I have been using Mail as an IMAP client and find it satisfactory for my small-scale use (ALL mailboxes combined have less than 11k messages right now). HTH, Kushal (talk) 14:15, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Having written all that out I thought I'd try the "Smart folders". They work OK for what I want, in terms of being able to find old messages. They don't really help me stem the tide of things in general (it is still very hard to manage the information flow) but they help for making sense of those few high-volume people. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 17:44, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Thunderbird has a search window where you can add several criteria and use "AND" or "OR" (but not some AND and some OR) - on my system it's under Edit-Find-Search Messages. I also know some people like to use Gmail because of its simple yet powerful search and "tag" system. Gmail can import messages from other accounts and also use their address when sending. Jørgen (talk) 19:20, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Since all Mail messages are Spotlight indexed, you can search for mail using advanced Booleans in the spotlight window (and then save a Smart search folder using that criteria). Also check out HoudahSpot [3] which takes Spotlight searches to the next level. --70.130.54.91 (talk) 06:11, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Questions about /etc/init.d/network

Greetings. I have a question about the following section of the network script located in /etc/init.d/network, which I am sourcing from a CentOS system.

interfaces=$(ls ifcfg* | \
LANG=C sed -e "$__sed_discard_ignored_files" \
-e '/\(ifcfg-lo\|:\|ifcfg-.*-range\)/d' \
-e '/ifcfg-[A-Za-z0-9\._-]\+$/ { s/^ifcfg-//g;s/[0-9]/ &/}' | \
LANG=C sort -k 1,1 -k 2n | \
LANG=C sed 's/ //')

While I know the final output of this command, and the resulting variable is 'eth0' and 'eth1' on seperate lines, I am unsure if I exactly grasp what it is trying to do, specifically the regular expression parts. The following is what I grasp from using portions of the command within a shell, however as mentioned before, I am unsure exactly what the regexp portions do.

• LANG=C sed -e "$__sed_discard_ignored_files" - Discards files containing extensions specified within the environment variable which was created when /etc/init.d/functions runs (~, .bak, .orig, .rpmnew, .rpmorig, .rpmsave)
• -e '/\(ifcfg-lo\|:\|ifcfg-.*-range\)/d' - Discards the loopback interface file, and anything with 'ifcfg-' any single character, and '-range'.
• -e '/ifcfg-[A-Za-z0-9\._-]\+$/ { s/^ifcfg-//g;s/[0-9]/ &/}' - Outputs a list of the interface files, in the format "eth #" where # is the interface number
• LANG=C sort -k 1,1 -k 2n - sorts the list with a key starting and ending at 1, then at 2n (at least that's what the manual page for sort says), though in my experimentation, this didn't change the resulting list at all.
• LANG=C sed 's/ //' - Removes the space from "eth #", so it outputs "eth#"

Do I have at least a ruidamentary idea of what these bits are doing? And if possible, might I inquire what the regular expressions are actually doing? Many thanks! ~Sincerely, Dani 137.155.2.27 (talk) 08:15, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Well...

• The ".*" in the 2nd sed means "0 or more of any character", not "any single character", so /ifcfg-.*-range/ matches anything containing "ifcfg-" and "-range"
• The 3rd sed:
  • is limited to lines matching /ifcfg-[A-Za-z0-9\._-]\+$/, which is any line with "ifcfg-" followed by at least one character out of upper- and lower-case letters, digits, '.', '_', and '-'. That's a pretty inclusive set; maybe it's to ignore lines with spaces in?
  • s/^ifcfg-//g removes the "ifcfg-" (if it's at the beginning, which none of the other regexes have checked for)
  • s/[0-9]/ &/ inserts a space before any digit (substitutes anything matching /[0-9]/ with a space followed by the string matched); this is so that it looks like a different "field" to the sort command
• The sort command looks a bit messed up to me, but what do I know? I think it's trying to sort numerically by the second field - so the "1" in "eth 1" - but that would just be sort -n -k2, or sort -nk2
• The final sed just strips out the space that was put in to make the sort work.

Looks incredibly convoluted for the job to me, but without seeing the directory list it's working on, it's hard to know exactly how to simplify it and keep it working for everyone's system... - IMSoP (talk) 19:47, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Auto complete data

Where are all the data that are automatically filled in computer forms saved in a computer? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 120.89.115.99 (talk) 18:17, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

That depends on the browser you are using. Most modern browsers will keep it within a configuration folder, normally located within your user's application data folder. --Sigma 7 (talk) 19:21, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Relative vs. Absolute referencing

Is there any way to reference files and foldres address i.e. paths in a relative way ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 120.89.115.99 (talk) 18:20, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Are you referring to URLs? If so, I know you can move up a folder or two from an address by typing two dots after a slash: /.. for one level and /../.. for two, just like you would in BASH: cd ../.. or in the Windows command prompt: cd ..\..--Rjnt (talk) 18:30, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

You may also be able to use logical variables defined at the O/S level, like "$WIBBLE_DIR/wibble_executables_subdir". StuRat (talk) 18:54, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

In what context? I know it from html, where relative referencing means relative to where the html file is located. So if you want to link to /z/lyrics/kevin_bloody_wilson/kevin's_court_song.html in an html file that is located under /z/lyrics, then it can be referenced with href="/kevin_bloody_wilson/kevin's_court_song.html". If the file is under /z/dirty_pictures, you could access it with href="../lyrics/kevin_bloody_wilson/kevin's_court_song.html", which first goes up one directory (the two dots that Rjnt mentioned) and then down from there. I hope I got the grammar right, because I'm a bit rusty. Why don't we have an article on relative referencing? DirkvdM (talk) 18:58, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Setiing up a lan with two Suse machines

I want to set up a local network, but can't get find much info on that.
First the basics: I have a pc and a laptop (netbook), both running Suse (11.0 and enterprise desktop 10, respectively), wich are connected with ethernet to a Linksys (wireless) router, which in turn is connected to a modem. Both can access the internet, so that's ok.
This being Linux, I sort of expected it to work instantly. I looked up the address of the netbook in the router and tried to surf there, but Firefox says "Failed to Connect. The connection was refused when attempting to contact 192.168.1.113. Though the site seems valid, the browser was unable to establish a connection." Then it suggested firewall settings might be to blame, so I disabled that on both machines and the router (of course not permanently, just to start with as many obstacles as possible out of the way). That didn't help.
So I searched for more info and found that I had to set certain things in yast > network settings / network card (differs on the two machines). On both machines, I set ifup instead of networkmanager, two separate host names, the same domain name, use dhcp, write hostname to /etc/hosts, activate device at boot time and firewall: external zone. Most of that was already set and most of the rest remained empty. I assumed it was the different domain names that were to blame, so I tried again.
However, the result is the same. Note that when changing from networkmanager to ifup on the netbook, it complained that it could not access installation media, so I skipped two files (from ///usr/share/lang, so I don't think that was important). Another thing is that the netbook has a rather odd device name: eth-id-00:21:85:4f:32:1c, where I expected a simple eth0. When I execute ifconfig, I get a normal eth0, with the 00:21:85:4f:32:1c as HWaddr. So just a different presentation, I presume.
So what am I doing wrong? DirkvdM (talk) 18:42, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm no expert at all, but could the error be that you haven't set up a web server? You say you try to "surf to" the computer, but how does the computer know what to show to the web browser? Have you tried to ping it? (then you'd have to set up file sharing if ping works, I have no idea how to do that on Linux but I'd be surprised if it was difficult) Jørgen (talk) 18:52, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Good question. A ping from the console gives a repeated line with "64 bytes from 192.168.1.113: icmp_seq=<climbing number> ttl=64 time=0.167 ms", with the time varying around 0.2 ms. A ping from the router gives the same, except with a much slower time of 0.9 ms (surprisingly). In both cases 0 packets lost. I can also do a traceroute in the router, which apart from two administrative lines (30 hops max, 40 byte packets) gives only one line, with three timings around 1 ms. As for 'surfing to the computer', I can also do that with my own computer by surfing to / (root). So I imagined the same would work with another computer if I have its address. DirkvdM (talk) 19:17, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Dirk, I love linux, and don't particularly enjoy going linux-bashing, but your statement "this being Linux, I sort of expected it to work instantly" in the context of wireless networking, gave me quite a a belly muscle excercise. My knee-jerk answer would be try a wired connection first, but if both computers can access the internet, wired vs wireless shouldn't be the issue. You write ..."and tried to surf there, but Firefox says"..., but as Jørgen points out, you can surf only to websites that have a web server running on the target computer, and you haven't written anything about installing one. I suggest that you install ssh (client and server) on both computers, and try to log into one of your computers from the other using ssh.

Regarding the installation media problem, I have no experience with Yast, but if it complains about not being able to access installation media, I suppose there is a configuration file somewhere that says where Yast should fetch new packages. If that file refers to both CD's and web-based repositories, I would try commenting out the references to the CD's, to force it to immediately go to the web-based repository. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 21:04, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I am trying a wired connnection. It's a wireless router, but note I say 'connected with ethernet' and I'm talking about eth0. Maybe I should have been a little clearer about that. And I sort of expected it to work instantly because networking is the area Linux is best in, I understand. For example, it sets up an internet connection while installing itself and I understand that with Ubuntu you can even start surfing to find help on the installation process - very handy! Anyway....

Both machines have openssh installed. I understand it's text-based (and I'm no hero in that area). So I type that in and then in the list I see ssh needs a hostname, but when I fill in the hostname I gave the netbook ('Netbook', very originally) I get "name or service not known". All the rest are options. Do I need any of those? Such as [-p port]? I haven't a clue.

But is there no other way? Reading the ssh article - it appears to be developed for secure connections. But I don't need that; I basically want the two computers to act like one. So open a program on the one and then with that open a file on the other? Just like I access a cd or a memory stick (or hd or memory, for that matter)? Why would it have to be different when it's over ethernet? DirkvdM (talk) 09:08, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

ssh is invoked like this:

dirk@Desktop:~$ssh Netbook

I assume your username is the same on both machines, if it isn't ssh needs a username argument:

dirk@Desktop:~$ssh -l DvdM Netbook

If the following conditions are satisfied:

1. both machines can access the internet
2. /etc/hosts is set up correctly,
3. the ssh daemon is running,
4. the router is not doing something weird,

Then this really should work. You have already confirmed condition 1. To check if there is a problem in /etc/hosts, check if this works:

dirk@Desktop:~$ssh 192.168.1.113

I'm assuming 192.168.1.113 is the ip-address of your second computer. (To make sure, type 'ifconfig' on the command line, you'll some lines of output, one of these shows the ip address of the computer). To check if the ssh daemon is running type

ps -e | grep sshd

You should get at least one line of output, that ends in "sshd". If you don't, make sure that you have installed both openssh-server and openssh-client.

The error message you quote from firefox is a bit suspicious. It says that the connection was refused. When I browse to an address that doesn't have a web server running, I get the error message "Unable to connect. Iceweasel can't establish a connection to the server at 127.0.0.1." (Iceweasel is firefox under another name). This could indicate that it is the router that somehow is blocking the connection. I have a Linksys router too, and I see that it has a setting (in the "security" tab) called "Filter Internet NAT Redirection", which is explained as follows: "This feature uses Port Forwarding to prevent access to local servers from your local networked computers." It is unchecked in my router, and I have never tried to see what happens if it is checked, but judging by the description, it sounds like something which could cause problems like those you experience.

ssh is usually quite hassle-free, and I wouldn't recommend changing to some other login mechanism. However, ssh won't make the two computers behave as though they were one. It sounds like what you want to do is to mount directories of the remote computer on the filesystem of your local computer. I believe this can be done, but I haven't tried it, and hope someone else comes along, to explain how that is done. But, for the sake of diagnostics and making sure your setup is ok, you really should get ssh working before proceeding. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 13:58, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I also thought about somehow mounting the partitions of one computer on the other, but didn't know how until I stumbled upon NFS, which appears to do that. And indeed it seems to work! Well, it might if the mount would not have been owned by root and I can't find a way to open a root browser to change the permissions. Aaaargh! A problem I encountered several times before: how do I open a program as root? Anyway, as you say, I should be able to get ssh working too.

"ps -e |grrep sshd" gives a line on the pc (3120 ? 00:00:00 sshd), but not Netbook. But on Netbook in software management I see that openssh is installed, and the summary says "secure shell client and server (remote login program)", so that seems to be ok. When I look for sshd it gives no results. Is that a problem? When I try it the other way around, from Netbook to the pc, after a minute or so I get "ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.103 port 22: Connection timed out".

Btw, what do I get when I get ssh to work? Do I get to control the other machine from the command line? Like I said, I don't know my way around that. And the things I do know take forever, even though I can type blind fairly fast. By the time I have gone down 10 levels in the dir hierarchy I've forgotten what I was looking for. :)

Still, for completeness: The user names are not entirely the same on both machines; on Netbook it's not capitalised. But neither 'ssh dirk@Netbook' nor 'ssh -l dirk Netbook' works. In both instances I get "ssh: Could not resolve hostname Netbook: Name or service not known". When I try the ip address, I get "ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.113 port 22: connection refused". And in the router, the 'filter internet NAT redirection' is not checked. The other three on that page are. DirkvdM (talk) 18:57, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

(outdent)

I'll answer your questions as systematically as I can. Quotes from your previous posts are in italics:

Regarding the ssh daemon on the target machine: When I look for sshd it gives no results. Is that a problem?

• If "ps -e | grep sshd" on the netbook gives no output, that is indeed a major problem. If sshd is not running on the host (Netbook), ssh from the desktop won't be able to make a connection. I'm puzzled that it isn't running when it is installed. To force it to start, you would type "/etc/init.d/ssh start" on a Debian-based distro. I don't know if it's the same in suse.

How do I open a program as root?

• From the command line:

su # su will prompt you for root's password, and you'll be logged in as root
then type the name of the program, with a complete path if necessary.

Alternatively

sudo programname_with_path_if_necessary # provided sudo is installed.

I don't know what the xauth setup in suse is like, but you might get problems with gui programs using the first method, and not with the second. If you run into problems with the display not being accessible, the easiest solution is to install sudo if it isn't installed, add your username using visudo (copy the permissions of root), and use the second method.

When I try it the other way around, from Netbook to the pc, after a minute or so I get "ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.103 port 22: Connection timed out".

• This one has me stumped. It indicates that the address is valid (otherwise you would have gotten the error message "no route to host"). It also indicates that sshd is running (otherwise you would have gotten "connection refused"). You have also confirmed on the target computer that sshd is running. What you should be seeing, is a prompt for the password of the username that sshd on the target machine thinks you are intending to use. Since there is a difference in usernames, remember the -l option. But even if you try to log into an account that doesn't exist, you should be prompted for a password.

Btw, what do I get when I get ssh to work? Do I get to control the other machine from the command line?

• Yes, exactly.

Regarding the differences in user names: The user names are not entirely the same on both machines; on Netbook it's not capitalised. But neither 'ssh dirk@Netbook' nor 'ssh -l dirk Netbook' works.

• To keep the number of things that could go wrong to a minimum, I would stick with ssh -l correctly_capitalized_username_on_target_machine ip-address.

You write (when connecting from desktop to Netbook): In both instances I get "ssh: Could not resolve hostname Netbook: Name or service not known".

• Please doublecheck /etc/hosts on the desktop machine. The error message says that the desktop is unable to translate the name Netbook into an ip-address. And as said above, stick with ssh'ing to the ip-address until at least that works.

Regarding router settings: And in the router, the 'filter internet NAT redirection' is not checked. The other three on that page are.

• That is the same setup that I have.

Regarding "browsing" to the target computer, you wrote : Well, it might if the mount would not have been owned by root and I can't find a way to open a root browser to change the permissions. And above: As for 'surfing to the computer', I can also do that with my own computer by surfing to / (root). So I imagined the same would work with another computer if I have its address.

• If you type "ftp://192.168.1.113" in the address bar of firefox, you should get a prompt for your username and password on the netbook. If /etc/hosts were setup correctly, "ftp://Netbook" should have the same effect. root access using this method might be disabled, but you should be able to log in with your ordinary username. You will then see the files of your home directory (and its subdirectories) only, not the root directory. You can get around that by creating a softlink to the root directory in your home directory. However, mounting the filesystem is probably what you want to achieve. AFAIK there are three methods, NFS, Samba and sshfs, but as I wrote above, I haven't tried this (although I have made a directory tree on my linux server accessible from the windows machines in my network using Samba).
• When you write that NFS appears to work, but that there is a problem with permissions, what exactly is happening? Are you able to mount the filesystem on the netbook as read-only? And which username on the remote computer (netbook) are you using?

Regrettably, linux programs don't always work out of the box, but ssh using a wired connection is one of the things that really ought to work. There appears to be at least three issues: (1) your desktop is unable to translate "Netbook" to the correct ip address. (2) sshd is not running on the netbook. (3) something is blocking the ssh connection from the netbook to the desktop. The last one is what's bothering me most. That same "something" might also block the connection the other way once you sort out the other issues. I can think of only two possibilities, a router setting, and a software firewall. Here (ubuntu) and here (suse) are threads that discuss similar problems, that might be helpful. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 22:27, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

If all I get with ssh is a command line, then it is not for me, I suppose. Still, I can't stand it when something doesn't work, so I tried a little more. Here's the results, but if that doesn't give you a clear hint, then let it be. I'll try NFS instead.

When I said that when I look for sshd I get no results, I meant in the software manager. That that gave no results is odd, since 'which sshd' (one of the commands I remember because it can be extremely helpful) gives me /usr/sbin/sshd (and ssh is in /usr/bin/ssh, so without the 's'). So it is installed, but the software manager does not know about it?? Anyway, I typed '/usr/sbin/sshd start', which results in 'Extra argument start'. No idea if that is good or bad. So I tried the ssh command with the other machine's ip address on both machines, but with the same results.

On both machines, in the network settings, 'write Hostname to /etc/hosts' is checked (which was the default). On both, in etc/hosts I don't see 192.168.1.1x3 (or anything like it) and the machine's name only in the last line, behind the address 127.0.0.2 (actually two entries there, the other being the machine name followed by a dot and the group name (which of course is the same on both machines)). So I tried connecting to that ip address (I know nothing, so I'll try anything), but now the connection is refused.

When I try ftp, on the pc I get "Failed to Connect. The connection was refused when attempting to contact 192.168.1.113." And on Netbook the connection times out.

About starting a gui as root from the command line - I already tried that by typing 'Konqueror' in a root console, which didn't work. And when I look for it with 'which Konqueror' it tells me it can't find it (in the standard paths). But it is installed. What I really want is to be able to switch to root within Konqueror. In 'properties > share' there is an option to login as root, but that doesn't work. And now the computer freezes on me. This is the sort of thing that made me switch to Linux (never crashed on me once in three years, except for X once or twice), but strange things happen with this computer. Either this Suse version (enterprise desktop) or the computer is buggy. I hope it's the former, so I can install a better version, but fear it's the latter.

Anyway, with NFS, I can view everything on the pc now, but it is mounted as root. Ah, of course, I ran the whole thing as root, so I should have done that as a normal user. Silly me. But I'm very tired now (been a very long day at work), so I'll do that first thing tomorrow. Thanks for your patience with me so far. :) DirkvdM (talk) 20:08, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Cellphones in the United States

Hi, I'm going to stay in the US for some time, and am looking to have a local cellphone number, and, in the longer run, buy a new mobile phone. However, I'm not used to the American cellphone/calling market structure. I would appreciate if anyone could help me with answers to some of the following:

1. Can I go into a shop and buy a prepaid SIM card that I can just put in my phone and call instantly? Will I pay a high markup over the minute / SMS fees to get this? (my phone is not locked to anyone and is GSM1900 compatible)
2. Do "minutes" on the operators' web sites refer both to calls placed by me and calls received? What should I assume about SMS if nothing is said about that?
3. Is it economically feasible to buy a cellphone without at the same time signing up with a new operator (and promising to stay with them for some time)?
4. In particular, can I get an iPhone and use it without paying for an expensive AT&T subscription?
5. Is there any website comparing the prices and entry costs for various operators?

Thank you! Jørgen (talk) 19:00, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

2. Usually they mean all minutes, called and received. The best thing to assume about cell phone terms is the best possible definition for the company. Cell phone companies are rather rapacious out here.

4. Not officially. Unofficially you can "unlock" it. (see IPhone#SIM_Lock_removal).

Only ones I know the answer to, sorry! The American system is slanted very heavily towards year-long contracts, as you probably know. If you will be here for around a year, it's best to just do one of those. For less amount of times, there will probably be a trade-off between prepaid and contract service. Specifics no doubt vary from carrier to carrier. US cellphone system sucks. :-( --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:34, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Look at the amount of time you'll be using it, or at least try to guesstimate it; if it's very little, a tracfone (sp?) might be advantageous, as you pay a very small fee compared to a yearly contract plus phone bill. You simply buy extra minutes when you need, I think. You might be out the contract amount if you don't stay a year, but you won't have used as many minutes.209.244.30.221 (talk) 19:39, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

With a Tracfone, you don't have any subscription. You buy the phone and then go to a store like Walmart and buy a phone card (check to make sure it's the right one, though!). Then I'm not sure of the process, but you have to put in the pin number on the card and it will unlock the minutes on your phone. Very easy and very good if you aren't going to use as many minutes as on a normal plan or won't be there as long as a contract would want you to be. EDIT: also, it's cheaper because you ONLY buy minutes you need. 24.180.87.119 (talk) 23:31, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Since we're talking about brand names here, I'll throw my 2¢ in about T-Mobile pre-paid. I believe it's the cheapest of the pre-paid. There's no daily "Access Fee" if you use the phone or not. Normally the service is 25¢ a minute and they expire in 90 days. But if you buy more than $100 in minutes at once, the prices plummets to 10¢/min and they expire in a year. I don't think any other pre-paid service can beat 10¢ a minute. Technically any phone can be made pre-paid by a T-Mobile service center -- they just need to program the SIM to recognize the pre-pay codes. But you can buy pre-packaged pre-paid T-Mobile phones in any Target or Wal-Mart (I think there are four models to choose from). Not sure what the pricing structure is for data and smartphones like Blackberry. --70.130.54.91 (talk) 06:05, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you all! Of course, if anyone wants to add more, I'd be grateful. Where I live now the notion of having to "use up your minutes", ie paying for anything else than what you actually call, is quite unheard of, however the operators have started to try to push it... Jørgen (talk) 18:34, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Back button not there first time I open a page, is there after

Not always, but often on AOL, I will open a page, do some clicking on links, and be unable to get back becasue the browser's back button isn't cluckable. However, if I open the same page and do the same thing, it is there.

It's not limited to AOL searches, either; on Wikipedia, that set of 4 tildes to indicate signing my query can't be clicked on to automatically link to it and thus insert my signature; it has to be copied and pasted. And yet, if I go back to it a 2nd time, it is.

Is this some weird, freaky virus? It's really only an annoyance so I'm nto to concerned, but still, it would be nice to know what's going on. Thanks.209.244.30.221 (talk) 19:03, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Sounds less like a freaky virus than it does a bad browser, one that is getting awfully confused or not implementing javascript correctly (in the case of the signature button). --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:28, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

What browser do you use? (Note: I am so tempted to make a chicken joke, but shall refrain...) 24.180.87.119 (talk) 23:34, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

If you won't, I will, even if I risk running a fowl of the OP: "What kind of chicken-shit browser has a back button that isn't always cluckable ? Those programmers at AOL must all have egg on their faces.". StuRat (talk) 03:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

AOL has their own browser, which is basically just Internet Explorer with some additional bugs added in. StuRat (talk) 03:23, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Beware that some links open in a new window, which lacks a back button since there is no previous page in that window. In such cases, you must close, move, or minimize the new window to see the previous page on the old window. StuRat (talk) 03:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Could I draw the OP's attention to a free and open source web browser that is Mozilla Firefox? Kushal (talk) 14:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

What is the easiest way to save Hotmail emails to hard disk?

Please? 78.144.244.16 (talk) 23:24, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd just copy and paste it into a text file (using Wordpad or even Notepad) and then save it normally. I don't know of any way you could possibly do it more easily. 24.180.87.119 (talk) 23:28, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Manually, for all 5000000 of them? Sorry, I should have said I want to back up all of them, too many to do individually. Thanks. 78.144.244.16 (talk) 00:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

How about forwarding a whole load of them to another account? Turns 50 mails into one mail. Astronaut (talk) 00:27, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Checking out my Hotmail, seems you can't attach a mail to another. Sorry. Astronaut (talk) 00:35, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

According to Hotmail#Desktop mail client access, Windows Live Mail has the ability to access Hotmail, and it presumably should have some way of saving emails; also if you have Microsoft Outlook, you can install the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector and use your Hotmail with Outlook. If you pay for a Hotmail Plus account, you can access it with any POP3 program, and then it would be easy to save stuff. --128.97.245.72 (talk) 00:31, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Help with .emp file format.

OK, so I downloaded some music from eMusic.com and it's in this weird .emp format. How can I play it or change it to, like, mp3 format? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.180.87.119 (talk) 23:25, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

It looks like .emp is a playlist of the music, not the music itself. You should install the official eMusic download manager or an unofficial alternative (like [4]). F (talk) 08:35, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

November 30

Now whenever I want Google I get iGoogle - annoyed!

A few minutes ago out of curiosity I clicked on iGoogle at the top right of the Google screen, as I wondered what it was. Now whenever I a) click on my desktop shortcut to Google, or b) type google.co.uk or c) type google.com I get redirected to http://www.google.co.uk/ig?hl=en where I am invited to "Create your own homepage in under 30 seconds". I am not interested in doing this! How can I stop getting redirected to this unwanted page and instead just get plain google.co.uk as before please? I have used CCleaner to delete all cookies, but it still does it. I am using WinXP and IE7. Thanks. 78.144.244.16 (talk) 00:28, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Try typing the "www" in front, and even the "HTTP://", if that helps. If neither of those work, try following this link: [5]. Once you get to the proper Google, create a bookmark/favorite. StuRat (talk) 03:06, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Click the "Classic Home" link in the top-right. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 05:07, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

http://www.google.com/ncr might do it as well. — neuro^{IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!} 15:19, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

trouble with slowdowns

Hello all. Over the last little while, I've been running into issues that may or may not be related. When I click on video files, they don't open and if I try opening the same file again (sometimes I don't double-click quite fast enough, you know?), I find that WE is not responding. I heard the fans running pretty hard, opened Task Manager and saw WE was chewing up 50% of my CPU resources. I restarted the computer and was asked to click on a user name to start Windows, which I've never had to do. I shut the box down completely, gave it a good dusting (just in case the fans were really fuming due to gunk build-up) and re-started. Again with this "Click on User Name" thing and vids still don't open. I've been running Avast! for quite some time and never found anything on board. The only software I've installed recently was Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, but it's a full, legit, program and actually apparently working as of the last time I checked. The internet also seems to really be dragging, but obviously that could just be traffic. Any of this making sense? If I heard someone else having these problems I would assume some kind of malware, but Avast! says no and I haven't been doing any high-risk behaviour. Could it be the hardware? Any help would be appreciated. I'm running Windows XP sp3. Matt Deres (talk) 00:48, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

mysql query question, merging SELECT results

I have two or more SELECT statments of the form:

mysql> select dayofweek(date), count(*) from games where tag="GOOD" group by dayofweek(date);

+--------------------+----------+
| dayofweek(date)    | count(*) |
+--------------------+----------+
|                  2 |      120 | 
|                  3 |      127 | 
|                  4 |      109 | 
|                  5 |      152 | 
|                  6 |      133 | 
+--------------------+----------+

and

mysql> select dayofweek(date), count(*) from games where tag="BAD" group by dayofweek(date);

+--------------------+----------+
| dayofweek(date)    | count(*) |
+--------------------+----------+
|                  2 |       58 | 
|                  3 |       69 | 
|                  4 |       57 | 
|                  5 |       62 | 
|                  6 |       61 | 
+--------------------+----------+

What does my query have to look like to get output like this: The column headings aren't as big a deal. I mostly just want to get the results all together. Thanks.

+--------------------+----------+---------+
| dayofweek(date)    |count BAD|count GOOD| 
+--------------------+----------+---------+
|                  2 |       58 |   120   |
|                  3 |       69 |   127   |
|                  4 |       57 |   109   |
|                  5 |       62 |   152   |
|                  6 |       61 |   133   |
+--------------------+----------+---------+

Thanks in advance. --Rajah (talk) 00:51, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Just join the results. For example: select dayofweek, badcount, goodcount from (select dayofweek, count(*) as badcount from games where tag='bad') b join (select dayofweek, count(*) as goodcount from games where tag='good') g on b.dayofweek=g.dayofweek; -- kainaw™ 01:03, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

thanks, but i get: ERROR 1140 (42000): Mixing of GROUP columns (MIN(),MAX(),COUNT(),...) with no GROUP columns is illegal if there is no GROUP BY clause when I do that. can you recommend a tutorial where I can read how to build up a join like that? --Rajah (talk) 01:23, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Correct. Using count(*) requires a group by clause - which you had in your queries. I was just typing quickly and skipped over it. There is nothing special or weird about the query I wrote. First, do you know what a join is? It joins two tables on a specified field. Second, you do not need to type a table name every time. You can type in a query that will temporarily become a table. That is what I did. Just use YOUR queries that you typed above as your tables. Put the query in parenthesis and give it a name after the closing parenthesis. I just used b and g as the table names. -- kainaw™ 01:36, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I got it. Thanks for your explanation! --Rajah (talk) 02:02, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

A word of caution if you use the above join syntax: If either of the counts (good or bad) is zero, you will loose the entire row in the results. A solution would be to select ... from (select distinct dayofweek(date) from games) ... and then left join each of the good and bad sub-selects. However, I think the syntax below is simpler and more efficient. -- Tcncv (talk) 02:25, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

You might also try something like:

select
  dayofweek(date),
  count(case when tag='GOOD' then 1 else null end) as countGood,
  count(case when tag='BAD' then 1 else null end) as countBad,
from games
group by dayofweek(date)

This works in Microsoft SQL server. I'm not sure about mysql, but looking at its documentation, it looks like it should support the above syntax. The value 1 is arbitrary. The count will count any non-null value. Also, the "else null" part is technically not needed, since null is the default value for the case expression. -- Tcncv (talk) 02:10, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Tcncv, that works as well and is a bit easier to do. --Rajah (talk) 04:07, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

For MySQL, a simpler way to write the same thing is

select
  dayofweek(date),
  sum(tag = 'GOOD') as countGood,
  sum(tag = 'BAD') as countBad
from games
group by dayofweek(date)

This works because, when used as a number, true becomes 1 and false becomes 0. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:37, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Firegestures

I recently made the switch from Opera to Firefox. One of the features I loved in Opera was Speed Dial and its ease of use; a simple gesture of the mouse made it magically appear. Browsing around the add-ons for Firefox, I saw Firegestures and Speed Dial and had to try them out. They work quite well, but the only thing is that I can't get Firegestures (I have no scripting knowledge) to open Speed Dial in the current tab, emulating Opera. I can get it to open Speed Dial in a different tab, but not the current one. Can anyone with scripting knowledge help me? I searched around google but couldn't find anything that worked. Thanks! --71.117.47.180 (talk) 03:50, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Program for determining primes

Here's the source:

#ifdef HAVE_CONFIG_H
#include <config.h>
#endif

#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>

using namespace std;

int main()
{

 long long int m = 2;
 long long int c;
 cout << "Enter a number to check for primality." << endl;
 cin >> c;
 if ( cin.fail() )
 {
   return 0;
 }
 loop:
 while ( m < c)
 {
   if ( c % m == 0)
   {
      cout << c << " is divisible by " << m << endl;
      return 0;
   }
   else
   {
     m++;
     goto loop;
   }
 }
 if ( m >= c)
 {
   cout << m << " is prime." << endl;
   return 0;
 }
 return 0;
}

(Written in and for Linux) I have several large composite numbers (16 digit pseudoprimes) and the program compiled from this code will tell me that they are divisible and what will divide them very quickly. However, I have several large probable primes (such as 7237443274373237) and the program hangs indefinitely and will not say if they are prime or not. However, for small primes (such as 61) it will very quickly tell that they are prime. So, how can I make this program stop hanging up? Thanks, Ζρς ι'β' ^¡hábleme! 05:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

The first step is to only check numbers up to the square root of the value you are checking. That will help dramatically, but with huge numbers like you have, it may not be enough. You can also only check for 2 and odd numbers starting with 3; this should cut the time by a further factor of 2. The ultimate goal, though, would be to only attempt to divide by prime numbers up to the square root of the value in question. Since around 4% of all numbers are primes 6% of all numbers in this range are primes, this reduces the number of checks by 25 times (or 12 times if comparing with 2 and odds only) further. However, this requires that you have access to a massive list of prime numbers, so may not be possible for you. One more hint, don't put taking the square root in the loop, only calculate it once, for best performance. StuRat (talk) 07:04, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Here's a chart for comparison:

  Number of checks
  ----------------
  7237443274373235 Checking every number from 2 up to the target-1
          85073164 Checking all numbers to the square root of the target
          42536532 Checking 2 and odd numbers to the square root
(estimate) 5000000 Checking primes to the square root

StuRat (talk) 07:15, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

'Around 4% of all numbers are primes'? I hope you mean 'around 4% of numbers less than about 100 billion are primes'. See prime number theorem for the real result. See also primality test#Fast deterministic tests for some less crude approaches to testing for primes. Algebraist 12:52, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's a good clarification. In the range of the square root of that big-ass number the original poster gave, it may be more like 6%, so I've corrected my estimate accordingly. StuRat (talk) 15:30, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Remote thread injection, weird failures

I've made a remote thread injector at [6] which can either get the command line of a process (1) or force the process to start any program I want (2). However, both functions only seem to completely work when I'm either debugging it using Visual C++ or OllyDbg. Using the Release build crashes the injector for both (1) and (2). Using the Debug build works for (1) but crashes the target process when trying (2). Additionally, when using IDA Pro, the injector crashes for both functions at wprintf.

I think this may have something to do with me running COMODO Firewall - in a Windows XP VM without any security software, (1) always works with the Release build but (2) crashes the target process. I'm running Windows Vista. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. --wj32 ^t/c 05:56, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I've narrowed it down to GetWinStaDesktop(), but I still don't know why it screws up the program... --wj32 ^t/c 07:18, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Possibly the security software (virus scanners, too!) detect your injection attempts and deny them.HardDisk (talk) 13:26, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Untitled

Hi!currently i am some troubles, i downloaded a game from (Nokiasymbianthemes.com)which is Star War,the force unleashed.it is in .rar format and i have Nokia N82 Mobile. I posted the a query on the same website but nobody answeres yet.please any tell how can i extract the .sis file from this.Any idea please, Thank you.

You have to use a program like WinRAR or 7-Zip [7] to extract the RAR archive. --wj32 ^t/c 07:20, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes Wj32, I know that but when i extract the file through winrar it comes with a .zip file and yes this too a compressed file again by extracting the .zip file it gives me .ro1 etc like file format , so what next i do?

In that case the RAR archive is split into multiple files. Extract all the .r* files and open the one named *.rar. --wj32 ^t/c 05:41, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

binary packages on Linux: what am I missing?

I have a Mac, but I'm curious about Linux. When I want a new version of software (like OpenOffice.org 3.0, for example), I can just download the latest binary and install it. And on the download page, there are Linux binaries right next to the Mac and Windows binaries. Yet, apparently, Ubuntu users are frustrated because Ubuntu 8.10 only includes OOo 2.4. According to our reference, they can get OOo 3.0 from a PPA or from the Backports repository (neither of which I know anything about). But why can't they just download the .DEB file sitting on the OOo download page?

Again, these are just examples... if I were interested in OOo 3.0 or Ubuntu in particular I'd be asking on their forums. But I think I'm missing something basic about how software distribution works on Linux. Thanks for any help! --Allen (talk) 07:38, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

You can download their .deb-file and install it using dpkg -i openoffice.deb. But it may be that dpkg warns about unmet dependencies, in this case you need the Backports repo. Backports is a repo where new packages get compiled using older libs, so systems using these older libs can run the new package w/o problems. HardDisk (talk) 13:55, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

The main difference between downloading the software from its maintainer and having a package "in" the distribution is that most modern Linux distributions include complex package management systems which allow the software to be cleanly integrated with the OS. They will generally handle issues such as the dependencies of the new software on new or updated libraries, and managing configuration, help files, and menu entries in a consistent way across all applications.

Another point is that different distributions will generally place different constraints on the stability of a piece of software (and its dependencies). So software considered ready for release by its creators may not be considered ready for installation on stable systems by the maintainers of a distribution, until certain defects have been resolved. (Or unless it can be "back-ported" to use older, stable versions of its dependencies.)

By downloading a standalone .deb file, a user is "opting out" of all these benefits, and taking on the complexities which the maintainers of a distribution spend their time working on. - IMSoP (talk) 15:52, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

This is a rather general problem. It's to do with how software is distributed. When (essentially) all of the software for the entire system is free - there are generally two ways to get the software you need:

1. You can download it from the author's web site (www.openoffice.org for example)...OR...
2. You can get it with (or upgrade it from) your Linux 'distro' (ubuntu for example).

Both ways work - and if you are happy to do this the first way on your Mac or Windows machine - then you can do the exact same thing under Linux and be happy.

However, under Linux, it's generally more convenient to upgrade your distro because the software is 'packaged' in the right form - all of the associated libraries are managed to be the correct versions - any other packages that depend on those libraries will be carefully checked...and so on. It's generally a very smooth operation. However, there is a time lag between the author of the software pushing out a new version and the distribution folks 'noticing' and updating and testing their package system...so it's very often the case that the version you can grab via 'apt-get' or 'yast' or 'rpm' whatever is several versions behind the cutting edge release.

Hence, you may be tempted to download directly from the author's website - that way you have the hottest release. Typically, you'll have to compile it yourself (although you may get lucky and find that there is a pre-built binary suitable for you) - and sometimes you'll find that some of the libraries it depends on are either not there or need to be updated. Now you get into a messy situation - if you don't pull the latest library version from your distro's packaging system, everything gets out of step and other packages that rely on that library may possibly stop working because they need to be upgraded too. Alternatively, the new software may install itself in someplace like /usr/local or /usr/share instead of in /bin or /usr/bin - now you have two versions of the software installed.

Basically, it's a little harder to get the latest version of a package like OpenOffice by grabbing it off their web site. Hence, when new versions of popular packages appear - users of systems like Ubuntu get really anxious for the Ubuntu packaging folks to include that new version in their packaging system so that it can easily, cleanly and smoothly be updated.

SteveBaker (talk) 16:09, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the answers! It makes me wonder why things are so easy on a Mac, then... is it that mac binaries made for, say, OS 10.4 and later, are already effectively backported by using libraries that are that old? (And on the compiling-from-source end, I take it that useful systems like MacPorts are uncommon in Linux?) --Allen (talk) 18:30, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Not a definitive answer, but one difference is that MacOS X is a very distinct and clearly defined target: whereas Linux comes in dozens of distributions, each with dozens of flavours and supported versions, and huge scope for customisation, a lot of information can be summed up simply by saying "requires MacOS X 10.4". So in a sense they're "already backported", but more importantly, such packages can have a fairly decent picture of what the target system will look like.

As for things like MacPorts, that is exactly the role played by the package repositories of distributions like Ubuntu - with all the trade-offs that we've been discussing. Compiling from source is less common (although portage, used by Gentoo, does exactly that) but doesn't necessarily solve the problems anyway (recompiling against an older version of a library might make something run on your system, but it might make it not run at all, because the software actually needs features from a newer version). - IMSoP (talk) 19:58, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding in VB6 for Windows CE 2

Hi all,

what plugin for VB6.0 do I need to be able to create applications for a Windows CE 2.0 device?

Thanks, HardDisk (talk) 13:23, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Coding Today screen applets in VB.NET

Hi all,

again a coding question, this time on WM6-based devices...how do I create Today screen plugins within VB.NET? The only things I found in Google are for eVC and C.net :(

HardDisk (talk) 13:37, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

router rebooting

When my broadband connection goes down I'm told to unplug the router from the mains electritity for 20 seconds, then plug it in again. This usually works, but what is happening during those 20 seconds? Why, given the high speed of electricity along a copper wire, does it take so long?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:33, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

The usual reason, for purely electrical devices with no mechanical components (unlike disk drives, for example) is that a capacitor must discharge in order to "start the system from scratch". StuRat (talk) 18:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I've wondered this too, and people have told me that it takes a while to make sure nothing is still stored in RAM. (Perhaps because of the capacitor Stu mentions?) But why wouldn't a device re-initialize its RAM or something when it boots up? It seems strange to me that a device would look for, and use, the ghosts of some previous state in its RAM. (And perhaps something about these questions should be added to our article on power cycling.) --Allen (talk) 18:57, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

The reason is that it's incredibly annoying to have your equipment reboot on you when there's a short power glitch. These are quite common in many areas (I lived in one), and I appreciated those devices which used this capacitor system. If your lights ever flicker, then likely you live in such an area, too. They don't have to "search for ghosts", either. As long as there is power to volatile memory, whether from the outlet or capacitor, it still contains the same data. They could physically disconnect the capacitor during a reboot to save you the 20 sends wait, but that would involve extra moving parts and a potentially harmful spark. StuRat (talk) 19:48, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Or maybe is it possible that if your modem goes down for long enough the broadband company decides to drop the connection and when you turn it on again it gives you a new one? I dunno. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 19:55, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

The time required before turning the router back on can vary depending on who you ask. From my experience in tech support, I'd say any specific time frame is likely a common rumor among tech support staff. Tech support reps often pass along bogus information to their peers that doesn't really help, but doesn't really hurt, either.

I usually ask people to turn off their routers for a few seconds, or to check that the power light actually goes off then turn it back on. I find it a waste of time to leave it off longer. However, I can't say with certainty there's no valid technical reason for waiting a certain time before turning the router back on. Here's what some various ISPs tech support help pages say:

• AT&T DSL - DSL modem direct to PC: after all devices are fully powered off
• AT&T DSL - DSL modem and router: about 30 seconds
• Verizon DSL - DSL modem: 15 seconds
• Comcast cable internet - cable modem: 2 minutes
• Road Runner cable internet - cable modem: 30 seconds or 1 to 2 minutes
• Verizon FiOS internet - router: 1 minute

--Bavi H (talk) 05:05, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

If you turn it back on right after you turn it off, you might increase the chance of damaging the device. 121.72.170.238 (talk) 08:25, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Java Exception Handling - logic error?

Hello all - Am writing a simple Java program to display an i*j character matrix but have been having a big headache with handling non-integer input. I'm trying to get a catch block to restart a do loop in the following way, on testing given a deliberate input mismatch exception it just ends the whole program rather than restarting the do:

import java.util.*;
//...
int i, j;
do
{
   //... 
   //...prompt to enter ints...
   try
   {
      i = sc.nextInt(); j = sc.nextInt();
   }
   catch(InputMismatchException io)
   {
      System.out.println("I/O error: please enter integer values.");
      continue; //was expecting this to restart do loop
   }
   //...
}while(i*j !=0); // data terminator
//...

I'm having real trouble finding the error in the logic here - could anyone point me in the right direction? Any help gratefully received. Psymun (talk) 18:40, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, first of all, I don't get what the i and j in the loop's condition are. They can't be ints declared earlier because that would make the (int i, j;) line illegal - also they can't be the very same i and j because the ones declared inside the loop are local to the loop. Also note that the "continue" will make the thing check the loop's condition before restarting it (not just restart it blindly). I'd advise separating the "checking user input" bit (fiddly and annoying and not very interesting) from whatever you're trying to do with the numbers entered. -ie write your own MyScanner with a safe int nextInt() method.

i, j were declared outside the do, excuse me. Have updated code extract to reflect that. Psymun (talk) 19:35, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

So continue goes to the end of the current iteration of the loop, evaluates the condition, and then if true, goes on to the next iteration. The problem is that the condition evaluates to false. i and j are initialized to 0 (the default value for ints), so if at least one of the inputs fail, then at least one of them will still be 0, and i*j will be 0, and the condition will fail. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 19:52, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Ahh, fantastic! Thank you! Yes, I initialized i, j to 0, so necessarily the do was ending. Implemented the following:

import java.util.*;
//...
   catch(InputMismatchException io)
   {
      System.out.println("I/O error: please enter integer values.");
      i = j = 1; //while now evaluates to true
      continue; 
   }
   //...
}while(i*j !=0);
//...

Thanks for help!Psymun (talk) 19:58, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Compaq ports

Hi - I'm installing a printer driver, and have got to the point where it's asking me what port I've plugged it into - I have to choose from a list of about 15. I've plugged it into one on the left side of my compaq laptop - what does that correspond to in the list?

Thanks, and please forgive my ignorance.

Adambrowne666 (talk) 21:49, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

What sort of printer is it? If it uses a "printer port", it will probably be LPT1. If it uses an RS232 port, it will be COM1 or COM2. If it uses a USB port then the PC ought to locate it itself - especially if you follow the instructions that came with the prionter on how to install its software. My printer is connected to port USB001. -- SGBailey (talk) 22:31, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

In many cases, if your OS already has a driver, it'll auto-install even with LPT1/parallel ports. My DeskJet 952C does this on Windows XP. Of course, it came out around Windows 98 and it was fairly popular too. Washii (talk) 05:29, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks all - I tried it again, and this time the Install Wizard kicked in and did it for me. Adambrowne666 (talk) 10:56, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Midtown Madness 2 Free?

where can i get midtown madness 2 full version for free— Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.207.66.104 (talk • contribs)

• You can download a demo from the official website [8]. The game is copyrighted and Microsoft have not released it under a free license so we cannot help you otherwise. Exxolon (talk) 00:58, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

December 1

Converting sound files

Is there any way I can convert some of my MP3 files to .wav files? I want to have Christmas songs play when I log in and out of my user account (I use Windows XP SP3). --Crackthewhip775 (talk) 01:54, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes. You can do it with Audacity which is downloadable free. Open the files into Audacity, then do Export as .wav in the File menu. --GreenSpigot (talk) 03:38, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. --Crackthewhip775 (talk) 04:37, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I think iTunes does this also. --69.149.213.144 (talk) 05:38, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Foobar2000 does this. — neuro^{IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!} 15:16, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

a good antivirus that dont need windows installer

i have a virus that dont let me install windows installer programs. I have kapersky here but it needs windows installer. Exdeathbr (talk)

Have you tried booting into safe mode, and installing it that way? If Kapersky doesn't allow it I'm almost certain NOD32 does. Gunrun (talk) 11:26, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Windows Installer apps cannot be installed in Safe Mode AFAIK. Have you tried running a malware remover (that is, because it sounds like you know what it is that is on your system) — neuro^{IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!} 15:15, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Well I installed avira free editon, just to remove some virus, then I was able to install nod32 again, and scan for virus and fix the virus that he found, now i will remove nod32 and install kapersky.Exdeathbr (talk) 21:53, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Dictionary/Spell Checker Problems in OpenOffice.Org

Howdy y'all. I recently uninstalled MS Office Home and Student 2007 Trial(Ran out of time) and I now plan on using OpenOffice.Org only. Unfortunately, for some reason its English USA dictionary is completely out of whack. All the words are missing from the standard dictionary????(standard.dic) I'm on the 3.0 version. Can someone help me out? Thanks.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 03:37, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, OpenOffice.org has bugs and problems in it. You'll need to find a way around it. Oh, and it has NO grammar correction.--Editor510 ^{drop us a line, mate} 17:26, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Most all software has "bugs and problems in it". For the dictionary problem, have you tried re-installing just the English USA dictionary? As far as grammar checking, there are extensions available that can use the grammar API that is part of OO.o 3.0 --LarryMac | Talk 18:17, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Uninstalling from Ubuntu

I'm a (nearly) lifelong Windows user and one of the things that's always bugged me about Windows is how, after you uninstall something, you still keep finding bits and pieces of the program all over - temp folders, start menu, registry keys, sometimes even the main directory folders, etc. etc. If/when I finally make the switch to a Linux distro, will I still find the same thing? Or is the issue I'm talking about program specific, and not much could be generalized about it? Matt Deres (talk) 04:26, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Most programs you will install on Ubuntu come in packages (DEBs in Ubuntu's case) - they contain information about which files get installed. When you uninstall a program, it will remove all the files it installed. Since the programs you use will be running under a normal user account (yours), they simply don't have the permissions to write to any system-wide "registry" or any system library locations. However, they will leave behind configuration files in your home directory (etc. /home/wj32/.mozilla for Firefox). System services create configuration files in /etc/, but you can purge those as well. Additionally, shared libraries are almost always contained in separate packages which other packages can depend on. So for example, both Firefox (firefox-3.0) and Nautilus (nautilus) (the file browser) depend on the GTK libraries (libgtk2.0-0) (the user interface). Programs won't install their own libraries everywhere like in Windows. --wj32 ^t/c 05:55, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

It won't delete config files by default (which I think is probably a good idea), but there is a "completely remove" option. Downgrading a package is hard (eg from firefox 2.0.3 to 2.0.2), but upgrading is easy. More info on the synaptic package manager at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticHowto --h2g2bob (talk) 12:45, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

All this is true, but to make it a little more clear: it's MUCH better in Ubuntu than in Windows. When you remove a program, it's gone, you don't notice it anymore. The files are removed, the process isn't running anymore. There might be a few configuration files left, but they're in a hidden folder in your home-directory, and it's trivial to remove them if you want to. There's no burrowing adware or spyware, there's no programs that just wont go away even if you try and uninstall them. It is absolutely much better in Ubuntu. 83.252.172.146 (talk) 14:51, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

You might be interested in Zero Install and Application directory. These are associated most with the ROX Desktop but can be used otherwise as well. Dmcq (talk) 14:26, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the info; these are the kinds of answers I was looking for. Matt Deres (talk) 15:24, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Mac: software update needs to quit before restart

I have updates to install on my Mac (Leopard). Now it needs to restart, but the error:

Logout has timed out because the application Software Update failed to quit. To try again, quit Software Update and choose Log Out from the Apple Menu. You can use the Force Quit menu item in the Apple Menu (or press Command+Option+Esc) to quit an unresponsive application.

Software Update isn't even open, it has quit by this stage, so I can't force quit it. Then if I click OK and restart it myself, it doesn't install the (already downloaded) updates. I can go through the whole process again (check for new updates, licence agreements, etc.) and find myself back where I began again.

It won't restart until Software Update has closed, but that's the same application it needs to initiate the restart - at least, a restart which will install updates. Any suggestions?My name is anetta (talk) 14:43, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

You can do one of two things. One is to open up the Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities), try to find the process that is running wild, and force quit it from there. The other is to just force a shutdown (hold down the power button for about 10 seconds) and reboot, which is easier, and really has basically the same effect. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:53, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Neither help, I'm afraid. Forcing a restart (or a restart any other way than initiated by Software Update) simply restarts and nothing more - as opposed to installing updates when it starts up again. The only process I can find related in Activity Monitor is "Update" - even when I force quit it, it reappears immediately.My name is anetta (talk) 17:49, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Never heard about it before. Sounds like a bug. Could you tell us which version of Leopard and which update you were trying to install? Thanks. Kushal (talk) 20:56, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

OSX10.5.5, updates for:

1) Airport Extreme Update 2008-004 v1.0 2) Quicktime H.264 Compatibility Update v7.5.5 3) Itunes 8.0.2 4) Java for Mac OSX Update 2 v1.0 5) Safari v3.2.1

It doesn't upgrade to OSX 10.5.6, which I understand isn't out yet. I had it on a previous installation, as well - but then it didn't logically stop be updatng (Catch-22 situation). My name is anetta (talk) 22:03, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Blackberry applications

I just purchased my first Blackberry. A Storm. I'll be using it for personal stuff, but some work. Is there a website where I can download free applications? I had many useful apps for my Iphone and was wondering if there was a similar website out for Blackberry users. Thank you in advance.--209.183.190.77 (talk) 16:44, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

lan problem

I have a windows vista laptop, which I use to connect to my hostel LAN. Recently it has stopped showing any computer in the network folder and stopped being shown on ther computers too. Our lan needs manual ip address assigning for each computers. I have noticed that my comp uses 2 ip addresses (using ipconfig), one of which is already being used my another pc. Going toNetwork Connections -> Local Area Conn->Properties->IPv4 and modifying the address only shows the second one, and I can, in no way stop my pc from using the other address. Please help. 218.248.70.235 (talk) 16:46, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Max Headroom intrusion incident

What is he wearing on his middle finger?--Editor510 ^{drop us a line, mate} 17:23, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

It would appear to be a dildo. SN0WKITT3N 17:59, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Why are object files necessary?

Hi. Why are object files necessary? I understand that with C++, a compiler creates a .o file? That file is then converted to a .exe file via a linker? Why doesn't it just create an executable directly? I used GCC to create a test application and all I got was the executable.--Rjnt (talk) 18:40, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

You can indeed skip the creation of .o files with something like:

g++ -o my_executable file1.cpp file2.cpp

The purpose of creating .o files is speed. If you have 100 source files, and make a change to only one of them, it will be enormously faster to just recompile that one file and then relink all the object files, rather than recompiling all 100 files. It's basically a caching system. --Sean 20:25, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

How do I get Google to search on an exact string?

I want to do a Google search on "RAISERROR(@Error" so I put it quotes. This usually works but I think the parens and/or the @ is messing it up and Google is returning hits that don't match my search string. 216.239.234.196 (talk) 19:41, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Certain searches do not work in Google no matter what, this is one of them. — neuro^{IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!} 20:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

You might be interested in Google Code Search, which allows the use of regular expressions. You would use "RAISERROR\(@Error" in this case, and indeed there are quite a few hits: [9]. --Sean 20:28, 1 December 2008 (UTC)