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October 1

Part Number for Drive Tray used by HPE D2700 Disk Enclosure

I have bought a bare HPE D2700 Disk Enclosure (AJ941A), i.e. with only 2 SAS 6Gb Controllers, 2 PSUs and 25 Drive Blanks.
I intend to populate the D2700 with SSDs of my choice, but I first need to know the Part Number for the compatible Drive Tray, as the Drive Blanks cannot be used to install Drives. Vickreman.Chettiar 10:50, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This forum thread may be useful. Tevildo (talk) 19:34, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a keystroke to return to 100% magnification ?

...using Windows 7, and typically Google Chrome. I am aware that CTRL 0 returns to "default zoom level", but that doesn't help. I want to be able to quickly go between 100% and 200% zoom levels, but CTRL + and CTRL - go in small steps: 100%, 110%, 125%, 150%, 175%, 200%. I currently have 200% set as the default, so that means I need many keystrokes to get back to 100%. I could set 100% as the default, but then I would have many steps to get to 200%. Ideally, 200% would remain the default, so CTRL 0 would still get me directly there, and I could get to 100% in one other keystroke.

Alternatively, if there's a way I can eliminate the intermediate steps, that would make me happy, too. BTW, if you're curious, my eyesight isn't so good, so I would prefer 200% all the time, except that an amazingly high proportion of web sites don't seem to handle that setting properly. Thanks, StuRat (talk) 00:38, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

See Windows key. ⊞ Win++ will zoom to 200%, ⊞ Win+- will zoom out if the Magnifier Utility is running, and ⊞ Win+Esc will exit the utility. Tevildo (talk) 08:15, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, but I prefer to just use the zoom in the browser, to avoid the overhead from the magnifier utility, which also lacks the option to magnify the entire screen, under Windows 7, 32 bit edition. StuRat (talk) 16:20, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

OK. There is a Chrome extension called "Shortkeys" that appears to do what you want, but I've not used it myself and this isn't an endorsement. You can also zoom in and out with Ctrl-MouseWheel, which may be quicker than the keyboard, although it may not be obvious when you're at 100% rather than 110%. Tevildo (talk) 21:05, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. CTRL mouse wheel works, and it lists the magnification level at all steps except the default zoom level, probably because that makes the "RESET TO DEFAULT" button (listed with the magnification) moot. StuRat (talk) 13:55, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, you might want to talk to your optician about getting a pair of bifocals, or a separate pair of reading glasses. I wouldn't be able to operate without them. Tevildo (talk) 08:22, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You haven't read all my recent posts, I see. I have a skin condition which precludes me from wearing glasses, jewelry, watches, or even tight clothes. Therefore, I wear a single contact lens, so I have near vision in one eye and far vision in the other. (There supposedly are bifocal contact lens, but I am skeptical about how well they might work, so haven't tried them yet.) StuRat (talk) 16:17, 1 October 2016 (UTC) [reply]

Make building from scratch every time

I'm following the instructions here[1] to build Unity, specially using the "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b" command given. The first time building it took 25 minutes, which is to be expected, since it's a big program. No biggie. But my problem is that every subsequent build is also taking 25 minutes, meaning it's starting from scratch for some reason. I'm pretty sure it's building from scratch because I see messages like "[ 44%] Building CXX object launcher/CMakeFiles/switcher.dir/StandaloneSwitcher.cpp.o" when I haven't modified any cpp files at all, so no objects file should need to be recompiled.

How do I make it so that it builds incrementally? I.e. only compile and link the portion of the problem that that has been changed since the last build.

AFAIK make does incremental builds by default, and no sane person would turn off incremental builds without a very very pressing reason, so I'm at a loss as to why this is happening in the first place. Pizza Margherita (talk) 03:32, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That's the default behaviour. To only do an incremental build, add the '-uc' option. From the man page

 -nc    Do not clean the source tree (implies -b if nothing else has been selected among -F, -g, -G, -B, -A or -S).

LongHairedFop (talk) 14:03, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Is it '-uc' or '-nc'? You said '-uc' but the man page says '-nc'. Pizza Margherita (talk) 16:16, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

With the '-nc' option it's not building from scratch anymore, which is great. But the bad news is that it's not building at all now. After a successful build with "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -nc -uc", I made some changes, and ran "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -nc -uc", but here's the result:

time dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -nc -uc
dpkg-buildpackage: source package unity
dpkg-buildpackage: source version 7.4.0+16.04.20160906-0ubuntu1
dpkg-buildpackage: source distribution xenial
dpkg-buildpackage: source changed by Marco Trevisan (Treviño)
dpkg-buildpackage: host architecture amd64
 dpkg-source --before-build unity-7.4.0+16.04.20160906
 debian/rules build
dh build --with translations,quilt,python2,python3,migrations --parallel
 fakeroot debian/rules binary
dh binary --with translations,quilt,python2,python3,migrations --parallel
 dpkg-genchanges  >../unity_7.4.0+16.04.20160906-0ubuntu1_amd64.changes
dpkg-genchanges: including full source code in upload
 dpkg-source --after-build unity-7.4.0+16.04.20160906
dpkg-buildpackage: full upload (original source is included)

real	0m1.275s
user	0m1.096s
sys	0m0.068s

Basically the build system thinks nothing has changed, and that there's nothing to build. Pizza Margherita (talk) 21:32, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

php without script file

So I have a php script with;

<?php
echo hash('md5', $argv[1]);
?>

that gets called from the command line as so;

php.exe -f md5.php textgoeshere

which produces;

96ad4fad21a0d24c732a00cf3450e2ae

as the output. How can I do this with php directly on the command line bypassing the need for calling a separate .php script containing the function? Cohefuku (talk) 14:34, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

php -r "echo hash('md5', $argv[1]);" textgoeshere. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 14:54, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, thanks zzuuzz! You're now officially a contributor to my new bot. I hope you'll be looking forward the to little surprise I have planned for the reference desk in the next few days... hehehe! Cohefuku (talk) 15:43, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)This should work (works on Linux, I think it should be okay on Windows too):

   echo "<?php echo hash ('md5', 'textgoeshere') ?>" | php

-- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:57, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You can also do it a bit more simply on Linux systems like this

echo -n textgoeshere | md5sum

This will work on Windows too if md5sum is installed (although your version of course requires php to be installed). CodeTalker (talk) 21:01, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Has any criminal been caught through machine learning?

I know that ML can be useful for detecting fraud or tax evaders. It could also be a good tool for concentrating police patrols there were more crimes could happen.

However, was any concrete case been solved by machine learning? --Hofhof (talk) 19:01, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What an incredibly broad question! To help formulate your question better, you might want to look up some useful jargon and start thinking about the way our legal framework does things.

Cases are never "solved" - they are decided, or remedied, or settled. And evidence is never the solution, either!

Admissible evidence means some document, testimony, or tangible item that a court allows attorneys to present during a case.

Dispositional evidence [2] means that the evidence was in itself enough to set the result of the case.

Actionable intelligence means some fact or information - legal or otherwise - that lets a law enforcement agency make forward progress, possibly leading to a warrant or an arrest.

So, a better way to phrase your question might be:

"Has a machine learning algorithm ever yielded admissible evidence in a court case?" Surely yes, thousands of times; but it might take a while to find great examples. If we broadly consider that much of modern forensic evidence, particulary biometric data like fingerprints, results from computer systems that may incorporate machine learning methods, then it will be easy to find examples.
"Has a machine learning algorithm ever yielded dispositional evidence in a court case?" Surely yes, but it might take many hours reading boring court documents to track down good examples.
"Has a machine learning algorithm ever yielded actionable evidence leading to an arrest?" Surely yes, but the records might not be public unless a court releases them. Once again, it may take hours to track down great examples.

Many people speculate, for example, that Palantir Technologies employs machine learning engineers to create products that are used by the FBI to investigate white-collar crime and to investigate human-trafficking. Some speculate that this technology was also used to catch Usama bin Laden, a rumor often repeated by major news outlets like Forbes. I was not able to find any data that convinces me beyond a reasonable doubt - at least, not during a cursory search of the websites of the Department of Justice and the FBI's website. (I have looked before, and never found anything conclusive, either, but as they say, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence...)

Here is a case study from the FBI's website: Social Network Analysis: A Systematic Approach for Investigating. "With the support of robust technology, SNA becomes reliable across time, data, analysts, and networks and quickly produces actionable results inside any operational law enforcement environment." (The jargon in that sentence basically means that the FBI believes it can solve crimes using such algorithmic analysis). In this particular case study, the algorithmic information did not lead to an arrest or conviction, but researchers believe it could have led to arrest and conviction if administrative and legal policies were different.

Nimur (talk) 01:37, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't a field I understand that well, but it probably depends what you mean by machine learning. The controversial software TrueAllele uses Markov chain Monte Carlo and the Matlab Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox [3] [4] [5] [6]. One of its competitors STRmix is programmed in Java and doesn't use Matlab but my impression is its design is similar [7] [8] [9]. Again I don't understand these that well but I don't know if you could say they were built using machine learning, and I'm fairly sure they don't learn between runs, but potentially you could say they use machine learning within a run. (The first external links for each software is the best explaination I found for how each work from a quick look.) Both BTW have been controvesially used in court cases in various jurisdictions including the US. Nil Einne (talk) 06:47, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

One may also want to be careful about what one means by ML leading to evidence. In many cases, it may be that the ML algorithms are used to uncover something that is subsequently reviewed by humans and the human interpretation rather than the computer one is what is presented in court. Circumstances where ML results are directly presented as evidence are probably quite a bit rarer than circumstances where they assist the development of a case in an intermediate fashion. For example, I don't know exactly how modern fingerprint database searches work, but I could certainly believe ML plays a role. However, when a fingerprint match is presented to the court, it is almost certainly based on the subsequent review and interpretation of a human expert rather than simply reporting what the computer generated. In part this is because of the role of cross-examination. Computers are complex, and some ML methods are quite opaque, which can make it easier for defense lawyers to cast doubt on their accuracy. So the prosecution is likely to rely heavily on human judgment when actually presenting a case before a judge and jury even if the initial observations leading to critical conclusions were first revealed by a machine. Dragons flight (talk) 07:15, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Steve Jobs, from literature drop-off to tech entrepreneur

How could someone like Steve Jobs, with an educational background in literature (and not even a degree), become that successful in a technical field? --Llaanngg (talk) 19:17, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Some would say he had a stronger background in electronics. There's a lot of people who have been successful at things which have nothing to do with their formal (institutional) education. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 21:13, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The technical stuff was done by other employees (originally Steve Wozniak). Jobs was just a manager cum charismatic guru. -- BenRG (talk) 21:28, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That leads us to the question what he was doing there. Of the real work was done by Wozniak. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Llaanngg (talk • contribs) 21:53, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

He handled funding and manufacturing and marketing and sales. There's a lot to do in a tech startup other than laying out circuit boards and writing software. -- BenRG (talk) 22:07, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, here's a source: a recent interview in which Woz said "Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs" and "he did not know technology". I don't think this is a revelation to anyone in the industry: everyone knew that Woz was the engineer and Jobs was the businessman. -- BenRG (talk) 22:38, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think you are correct about people "in the industry", but anecdotally a lot of "average people" think Jobs invented the personal computer. Shows you how much of an impact image-crafting can have. This might be where the original poster is coming from. --47.138.165.200 (talk) 01:06, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The original question asked how he became successful - and that question can be addressed entirely without reference to his technical skill. If you want to know about Steve's life, his authoritative biography, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, is worth reading.

Nimur (talk) 01:03, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Also note that Bill Gates similarly is not so much a tech guy as a businessman, but recognized that the computer mouse (invented by others, such as Xerox) would be world changing, and made his software and hardware mouse-compatible starting in 1983-1984. StuRat (talk) 14:02, 2 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bill Gates was more programmer than businessman in the early days. See Bill Gates#Early life. -- BenRG (talk) 03:10, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(EC)Whoa back the truck up, by all accounts Bill Gates was a very skillful programmer. You can't put Bill and Jobs in the same basket. Bill became one of the most successful business men in history, but he started as "very much a tech guy", Jobs didn't even start as a tech guy. Vespine (talk) 03:11, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It is also well documented by both Bill Gates and Warren Buffet that Bill tried to get Warren to be the owner and head of what would become Microsoft, but Warren didn't believe that he had the financing at the time. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was already touting his concept of treating sales as a religion, encased beautifully in Klaatu's "Perpetual Motion Machine" lyrics. 209.149.113.4 (talk) 16:38, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Because Jobs had the advantage of being both a great perfectionist for whom people would do their best work and also being around at the time when the state of the personal computer industry was so undeveloped that someone with minimal qualifications but considerable imagination could get into it and become successful in it. Similarly, Gates dropped out of Harvard slightly earlier because he felt that the developments of the period were so exciting that he had to drop out of Harvard and set up his own company before it was too late. Let's not forget that Jobs failed in many ways, too: when he set up NeXT a few years later, by the time Windows and MS-DOS had achieved dominance, it did not manage to win many customers - it was the Windows Phone 7 or WebOS of its day, admired but not used. It took Apple buying NeXT and making him CEO again to put its technologies to great use. There's an alternate universe where he gave up on it, Apple folded and he concentrated on running Pixar and that's what we remember him for. Blythwood (talk) 19:55, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

October 3

Manipulating images

Hi all--I need something easy to help me manipulate some images. Specifically, I have eight gifs I need to combine into a single jpg. My PC is nothing special and I have no special graphic software, and I am hoping to do this with the stuff I have which includes Picture Manager and standard Windows stuff. I have Image Processor but I have no idea what it is or does. Your help is much appreciated. Drmies (talk) 14:47, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Are the GIFs animated? (assuming the're not animated) If you mean to put them together in an array in a single larger image (e.g. a row like a filmstrip), you can do that with ImageMagick's montage function. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 14:54, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Finlay McWalter. (No, nothing's animated.) I'm looking at their website. There's 13 versions for Windows, and I don't know what the difference between static and dynamic means. Don't overestimate me: I don't even know what the difference is between Win64 and Win32. Wait--I have Windows 7 Enterprise, 32-bit, so that cuts out a few options. So--dynamic or static? 16 bits per pixel or 8 bits per pixel? Drmies (talk) 15:06, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

ImageMagick-7.0.3-2-Q16-x86-dll.exe -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 15:10, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. If this works I'll put you on retainer. Drmies (talk) 16:33, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

GNU Image Manipulation Program is very powerful, but will take a little more effort to learn. It can work with layered images and combine them using masks, transparency, or user-specified methods. Nimur (talk) 15:02, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ha I'm looking for low learning curve. I remember vaguely what layers are, from way back when, when I had some hijacked copy of PhotoShop or whatever it was called--but I know I don't need to mask, transpare, dither, wax, or wox. Drmies (talk) 15:06, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

How do you want the images combined? Do you want to make side-by-side, 2x4, 4x2, or some such composite image from several images, like a cartoon strip from individual cartoon frames? Or something more complex, with elements of one image cut and inserted into other images? 91.155.195.247 (talk) 15:41, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Very simple--two columns of four will likely fit. Eight of these, really--nothing fancy, so that they'll fit on one printed page. Drmies (talk) 16:33, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)@Drmies: I think the lowest-tech solution, since you run Win7, is to use Paint. Open one window of Paint for the final picture, then for every picture:

Open it in another Paint window: either from Paint itself do "open"/ctrl+O, or right-click from explorer -> "open with" -> paint (ask for more programs if necessary)
Copy its content with the selection tool: the shortcut is ctrl-A (select all) then ctrl-C (or ctrl-X) to copy, otherwise "select" "rectangular selection" and click-drag to have the whole picture
Paste the result into the final picture window: go to there, and then ctrl-V or right-click -> "paste". Click and drag to place it as you wish.
Close the original image paint window.

Once this is done for all photos, save the result (ctrl-S or file tab -> save) in the correct format.

As you can imagine, there are plenty of reasons why this is not an optimal solution. Some of those are linked with the fact that Paint uses raster graphics rather than vector graphics, i.e. the images are considered as arrays of color bits rather than as sums of lines, circles etc. - while it is legitimate for photographs, it still limits the possibilities of edition. (JPEG images are a bit more complicated, but basically it is the same.)

First of all, if you need to resize your images to fit them in the final image, there may be big artifacts in the final image (bigger than with other software solutions). If you intend to process 80 instead of 8 images, it may be time to learn to automate the process. Gif to jpg is probably not a good idea, compression-wise. And of course Paint ~~eats your soul~~ is non-free software with inferior abilities to pretty much everything else.

LibreOffice Draw is maybe the simplest-to-learn free equivalent, but less powerful than either of the previous suggestions (ImageMagick or GIMP), or (my favorite, but only because I am used to it), Inkscape. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 16:37, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In the end this needs to be printed (in a book--a real book) so I need to have at least decent quality--the publisher requires jpg. I thought about bitmap but that means conversion to bmp and then conversion to jpg (right?) which means quality loss. So I suppose I'll try one of the options y'all are giving me here--thanks! Drmies (talk) 16:41, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If your publisher requires .jpg, cancel the deal. I am only semi-joking here. I see no good reason to require jpg-only pictures. Jpg images are lighter for the "same" resolution, measured in pixel size (again, JPEG is the place to read about this), but if that is the issue, they could (and should) give you a size limit of some sort rather than imposing an arbitrary format. If anything, some of the pictures you linked may actually be lighter in other, lossless compression formats such as gif (lots of white space). Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 17:12, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In total seriousness, JPEG is not the best format for these images. It will require great caution and a good deal of technical expertise to turn your source images - line-diagrams and text - into good-quality JPEG files that do not have severe visible defects (text and lines provide excellent examples of compression artifacts). It is possible to make a good-quality JPEG that contains lines and text, but it requires great care, expertise, and attention to detail - not to mention, difficult-to-use software tools that let you specify intricate technical details of the compression algorithm. If you are going to be printing such diagrams, certain other file-formats like PNG are preferable. Of course, you can introduce image defects into any file format, if you aren't careful.

Maybe it is worth enlisting the help of a professional graphic designer? Once your image file is committed to the publisher and/or printer, you won't be able to fix any defects. A graphics-professional might be worth what you end up paying them.

Nimur (talk) 17:35, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agree that JPEG is a bad format for this kind of images - JPEG is, after all, the Joint Photographic Expert Group, and is designed to provide good quality for typical photographic images, with colour gradients and smooth shapes and transitions. It is not very good for line art. As for the practical approach: If it's a one-off, I use Apples Keynote, arrange the images manually in a slide with right proportions, then export to PDF. I'm fairly sure that Powerpoint should be able to do something similar. If I'd care about quality and automation, Imagemagick as suggested above is the way to go. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 18:39, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fun game for competitive coding?

Hey, friendly Wikipedians, I don't suppose i could trouble you for help on an inane but (I hope) interesting question? So me and a group of friends want to play a game where we code up AIs to play a relatively simple game, and pit them off against each other. None of us are pros, we're basically doing this just to refine some skills and have a bit of fun. We were thinking chess, but ruled it out because unless you're prepared to get way more than casually into it that will just evolve into refining a minimax. Basically, therefore, we're looking for something with no obvious heuristic other than victory. We looked at various variations of capture the flag but couldn't come up with a simple version which didn't just incentivise ultra-defensive play. I don't suppose any of you might know offhand something which would suit our purposes? Many thanks! 176.27.136.246 (talk) 22:24, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Don't have a firm suggestion (sorry!), but this is an interesting question.. perhaps a platformer of some sort (the victory being the quickest time)? -- samtar ^{talk or stalk} 22:31, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Designing a competitive AI for Pong makes for an incredibly awesome, simple, fun programming challenge.

You can pit your AIs against each other and see who wins. You might be surprised at how complex this simple game can become, when you pit AIs against each other. If you find that your players are "too perfect," you can add constraints (if needed); or you can accelerate the game-simulation-speed to super-human levels.

A few years ago, friends and I played the Ant Farm AI challenge... that game had very simple rules, but the mathematics of designing a winning strategy became so amazingly complex that I think we both dropped out after just a few iterations of the game. The point, if anything, is that even incredibly simple game-rules lend themselves to profoundly complex artificial intelligence strategies.

Nimur (talk) 22:33, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I once greatly enjoyed a competition consisting of writing an AI for a simple car-racing game. There wasn't even terrain: just a planar region containing a series of checkpoints to touch (within some distance) to constitute a lap. It is nonetheless highly non-trivial if you include collisions between cars; the version we used also added simple weapons (à la the green shell from Mario Kart). --Tardis (talk) 02:10, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps boring, but easy: Connect 4 or Battleship (game). You might want to impose a per-move or global time limit. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 02:30, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The iterated prisoner's dilemma has been played as a tournament for AIs. For novices it has the advantage that the rules are almost trivially simple, and one can write a pretty simple AI that plays well, but one can also make the AI quite sophisticated if one wishes. CodeTalker (talk) 02:51, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Iterated rock–paper–scissors is also very difficult to play well, and has been the subject of numerous academic papers (such as this one). See if you can beat the top-ranked algorithms here. -- BenRG (talk) 22:54, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In my younger years, we had to code an "IA" for one of the zillion variants of awele. There is no obvious heuristic, and the tree is large enough to guarantee you cannot brute-force the minimax. However, you need one boring hour of coding the rules of the game (how stuff moves and is captured). Some of us managed to code the alpha-beta pruning that beated most of the prof's programs (the ones that played at random, or minimax with some "clever" evaluation heuristics), but transposition tables and negascout was a bit too much for us to do within three hours.

BTW, most if not all algorithms that were developed for in the "chess beats human" years are variants of "refining the alpha-beta pruning". In recent years there has been some machine learning and that is conceptually different (see AlphaGo) but that is probably beyond the abilities of for-fun coders. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 07:23, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There used to be a guy here named "Steve Baker". He had some programs designed specifically for competitive coding. I remember seeing one that looked like dinosaurs. I believe that you programmed the AI for your dino and then they fought. He surely has some way to find it on his personal website: https://www.sjbaker.org/ 209.149.113.4 (talk) 15:36, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@SteveBaker: you were mentioned above. :-) --CiaPan (talk) 16:58, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! Yes - the software still exists - it's called "botzilla" and you can download it from the Botzilla Sourceforge project. Each player provides a "DLL" for Windows (or a ".so" file under Linux) that controls one of the robots in the game. You play as gigantic robotic dinosaurs (or whatever) - trying to kill all of the other bots and be the last one standing. Gameplay happens in a simple grid-like city with a forcefield around it. To keep games to a reasonable length, the forcefield starts to shrink inwards after a few minutes, forcing the robots together.

Each turn, your software is provided with a low-rez "map" of what your bot can see around it - and on the basis of that, has to decide the direction and speed to move your bot - and also whether you want to shoot, stomp or "rage". There are various collectables scattered through the city that get you benefits of one kind or another. Gameplay can be one-on-one or many-on-many. Moving through a building slows you down (and destroys the building - which is pretty satisfying!).

Bots can also output text into a speech balloon over their heads - it has no effect on gameplay - but is good for 'trash talking' the opposition and for debugging!

I worked hard to make it an interesting spectator sport as well as a challenge for the players - so get a big-screen TV with a crowd of people (preferably with beer!) cheering for the winners. It even supports red/cyan 3D glasses!

When the competition is running, the software will make an effort to produce cool camera angles - but a human operator has the ability to move the camera manually and/or switch between standard viewpoints.

The package comes with some sample 'bot' programs - including a couple that won competitions when I last ran this...there is also a bot program that you can drive with a joystick to make the game human-playable!

Sadly, the code is very old - and hasn't be touched for about 10 years - so it may be a little 'dusty'.

SteveBaker (talk) 19:15, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You could do a 13 cells wide and at 28 cells tall (with cells above 25 being hidden), pentomino version of tetris. Pentomino means that unlike tetris pieces that are made of One-sided tetromino pieces, your game will will have pieces made out of 5 square tiles, so One-sided pentomino ones (the gameplay area was adjusted from 10 wide to 22 tall because of that). Both players would play at the same time, and if you want one player to influence the other, you could include a rule that if you clear 5 lines in a row, the next bag the other player will receive will be a bag of one sided hexomino.177.92.128.26 (talk) 14:09, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Alternative to Vicuña uploader?

Is there a good alternative to Vicuña uploader for Windows (10), which I had been using to upload groups of photos to Commons? It stopped working for me yesterday. I installed it on another Windoes 10 computer and it won't work on it either. I suspect that a Windows 10 update caused it to stop working. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 23:36, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

There are many alternatives, including these standalone desktop applications. Nimur (talk) 23:41, 3 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'll check some out. Since I wrote the message and got your reply, I tried The Commonist (the only other one I was able to find). It did not work well. It uploaded only one of the six files I selected, The fifth of six did upload, even though the progress bar went across on each of the files, the others all failed. Its interface is bad - there doesn't seem to be a way to copy the file name, description, and categories from one file to the next (sometimes I'm uploading dozens with the same info), and it did not rename the file as I told it to. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:08, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

PattyPan doesn't seem to do what I want to do. I tried to download ComeOn! - a Java screen came up and dots went across, but then it closed without doing anything. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 00:27, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Vicuna works a little bit, once in a while. It successfully uploaded a set of three photos to Commons, although it had great difficulty logging in. Then I tried up upload a set of 12, but only the first one got uploaded. I exited to start the program again, and now it can't log in. Could the problem be with Commons? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 02:58, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And now I can get it to log in, but the selected photos don't show up in the thumbnails, so they won't upload. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 03:01, 6 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

October 4

THunderbird and Gmail

How do I get Thunderbird to use Gmail.?--86.187.171.66 (talk) 11:35, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-gmail -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 11:44, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Monitor problem

Every so often my monitor goes blank. If I switch it off and on again and then move the mouse or hit a key it comes back on again. Any idea what might be causing this? Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 22:59, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

By 'blank' do you mean black or white? Does it happen while you're working or only when you haven't touched anything for a bit? —Tamfang (talk) 23:23, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If it is one that automatically goes blank to save power when it hasn't been used for a period of time – it may be that power-saving circuit that is failing. Even back in the days of CRT monitors, the circuitry was so mystifying and difficult to get to, I ended throwing out an excellent Diamond monitor 'cause I couldn't fix it. These days I leave my chiropodists to sort out all my digital problems.--Aspro (talk) 23:28, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

To troubleshoot, the first thing to do is to disable the "turn off the monitor to save power" setting on your system, if it isn't already, and see whether that stops it from occurring. If you don't know how, do a Web search. --47.138.165.200 (talk) 23:32, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

By blank I meant black. I was wondering about the power-saving thing as it is meant to do that when left for a long time, but now I think about it I don't recall it doing that for ages. So it seems to go black when it isn't meant to, and not go black when it is meant to. That would accord with your suggestion. I may have to invest in a new one then, which is a shame as I'm used to this one, it sits nicely on my desk, and it's always such a faff unplugging and plugging in things. DuncanHill (talk) 23:35, 4 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fear it is the monitor itself, so after disabling the power save (as suggested above) and should you find no improvement - try booting up with a Live Linux disc. If the problem still occurs it is not down to your current operating system. The only other things I can think of are: (1) check your cabling. (2) How old is it? Plus 3 years? The clock depends an a little button battery - its easy to find on the motherboard – it may just have enough power to keep the crystal oscillating but not enough to let the monitor know the is computed up and running - replace battery. (3) Use a can of freezer on the motherboard and internal cabling whilst repeatedly pressing the space bar to see if the mother board or internal connectors have a dry joint. If you do have a dry joint, the expansion/contraction produced by the freezer may make the monitor switch on again. If so -apply soldering iron. PS. Whist looking inside, take the opportunity to vacuum out the fluff from the heat sink of the CPU. --Aspro (talk) 00:40, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

No improvement on disabling power save. I have no idea what a Live Linux disc is or where I might find one!. I will check the cables. PC is 3 years old or so, monitor rather older. I will have a clean inside and look for the battery. I suspect soldering my PC may be beyond my level of competence. I have noticed that when it happens the light on the monitor power button stays green, but it should go yellow if it shuts down for no use. DuncanHill (talk) 00:45, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. Think the best Live Linux (in your case) is probably a very small one like Knopix. As your computer is currently up the spout. Get a neighbors teenager (he or she – as girls are good at these things too) to down load it onto their computer and burn it onto a disc or pen-drive for you. Have them then boot your computer up with Knopix – and see if the problem persist. The advantage of a Live CD (and here is a list of List of live CDs) is that you don't instal them. They run externally and so don't affect your installed Operating System in any way. After, unplug the pen-drive or take out the Live disc from the CD tray and your computer is exactly like it was before. As for soldering,... one step at a time! Lets exclude the simple things first. It is encouraging to hear that the light stays green. P.S. Whilst you are at it, you might like try to to test out Linux Mint on a live CD. Unless you are using applications that will only run on Windows you'll find that Mint is easier and less time consuming to maintain. If you just surf, email, word-process, image-manipulate (photoshop), etc. There is no earthy point in using pain in the ass Windows any more. --Aspro (talk) 02:08, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, if a user asks a technical question, it is not considered good netiquette to recommend that they throw everything away and/or install a different operating system. If you don't know how to debug the user's technical problem, or if you don't like a particular software, refrain from answering the question. Nimur (talk) 18:35, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not certain that you even have a problem - are you sure this is not "correct behavior"? Can you post your monitor's make and model? Have you checked your system's power saving preferences and features? Nimur (talk) 18:35, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. The first thing that came to mind was that this is screensaver behavior. Akld guy (talk) 19:18, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If it were screensaver behaviour it wouldn't need the switching off and on again bit. It also wouldn't happen at random intervals, even when typing, and I probably wouldn't have said above that it wasn't behaving as expected. I might not know what a Live Linux disc is or be confident in my soldering abilities but I do know wanted from unwanted behaviour on a machine I've been using for years. DuncanHill (talk) 19:50, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

October 6