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January 15

Google mobile items on a computer?

My wife sent me a confirmation for the trip that she's on. We both use Gmail. When I pull up the Google Search app on my Android phone, it quite handily tells me that her flight arrives in three hours via what I believe Google calls "cards" below the search input field. It also tells me other things like how long it will take me to get to work from where I am, what the current stock price of my employer is, etc. I'm mostly interested in the flight itinerary though. I'm wondering if it's possible to get this info on some Google web page without having to search for and open the email that she originally sent me. Is this possible? Dismas|^(talk) 00:06, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

I think I answered my own question. It looks like the app is called Google Now and the functions used to be available through iGoogle but are now available on a desktop if I use Chrome... which I don't. Dismas|^(talk) 00:23, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

If you Google a flight number (e.g. AA001) Google displays a graphic that shows you real-time flight status, with scheduled and actual departure and arrival times and departure and arrival terminals/gates. Gandalf61 (talk) 13:23, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. That depends on my remembering the flight number though. With my phone, I can just look at the app and not need anything more. Dismas|^(talk) 13:43, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

You could set a bookmark for www.google.com/#q=<flight number> , replacing <flight number> with the flight number, then you only need to note it down once. MChesterMC (talk) 10:42, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Does it display an icon of the plane in flames if it crashes ? StuRat (talk) 22:07, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

January 16

Windows Server 2008: Indexing service running / not running

Hello there,

I've got a problem. I don't understand what is going on. I wanted to set up Indexing on WinSer 2008. There are good websites that walk you through the process. So, if I open my "Server manager" I can see in the leftmost pane "Roles," I click on that. I see "File Services" and in the central pane I see "Indexing Service cisvc Running." It really says RUNNING! In the pane for "Role Services 3 installed" it says. File Server - installed; windows server 2003 File services - installed; "Indexing Services -- Installed." Also if I click on Configuration==>Services and check Indexing Service in the center pane (large) I can see that "Indexing Service Started Automatic." It means it is RUNNING.

This is the problem. If I find "Indexing Options" Wizard via a START==>Search window I can see that the whole wizard is dimmed and on top of it it says: "INDEXING IS NOT RUNNING." I made it all capital, in fact it is in lower case.

If I try to search for any file I need, I can see that there is no indexing. Besides I've never set up folders for indexing which I should have been able to set up via "Indexing Options."

The truth is I downloaded Ubuntu, paid them fifty bucks and now I cannot find it in the directory tree.

What is the problem? Thanks. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 02:49, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I just found this http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/WindowsServer2008/AdminTips/Admin/TroubleshootingIndexingisnotrunningonWindowsServer2008.html website It says I installed the wrong windows service and in fact I needed to install Windows Search Service. Is it true? --AboutFace 22 (talk) 03:13, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't understand why you think you need to enable indexing if all you want to do is find your Ubuntu folder. Indexing speeds up repeated searches of files in commonly used locations, but I don't think it will speed up a one-off search for a single folder, especially when that search potentially has to span you whole file space. Gandalf61 (talk) 15:08, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Indexing is very useful. You never know when you need it next time. I uninstalled Indexing Service as that website suggested, installed Windows Search Service and the indexing is still not working. It has become a big hassle. Now I went to my other OS: windows 7 (on the other hard disk), included the Windows Server 2008 hard disk in its Indexing and wait when it collects all indices. This might be the only way for me to search in the server. I wish someone with experience could comment on why I cannot set up indexing in the server. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 15:42, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

image threshold tool?

I want a tool to read two similar images and output a comparison image: white where image A is brighter than image B, black where image B is brighter than image A; don't care where they're equal. If ImageMagick can do that, what's the syntax? —Tamfang (talk) 03:46, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I should mention that the images are monochrome in content, though RGB in format. —Tamfang (talk) 10:46, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm wondering if GIMP might not be better for this. Image A can be positive and change image B to negative. You don't then need to know the syntax. One just merges the two layers together. For final adjustment, slide the mid scale pointer up and down (on both layers).--Aspro (talk) 14:11, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

To merge layers, the top one needs to have alpha 1/2, right? And I can't find a command to change (or examine) alpha for the whole layer. (I have GIMP 2.6.12) —Tamfang (talk) 22:55, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Changing the alpha of an entire layer is easy. Just open the "layers" dialog, select the layer you want and use the "Opacity" slider. SteveBaker (talk) 03:39, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Ah, it's hiding under the Windows menu rather than the Layer menu. —Tamfang (talk) 08:32, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

I think compare is what you want in ImageMagick.--Salix alba (talk): 15:44, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Never mind, I can't get ImageMagick to work; seems to be missing a library. —Tamfang (talk) 22:55, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks all, it's partly moot. A belated bit of algebra told me I can get the effect I want with a cunning POV-Ray pigment and simple thresholding. —Tamfang (talk) 08:32, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

What does the limit of 32 or 64 bits actually imply?

The maximum representable value might be 4,294,967,295 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 for 32 or 64 bit computers. But can't you represent bigger integers than 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 on a 64 computer if you simply break up the integer into two and save it in two registers? I see that this will be slower than one integer in one register, but it doesn't have to mean that strange mistakes will happen. In the same way that I know that if an odometer was at 999,999 and I drove 2 extra miles, now the car has 1,000,002 miles not 1. OsmanRF34 (talk) 18:03, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Certainly integers to large to represent with 32 or 64 bits can be dealt with by breaking up into pieces. This is done in some cases. But consider a statement like this in a typical programming language:

A = B + 227;

Ordinarily, the complier will be designed so that A and B must be limited to values that can be stored in the computer's registers, whatever size that might be. So if larger values are to be manipupulated, the programmer would have to test each number to see if the result will be too large, and write code that explicitly carries the excessive result into a new variable. Alternatively, the programmer could find and use a subroutine library that handles larger-than-usual integers. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:23, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I don't think "ordinarily" is right here. In Java, the sizes and formats of the integer types don't depend on the CPU type. In Python, integer operations that overflow the machine register size automatically upgrade to arbitrary-precision integers. In C and C++ the size of int may differ, but not necessarily – it is normally the same size in 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. Perl and Javascript's "integers" are IEEE double precision floating point, which can exactly represent integers up to ±2⁵³ on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

Regardless of the language, if A and B are 64-bit integer types, the compiler will do 64-bit math using whatever CPU facilities it has available. It won't truncate 64-bit results to 32 bits just because that's the CPU register size. The only thing you have to worry about is whether generic type names like "int" map to 64-bit integer types or not. Almost all languages that have 32-bit integer types also have 64-bit integer types on 32-bit platforms by some name or another.

Historically the number of "bits" of a system has been as much about marketing as technology. The Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis / Mega Drive were both called 16-bit even though the Mega Drive's CPU had 32-bit registers and both machines' CPUs had a 24-bit address space. For that matter, the current AMD64 / Intel 64 / x64 architecture has a 48-bit address space, though pointers are always stored as 64 bits. It's probably better to talk about x86 and x64 than "32-bit" and "64-bit", since they're better defined terms. -- BenRG (talk) 21:46, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

The major limitation of 32-bit systems is the storage of a memory address in a register. This makes it difficult in general purpose programming to use more than 4 GB of RAM - and in practice less is available to a program because the operating system and other programs will use some of the available space. Memory segmentation is used on some systems to allow programs to address more memory than the register size allows, but this can complicate programs and prevent use of very large structures (probably, this was more of a problem with the 16-bit processors; see x86 memory segmentation).-gadfium 20:16, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

Look at BigNum, the article there discusses using numbers larger than a 32 or 64 limit. RudolfRed (talk) 02:59, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

There isn't much problem programming a computer to calculate to more precision than it's underlying word length. HERE, for example is a web site that allows you to do calculations with up to 226 million digits (which is probably due to a memory size restriction rather than an actual computational limit). It's just like when people who've memorised the multiplication tables up to 10x10 can multiply numbers like 123x456 by calculating 456x100 + 456x20 + 456x3. "long multiplication". The difference is that it's much slower to do that than if you'd memorized the multiplication tables up to 1000x1000 instead.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:35, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

If your odometer was at 999,999 and you drove two more miles, it would read 1,000,001, not 1,000,002. Perhaps working with large numbers is not as easy as you thought? Matt Deres (talk) 13:44, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

program that runs on xp only

not in the following os, not even in compatibility mode.. but xp is discontinued.. what can i do.. thank you --82.58.163.72 (talk) 21:10, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

You can use Windows XP Mode if you have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate. You can also use VMPlayer. [1] --  Gadget850 ^talk 21:47, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

January 17

Wikia and templates and images, oh my!

I would have asked this at the help desk, but I'm not sure if it's Wikipedia-related enough, even though I know Wikia uses MediaWiki. I'm attempting to add a category to a template (specifically, an image tag) so that all the images that transclude the template will put the image in that category. I found that adding it with includeonly tags seems to put the category name on the image's category list but does not actually seem to put all of the images in the category (a good 200 are listed but I know I tagged at least 500 by this point). Is there something I'm doing wrong or is it a lag of some sort? Thanks for any help. - Purplewowies (talk) 01:32, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes probably a lag. The job queue is often pretty long you can see it at [2]. You could try doing a WP:NULL edit on some of the pages. This should recalculate the categories and you can use that to test the templates working correctly.--Salix alba (talk): 00:41, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Net Neutrality

Hello. I have been hearing a lot about net neutrality in the US. I was wondering, if the carriers are allowed to discriminate what traffic they allow, would it mean the end to hosting on a personal server? For example, if I have comcast and I go to a friend's house and she has some other carrier, will I still be able to ssh to my computer or will that not work anymore? Thanks! 24.128.61.100 (talk) 04:40, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

No answers yet, so I'll bite...

Today, many IP addresses are globally unique and globally routable. This is an emergent property: the internet protocol allows connectivity across multiple networks; and we have a situation in which many networks exist across the globe, and all choose to connect together.

Some day, it may be the case that many networks choose not to connect together. Or, they may provide connectivity at a very sluggish speed.

The Internet is a complicated piece of technology. As of 2014, nearly "everyone" agrees that there is one internet. Specifically, this means that we all defer to one organization (IANA) to provide canonically correct unique addresses. But the technology that underpins the internet protocol doesn't require that structure at all! I can make my own domain server and my own IP allocation server, and build my own network, and write my own routing tables, and if my network becomes large enough to become useful, I can choose to charge other people money for access to my network. That's how the commercial internet developed - a bunch of private networks started charging subscribers for access - and most users ultimately wanted access to government networks that the ISP's didn't even own! When the marketplace became more competitive, these networks needed more value-add; so as a bonus, they also provided connectivity to other private networks... and today, almost all the networks are connected. The competitors had to start cooperating.

At least a few economists and theorists believe this business arrangement is unsustainable. For example, I took a class with this guy, Ramesh Johari, who has extensively published his work on the topic of network graph connectivity in an internet that is dominated by private enterprises who are actually competing against each other. It is a fascinating problem in game theory, because the decision problem is quite complex. Any organization - an internet service provider - has more value if it is better connected to other networks. But if an organization has more value, it will demand more aggressive terms for its peering arrangements; and it will try to put its competitors out of business - resulting in fewer networks to compete with or to cooperate with!

So, it is actually possible that in the next decades, we will find that an Internet is not sustainable from an economic perspective. That is, it may be unprofitable to have one, global, unified network. It may be more profitable for each individual company to maintain its own large network that is not connected to many peer networks. To an end user like yourself, that means that some valid IP addresses would not be routable for you.

Now the hard part is, where exactly is "neutrality" in all this mess?

Network neutrality explains some of the many ways that the term is used. The biggest problem is, everybody likes the way "neutral" sounds, but few people can agree on which policy decisions are actually "neutral!" Does "neutral" mean that every network must play by the same rules? Or use the same quality of service? Does it mean that a government auditor must enforce packet-latencies according to some set of requirements? What packet latency requirements are "neutral"? If an organization buys new gear improving speeds within its own network, must it be required to buy new gear for all its competitors (i.e. everybody in the world) so that all network traffic flows equally ? These are farcical solutions to a very complex economic problem. It will take many decades for public and private sectors to figure out what to do.

So in the short run, nothing is changing, and that means your friend's commercial internet service provider probably will continue to be globally routable. I can assert with high confidence that the round-trip travel-time for a packet from your house to your friend's server is slower than the round-trip packet-time from your house to Google's server. Even if your houses are a few feet apart. Even if you live nowhere near a Google data center. Carriers, phone companies, internet providers, and your home's Wifi router all already discriminate in favor of certain types of traffic. So we're living in a "not very neutral" internet already, but there has not yet been a loss of graph connectivity.

Nimur (talk) 15:35, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Oh, here's a new book, available at no cost: Economic Modeling in Networking, which sets out to answer questions like "what's the difference between efficiency and fairness," in the context of internet economics. Nimur (talk) 15:40, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you! That was very helpful! 24.128.61.100 (talk) 02:54, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Consider what happens to a site like Wikipedia. Without net neutrality, either Wikipedia pays money to the ISP's - or their slice of the bandwidth is reduced (presumably heavily - or else nobody pays the premium). Since Wikipedia doesn't have a whole lot of money to bid on the available bandwidth compared to (say) YouTube - they'll inevitably wind up running really slowly by comparison. Worse still, there isn't (yet) one single place you'd have to go to in order to negotiate a payment. In principle, you'd have to negotiate separately with every cellphone provider, every cable TV network, every telephone-DSL provider and so forth. To reach global coverage, you'd need a massive army of negotiators working with ISP's around the world. You'd also have to figure out where it's worth putting the money. Do you fund good coverage to AT&T and let Sprint customers get slower coverage? Do you provide better coverage to West-coast US users or East-coast?

Worse still, if one service provider decides that they can make a lot of money by charging web site owners money - it's only a matter of time until someone realizes that they can offer consumers "free" Internet and live off of the fees that web site owners pay them. We know that "free" or "very low cost" services are popular to consumers - that's why our (free) broadcast TV shows are stuffed full of annoying adverts. So once one ISP goes that route - it's only a matter of time before the others do too.

In a world where most people use "free" internet and web sites pay the bills - how can independent web sites possibly survive? Wikipedia couldn't function in that world - so it would pretty much die without taking on advertising, paid promotional articles or switch to a pay-per-use model.

Pretty soon, the Internet starts to look like TV. Advertisers will start to drive content. TV shows are not made to make viewers happy - they are made to pull in advertising revenue. That's how the Internet will eventually end up. Gone will be the time when a bunch of enthusiasts can put something together in a garage and become the next Google - they simply won't be able to break into the closed-society of high-paying web sites - so the general public will simply never see them.

None of those consequences are very nice...each one destroys the beautiful thing that the Internet has become.

SteveBaker (talk) 17:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you Steve! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.128.61.100 (talk) 00:06, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

The IPv4 endpoint of a 6to4 IPv6 address

Hello, I have a dynamic IP that I have been using for years. When the internets went all magic and changed to IPv6, my IP starting messing with me. I never received a IPv6 address for about a year, then started getting them sporadically. Recently, I seem to get one about once every two weeks (I receive a new IP every 8 hours when my dial-up IPS disconnects me, I leave my connection always on and have it auto-re-dial when disconnected). About once a month, I receive an IP that flips back and forth from IPv4 to IPv6; I know it is the same IP because the WHOIS of a IPv6 lists my IPv4 address and I know it flips back and forth because I use "special:mytalk" as a sandbox (so I could be on my IPv4 talk page/sandbox and then an hour later save an edit and it goes to my IPv6 address which WHOIS traces back to the same IPv4). So my questions are: 1) why do I receive an IPv6 address only some of the time, and 2) why then does it flip from an IPv4 address only some of that time? Rgrds. --2002:4055:D812:0:0:0:4055:D812 (talk) 17:09, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

You must have an IPv4 address all the time otherwise a big chunk of the internet wouldn't work for you and you couldn't use 6to4. Also it sounds like you are conflating issues which makes it difficult to diagnose anything. You could be connecting to wikimedia servers by IPv4 because your connection currently has not managed to obtain an IPv4 address by any means it's set up to or you could be connecting to wikimedia servers by IPv4 because you browser for some reason chose it over IPv6. Rather than confusing yourself with how you connect to wikimedia servers, you should first better diagnose whether you have a working IPv6 connection all the time or what.

For example, try pinging a host on IPv6 (ping -6 ipv6.google.com). Even better, work out from you router or whatever else is getting the IPv6 address whether it always has a public IPv6 address or what. Once you've worked out the state of your internet connections IPv6, you can then either move on to trying to work out why you sometimes connect to wikimedia servers via IPv4, if it really matters; or work out why your internet connection doesn't always have IPv6 (a problem with the relay or your router perhaps). At a minimum, you should at least test with another host, e.g. try accessing [3] and [4].

BTW, the internet never went all magic and 'changed to IPv6'. Sadly, many servers let alone connections still don't have IPv6. But some have had IPv6 for a long time. I started using IPv6 via a tunneling service in ~2007 which was in some ways fairly late (although root servers only got IPv6 in 2008). You may be thinking of World IPv6 Launch Day in 2012 when a number of major websites (including content mirroring providers/CDNs) added AAAA records for their main websites with the intention of leaving it on permanently. This meant these services were accessible by IPv6, so those with IPv6 may have accessed them via IPv6 depending on the set up of their browser and/or OS.

But many services did not take part and as I've said, a number already had AAAA records by that time so were alreadt accessible via IPv6. And a large number of connections still don't have working IPv6 so are still using IPv4 hopefully without issue. (One of the reason it took so long for these major services to enable IPv6 was not so much because their backends couldn't handle it, but because they were concerned that misconfigured hosts with IPv6 that wasn't working properly would have problems accessing their services. Google for example had ipv6.google.com for a while. And they even had a way of adding AAAA records for their services even before the IPv6 (trial) day, see IPv6 brokenness and DNS whitelisting.)

Nil Einne (talk) 13:26, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Changing default zoom in Pages 5.0

I'm using Pages 5.0 in Mavericks, and I want to change the default zoom to 150%; does anybody know what I need to type into Terminal to do this? I've seen people suggest the command "com.apple.iWork.Pages SLDefaultsPageScale 1.50", but of course that only works in Snow Leopard. --Lazar Taxon (talk) 19:17, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

January 18

Reviving dead torrents

I've been trying to download a "semi-dead" torrent on BitTorrent for a couple of days now. 404 MB out of the 5.57 GB size 320 kbps discography has been downloaded and I've been waiting for several days for the rest to finish downloading. No progress.... The torrent is only several years old by the way. I read that adding trackers would help bring back to life a dead torrent by adding seeds. I've tried to find online and add more trackers, but that didn't work for me. Is there any way that my torrent can be revived? What are some ways to bring a dead torrent back to life? Willminator (talk) 03:23, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, the general rule for torrents is that they're useless or pointless if there aren't any seeds supplying the download. Blake Gripling (talk) 06:01, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Right, without uploaders there is no downloading. But the OP is asking how to find more seeds, and indeed, adding trackers is one possible solution for that. Sometimes they are dead, so there is no work-around here. Maybe try another torrent with the same name. Possibly someone created a torrent of the same medium, maybe with a lower quality, but more seeds. BTW, several years old is a lot of time when it comes down to the internet. OsmanRF34 (talk) 14:33, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict) A tracker keeps, er, track of who is downloading and hosting (leeching/seeding) a torrent. If nobody is seeding, the odds are usually very low that the pieces of the torrent held by the leechers add up to form a whole. Adding more trackers looks at your peers (whether seeders or leechers) and checks to see if their torrent has other trackers associated with it (if you look through properties, etc. of a particular torrent you'll likely see it's associated with several). If the new trackers have been keeping track of seeders the original wasn't aware of, then great! But if that doesn't work -- and assuming your router isn't filtering out important ports -- you're kind of out of luck unless one of those seeders appears (but it's not unheard of). As OsmanRF34 points out, there are often multiple torrents with similar names associated with the same index/tracker. This is good for providing options, but bad because even if two are functionally identical, searching for trackers for one won't pull in those downloading/seeding the other. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  14:41, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Your best bet is probably to ask the band who's music it is to seed it. If they made a torrent, they must have been interested in distributing it in that fashion at one stage so maybe they still are. If it's not the band itself that's doing it, but it some sort of public domain or creative commons or whatever content, you can try looking at forums where there's interest in this sort of thing (archive.org may be a decent bet) and seeing if you can find someone with the content able to seed. In particular, see if you can find the person who originally contributed the content and where they started it. Of course if you're downloading copyright violating stuff, you may be SOL since contributors of such material are often intentionally difficult to find. Nil Einne (talk) 21:39, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Track changes

Is there a Track Changes option in Libre Office for Linux? KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 10:07, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

If you don't get an answer here this is their Q&A help forum.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:26, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

edit->changes->record and edit->changes->show -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:09, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Public Parsoid server ?

Hi,
I would like to know if the Wikimedia foundation shares its Parsoid server with the public, and if a user can log in from my private wikimedia board to the server.
I would like to know the details of the connection too.

Google maps light ?

When, in Google Chrome on Windows 7, 32-bit, I type a restaurant name as a general Google search term, it shows me a nice little preview map indicating the locations of that chain in my area. So far so food. Next I pick on the little map in the hopes of getting a full-sized map of the same thing, where I can zoom in and drag to find the names of local streets etc. This is where it all goes bad. Instead of what I want, I get a map showing every "point of interest" in the area, with pop-ups listing reviews of the restaurant, offering to recommend bicycle routes, etc. Even with nothing else running on my PC, this can take it down to a crawl. So, what's the easiest way to get what I want, just a larger version of the preview map, without all the bloatware ? StuRat (talk) 18:36, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Setting mode page ???

This is the scoop. I have latest the UltraISO. I just tried to burn a DVD with it. It gives me this error: "DVD-R/RW media requires setting mode page to use DAO writing." Farfetched: there is a program "mode" in Windows\System32. I ran it but it does not seem to be relevant at all. It gives COM1, COM2 and CON parameters, nothing else. What is the meaning of it? Thanks. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 18:37, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

It is possible that the cryptic message simply meant that the DVD was not formatted. Once I formatted the disk the message disappeared. When I do System restoration disk the backup itself formats the disk, so with UltraISO I was under the impression it would do the same. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 20:07, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

DAO means disk-at-once, and the "mode page" is a SCSI mode page, I assume (your drive uses ATAPI, which is SCSI over ATA). If it was a DVD±RW and by formatting you mean erasing, then the error message is probably nonsense resulting from UltraISO misinterpreting an error code from the DVD drive. It is possible to format a DVD±RW disc (by writing a blank UDF filesystem to which files can later be added), but that probably isn't what you're doing. -- BenRG (talk) 00:23, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

OutfoxTV still listed in System Configuration Startup despite removal

hello, I was looking thru the Startup files in System Configuration (msconfig) and I saw "OutfoxTV" listed screenshot. I have never seen this before, and I assume it came from something I downloaded from CNET for free. Anyway, I couldn't find OutfoxTV at all on my computer, not even where it was listed as being (Program Files\OutfoxTV, which didn't exist). So I downloaded it, installed and removed it, then restarted my computer but it still shows up in System Config. I found it in HKCU and removed it with RegEdit, restarted, but it still shows up. Is it safe to say it'll be in the Startup list forever, even though I can't find it on my computer?Bananas9 (talk) 20:50, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

AutoRuns should help. --  Gadget850 ^talk 12:53, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

If you delete it from the registry using regedit (at the branch indicated in the location column of msconfig) and it then reappears, something else is putting it back. Maybe it is one of the other startup programs, but since you don't recall installing it in the first place, it is quite possibly malware which snuck it onto your PC in the first place and now refuses to let you delete it. Astronaut (talk) 23:57, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I took a little more time to Google this. This appears to be malware. Here is a removal guide. --  Gadget850 ^talk 01:10, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Chrome Media Settings

Until recently, on going to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2 and clicking "Listen Live", a separate window appeared with the radio program streaming in it. Recently this changed so that the new window downloads a PLS file, which I then have to listen to with an external media player.
This is only happening in Chrome, so I assume I've changed a setting somehow. Can anyone tell me how to change it back?
Thanks, Rojomoke (talk) 23:20, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

January 19

clearing stuck print queue

An item that the print queue (Windows 7) says is "deleting" won't go away when I Cancel All Documents. How can I get rid of it? Thanks, --Halcatalyst (talk) 01:37, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I've often had the same problem. Sometimes connecting the relevant printer allowed me to delete the stuck document, and sometimes I've needed to restart the computer (or even delete and reinstall the driver in Vista). Dbfirs 09:02, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I have clients who have this issue every week. You can do it the long way,[5] or create a batch file.[6] --  Gadget850 ^talk 12:52, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, gadget's solution is better than mine. I like the batch file. That would have saved me a lot of time when I was having problems (years ago). Dbfirs 13:24, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Came back to it after turning off the computer overnight and "deleting" was gone. Cancelled All Documents, and the item disappeared. However, I am going to write down how to create the batch file. Thanks to you both. --173.16.18.137 (talk) 16:39, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

For advanced uses, I have a version that adds an entry to a log file. I then have the Print Spooler service call the batch file whenever it crashes. I also have a version that elevates the command prompt to admin level. --  Gadget850 ^talk 18:00, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Answers above are more than sufficient, but here's Microsoft's official answer (from XP days) which includes the solution that works for me: my printer seems to be one that I can just turn off/on to clear the spool. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  14:53, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

What came before the Unix shell?

If there were no windowing system at the time, how did users at that time interacted with the system? Only with punch cards or is there any missing link between shell and cards?? OsmanRF34 (talk) 14:29, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Let's not confuse the user input device with the shell. Technically, you could scan a set of punched cards to provide input to bash or any other Unix-style shell. If you wanted, you could add a punched-card machine to provide very inefficient I/O for a modern operating system - even replacing mouses and touchscreens - because of the abstraction tthat serialization of data allows.

Before the bash shell there was a long line of similar shells. Before that, there were command-line monitor programs. Before that, most computers had very simplistic user-interfaces that were designed to be controlled by programmers - there were no users who didn't also program. Computers programs were a lot less interactive, because they were slow, and they shared resources; so in the very early days of computing, programmers wrote codes and ran them; the only input and output were stored files.

Files could be stored on a deck of punched cards, or on magnetic tape, or on another computer. For example, the IBM 1401 was commonly attached to the IBM 7090 so the bigger processor could be working at full utilization, while a programmer provided data on the smaller and cheaper system.

Since the early 1950s, the file system abstraction has allowed programmers to design code that is agnostic to the physical storage medium. An early program did not need to know whether its input came from a punched card deck or a serial magnetic tape. Of course, there have always been pesky cases of broken abstraction, and they were more problematic in the era when hardware limitations were much more severe. Nimur (talk) 16:18, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

• Quoting from our shell (computing) article: The first Unix shell, Ken Thompson's sh, was modeled after the Multics shell, itself modeled after the RUNCOM program Louis Pouzin showed to the Multics Team. Looie496 (talk) 16:36, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

• An interface that was more interactive than punch cards, but less interactive than video terminals, was the printing terminal. Some of these were teletype machines. One, the IBM 2741, was based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:27, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Before the GUI windowing system (invented at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center), people usually interacted with computers using dumb terminals. For example, the IBM 3270 and VT100 terminals connected to mainframe and minicomputers, and DOS like environments running on PCs. These were not really shells but command line interfaces where you type commands to make the computer perform an action such as edit a file, compile a program, or run a shell script (a collection of these commands in a file). The use of dumb terminals is far from dead, though it is more often done today using a terminal emulation program (PuTTY is one such emulator).

Before dumb terminals, there were teletypes which were used to produce programs and their input data on punched card or paper tape.

Astronaut (talk) 23:48, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia-like software for writing academic papers

Does anyone know if there is a way to use the wikipedia software to write academic papers? I find that it's easier if I use my sandbox, and then it generates a nice looking page with the footnotes and then references at the bottom...or have I answered my own question? Hires an editor (talk) 14:39, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

You can install your own instance of MediaWiki to run on your own computer. You can even configure it to keep all your data totally private, instead of sharing it like a public website. You can use it to write your own papers, or your own encyclopedia, or any other writing task that you see fit. Nimur (talk) 16:21, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Bear in mind though that much of what you may regard as standard functionality on wikipedia, including part of the citation system comes from templates. Simply installing MediaWiki even with all the added extensions like cite.php may not give you what you expect from wikipedia. You'd need to install these templates on your own wiki which may take a bit of work since there's a fair few of them often dependant on a main template (although I believe this is changing with the rise of lua).

However writing it in your sandbox yourself here on en.wikipedia isn't a good idea. Beyond the fact you may not want to share this info so publicly, WP:wikipedia is not a webhost so you're likely to find your sandbox deleted at any time if you use it for that purpose. So if you do want to use a MediaWiki like system, it may be your best bet.

Nil Einne (talk) 21:33, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

I think you're going to find that you have great difficulty getting your document into the format needed for submission. If you like the "wiki" style of doing things, I recommend [[LaTeX|Template:LaTeX]]. That can get you into difficulties too, but thousands of people have figured out ways of solving them. Looie496 (talk) 18:31, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Likewise: In the long run, I think you would be better off learning the simple coding of LaTeX. It creates very professional results, which is why perhaps, so many professionals use it for creating their academic papers.--Aspro (talk) 18:33, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

LaTeX is powerful, but it's quite clunky compared to the numerous alternatives. I would only recommend learning and using LaTeX if you are working among a community who also uses it. LaTeX is intended for typesetting printed documents. That is, the final product will go on paper. Compared to MediaWiki markup, HTML, or even just a hyperlinked Microsoft Word document, LaTeX produces very poor digital document. Its file-format is esoteric; its rendering system is slow; its hyperlinking featureset is limited; embedding dynamic content, like an animation, video, or software simulation in the document is nearly impossible; its portability to modern operating systems (like Windows, Android, iOS, for example) is very poor. Many people work around this limitation by rendering, and then exporting, rendered LaTeX documents to PostScript (or Enhanced Post Script); or to PDF; this yields a static document that cannot be easily reflowed, re-edited, or re-typeset on different types of screens. Nonetheless, many people still use LaTeX - especially in fields related to mathematics - because some authors find LaTeX syntax for mathematics very convenient, and they do not wish to learn how to use a LaTeX plug-in for Microsoft Word, or MediaWiki, or Open Office.

If you're looking to author journal submissions, check your journal's recommendations for digital document formats. Many journals now prefer a rendered PDF document, or a Microsoft Word file, rather than raw TEX markup. Nimur (talk) 18:45, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have a well-known bias against LaTeX, as evidenced by our archived discussions on this topic. In my defense, I have learned and used LaTeX extensively - so intensively that I can identify its shortcomings. I have successfully compiled the LaTeX processing pipeline from source (...and many more times, I have tried to do so unsuccessfully). I have backported document layouts and TeX wrapper scripts; I have operated all the bibtex workarounds and tex2html hacks too many times to count. I freely admit that the TeX-style mathematical equation syntax is quite convenient. Everything else about TeX is stuck three decades behind its competition. Mathematicians and physicists would do the world a favor if they would write HTML instead of TeX. If mathematicians desire more compact syntax for writing mathematical formulae, they ought learn MATLAB or FORTRAN or C, because there is not an equation yet expressible in human-readable format that cannot be equally-well-represented as a valid computer program. If mathematicians desire more "beautiful" equation rendering, they ought to learn how to write better style-sheets; and if there is truly something deficient in the rendered document, then they out to design a specialized HTML layout engine. Nimur (talk) 19:05, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Ugh! LATEX does exactly what you tell it. Academic journals will thus, be happy to accept it for the foreseeable future or until microsoft comes up with something better. Why when one can create Latex doc's should one have to learn all these other things? LATEX for academics and researchers who (think they) don't need it--Aspro (talk) 19:12, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Do you find it surprising that your link is a PDF document, and not a TEX document? Or, that when I view it on my 64-bit Unix supercomputer, the document's footnotes are not hyperlinked? This document's author painstakingly crafted \ref links, and then destroyed their functionality by rendering to a not-very-portable-document-format. The author could equally have typed "Footnote 1” in a plain-text document. I could then set my font to Computer Modern, and the document would be equally functional, and use fewer bytes. Nimur (talk) 19:15, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

To clarify, I didn't intend to give a ringing endorsement of LaTeX. It has huge advantages over MediaWiki, but in the modern world I believe there are numerous better alternatives. Looie496 (talk) 19:24, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. There may well be, better applications than Latex but we (I and every-bodies else’s dogs) would be interested in examples, rather than a 'belief' that such other applications exist. Then we can discus them and so answer the OP's question more fully.--Aspro (talk) 20:14, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

The OP asked for "Wikipedia-like" software - which would be a private instance of MediaWiki. I have used the same set-up for documenting hobby projects and collaborative projects. Sometimes, wiki-syntax is exactly what I need for document preparation, instead of a word-processor.

If the OP is looking for alternative word-processors of the more conventional variety, there are numerous choices. Microsoft Word is the obvious market-leader; and OpenOffice/LibreOffice are free software alternatives. These offer many of the advantages of TeX, with generally better usability and better platform portability. If your primary computer runs iOS or OS X, Apple's Pages software is very convenient and is now available at no charge. Mathematicians who need symbolic mathematical formatting, but also need to do useful work, can purchase Waterloo Maple - which, in the hands of a skilled operator, produces fantastic documents that can also execute complex calculations.

If what you must have is a mark-up language (as opposed to a word-processing software tool), there are many alternatives: other mark-up languages, like XML, MathML, HTML, or Wiki syntax, or even JavaDoc; all of these are better defined than TeX (in the sense of having a complete formal grammar), and that encourages documents that are more well-formed than TeX. Nimur (talk) 09:39, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

I've been using LaTeX for more than 20 years, and there are a number of (what I consider) good reasons for it. All journals and conferences I work with accept either LaTeX or LaTeX-generated PDF, and they provide LaTeX style files that make it easy to conform to their typesetting requirements. Typically, they even suggest LaTeX as the preferred format for preparation, even if they want the result in PDF. Secondly, LaTeX makes easy things (plain text, lists, definitions) easy and easy to get consistent. It makes hard things (mathematical typesetting) possible, and with some practice, bearable. LaTeX also is compact - the typing and reading overhead is a lot less than for XML-based formats. Thirdly, LaTeX is plain text. I can use my favourite text editor, which is both powerful, responsive, and unobtrusive. Being plain text, I can write code to generate LaTeX output - most of the tables in my papers are generated directly from experimental results using a bit of Python or AWK or shell. And again, being plain text, I can use standard version control software like git or subversion for both version control and collaboration. And thirdly, LaTeX is open both in theory, but also in a practical sense. I can still open and process files from 20 years ago. Even if, for some reason, the file won't compile anymore, I can still look at the source and typically get all of the content. And because LaTeX is an open and transparent format, I don't suffer from vendor lock-in - which is bad if the vendor is good, but catastrophic if the vendor goes out of business. Finally, LaTeX is pretty much standard in my field. Everyone can get it, it's free, and exchanging documents is painless (unlike documents that passed through, say, 5 different versions of Word). Now the fact that I use Beamer (LaTeX) for slides has to have something to do with stubbornness and irrationality ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:18, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Nimur, if you've used LaTeX extensively you must know that PDF supports hyperlinked footnotes/references and LaTeX supports them in PDF output. Why that particular document doesn't have internal hyperlinks I don't know, but it isn't because they used LaTeX and/or PDF. Also, distributing documents as PDF, instead of in editable source form, is not exactly peculiar to the TeX world. -- BenRG (talk) 07:06, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

They may accept it, I don't know whether all are happy about it. Consider these two guidelines from prominent journals [7] [8]/[9]. Both prefer Word or Wordperfect. The latter won't even accept the TeX file wanting a PDF (well I imagine they have no problems if you convert it to another format they accept like RTF or TXT). The former will accept the TeX file in addition to the PDF or PS for your final submission (it requires a PDF for the initial submission, I think most expect that to make it easier for reviewers). And while I don't know how old it is, they say they want it simple because 'converting LaTeX files to Word format relies on a DOS-based utility that converts to HTML as an intermediate format'.

Another prominent journal albeit with a narrower focus [10], doesn't mention TeX at all, and although they accept TXT, since they require an editable/modifable format and prefer Word, it's unlikely they accept it. Of course you could publish it to TXT or perhaps RTF yourself [11] like you're basically doing with Nature but the fact they didn't mention it suggests it's not something they wish to concern themselves with.

Sure some are happy with TeX [12], but clearly the idea all journals are happy with it doesn't seem to be supported when some don't even accept it and others seem to indicate it's not something they really like to deal with. This doesn't seem to be a new thing either. An article from 1996 in the same LaTeX journal you linked to above [13] says something similar.

Nil Einne (talk) 21:22, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Nit: TUGboat is not a LaTeX journal, but rather a journal on digital typography with a focus on TeX in general. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:00, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Psiphon 1 fails to display HTTPS websites

Dear Wikipedians:

I set up a Psiphon 1 server. I logged onto my Psiphon server from another computer and browsed a few HTTP websites, they all worked well. However, when I attempt to browse an HTTPS website, I got an error page that says:

HTTP Error 501/Not Implemented.

I am wondering what is going on and how I can resolve this error?

Thanks,

184.147.43.3 (talk) 23:48, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

January 20

Ubuntu in VirtualBox

Hello! I am trying to set up my Windows Server 2008 (among other things). I installed Oracle's VirtualBox and it seems to be working more or less OK. Then I tried to install Ubuntu Desktop. I downloaded it, unzipped it with UltraISO, copied the whole directory on a DVD, burned it and used the executable file there to install the OS. I hoped that somehow it will end up as the Guest OS in Virtual Box but this does not seem to be the case. It appears (I may be wrong) that it is now a third OS on this computer because I see it on Windows Boot Manager (black screen). I have now Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Ubuntu there. What did I do wrong and how to correct it? Thanks, --AboutFace 22 (talk) 01:44, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

It sounds like you have indeed installed Ubuntu directly onto your hard disk as a third OS alongside your two Windows installations. You probably now have the option to choose Server 2008, Windows 7 or Ubuntu at boot time. Unfortunately, you cannot switch between them without rebooting.

Ubuntu is not installed in the virtual machine (Virtualbox). To install it, you first need to create a virtual machine. Virtualbox supplies a few configurations (including one for Ubuntu) for you to start with, or you can create your own from scratch. Make sure your VM is created sufficient virtual hard disk space and sufficient memory - this suggests a minimum 5 GB disk space and 500 MB memory], though you will almost certainly want more if you want to run anything other than just the OS. Once configured, start Virtualbox and then start your virtual machine. The virtual machine's BIOS will detect that no OS is installed and at that point you tell it to look at the Ubuntu Desktop ISO file you downloaded or or the DVD you created. It will install Ubuntu to its virtual hard drives and then you're done.

As for removing your triple-boot Ubuntu from your hard drive, that is quite easy though you might have to do something with the Windows Boot Manager - I'm not sure what (maybe someone else can help with that). Astronaut (talk) 12:23, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. I did create two virtual machines in VirtualBox: Windows 8 and Ubuntu BEFORE I installed UBUNTU from the DVD. It was easy. Unfortunately it did not give me that option you describe. I sort of expected it but it never appeared. I will try to read literature more closely. Ubuntu now appears in the Boot sequence and also as a program installed in Windows Server. It is in Control Panel==>Uninstall Programs. Thus it can be removed. Besides I know how to do BCDedit. I've done it many times. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 15:53, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

A virtual machine in Virtualbox is like a separate machine with its own BIOS, its own (and initially empty) hard disks, its own memory, etc. I recommend you read the manual - particularly '1.8. Running your virtual machine' - to read how to install an OS in a virtual machine. There are also video tutorials - just search on Youtube. Astronaut (talk) 18:53, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Astronaut. It is all very useful. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 02:31, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

How to find out if this tower has an OS?

typing on phone, sorry for grammar etc.

My boss wants me to get an old tower in working order. its a dell inspiron with a Vista sticker. When i crank it up, it warns me that the hard drive selfchecker has detected a possible problem with the hard drive. ging forward takes me to the Dell splash page and the Windows XP (?) splash page before it tells me Windows didnt shut down properly, would I like to start in safe mode, safe mode with network, safe mode with command prompt, last known working settings, or normally? All do the same thing; load for a while then loop backto the hard drive warning. doing a dell selfcheck with f12 fails because it cant find the partition. there is nothing in the cd drives.

I suspect there may be no os installed. how would i go about testing this? hoe do i fix it if he doesnt have the disks handy? wat else might be the problem? and why does a vista computer haven XP splash page? --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 09:11, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

If the XP splash screen displays there was/is at least 1 OS installed - i.e XP. Could be a dual-boot system but I would guess that it was downgraded from Vista to XP. Easiest way to check the drive is to remove it from the tower and plug it in another (working) tower or USB housing. Download Seatools (or whatever is appropriate for your brand of HDD) and run the diagnostics. Run chkdsk x: /r from the command prompt (where "x" is the applicable drive letter for the drive). If all goes well you should be able to browse the drive and partitions. You will be able to tell from the folder structure if it is XP/Vista. If there is more than 1 bootable partition you will need someone other than me to help you. The first step is to establish if the drive is not fubar otherwise you're wasting your time.196.214.78.114 (talk) 10:14, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Another option which should at least get you to the point where you can look around for what the problem is would be to use a Ubuntu LiveCD/USB stick. It's a free operating system that will let you run the operating system off of the usb/livecd without trying to install anything. It's pretty easy to do, even. Without the Windows discs this may be the best way. And, of course, you could always install Ubuntu or another Linux distribution instead of Windows to avoid future problems caused by not having the discs (or by not having an up-to-date operating system). Regardless, I would also recommend running diagnostics on it. Even if you format and reinstall the OS you could still have hardware issues (e.g. a bad hard drive). --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  15:01, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Since I don't have a second tower I could easily plug the harddrive into that isnt currently in use, I'm going to attempt the Linux workaround just to get inside the machine without having to take it apart. Any recommendations on diagnostics I should prioritize once I'm in the system? I figure harddrive-related things are the most obvious target.

Also assuming this doesnt work and i have to insert the harddrive into a new tower; the second tower won't be in danger right? Do hard drives just work in any tower, or do I have to keep the same make/model/providing company? Just dont want to take out another company computer. --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 16:04, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Is there something special about that tower? Otherwise this seems like an incredibly inefficient way for your boss to use the salary you are being paid. Looie496 (talk) 16:21, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Despite my degree in Literature, I'm known as the office 'tech guy' and all technical problems are directed to me. I just fixed the printer, remapped the network and am currently installing drivers for a scanner, with only Google, logic, and you guys helping me out. Thank you I should add :) --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 19:16, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

You're obviously a techie ;-). But the point is that a reasonable tower sells for about US$500, so unless you are very cheap or "there anyways", from an economic point of view, you should probably not fix machines that take more than a small single-digit number of hours to fix. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:05, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

I think i may have found the problem. i got ubuntu up and it works fine. followed these steps http://askubuntu.com/questions/317241/can-i-use-ubuntu-to-diagnose-hard-drive-or-ram-problems-in-windows but according to disk utility there is nothng under local storage. there are just no options except peripheral devices. oes that mean there is no OS installed? --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 20:22, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

No, that would mean it doesn't see a hard drive there. Might be a controller issue, might be a hard drive issue, but almost certainly not an OS issue (at least that wouldn't be your only issue). My instinct would be to tell you to run GParted rather than the Disk Utility to take another look, but that may just be based on my preference. At this point, now that you're [at least temporarily] a Ubuntu user, I would point you to the quite active and generally very helpful Ubuntu Forums, which will have a lot more OS gurus than frequent here, I think. --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  21:14, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

GParted agrees that the only partition is the one on the computer. I admit to being slightly out of my league here, but I guess tonight I can ask the Ubuntu forums for help and see what they can do. Any further advice or recommendations on actions to take, let me know. Thank you all for helping me get this far :) 50.43.130.15 (talk) 23:04, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Oh I thought you had nothing listed under local storage other than peripheral device (usb/cd). What is the partition "on the computer?" --— Rhododendrites ^talk |  23:16, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Typo...I meant "is the one on the thumb drive." The Linux one I just added. 50.43.130.15 (talk) 23:53, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Focal Adhesion Counter

Hello. I count focal adhesions on about 200 photos a week with ImageJ. Is there a program that can automate this process so I do not need to manually contour the cells on my photos, measure the area of the contour, and summarize the number of focal adhesions? Thanks in advance. --Mayfare (talk) 23:28, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

For something as specialized as this, the only hope is to ask around among people who do similar work. Looie496 (talk) 03:33, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Well you may be in luck - while I haven't worked on such things myself I have several colleagues who do automated microscopy analysis of cells and whom I could ask about this. The first thing you need to think about though, is how you define a focal adhesion in your images in terms which a computer can understand (i.e. absolutely specific and precise). You must precisely define a set of criteria that segregate the images fairly exactly into "focal adhesions" and "not focal adhesions". For example, what stainings do you have? Are focal adhesions in your images areas of colocalisation between two stains, do they have a maximum and minimum size, are they a characteristic shape etc.? You also need to contour your cells, but that is an easier problem as it is such a common thing to do that lots of pre-existing solutions exist.

The reason I am asking all this is that there are lots of programs which automate microscopy analysis, but they all have different capabilities, so I can't recommend one unless I know exactly what you want to do. If you get back to me with a) what your images are (are they 2d or 3d, confocal or wide-field, what stains do you have?) b) How you define both cells and focal adhesions, I can ask my colleagues whether they think any of the programs they are familiar with can possibly automate your analysis (a definitive answer is not possible, as so much depends on the quality of the data). A final word of warning; programs for advanced microscopy automation can be powerful, cheap or easy to use, and if you're very lucky indeed you get to pick two out of three. You may end up needing to spend many thousands of dollars and learn some esoteric scripting language if your requirements are sufficiently advanced . Equisetum (talk | contributions) 11:42, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

January 21

Finding specific Wikimarkup

Many people on Wikipedia use relative image sizing of thumbnails to respect logged-in registered user's preferences where they have bothered to set them.

Unfortunately, over at our sister project Wikivoyage the discussion about introducing this image syntax seems to have both been sidelined and stalled.

I'm trying to find occurrences of "|upright=" within 20 characters of "thumb" so that I can see the earliest use of relative image sizing of thumbnails in a Wikivoyage article to bolster the case for introducing this syntax more widely there. Does anyone know of a tool or simple method I could use to search with, please? --118.93nzp (talk) 04:23, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

You could download the complete edit history of every article and search it locally. The file is only 320 MB compressed, but expands to 65 GB, so you might be limited in the tools you can use. Here's a short Python 2.x program that will search for approximately what you're looking for.

    import re, sys
    for line in sys.stdin:
        m = re.search('<timestamp>(.*)</timestamp>', line)
        if m: timestamp = m.group(1)
        m = re.search('<title>(.*)</title>', line)
        if m: title = m.group(1)
        if re.search(r'thumb.{,20}\|upright=', line) and title is not None:
            print timestamp, title
            title = None  # only print the earliest revision

You would use it like this:

   7z x -so enwikivoyage-20140117-pages-meta-history.xml.7z | python find_thumb_upright.py

-- BenRG (talk) 08:54, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

One can alternatively use more elegant tools. →Σσς. (Sigma) 09:53, 21 January 2014 (UTC)