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October 7

Connecting to my port 8080

Hi all -- I'm supposed to have another computer connect to my port 8080 (my computer is apparently acting like a server). How do they do this? I know my IP address. Is it [ip-address]:8080? Is the colon right? Something else?

Thanks! Sam —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.137.215.22 (talk) 05:28, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

HTTP proxies use this port the most often. If that's the case, they'd set up their browser to use the port to surf the web. In Internet Explorer, you go to Tools --> Internet Options --> Connections --> LAN Settings. Then, you check the box for proxies and enter in the IP address and port number. Don't include the colon. If they're not running Windows or want to do something else, then tell us their OS and your goal we'll be able to help you more.--Tree 'uns 5 (talk) 08:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't think this has to do with proxies - I just think you want to allow a computer to talk some protocol to your port 8080. You're right, the url will be with the colon as you say, eg http://[ip-address]:8080/path/document in the case that you have an http server running. If they can't connect to you, then you should check the firewall / NAT settings between you and the client (maybe there's a router sitting there messing things up). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 14:11, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Common problem: If your IP Address is something like 192.168.1.100 and the other person is not connected to the same router, you will need to get your real IP address and set up port forwarding at the router. -- kainaw™ 15:04, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Locking

Is there a program or something that displays the classified screen that is used on military computers when people enter the room that cannot see the screen. I would like to use something like that when I lock my computer in Windows. --omnipotence407 (talk) 12:29, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the screen looks like but i'm sure you could find (or if you have/can find a copy of the image) create a screen-saver that mimics this. You can then set it to requiring a password to unlock from screensaver and have a short-cut to setting off the screensaver/hot-spot to put your mouse in to activate the screensaver. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 12:46, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Attack of the Undead boot.ini file!

I recently purchased a used hard drive. I low-level formatted it using appropriate software from the manufacturer and installed Windows XP Home Edition on it. For some reason, the boot.ini file contains entries for not only my XP installation, but also for a XP Pro installation and a Mac OS X installation. Even after deleting the file and reformatting the hard drive the entries persist! What do I do? 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 13:08, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I would recommend removing the current disk partitions entirely and recreating new ones in their place (even if it's just one big partition). That should get rid of anything and everything lingering on the disk. You can do this by clicking on Start, right-clicking on My Computer and then selecting "Manage" from the menu that opens. Then select Disk Management. From there, you should be able to remove all partitions on that disk, which should just wipe out absolutely everything on the hard drive. Of course, that means you'll also have to re-install Windows all over again. (One second thought, actually, I guess you could simply skip that step and start by re-install Windows XP; it can perform the same service in the beginning of the installation, if I recall correctly.) Obviously, if you're going to do anything like this, you really need to back up everything you want to save on that computer, 'cause once you do this... baby, it's gone. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 13:35, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I can't even boot into Windows because of this problem. The OS looks at the boot.ini file and can't find the XP Pro or Mac OS X installation and refuses to boot due to "a hardware configuration problem." And i've tried re-installing already, and the entries keep coming back. PS sorry about my terse reply, this problem has annoyed me for a while now and i am sick of it. 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 16:06, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you couldn't even boot into Windows. All right, in that case: just put in the Windows XP install cd. It should, at the very beginning, offer you the chance to repartition the hard drive. Again, just remove all partitions from it and create a brand new one. I believe that should solve the problem. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 16:11, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah, to be more specific, just in case this isn't clear: boot from the Windows XP install cd, of course. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 17:33, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Those entries probably aren't coming from your Windows boot.ini. They are probably because the previous owner installed a bootloader like GRUB (and Hackintosh as well by the looks of it). Try resetting the disklabel of the entire disk using GParted. That will get rid of everything. --wj32 ^t/c 22:45, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Surely getting rid of all of the partitions will do the same, though? Or is there some reason that wouldn't work? (I'm asking for future reference rather than just to disagree. =)) -- Captain Disdain (talk) 01:10, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

It's probably in the comptuter's Master boot record, which is not part of any partition. APL (talk) 12:57, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Doesn't the Recovery Console have a fixmbr option? Will that work? 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 13:03, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that should work if the problem is with the MBR. --wj32 ^t/c 03:33, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes! No more problems! (I had to manually delete the invalid entries in safe mode though...) Thanks everyone! 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 13:05, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Office 2007 instalation issues

I recently bought Ultimate 2007 to upgrade from the student version, but everytime I try to install it I get an error saying that it won't work. I also cannot unistal or repair the old version using control panel. I bought a new HDD and copied my old C drive onto that (using xxclone), could that have missed anything during the copying process? Jackacon (talk) 13:51, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

It probably missed the registry entries outlining where the installed Office version is and where its uninstaller is. Try manually deleting the old version and re-installing it from the disk. Hope this helps :) 31306D696E6E69636B6D (talk) 16:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

When you say manually deleting the old version, do you mean deleting it off of C:\ and removing the registry entries for office? Jackacon (talk) 16:21, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

It's now sorted! If anyone else does have the same problem, microsoft have made a very good guide here, just make sure you follow it exactly as it says. Jackacon (talk) 19:02, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

From Live CD to real life

I am planning to buy a new laptop, but I want one that will run Ubuntu without too much trouble. If I test my new laptop with the Live CD and it works, is it sure that the installation will work? Mr.K. (talk) 16:25, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I think so. Unless you're getting one with exotic stuff (e.g shock detector, fingerprint reader) then the wireless lan is probably the most likely thing to not work (and those problems becoming pretty rare). Make sure to test everything (audio, cd/dvd write, bluetooth, memory-card reader). I can't speak to specific models (things change so), but I've had good linux experiences with Acers. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 16:44, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

(this was after edit conflict) AFAIK, yes. However, have you considered buying a computer that comes preconfigured with Ubuntu? http://dell.com/open leads to this page. If you are into Lenovo ThinkPads, there is a wiki dedicated in helping you at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki . Just a thought. Kushal (talk) 17:03, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Saving iPhone SMS messages?

Is there a way to download/browse/archive iPhone SMS messages to my computer? --70.167.58.6 (talk) 16:31, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Only thing that I know of at this point is a piece of software (Mac OS X only) called Syphone. It is in beta, and the site gives no clue as to whether it is compatible with the iPhone 3G. Provided you do have a Mac, I have no clue if this will work with your phone, and I don't use, nor guarantee it; I only remember stumbling upon this solution as I purchased another piece of software from this vendor. --Renwique (talk) 22:24, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Sadly, the last beta was a year ago. And it does not work with iPhone OS 2.1. --71.158.222.207 (talk) 03:53, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, didn't think so. Worth a shot, though. --Renwique (talk) 20:59, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Not sure if it's exactly what you need, but I usually just forward the messages to my email account (yay AT&T), but as I don't yet have an iPhone I don't know how that would work out. DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 05:01, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

High-gloss laptop screen

Is there a name for high-gloss laptop screens? What are the advantages of these screens? Mr.K. (talk) 17:27, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Er...LCD? bibliomaniac15 02:58, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

'Glossy'? It varies by manufacturer. Usually their pictures are more saturated (which may be a problem or a benefit, depending on the usage/user), they may show less of a 'screendoor effect', and that's about it. They give have massive amounts of glare, though, and are often just used to cover up an otherwise subpar panel. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:57, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

When is a saturated screen a problem? I use the laptop for programming, writing and sometimes watching a film. It looks like all the cheap Acer laptops have a glossy screen nowadays... 80.58.205.37 (talk) 10:44, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Some graphics people don't like it. The glare is the main drawback, the color is usually a positive, which seems to be why the manufacturers do it. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 21:38, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Playing certain CDs on my stereo causes them to have a vinyl-esque crackling and pop

Last Christmas I got a brand new JVC MX-KC58 compact component system. I've noticed that plenty of my CD's (today its my copy of The Stone Roses) don't play properly on it. The first song or two will have an annoying crackling and popping effect almost exactly like that which can be heard on old beat up vinyl albums. As the album plays it progressively gets worse until the album is deemed not readable by the system and it just stops playing. The CDs themselves are in perfect condition, I purchased them myself and they are not CD-Rs. The only way to get around this problem is to play them in my 10+ year old PC with a generic brand CD-ROM drive my friend gave me for free, which instantly plays all of them perfectly. This ancient drive which was given to me by someone who was about to throw it away plays albums better than a brand new $170 compact component system. It annoys me because now the sound has to go through the crappy sound card of my PC. Sometimes if I keep trying over and over my stereo will eventually read the disc right, but this becomes absurdly frustrating. I've had enough so today I decided that my options were either to ask the wiki reference desk or pull an Office Space and drag it in to a field and smash it. I realize that this is probably too vague a question and that it is tl;dr anyway so I don't really expect any responses. NIRVANA2764 (talk) 17:44, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm guessing that there is some kind of alignment problem with the laser diode in your CD player. Any chance it's still under warranty? --LarryMac | Talk 19:32, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

e-paper

Can you get touch screen e-paper? If yes, is it multi-toutch? Thanks.92.2.212.124 (talk) 20:08, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Any specific item from any specific manufacturer in mind? I am pretty sure the technology is there for multi-touch touch screen e-paper. Electronic paper may have more for you. Kushal (talk) 22:40, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

It ought to be possible to add a touch-screen layer onto an epaper display - so if it hasn't already happened - it probably will happen sooner or later. The touch screen itself doesn't depend in any way on the underlying display technology, so whatever is currently in use for LCD's ought to work OK with epaper providing it can be sandwiched with it without one damaging the other in some manner. However - there may be a deeper problem. epaper displays update VERY slowly - it's doubtful that they would be responsive enough to do the kinds of things you'd expect from a touch-based interface. epaper is really best for things that dead-tree-paper is good for - non-interactive reading materials - where a delay for an occasional page-turn is not unacceptable. SteveBaker (talk) 03:37, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Cell phone/mobile phone.

Why do Americans call mobile phones, cell phones? It makes sense to call a phone "mobile" because it is actualy mobile, but "cell phones" aren't cellular, the only thing that is cellular is the phone network. Thanks. 92.2.212.124 (talk) 20:12, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Further back in the past there were mobile phones that did not operate on a cellular network. The invention of the cell was a big improvement making the phones far more available. In Malaysia the phones are called hand phones. This shows that they skipped the stage of the car phone which was too big and power hungry to carry around in one hand. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:12, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

It is also hand phone or hp in singapore. 118.90.128.113 (talk) 08:39, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

The language desk may be better equiped to handle this question. Chances are the answer lies in the history of cell phone markeing in the US vs. wherever you are. Still, "cell phone" doesn't seem inappropriate: it describes how the phone operates. Mobile phone is also acceptable, but makes no distinction between cellular phones and satellite phones. --Shaggorama (talk) 21:13, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Server issues

I was playing around with thhis website using drupal running on wampserver 2.0. I upgraded winXP to server pack 3 and now I can't get to phpmyadmin anymore. anything localhost just turns up a typical browser error. I'm guessing I need to uninstall and reinstall the whole kit, but I don't want to lose my website. Is there any way I can at least export or save my database w/o doing it through phpmyadmin or a web browser at all? --Shaggorama (talk) 21:07, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with this particular server package, but most of those include the MySQL binaries as well. Look for mysql.exe file somewhere in the wampserver directories to get to command-line MySQL interface and use SQL commands to back up the tables. Alternately, search for the configuration file (my.cnf) and examine it to find out where the database files are kept (parameter "datadir="), then you can back your data up without interacting with the server. MaxVT (talk) 18:55, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe Windows Firewall or some other security software is blocking it? --wj32 ^t/c 03:28, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

First cable companies

What cable company was established in 1858 to carry instantaneous communications across the ocean that eventually would be used for Internet Communications? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Beccalynn30 (talk • contribs) 21:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Cable & Wireless. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:13, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Read Transatlantic telegraph cable, Atlantic Telegraph Company and Cyrus West Field. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:20, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Also, Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson. Kushal (talk) 22:36, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

By the way, it was not called Cable & Wireless back then. If this question is for a million dollars, please use another life line to make sure it isn't a trick question. By the way, since when can you Wikipedia while on the hot seat? :P Kushal (talk) 22:53, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a homework question, or a gameshow trivia question.

I'd like to use my life line... To wikipedia!

66.216.163.92 (talk) 22:43, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Language Bar changing languages

I own a Vista laptop that has three languages in the Language Bar--"US", "Canadian French", and "Canadian Multilingual Standard". For some reason, once in awhile I guess I'll hit a key that will make the Language Bar automatically switch from the "US" setting to one of the other two, though I have no idea what key is doing this. I don't have a key that changes the language, so I must be accidently pressing a combination of keys which makes the language change? I'm not sure.--Pointy77 (talk) 23:54, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

That'd be Alt-Shift, at least in XP. I've commonly had the same problem with XP (usually I use the Finnish keyboard layout, but on occasion I've found myself needing the US layout), and as long as I had the selection in the status bar, it kept switching layouts even on situations where I absolutely swear that I didn't hit the keyboard shortcut, and it happened often enough that I become really conscious of the keys I was hitting. I've had this happen on a number of computers, and obviously, that caused problems. I ended up having to have just the Finnish there, therefore eliminating the whole switch thing and just manually adding the US thing when I need it, because having the layout suddenly change in mid-sentence really drives me up a wall. I've heard others report this same thing as well. I don't really have a solution to it, other than removing all the languages you don't actually use from the selection. You can always add them back again later if you want. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 01:15, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Don't know about Vista, but in XP you can set shortcut keys for the specific languages rather than just to switch to the next language. So if you use all the languages, you could have Alt-Shift-1 for US, Alt-Shift-2 for Canadian French and Alt-Shift-3 for Canadian Multilingual. You can also turn off the shortcut for switching languages. I only use one language, so I've done this and set Alt-Shift-0 to switch to my usual language just in case it somehow gets switched to something different! All this setting is done through the regional settings - see this link for instructions on how to get to them. Goodness knows why Microsoft make the shortcut so easy to press accidentally - you're the fifth person I've told about this since January! AJHW (talk) 15:43, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

As it happens, I just got a new computer today, with Vista on it, and it has the US and FI layouts there by defaults. I typed a sentence, hit enter, and started to write another, and all of a sudden my lovely umlauts were gone, replaced by the devilish colons and semicolons. There is no way I hit alt-shift between those two sentences. Unless this is some kind of a case of confirmation bias -- which I admit is a possibility, even though I don't believe that to be the case -- the bastard thing really does switch between the keyboard layouts by itself. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 22:14, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I figured it out; Control-Shift changes the language. Thanks for the tips and help!--Pointy77 (talk) 21:28, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Add startup programs on Ubuntu

I was wondering if it was possible to add programs at startup, on Ubuntu, via the command line (terminal), I know I can do it in a graphical way, but I need to do this in the command line... any ideas? SF007 (talk) 23:38, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I use bash. To make programs start when bash starts (regardless of flavor: Ubuntu, Debian, BSD, Fedora...), you just add the program to .bashrc in your home directory. The .bashrc file is a series of command-line instructions that run as bash starts. -- kainaw™ 01:12, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Did not worked very well for me... what I was looking for was the location of the files that store the settings when we do it in graphical mode... But thanks anyway SF007 (talk) 13:37, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I think you can do this by linking to the script in /etc/rc.local . But that's not what you're looking for 59.95.97.3 (talk) 14:15, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that does not work either... SF007 (talk) 16:44, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I believe the .profile file in your home directory gets executed when you login, perhaps you can use that. - Akamad (talk) 02:00, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

1. By startup, do you mean when logging in as your user? or do you mean during the boot process?
2. What is the nature of the program(s) you want to run? Should they open a GUI when you log in for instance?
3. If you want to do exactly the same as is done through System -> Preferences -> Sessions, then have a look inside ~/.config/autostart/. When you add a program to the session using the GUI, it will create a .desktop-file in that directory. The .desktop-files are plain text files with an easy format. You can create your own using the shell, by looking at the pre-existing .desktop-files to see what fields you'll need to set. Reep (talk) 16:02, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Nothing posted here worked...

@reep: What i wanted was exactly what you mention in "3.", but I don't have a "autostart" folder on the location you told me. (maybe it's because I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 beta...) SF007 (talk) 23:40, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

October 8

I have seup my own wiki, but I cannot edit any page (solved)

Hi, I'm trying to install my own wiki (here), and I have problem with editing pages. Installation was successful, but everytime I want to save changes to some page, I get following error:

Your edit has been rejected because your client mangled the punctuation characters in the edit token. The edit has been rejected to prevent corruption of the page text. This sometimes happens when you are using a buggy web-based anonymous proxy service.

I'm certainly not using any proxy service..I was searching for possible solution, but I couldn't find anything on MediaWiki pages nor Google. How could I solve this problem? Thanks for any advice! Lukipuk (talk) 02:35, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I seem to be able to edit it fine. Perhaps try a different IP address? 193.194.132.78 (talk) 07:08, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh i changed the wiki engine from MediaWiki to DokuWiki and it works now, but thank you :) Lukipuk (talk) 13:49, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Finding all IPs affected by a range block

Hello everybody, is there a tool or a website to find out which IPs have been affected if someone performs a range block? Thanks 211.30.12.197 (talk) 07:21, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't see what the need for a tool would be. If it is a decimal system for defining the range, it is very obvious. If you block 192.168.1.25-98, it is obvious that everything from 192.168.1.25 to 192.168.1.98 will be blocked. Usually, a bit-mask is used. Something like 192.168.1.0/20 will use the 20 most significant bits of 192.168.1.0. Written in binary, that IP address is 11000000.10101000.00000001.00000000. I struck out all but the first 20 bits so you can see that any IP address that has those first 20 bits is blocked. They are sequential from 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.15.255. -- kainaw™ 13:04, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Java Hashset look up

Given a class (Thing) with three members (mone, mtwo, mthree) I want some kind of Java Collection<Thing> that let's me

1) put objects in it, guaranteeing uniqueness of just mone and mtwo (ie mone and mtwo can't both be the same for two elements)

2) retrieve them by just mone and mtwo, in constant time for arbitrary mone, mtwo

Is there an obvious Collection to use?

Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 08:23, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

2) The problem with Sets is that they don't really have a "retrieve" functionality. The reasoning being, if you can tell it what you want to retrieve, don't you already have it? They didn't think about having different objects be "equal" and using one to retrieve another. One solution would be to use some kind of Map<Thing,Thing> that maps each thing to itself. Retrieval time complexity depends on the data structure used.

1) For this, you would just override the equals() method so that two objects are equal if their mone and mtwo are equal. Note that if you do that you also have to override the hashCode() method or else you would violate its contract and it wouldn't work in a hashed data structure. --Spoon! (talk) 09:45, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

So I could just have a Map<ThingSignature, Thing> where a ThingSignature has members mone, mtwo and each Thing has a getSignature() method and I add Things like map.add(thisThing.getSignature(), thisThing) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 11:41, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Or I guess skip the ThingSiganture class if I can figure out a simple return type like String for getSignature that would really be unique...... Hmm... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 11:42, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Tor

Are tor users allowed to edit wikipedia and create accounts? Are tor users blocked frequently by check users? I am considering to install tor that's why I wanted to ask. Thanks 59.95.116.34 (talk) 10:02, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Anything else I can do to stay anonymous on wikipedia? 59.95.116.34 (talk) 10:04, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Open proxies and Wikipedia:Advice to users using Tor to bypass the Great Firewall contain all the answers to your first question. In response to your second question, what would you be trying to hide and from whom? -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 10:18, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks59.95.116.34 (talk) 10:24, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

[1] The only way to do that is to not edit abusively. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 11:22, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

If you do that (edit abuseivly ) they call you an ADMIN. 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:43, 10 October 2008 (UTC)--

Controllable animations...?

Hi. I am looking to make a 3D animation for a course I’m doing, using some kind of CAD/animation package. The caveat is that I’d like to be able to control the animation from a script that has a user interface. This would mean that, for example, the user could click a button to send the objects on the screen in different directions, all managed by a script.

CAD/modelling software I am familiar with include SketchUp, AutoCAD, Rivet and Blender (to an extent). Scripting languages I can use include Visual Basic, MATLAB and C.

Are there any suggestions as to how I could go about doing this? Many thanks.

LHMike (talk) 10:05, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Blender can certainly do that. There is a game engine (of sorts) that comes with blender and can be scripted in Python. It's an opensource package - so it's free. However, if you have $$$ - then Maya or 3DS Max should be able to handle your needs.

Incidentally, FYI, you should distinguish "CAD" programs from other 3D modellers - CAD packages have very specific features such as the ability to deal with the volume, mass, center of gravity, etc of an object. Most 3D modellers for animations use some kind of "surface representation" which doesn't lend itself to the kinds of things CAD users need - but is easier for things like animation and rendering where you really don't care much about volumetric information. Blender is very definitely NOT a CAD program - AutoCAD certainly is (and it sucks for animation!). SteveBaker (talk) 03:24, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Thunderbird On Mac

My Thunderbird keeps telling me I have mail, when I don't. This happens every couple of minutes, and it is driving me crazy. Is it supposed to do this? How can I set it so it tells me I have mail, when I actually have mail???--ChokinBako (talk) 11:04, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Are you using it with an IMAP server? I've had issues with IMAP getting confused about what mail I've read (though with Mail.app, not Thunderbird). But really, I don't know, you need to give us more info about your setup. --140.247.11.23 (talk) 14:16, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Do you have UNREAD messages, though? Kushal (talk) 15:44, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Clarification: Do you have emails that arrived in your inbox that you never bothered to open? When I said UNREAD messages, I meant those messages. I did not mean messages that you read and then marked as unread. Kushal (talk) 20:39, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Is it possible that it's notifying you of the arrival of a message - which is then immediately classified as spam and deleted or pushed off into another folder? I use Thunderbird - but I turn off the notification feature - so I'm not 100% sure what happens in those circumstances. SteveBaker (talk) 03:15, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

five advantages of open loop control system

May you list for us five advantages of the open loop contol system. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.44.166.203 (talk) 11:24, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

May you explain for us why the article open-loop controller doesn't answer your question? -- kainaw™ 12:57, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

And may you further explain for us why you expect us to do your homework, when it's clearly stated at the top that we do not do homework here? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 18:18, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Making ringtones

Is there any sort of free music software that I can use to cut out the choruses of mp3 files so I can use them as ringtones for my phone? --Candy-Panda (talk) 12:00, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Audacity is pretty good with that, Goldwave too

Forai (talk) 14:19, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

You may already be aware of this site, but you can crop any available ringtone on Myxertones as well as uploading your own MP3s. --Endlessdan and his problem 18:29, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Or Audacity if you want to do it yourself. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:22, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Yup. I use Audacity, myself. The Jade Knight (talk) 07:40, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

InvisionFree or phpBB3?

Which Internet forum software is more reliable and less prone to security vulnerabilities and hacking attacks, InvisionFree or phpBB3? Thank you very much in advance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by XxCutexXxGirlxX (talk • contribs) 15:14, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Securitywise, Going by the wikipedia articles phpBB and InvisionFree, If security is your thing then I would say phpBB3. InvisionFree article states:

"Limitations of InvisionFree include the lack of FTP access and editing restrictions and inability to access the MySQL database directly, lack of security as the software is remotely hosted." and while the phpBB article states it's been hit a few times, phpBB3 remains rather open. (Not to mention I run my own little php forum and it hasn't seen too many problems securitywise). Hope I have helped Forai (talk) 16:28, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

That "lack of security as the software is remotely hosted" is unsourced, and sounds like someone's opinion. It seems they're saying "it's less secure because it's hosted on someone else's server, rather than your own", that seems like a horrible over-simplification. It's like saying "gmail is less secure because it's hosted by Google rather than on a PC you set up yourself". -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:37, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Fast DVD copier

Hi. Is anyone aware of a (preferably free) fast DVD copier (for un-protected DVDs)? I usually use Nero, but to copy a single movie disc it takes up to an hour. My friend has Roxio and it only takes him 15 minutes, tops. Are there any decent, free DVD copiers out there? Thanks in advance. --Endlessdan and his problem 18:27, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Your friend probably has a faster DVD drive (or two). If all the copier has to do is read and write data (no recompression, no crypto) then the software does very little, and so all software should run at much the same speed on any given drive. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:29, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

We have the same speed DVD-RW. The way he explained it (he gave me an extremely dumbed down explanation): Nero is slow because it takes the contents of the DVDs and dercrypts them (its already decrypted, this appears to be the unnecessary step), then takes the de-decrypted contents and places them on the DVD and then erases that copied content from its temporary memory. The Roxio program just goes DVD to DVD. I could be wayyyy off. But even copying a CD on Nero takes a long time. --Endlessdan and his problem 18:36, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Decrypting is trivial (your CPU can decrypt a CSS stream much faster than any DVD can deliver it; if the media isn't encrypted there there is nothing to decrypt - you can't decrypt the unencrypted). If your drives really are the same, and your using the same media, then most likely you have Nero set to one of its more paranoid settings. Turn off speed testing, and the simulation/trial run thing, and turn off its error-correcting/retry on error option, and make sure it's detected your drive at its full speed and is set to use that. It's not that Nero is slow (Nero, at least in its retail version, is very highly regarded) but that it defaults to some rather paranoid settings. If you just can't persuade it to work faster, try Infrarecorder, which is free. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:58, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Now things are quite different if your copying a video DVD from a commercial version (which is almost always dual layer) down to a single-layer DVD-R. That way it can't just copy data from one disk to another, but has to decode the video and then re-encode it at a lower bitrate. Even on a good CPU that re-encode can take 30 minutes, which has to be done before the newly compiled (shrunken) DVD image to the blank DVD-R. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:02, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah, one thing to do is to download the absolutely latest patch of Nero from Ahead's website; because Nero fitters around with features of the drive much more than other programs, it really needs to know about your exact drive. If the drive is new and your Nero isn't super-updated then it may fall back to safer speeds. I've had Nero refuse to recognise a given drive is writable at all, when even XP's dullard cd-write subsystem could write to it. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:15, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Wow, thank you. I will try to mess with the settings and check Ahead's website tonight. Thanks again. --Endlessdan and his problem 19:50, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Online shopping project

Hi, Can someone help to give me some intruction to do Online shopping project ? give me some outlines,etc..

likes

1. Decision Support Systems 2. Developing Business/IT Solutions 3. Enterprise and Global Management of Information Technology.

In conducting research and developing the paper, students are asked to address the following questions in their final analysis (paper): Define the topic of choice; how is the topic important in ensuring the success of the business/organization; what are some specific products (i.e. systems) relevant to the topic, used in a particular business or industry today; what aspects of the topic may change in the future (necessary to improve or enhance the services or products that it generates or maintains); what are some of these changes.

Thanks

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.98.233.164 (talk) 19:25, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

We would love to help you but we need to see what effort you have done so far. As you might know, we do not do your homework for you. We MAY help you with specific parts with which you have problem with, but for the most part, we allow you the opportunity to call your work your own. Kushal (talk) 19:47, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Do you really mean online "shopping" or did you actualy mean online "selling"? Customers shop. They don't need business or IT solutions and have no need for IT technology above a web browser. As for decision support, that is nothing more than asking your buddy if he or she agrees with your purchase. -- kainaw™ 19:48, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

RealPlayer 11 on Ubuntu 8.10?

Resolved

I recently tried to install the .deb file of RealPlayer on a beta version of Ubuntu 8.10, but it did not worked... is it a problem from my computer, or some sort of other problem? can anyone install it? Thanks. SF007 (talk) 22:55, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Can you give more details please? --wj32 ^t/c 03:33, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

I open the .deb file, click install, it starts downloading the dependencies, but than just "hangs", clicking the button to see the terminal shows some "404 not found" errors on what should be the dependencies links... SF007 (talk) 14:41, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

My guess is that the package archive mirror you are using is having some problems, so all packages aren't available at the moment. Try switching to the main archive or a different mirror near you by going to System -> Administration -> Software Sources. Then try installing it again. Reep (talk) 16:21, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Just reloaded/updated the repositories and it just worked! thanks. SF007 (talk) 19:52, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

October 9

Shipping

If I ship my PC, do I need to do anything special to prepare it? Clarityfiend (talk) 04:14, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

A heap of bubble wrap. I shipped my PC from the Australia to the Philippines and it had dents all over it and needed a repair on arrival after the long trip. It may also be worth removing the important components (like the graphics card if it is a good one) and wrap them up separately just to be sure. Shipping companies tend to ignore ‘fragile’ stickers. 203.202.144.223 (talk) 06:43, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Only if it's a really impressive heap. I recently recieved a computer with an inch of bubble wrap around it, which wasn't enough: one corner of the case had been dented in transit. I recommend taping styrofoam blocks to the corners and edges, to imitate the way computer companies package things. --Carnildo (talk) 19:59, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Heh, with all the computers I had transfer I always had them in the styrofoam blocks, I just don't trust the alternative of it getting trashed by shipping. For monitors I throw a peice of cardbord infront of the LCD too for at least the illusion it does something. pretty much though it's just "Wrap it in bubble wrap or use styrofoam blocks if you can get them." Forai (talk) 22:07, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Personally I'd take the hard drive out and just carry it with me on my person. No sense is risking losing all your data at once if your computer gets redirected to Dubai on accident. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 23:17, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

I strongly agree - take the hard-drive out and hand-carry it. Everything else in the machine can easily be repaired or replaced in the event of a disaster - but if the drive gets trashed (and it's by far the most sensitive component to being dropped or jolted) then you've got a major problem with reinstalling everything. Obviously you should back everything up onto CD's or DVD's too (even a hand-carried drive can get damaged). But even with a decent backup - the hassle of getting everything back how you like it makes looking after the hard drive very important. If possible, put it into one of those silver/grey plastic bags and then wrap the bag in bubble-wrap. As for the rest of the computer - I'd probably remove any internal cards (eg the graphics card if you have a separate one) and treat those the same way - silver/metallised plastic bag - then bubble-wrap. Don't forget to wrap your keyboard - the keys tend to suffer during shipping and can pop-out and get lost. SteveBaker (talk) 13:37, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

In addition to the above, if you have a very large CPU heatsink consider removing it. With enough jostling they can yank the CPU right off the motherboard in a very destructive way. This is especially true if you've got some sort of super-duper giant aftermarket heatsink designed for overclocking or fanless operation. APL (talk) 17:40, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I actually did that once, yanking my whole heatsink and CPU out without releasing it from the socket, and it's fine to this day (turns out my thermal paste had turned into a glue-like substance). Having a big block of loose metal tumbling around your case though, is definitely no good. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

New file system on Windows

Say I have a disk with a custom file-system on it - something that Windows does not support as of now. Could someone guide me on how I can go about creating a driver to make windows understand, and access this new file system?--Seraphiel (talk) 08:21, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

You need the IFS Kit. It used to cost money and it looks from that page like it still does, but I was under the impression that it's now available for free, so look around. The NTFSD mailing list, run by OSR, is a useful resource. I think there's only one book on the subject. Sorry for the quick reply but I have limited time... -- BenRG (talk) 17:04, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

The other alternative is to just access the partition directly and write your own user-mode driver and GUI... --wj32 ^t/c 22:57, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, BenRG and Wj32. Those look like good starting points. I've managed to get my hands on the book, and have joined the mailing list too. I'll go through them and post back if I have further queries. Thanks again.--Seraphiel (talk) 07:35, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Help installing LinuxMCE

Has anyone here successfully installed a full LinuxMCE system in their home? We are thinking of doing an installation at my friend's house; his is the guinea pig for what will hopefully be many more. I've browsed the LinuxMCE Wiki but it is simply information overload. What I'd REALLY like is for someone who has already done it to give some guidance as to which components to buy, particularly when it comes to the security cameras and controllers for them. I thought I'd try the Refdesk first before hitting the LinuxMCE forums, please don't shoot me :P Zunaid 14:01, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

global village

We know right now that the globe is now turning to be a global village with the use of computers everywhere. At first it wasnt so. My question why is it now important to learn computing and not just the fundamentals but to go into details to learn oracle, systems administration and engineering etc. Emmanuel —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.210.28.223 (talk) 14:11, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

It isn't important to know those things. That is specialization relevant only to a small number of occupational fields. Having good knowledge of computers and a basic understanding of how they work/operate is a good thing. I've never seen anyone suggest Oracle knowledge etc. is important to the general public. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 14:39, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

There are huge benefits to be had from learning some basic computer stuff - like scripting/programming and basic systems admin. Even if you wind up in a career that doesn't demand those things - it's amazing how many day-to-day office tasks can be helped out by being able to write a simple script - or by understanding how to fix simple technical matters yourself rather than having to run to the IT department (or paying a bunch of bozo's like "The Geek Squad" or the Microsoft help desk) every time you have a minor problem. Computers are here to stay - and they are getting into every corner of our lives - not being "computer literate" in the age of computers is going to be as bad as not being "literate" in the age of printing. SteveBaker (talk) 13:30, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

graphic cards

is it possible for graphic cards to display 1920x1080 pixels on a 46" sony hdtv used as a monitor? actually wut ishould be asking is are there any graphic cards out there displaying that many pixels when set on the settings tab when u right click?Jwking (talk) 16:23, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

The settings tab should display the resolutions compatible with your monitor if you have installed the appropriate drivers. As long as your graphic card has enough video memory, you should be able to use large resolutions. --wj32 ^t/c 22:53, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Actaully a few graphics cards that have a HDMI output connector on the card, have a Native resolution of 1920x1080. To get a graphic card who's programmable clip clock is fast enought to do that resolution requries a peice of software called Power~ something. I cant remember. My EVGA PCIx16 nVidia 7600 is the only card I have that can do it. I have a Toshiba Libretto U105 at work, that has the 64Mb of VRam ( shared memory ), but its pixel clock is not fast enough. ( Damn old Intel internal video chip ). Use the " Dell Ultrasharp UXGA 17" Screen" driver (.inf file ) to tell your video card, what monitor you have ) ( You can see this thread: [2] ) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:31, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, what? A Voodoo 3 3000 could do 2046x1536 at 60Hz. You don't need HDMI out either; you can get a simple adapter to go from DVI to HDMI, and some TVs take VGA as input. You can do component video out too, depending on the video card. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:37, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

And: The software you're likely thinking of is Powerstrip; that will let you get resolutions that are not displayed as an option by the driver, but it's usually not necessary for 1920x1080. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 06:46, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Damn! Thanks Crusty, Thats the software exactly. What is your definition of Usually? I have never seen a video card, except a nVidia 8800GT that didnt need it.

And, 1920x1080 is 1Mpixel, so you need at least 32MB to do a 24-bit still picture. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.185.0.29 (talk) 08:58, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

My definition of 'usually' is "> 50% of the time". Unless there's something wrong with the card's detection of the TV, I haven't seen any that require using powerstrip for that resolution. 1080p is an HDTV resolution, it's pretty common. Also, your calculation looks wrong: (1920*1080 pixels) * (24 bits / pixel) * (1 megabyte / 8388608 bits) = 5.93 megabytes. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 13:48, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Most modern graphics cards should be able to get to that resolution - but are you sure your TV can handle it? By default the graphics card is going to produce 1080p (progressive scan) - but many (even quite high end) TV sets can only do 720p or 1080i (interlaced) which is not quite the same thing. Most of them will accept those higher resolution images - but down-sample them to the resolution they actually can manage. That looks OK with TV programs and movies - but when you do that with images from a computer, you get a picture that looks pretty terrible - and running your graphics at the actual resolution that the TV can manage without tricks will produce better results. SteveBaker (talk) 13:24, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

.net Framework

Is there any good reason why I would need to have .net v2 and v3 installed on my computer at the same time, or does v3 being the latest issue provide the full functionality of previous versions ? I just note that v2 and v3 are installed side by side on my machine rather than v3 having overwritten v2. The size of the latest updates is also an issue if I have to download for both versions.--196.207.47.60 (talk) 16:36, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Probabbly there is no good reason, but I think you need to keep both to be able to run files that require one or another. Hey, it's Microsoft software, don't try to understand it... SF007 (talk) 19:59, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

.NET Framework 3.0 is based on 2.0 and adds support for WPF, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows Communication Foundation. When you install 3.0, it installs 2.0, plus those features. .NET Framework 3.5 is similar (this is from the download page for 3.5):

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 contains many new features building incrementally upon .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0, and includes .NET Framework 2.0 service pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.0 service pack 1.

--wj32 ^t/c 22:50, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

It's quite common for different major versions of shared libraries to be binary-incompatible, meaning that you have to have at least one instance of each major version installed if you want to support all the applications that use that library. I'm not sure this is true of .NET but I think it is. -- BenRG (talk) 21:25, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

CR-RW problems

Hi everybody. My brother recently downloaded some files for me and burned them to a CD-R. I have a CDRW drive, but for some reason when I open the drive, it says there is nothing on the disk (0 objects). If I look at the disk properties, it says there is 250mb of data on the disk. I have never before had any problems reading any disks on my Sony CRX100E CDRW drive. Any ideas what the problem is? I have WIndows 98, if that info is at all important. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 18:13, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

IsoBuster is a good program to recover/check data on CDs/DVDs, it will let you see all the "tacks" on the CD, and the files in them... you can try it (I think a trial verion is available) SF007 (talk) 19:56, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Are you opening the CD with Windows Explorer or with some other program (I'm amazed at the number of users who have no idea what WE is and try to read stuff by browsing from Excel or something...)? It's been a long time since I used 98, but it may have had the option to not show certain file types (mostly internal-type files like DLLs, etc.); if the files your brother put on the CD are of the type WE doesn't think you should see, the window will be empty but the disc still show as having memory used up on it. I believe the options for that are under Tools - Options in WE. If that doesn't help, it may help us if we know what kind of files you're expecting to see. Matt Deres (talk) 20:42, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes I'm using windows explorer. He put a patch for one of my games and a mod for another on the disk. I'm assuming they'd appear as zip or intall shield/setup launchers, but I'm not totally sure. I'll try to get ahold of him to check. I've been able to use disks with the exact same specs, so I know for sure that it's not a case of a disk being to advanced for my drive. --136.247.76.236 (talk) 22:01, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Whew. Do you have any indications that the disc is not being read correctly (light flashing or not coming on at all, weird sounds of the disc being spun up faster and faster)? If so, the disc could simply be mis-burnt. It happens. Did you check to see if Windows was hiding the files on you? I believe the check for that is under Tools - Options (or Folder Options, something like that). Somewhere there'll be an option to show or hide hidden files (at least I think so; as I said, it's been ages since '98 for me) - make sure Windows is showing you everything. Also, ask your friend if he left the disc "open" or closed. I've heard some drives can't read discs left open by a different drive. To be honest, it sounds to me like the disc is simply toast. I've been burning discs for about a decade now, back when the fast model was a 4-2-24, and they are notoriously unreliable. BurnProof tech has helped a lot, but it's still a leap of faith, especially for burning simple files (as opposed to ISOs and other images). Spend $10 on a flash drive and never worry about it again. Matt Deres (talk) 00:33, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, I took the disk to my old man's house, and I was able to read it on his computer. I burned the files to another disk, which I am able to read on my computer. I installed the mod, but when I try to install the patch, I come up with this: "Could not initialize installation. File size expected= 121137572, size returned= 121139200. The parameter is incorrect." Any ideas? Thanks. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 17:56, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Writing CDs and DVDs on a MacBook

Out of nowhere, my MacBook has problems writing to and recognizing blank CDs and DVDs. The drive itself seems to have no problems reading CDs or DVDs, including writable and rewritable CDs and +/- DVDs that already have data written to them.

However, if I insert a blank CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, or DVD+R/RW, the drive spins the disk up and down a couple of times, then ejects the disk, not recognizing it anywhere.

It seems as, all of a sudden, the drive itself does not recognize that it is a burner. Toast 8 reports (as it always did) that the drive has burning capability.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance. --Renwique (talk) 19:56, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

October 10

My "trashcan" or "recycle casket" or whatever to call it has suddenly gone missing from my desktop.. Almost as if it has been deleted. And I can say I certainly haven't deleted no trashcan!

This is a problem coz i can't find it again anywhere and im a bit clueless as to what to do. And i don't know/rememebr what it was called exactly so I havent been able to 'search' my harddisc either for it.. hopefully it is just the shortcut that has gone missing from the desktop, but i just dont know...

what might have happened? and more importantly - how to fix it and find it and/or restore it?

thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Krikkert7 (talk • contribs) 00:07, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, My first guess would be that you accidently moved the recycle bin off the screen somehow and lost it. The simple way to fix it in that case is re-align the desktop by rightclicking and arrange icons by whatever. Then grab your recycle bin and re-arrange how you liked your desktop. If it's more complex then that then please reply with information. Forai (talk) 00:23, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I think it is actually possible to delete the icon for recycle bin on windows xp or later. Did you accidentally press delete for it? 12.169.180.158 (talk) 01:49, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

If you are using Vista, you can right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize. Then click "Change desktop icons" on the left and you can get your Recycle Bin back. --wj32 ^t/c 02:16, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Dont look for tech support here often. OK! To find your trash can, if its on the display but hidden? ( Right click on the desktop ) Arrange Icons by (Third option)Type. To UnHide it, run TweakUI Windows Power Tool. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:33, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

thanks guys big time, with your help I got it sorted out! :D

Spyware

I am a complete retard and have managed to infect my computer with spyware. What good, free scanners can I use to get rid of it? Thanks in advance. 86.143.234.77 (talk) 02:18, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Spybot search and destroy and AdAware are both good scanner. Just google 'em. --AtTheAbyss (talk) 02:28, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

The steps laid out here seem to be pretty solid (open the appropriate thread for you operating system). Yes they're recommending you run several scanners, but it's a good idea to do so if you've been hit. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 04:14, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

You are NOT a complete retard. Humans CANNOT MAKE MISTAKES! Only computers can. OK! If you computer is infected with spyware, you want to get a program called Spybot Search and Destory. [3].

Install it.

Run the Immunize function

Have it scan as the last thing you do during the day. ( it should take an hour or so )

Turn on Expert mode, and look at BHO's ( Browser HiJacker functions ) and click on each one. If one appears that you dont know what it does, type is SPID code ( looks like {EAD4891924-2120-1249 ) into google, and you can easily find if it needs to be deleted.

Just so you know, I got an email, and moused over the graphicl. Turns out it was a link to a codec downloader that loads a trojan horse.

What this means, is that anyone can be fooled, and Windows is inhearntly unsafe by design ----~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.185.0.29 (talk) 06:41, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

how to change from alphabet to ascii code?

i want to know ,how to change from alphabets to ascii code in c++ language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.179.31.23 (talk) 07:26, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

With single quotes, like 'a' (not "a") --194.197.235.221 (talk) 09:13, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Not sure what the question means. Most codes around now except EBCDIC have ASCII as a subset and nearly everything extra is extra because it isn't in ASCII, there are a few things which could be put to something similar but have different semantics. Give an example of an alphabet you would come from and what you would expect the result to be. Do you want to change to Unicode, e.g. UTF8 or UTF16 for instance instead? Dmcq (talk) 12:08, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Generally (since almost nobody uses EBCDIC anymore) - and presuming we're talking about a non-internationalized program, letters are "already" in ASCII codes. So if you write:

 for ( int i = '!' ; i < '~' ; i++ )  // Run 'i' over the entire set of 'printable' characters
   printf ( "'%c' is %d\n", i, i ) ;  // Print 'i' as both a character and an ASCII code

...you'll get an ASCII chart printed out that starts with:

   '!' is 33
   '"' is 34
   '#' is 35

...and eventually...

   'A' is 65
   'B' is 66
      ...
   'Z' is 90

...and so on until we get to...

   '}' is 125
   '~' is 126

SteveBaker (talk) 13:09, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

IBM sells five gigabucks worth of EBCDIC-based mainframes each year, so somebody must be using them. A very miserable somebody, but still. --Sean 13:50, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd be quite surprised if there were any C++ programs running on them though! SteveBaker (talk) 14:09, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Why? My current project involves Java on the mainframe; I don't have any direct experience of C++ but I don't see why people wouldn't use it. 81.187.153.189 (talk) 10:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about Java - but C++ on ZOS/OS-390 uses the ASCII character set. Some sort of EBCDIC-to-ASCII and ASCII-to-EBCDIC kludge is used on the inputs and outputs of the C++ code so it can run in a "normal" ASCII environment internally. I'd be quite surprised if Java for that operating system didn't do the exact same thing. SteveBaker (talk) 03:18, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, characters (or 'alphabets' as you call them) are stored as numbers (in ASCII codes). With printf you can choose to print the ASCII code as a character (%c) or as a number (%d) (simplistic explanation) --wj32 ^t/c 21:18, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Converting ClearSpace markup to MediaWiki

Does anyone know of a package/plugin/whatever to convert documents in the Clearspace wiki markup (urgh!) to MediaWiki? SteveBaker (talk) 14:10, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Scanning banknotes

Why can't banknotes be scanned? 14:31, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

They can — they just don't give an accurate reproduction when scanned. This makes it more difficult to forge them. -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 14:52, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Many photocopiers and computer programs detect the EURion constellation, a pattern present on many bank notes, and refuse to operate. That article also suggests digital watermarking may be used as well. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 14:54, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Interestingly, photocopying American dollars is a felony, unless changed/enlarged/shrunk to the point that it is immediately obvious that it is a fake. Even if you never intended to pass the money as counterfeit, it's still illegal. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 00:47, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Laptop Downloading Woes

I was given a troubled HP laptop computer to diagnose and repair that I can not find a solution for.

The problem it had initially was that it could connect to a network via cable or wireless and would show up with IP information, connected to IM programs, etc. but would not connect to the internet through a web browser. This turned out to be a problem with the a Norton program that apparently comes pre-loaded on HP systems.

So, now the laptop is connecting to browsers and everything seemed fine. Come to find out that I can not download anything from the internet to the hard-drive, such as a simple installer program. Any files will begin downloading like normal (ask where I would like to save, pop up the download window, etc.) but then just immediately complete and do not show up with any resulting download. The very first time I had this issue, I believe it actually downloaded for some time, completed, and left me with a fragmented file that could not be opened.

The laptop -will- download updates via Windows Updater, but I believe it will not allow me to download files from other programs, such as Zune Marketplace.

I have tried hooking this laptop to different networks (work network and home network), using different web browsers (FireFox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome), clearing the TCP/IP Stack via the command line, logging in as a Guest user on the computer, booting up in Safe Mode + Network, and have not been able to identify any firewall, anti-virus/spyware programs, or generic Windows settings that could possibly cause this issue.

The computer is using 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

209.253.35.194 (talk) 17:05, 10 October 2008 (UTC)Impen

As a temporary solution, try getting a download manager and resuming every time the download breaks. This might be an issue with your ISP, or with Norton security software. Have you tried disabling Norton antivirus/firewall? Also, by "not show up with any resulting download" do you mean the download doesn't show up in the download manager, or isn't present as a file on the filesystem? If it exists, how big is it? --wj32 ^t/c 21:23, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that the download is not breaking - it is completing extremely quick. There is no download to resume, because the system thinks it has finished.

I know it is not a problem with an ISP, because I have tried it at two different locations with separate networks (home and work) and it is not a problem with Norton. I uninstalled any/all Norton related software I could find on the computer with the aid of the program they make you download to uninstall their software.

By "not show up with any resulting download," I mean it does not create any new file on the system. The option for "Open" and "Open Containing Folder" options are not available in the browser. It appears the downloaded file does not exist at all.

Also, I have tried this on a wired and wireless network.

Thank you for the input, wj32. =) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.253.35.194 (talk) 22:28, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Try using IE and "Open"ing the file. Does it download properly? It might be that you can't write to the download location (very unlikely though). Also, what was the problem with Norton? Try going to C:\Windows\system32\drivers and seeing if any Norton-related drivers are still there. --wj32 ^t/c 22:46, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I have tried "Open"ing or "Run"ing these fies when downloading with Internet Explorer and FireFox, and it does appear to work. The files I was trying to download previously may have been too small to determine whether they were actively trying to download or just cutting short (I didn't think they were, as my work network is typically slow).

After trying to download a few larger files to the hard-drive, it appears that the browser is allowing the downloads to make progress up to 100%, then immediately eliminating the download. The file does not appear on the system once the download progress is complete. This was the same result when trying to download to desktop, My Documents, or a USB thumb-drive.

I searched the C:\windows\system32\drivers directory for any suspicious looking drivers, but the esoteric nature of driver naming prevents me from really locating any that may have been associated with Norton.

I am not sure what the problem was with Norton, but it seemed to be a common issue with HP laptops pre-installed with the Norton software. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.253.35.194 (talk) 23:59, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

That's very strange... are you sure the file is actually present while the browser is downloading? Obviously, if the file is present, the browser can't be deleting the file (why would it do that?). --wj32 ^t/c 00:55, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Ubuntu download as VMware virtual machine, VMware tools preinstalled

Where can I download Ubuntu as a VMware virtual machine with VMware tools preinstalled, aside from the VMware website? I have an Intel Mac 10.5. The VMware website keeps 7zip archives of Ubuntu with VMware tools pre-installed, but the only one (of four files in the archive) which VMware Fusion can open gives me a Terminal only. (The 770MB "VMware Virtual Disk" remains untouched.) I successfully installed Ubuntu manually, and then I tried installing VMware Tools afterwards. But that doesn't work either. When it goes to configure itself, it seems to want a C-compiler, but can't find gcc even though it is installed. (Apparently, v4.2 is already installed.)

My solution is to download it, altogether, with Tools pre-installed. VMware Tools is software that runs in the virtual machine, to help it integrate better with the host system. I'm a noob, much as I make every effort I can to decipher what I can't understand!My name is anetta (talk) 17:53, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

In the guest, open a terminal and type sudo apt-get build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`. Then install VMware Tools. Ubuntu comes with GCC, but without the essential headers. --wj32 ^t/c 21:27, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Thankyou for your help, Wj32, but copied straight in it says "E: Invalid operation build-essential", and even when I change it to apt-get build-essential linux-headers -"uname -r", it says E: Command line option ‘n’ [from -uname -r] is not known. Even when I run it as root. I'll try again after updating the machine, however.My name is anetta (talk) 23:51, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Oops, sorry! I meant sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`. --wj32 ^t/c 23:56, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

You can get "Super Ubuntu" in a Virtual Machine (not an official version):

http://hacktolive.org/wiki/Download_Super_Ubuntu —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.196.42.142 (talk) 01:38, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Thankyou. Terminal is busy. And I'm torrenting Super Ubuntu as well.My name is anetta (talk) 11:16, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Why memory segmentation?

We have an introductory course in microprocessors. In 8085, the data bus of RAM chip and microprocessor both are 8-bit and hence interfacing is straightforward. For 8086 however, data bus of processor is 16-bit and that of RAM chip is 8-bit. We can't have a 1MB ram chip in which we can address two locations at the same, hence we use two chips each of 512kb for interfacing to the 8086. This is also where the concept of memory banking comes in.

However, my question is - instead of going through all this hassle, why can't we have RAM chips with data bus of 16-bits? It would make the trouble of segmentation unnecessary. (For now, let's ignore the other advantages of memory segmentation.) My professor explained that it's a "hardware limitation" of 8086, but I don't understand how - if data bus of both processor and RAM is 16-bit.

Thanks --RohanDhruva (talk) 19:06, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Doubling the size of a given bus is a lot more than just adding 8 wires; you need to double the number of parts for every part of the system that touch that bus. This uses real estate on the silicon die, which is always in short supply. Worse, particularly back in them days, chip design software was very primitive (making even trivial-seeming changes into a lot of hard work) and really Intel didn't employ all that many people. Plus I guess they thought (rightly, from an economic standpoint) that the 16/8 chip would sell perfectly well, and they could do a 16/16 chip later. I'm sure they came to regret that, from a technical standpoint, later - but by that time they had huge piles of 8086 cash, so it's hard to say they were wrong. Incidentally if they had made it 16/16 you wouldn't have needed 16 bit RAM chips - you'd just use two 8 bit ones in parallel and common their chip selects. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:22, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Additionally (in general; I don't know the specifics of the 8085->8086 transition) there are other reasons why a new chip might willfully inherit the limitations of its predecessor. These include the goal to be:

• pin-compatible, or as close to as possible, to minimise the effort designers have to put in to switch a given board from your old device to your new one
• instruction compatible, or at least very similar, so existing software works, or can be ported with less effort
• hardware compatible, so existing devices (like memory SIMMs) from the old system can be used in the new. Also remember that RAM isn't the only thing on a classic x86 system address/data bus - external devices like UARTs, mouse controllers, floppy controllers, and many more are all built to the same architecture standard; the less you change that, the more of these devices will work (or the easier it will be to make them work).

As with my first answer, the real reason is "economics". -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:13, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Self-Replicating Program

How would one go about making a program that makes a random change to its programming based on a dictionary of commands and then replicates itself? Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Freiberg (talk • contribs) 21:48, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

You'll have to tell us what environment you're thinking of programming this in (or, if you have no constraints). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:52, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

While I don't necessary care about the programming language used, I am hoping to not have it swamp my hard drive, perhaps by partitioning the hard drive. Also, I am hoping that any program that fails to replicate is deleted.--Freiberg, Let's talk!, contribs 22:20, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, you want to build a virtual machine with a limited instruction set defined by yourself and have your "programs" run inside that virtual machine. Assumedly what you are thinking of is a kind of artificial life evolving through a genetic algorithm. See Tierra for an implementation of that. Equendil Talk 01:12, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

It's not that hard to do it in most languages. You could even do it in C++. Write a program that writes a copy of itself to disk - then runs the C++ compiler on the result - then runs the result and exits itself. That's not too tough - after that it's a matter of making the random changes...but the trouble with that is that almost any random change results in a program that won't compile. Hence the attraction of making a virtual machine with a limited instruction set (as Equendil suggests). The principle benefit of doing that is that you can arrange that (a) there are no "illegal" programs - they all run in some manner no matter what garbage they contain...and (b) that the ratio of 'useful' instructions in the instruction set to 'obscure, not very useful' ones is kept to a minimum to give the next generation. In that setting, you can make a single 'special' instruction that means "make a copy of yourself with N random alterations". Being able to control the virtual machine also means that there is no risk of "The Terminator" knocking on your door and telling you that a program evolved from your system will escape in the future and takes over the world enslaving all of humanity (never a good thing!). SteveBaker (talk) 01:38, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you; this is exactly what I needed to know. That was also exactly my intent, as I wanted to set goals and see what kinds of programs I could "breed". I now know.--Freiberg, Let's talk!, contribs 21:54, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

You may be interested in the evolutionary computation article. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:58, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I am indeed. Thanks. --Freiberg, Let's talk!, contribs 16:09, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

"See what I did there?"

What does "See what I did there?" mean in the context of web forums or blogs (I'm asking on Computing instead of Humanities only because it seems like a web meme). From what I can tell from Google, it generally follows a dumb pun or play on words. Generally a really obvious one. Is the idea that people aren't clever enough to get the play on words? Or is there some sub-text or joke that I'm missing?

Thanks! Madd4Max 23:04, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Google gave me this at Urban Dictionary. Algebraist 23:08, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I've seen "I see what you did there." - but not the form you describe. It usually happens when someone posts a lame pun or a crappily photoshopped "joke" image - and the other person replies "I see what you did there." as a way to say "I acknowledge that you tried - but I didn't find that at all funny or original". SteveBaker (talk) 03:10, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

October 11

Web Programming Question

I want to construct a website with an interface that randomly presents users with one of a finite set of variables -- such as an image and accompanying text or audio, or a randomly generated web-page -- and requests user input -- such as a series of radio buttons next to accompanying text. So ideally it would work something like this: A user would hit a button or a link, be taken to a web-page generated with a randomly selected picture and accompanying audio, and then have the user fill out a form with radio buttons or something similar. Oh, and most importantly, I then need to collect the data from the forms and the information about the randomly generated page, store it in someplace, and allow me to perform meaningful operations with it (such as computing averages, etc.).

My question is: what programming language does this series of tasks sound most appropriate for? I'm used to programming (C++, Python) but have very limited experience with web-programming, so I don't really know where to begin. Further, do I need access and knowledge to/of the server on which the application would be stored in order to program the necessary CGI to perform the kinds of operations I mentioned before, or can I somehow just have it all written to a .data file stored elsewhere on the site? Deshi no Shi (talk) 00:50, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

For something like that, I'd normally toss something together in PHP - database access is fairly trivial that way, especially if you're using something like MySQL, and PHP uses a C-type syntax, which should help given your C++ background. Plus you just toss the PHP code into a plain text file for parsing by the web server, so if the server supports it you won't need any access beyond the norm. If you go with a CGI Python would be easy (although I'd use Perl as a matter of habit). Typical server configs place CGIs in a separate executable folder, so you'll need access and permissions. - Bilby (talk) 00:59, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Would be so easy to do in PHP. Do it PHP. If you know C++ and Python you'll find PHP to be a walk in the park. Just look online for a quicky tutorial on using form data (e.g.) and databases (e.g.) with PHP and you'll be able to figure out the rest just fine. PHP is just a matter of knowing how to work with the web—the syntax is easy and there are functions pre-built for just about everything.

As for the server stuff... if you do it in PHP, you don't really have to know much about the server at all, esp. if you are just doing the sort of thing you describe. Some areas of functions (e.g. image manipulation) can be heavily affected by the version of PHP installed and what options it was compiled with. If you are using a real MySQL database you will have to get things set up on the server correctly with that (I recommend using a tool like phpMyAdmin for that). If you are just writing to a plaintext file then no, you don't need anything special.

Note that the easiest way to develop in PHP is to install a local Apache server (if you don't have one already) and install PHP with that and do it on your local computer, and then transfer that to the server. Sometimes there are little bugs or differences incurred when doing this, based on differences in OSes or installations, but they are rarely things that can't be worked around pretty easily. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 01:39, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Mouse problems.

I have seemed to run in to a small problem with my logitech mouse. The problem is that i have reached the far left end of my mouse, but the curser is on the far right side of my screen, i can still move is up and down, but i am unable to move it further to the left without going off my mouse pad, what should i do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.164.220.177 (talk) 06:40, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Lift the mouse up (with your hand, against gravity) and place it at the centre of your mouse pad again. 59.95.101.123 (talk) 12:10, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Alternatively, purchase a larger mouse pad :) --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 21:13, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your help, I have a budget of $880, where would i be able to find a mouse pad that will work with a Macintouch Computer for under $800? —Preceding unsigned comment added by E smith2000 (talk • contribs) 05:51, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Huh? --98.217.8.46 (talk) 13:23, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I can create a large mouse pad for you at a bargin price of $879.00 203.202.144.223 (talk) 22:27, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Markup language for desktop frontend ?

Will ever HTML, or any other template based / markup languages be used, to design desktop frontend (of course, in combination with some scripting language, and style sheets) ? With xml and xsl, I don't think this is impossible. In this case we need only a rendering engine and a scripting engine on the top of kernel. This could possibly replace other traditional desktop frontends like, xwindows, gnome, or KDE. I am not sure, just asking... --V4vijayakumar (talk) 07:22, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Depends on what you meant by that, Glade Interface Designer outputs a xml file that's used with bindings but is itself language independent. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:37, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't that be a bit slow, especially with using scripting languages? Of course, there's already XUL which uses JavaScript, but that isn't used for non-web-applications (much). --wj32 ^t/c 09:14, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

NeWS (one of the early windowing systems for Solaris) used PostScript for all of it's rendering and user interactions. When a normal application program (written in C, perhaps) wanted a GUI widget (like a button or a menu), it would send the PostScript source code to the windowing system that would run hundreds of these little postscript programs in parallel. The postscript would draw the widget - monitor interaction with it and send data back to the application as needed. It was a pretty elegant concept and even on mid-1980's hardware, it was pretty usable. However, it fizzled and never became really popular. SteveBaker (talk) 03:07, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

NeWS hm.. interesting. I am sure something like this will come back. :) --V4vijayakumar (talk) 08:11, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I've heard that OS X uses PDF in its display layer, though individual applications don't have to send it PDF source to work. 81.187.153.189 (talk) 09:25, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

It's not the same thing though - Postscript is an actual programming language. You execute the program in order to make the graphics. The cool thing about NeWS was that if (for example) you wanted a widget with a weird set of radio buttons where any two out of three could be pressed down at any time - or a widget that let you enter numbers in base 12 or something crazy like that - or a button that turns pink when you click on it - then you could send a little Postscript program to the window manager that would draw the widget - monitor mouse clicks and keyboard input directed at it and handle all of those little annoying error checking things...so the real C-language application would only ever see "clean" data coming from the GUI in a format that it could determine. This is nice for a system like NeWS (the 'N' stands for "Network") because a program running somewhere remotely can send a short Postscript program to your local computer that's drawing the desktop - and low level GUI stuff is handled on the client machine with only final results being sent back to the application. Because Postscript is portable - and the interface between application and window manager is just ASCII source code - the machine architecture of the windowing client and the host could be completely different. SteveBaker (talk) 19:10, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Alternatively to everyone just telling you names of Interface Markup Languages, read the article User interface markup language and find out for yourself. Note that you could have easily find that article yourself. You'll also see that XAML can define language logic as well as interface, plus it can be scripted/hard coded as well. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 11:08, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Linux kernel

I know that optimizing the kernel for a machine will give faster boot-up, but will it make other userspace application more responsive too? Will Firefox launch faster when I click its icon, or is it just the boot time that depends on kernel optimization?
The Firewall (talk) 10:27, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but usually not by much (single-digit %); mainly because the kernel will use less memory, freeing some more for the applications, and because you can optimize the kernel for your particular CPU instead of a generic i386. MaxVT (talk) 19:24, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

It really depends a lot on the application. A program that (say) calculates the first million digits of PI will probably use almost no kernel time - it'll get interrupted by the kernel once in a while - but that's going to be a tiny fraction of the total runtime. In that situation, the performance of the kernel is almost irrelevant. But pick a program that's doing LOTS of kernel-related activity (allocating memory, doing I/O, switching back and forth between lots of tasks) - and it's time could be dramatically affected by the performance of the kernel. The only reason booting up is so sensitive to kernel performance is because most of the programs that are invoked (and there are LOTS of them) are doing exactly those kinds of things that lean heavily on the kernel's performance. FIrefox ought to launch noticably quicker if the kernel gets a lot faster. SteveBaker (talk) 02:55, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Strange symbols on webpages

I've often noticed strange symbols appearing on webpages. In all of them, a valid character is replaced by a seemingly unrelated group of characters. For example, see this page where in the search result, ‘ gets replaced by ’. Could someone tell me why this happens? --Seraphiel (talk) 13:24, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I can confirm that I have also seen this phenomenon, but I do not know what causes it. - SigmaEpsilon → ΣΕ 16:09, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I think this is usually caused by software getting the character encoding wrong - if you visit the original article in Firefox and go to View > Character Encoding > Western (ISO-8859-1) you'll see the weirdness in the headline there too. It seems to work fine in UTF-8, and I'm not sure why the Google News spider isn't using that. — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 16:39, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

The Google News spider is probably at fault. The original article is served using the utf-8 encoding both from web server and in the document, and the characters used are encoded properly. Some script on Google's side bungles them, probably assuming ISO-8859-1 encoding or incorrectly handling UTF-8 characters. MaxVT (talk) 19:36, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

JAVA PROGRAM(Test1 of Computer Science)

Qsn1. Write down a java program that produces the following pattern,given any value of n. n=1;

*  

n=2;

 *
* *
 *

n=3;

  *
 * *
* * *                      [15]marks
 * *
  * 

n=4;

   *
  * *
 * * *
* * * *
 * * *
  * *
   * 
//The input should be from the keyboard Tsotetsirapman (talk) 14:33, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Read the top of the page. No homework questions. And really, this is pretty straightforward. Just look up how to for loops. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 14:37, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks like you want a counter, say i, which increases until n, at which point it decreases until 0. Then, for each i, you want to print out i amount of stars (with the correct spacing as well). Should be pretty easy. Here's a big clue: the code looks something like this in C:

int up = 1;
int i;
int n = 4;

for (i = 1; !((!up) && (!i)); (i == n) ? (up = 0) : (up = up), up ? i++ : i--)
{
    // print stars here
}

--wj32 ^t/c 23:54, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Here's another clue: for each i, the amount of space characters before the first star is n - i. I hope you were able to figure that out by yourself!--wj32 ^t/c 23:46, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

If it were me, I would probably use recursion... perhaps it may be a bit over complicated, but I've always found writing recursive functions to be much more interesting than for loops.

   void printStars(int n)
   {
       if(n==0)
           return;
       for(int temp=0; temp < n; temp++)
       {
       cout << " *";
       }
       cout << endl;
       printStars(n-1);
   }

Obviously that's not complete, but that's the basis of what I would do... :) DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:21, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

MHTML

This [4] says you can save a "whole Web site" as MHTML. How is this done? I've only ever got it to save one page at a time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.63.184.3 (talk) 17:53, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I think [5] meant "page", not "site". --grawity 18:07, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Auto-Refresh?

Is there a way to make Firefox automatically reload a page after a specified amount of time? I'm playing Forumwarz and there's a page that displays crucial information, but I need to to be always up-to-date. Instead of pressing F5 and alt+tab all the time, is there a simpler way?. 58.161.97.173 (talk) 22:05, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

There is a "Reload every" plugin for Firefox - [6] -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:23, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh, thank you very much 58.161.97.173 (talk) 23:00, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

October 12

Cryptographic hash in less than O(n)

Do any known cryptographic hash functions run in less than linear time? NeonMerlin 01:14, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Bad ones can run in far less than O(n) time. Consider the worse one of all: Just use the first X bits as the hash. That is O(1). But, you can use whatever integer you want for X and get arbitrary length hashes! I do see that the list of popular hash functions on cryptographic hash function doesn't have runtime costs. Checking the articles, I don't even see anything in there. Looks like we need some research. -- kainaw™ 02:31, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Even worse and faster hash function: always return 42. Not so "cryptographic" though. --71.106.183.17 (talk) 04:14, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I doubt that any good cryptographic hash functions run in less than linear time. You might be able to fudge "good" for a particular application, and get away with less, but not in general. Consider the property "second preimage resistant" as described in the article Cryptographic hash function: It should be very hard, given one input x, to generate a second input y, such that hash(x)=hash(y). To get that, you need every byte of the input to have an effect on the output. But doing anything to every byte of input is necessarily going to take at least O(n) time.

It's also a minor point from a practical perspective. Most of the times that you're interested in the cryptographic hash of some data, you're also doing something else with the data -- storing it on disk, or transmitting it across a network -- that takes O(n) time, and a fairly substantial amount of time at that. So any gains you'd make from having a sub-O(n) hash function would be swamped to insignificance by the cost of your other operations.

The only application that comes to mind where it's not moot would be something like Open Source Tripwire (checking to see if files have been modified, in part by checking their hashes) since you're potentially hashing the file a lot more often than you read it, or write it, or transfer it. But I think that's one application where you couldn't "fudge" things -- if you don't use each and every byte in your hash, an attacker could conceivably slip something into the bytes you ignore.

On a parting note: I think (but I'm no expert) that currently used cryptographic hashes are all O(n) in time and O(1) in space (excluding any space used to hold the input). -- Why Not A Duck 04:37, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Google 2001 and phrases

A google 2001 search for "Sarah Palin" with quotes gives no hits, but doing a search for Sarah Palin Alaska (without quotes) reveals that pages featuring the phrase "Sarah Palin" existed back then. Does anything like this happen for any other search terms in google 2001? Andjam (talk) 04:09, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the quoted phrase feature didn't work back then. --Sean 21:56, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Firefox: Predict my URL please, but not a whole bunch of nonsense

Hi all,

I set Firefox to auto-fill my url bar as I type some time ago (using about:config, I don't exactly remember where), so that typing in 'news.g' would fill in 'news.google.com' and I could just hit enter. After the latest update, though, it's started filling in much more than I typed, and instead filling in addresses it's been to, e.g. news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=:ePkh8BM9E2IF2mHAArFFW[.....], forcing me to finish typing and hit delete, or using my mouse to delete the rest.

How can I tell Firefox to only auto-fill addresses that I've actually typed, instead of addresses that I've been to?

Thanks! — Sam 07:58, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

ASP.NET: <%# %>

Can someone remind me what that is called? In between it would be an expression. I would search for it, but those characters aren't coming up in google or msdn. Thanks Louis Waweru  Talk  15:40, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

is that like a preprocessor directive? 68.146.178.33 (talk) 18:51, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that you are right...it's strange but I can't find anything about them to confirm this. Someone else described them the way you do, and give this list of them #if #else #elif #endif #define #undef #warning #error #line #region #endregion. That one in this section title is the only one I've been using, it's always been with binding data...I'm trying to figure out how many there are and how to use them to see what I can and can't do with them. But they're not turning up anything for me. Louis Waweru  Talk  22:31, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

gnome 2.24

Is there a .deb package of GNOME 2.24 available for downlaod for either Debian or Ubuntu (latest stable versions of both)? Thanks in advance :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.138.187.117 (talk) 16:06, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Linux: inline text editing

What is "inline text editing" in Linux? Thanks. Smaug 16:45, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Currently, "inline text editing" almost exclusively pertains to editing web page content through a web browser directly on the web page's server. For example, when you click "edit" on Wikipedia, you are using an inline text editor. Linux doesn't really have anything to do with it. The web server could be Linux, Windows, Mac, Commodore... -- kainaw™ 16:57, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

There is something, when you are editing a text document in Linux. There is graphical, there is stuff like nano, and there is "inline text editing". What is inline text editing? Or does it refer to graphical or nano/w/e? Smaug 17:09, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Tell us where you saw this term? SteveBaker (talk) 18:58, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe ed, the "line-oriented editor"? - IMSoP (talk) 19:26, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Re SteveBaker: "1. What are two advantages of graphical and inline text editing?" Smaug 21:45, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh-oh. Now your confessing to having asked us a homework question...which we're not allowed to answer. But if this is indeed homework - then the answer must be somewhere in the books you're working from. Personally (and I've been using Linux since almost the first version - and I've used other UNIX versions since the mid-1970's)...I have never heard this term. It's possible they are talking about "line editors" versus "visual editors" - you can see a 'line' editor in Linux by opening up a text console and running 'ex filename' versus a 'visual' editor by running 'vi filename'. (These are actually different modes of the same underlying program). SteveBaker (talk) 00:27, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Versatile Flash Animation Software

Howdy folks, I've been looking a whole lot lately into animation and the like, and I was wondering what exactly the "Standard" software is for Flash animation. I've been looking at Flash MX, but I've heard there's some stuff out there that's better purely for animation, however I still want a decent amount of versatility. Thanks!

Kenjibeast (talk) 17:10, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

There are different types of web animation, one of them is Flash. Flash animation is any animation made using Flash. Flash MX is an old (though still very good) version of Flash. It has since been followed by Flash 8 and Flash CS3.

I have not used any animation software other than Flash MX and Flash 8, but I find both to be great for animation and great for other stuff. I even use it to make static diagrams, or in place of powerpoint presentations. Smaug 17:46, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Vista track number help

I have a folder with more than 200 songs and I'm giving them track numbers. However, when I try to give a song a track number over 99, I get an error. Can Vista not handle track numbers over 99 or something? How do I fix this; use WMP?--Oldman55 (talk) 17:59, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

You're going to have to edit the id3 tag in a different program. You can do it manually in WMP, but some programs will let you automate something like that...I can recommend Tag&Rename.Louis Waweru  Talk  18:54, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know of any albums with more than 99 tracks! Your problem is almost certainly that you're trying to put a bunch of songs that are not part of the same album into a single album. You need to put them into the albums they came from originally. SteveBaker (talk) 18:55, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Well they're all ripped from a game that doesn't have an OST, and I want them all in one folder and with track numbers following each other so they stay in one spot on my ipod.--Oldman55 (talk) 18:57, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Weird browser glitch?

Hi. This has happened four times already, including three times today. The first time happened a while back, when I was uploading an image of a Northern Cardinal to Commons from my computer. I think I had one Wikipedia window and two Commons windows open in my browser. I use IE. As I closed either one or two windows, I don't remember, new windows started randomly popping up, each an exact duplicate of a window I closed. If I pressed "Esc", the new windows would just come up like 'there is nothing to display'. Today, when I was opening new windows from my watchlist, once while editing persimmon, another time while editing The Weather Network, and another time with Cyclone Nargis, I closed the window I was editing to come back to my watchlist, and the exact same thing happened again! As I closed the window, more windows would pop up of the window I closed. The only way to stop this is by closing all the windows, in which I have to log back in again if I closed my watchlist window. Since my computer is a bit slow, it took a while for the windows to load, so today by the time I closed all the windows only about six or seven managed to stay up at the same time. If left unattended, perhaps it could open indefinitely. I remember with the TWN and Nargis articles, the page hadn't completely finished loading before I closed it. Is this a general browser glitch, or could it be some sort or virus? I'm not asking for professional advice. The problem is, this has never happened without me closing a window and also not without closing a wiki website, or at least I saved something, closed it before finished loading, and this happens. Any ideas? Thanks. ~AH1^(TCU) 19:43, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia has melted down. See my question below. Powerzilla (talk) 20:43, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Keyboard Problem

Hello, my 'e' key is at the point where it's barely responding. I have to press down on it fairly hard for the letter to appear on screen and it's significantly lowering my typing speed. Is there any quick fixes for this? Thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.236.176.39 (talk) 20:34, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Buy a new keyboard? They only cost about £10-15. Algebraist 20:44, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a laptop... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.236.176.39 (talk) 20:52, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Other option, get a vacuum cleaner and completely vacuum the contents of your keyboard. You would be surprised how much crap collects between the keys and the pad or membrane underneath! :) Thor Malmjursson (talk) 20:54, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Most laptops let you unscrew the faceplate of the keyboard, giving you better access to clean the inside of the keyboard with blowers, wipes or whatever. If you need online intructions, there's a good site for MAcs, ifixit.com, and I'll bet there are guides out there for some PC laptops. — Sam 21:09, 12 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.38.252.83 (talk)

You can buy some "switch cleaner" spray - (you'd get it in any decent computer store...or RadioShack) gently lever off the keycap with a flat screwdriver and spray a good squirt down into the center of the hole - put the keycap back on and tap the key repeatedly. If you've lead a good and virtuous life - your key will gradually come back to life. If it gets a bit better, do it again...but if not...give up and buy a USB keyboard - it should work just fine - even with a laptop. (Although it's going to be kinda inconvenient if you actually use your laptop for mobile computing). SteveBaker (talk) 00:20, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

When this has happened to me, it's been because something solid is stuck underneath the key (on my laptop). I usually just pop the key off and pull whatever it is out with tweezers... but be warned, you can damage the key doing this. I recently had to replace my keyboard, so I had a dummy to test on. Should you decide to do this (at your risk) you usually just lift on the side or bottom of the key and the cap will just pop off... depending on the manufacturer. On my new gateway, you lift from the bottom, on a slightly older gateway, it's the side. Anyway, make sure you don't lose the little squishy plastic piece underneath. To put it back on, just line up half of the key (generally under some hook things), and then push down on the other half to put it back on. (Again, at your own risk! I've broken keys doing this occasionally). DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:29, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia Having a MELT-DOWN?!

Is Wikipedia having a melt-down? It is repeatedly malfunctioning. Getting really weird shit on it, disconnects from wikipedia. I guess it finally blew up. Powerzilla (talk) 20:42, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I've had no problems. Can we have a bit more info? What operating system are you on? What browser are you using? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 21:32, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia sometimes has a little hiccup but it's usually fixed within hours. Just be patient. Seems fine now. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 02:07, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Ignoring Users on YouTube

Is there a way to find out which users are ignoring you on YouTube or how to find out if a certain user is ignoring you?Serpentipes (talk) 21:35, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

You mean users who have blocked you? You can try individually by trying to subscribe to their channel. It won't let you subscribe if they blocked you. ScienceApe (talk) 00:08, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

October 13

Is Windows 7 being released so soon because of the criticisms about Windows Vista?

I actually didn't realize that a successor to Vista was being released so soon. ScienceApe (talk) 00:07, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

No. You can make that claim if you like, but you'll have no evidence to back it any more than you can claim that Windows 7 will be released soon because Tony Gonzalez is looking for a quick trade. There is no cause and effect there. -- kainaw™ 01:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

What file types benefit most from defragmentation?

Although we have several articles on fragmentation and defragmentation, I don't see my issue addressed. Discussion follows based on 8.3 naming conventions, but answers should easily generalize (shouldn't they?)

• Initially, I thought compacting .exe (and .dll) files would have the most benefit, but now I'm fairly sure that defragging such files only helps once, at program launch.
• There wouldn't seem to be much benefit to compacting document files (.doc, .xls, etc), as they do a WriteToTemp-Delete-Rename sequence whenever they're resaved.
• Savefiles and the like from games wouldn't seem to offer much benefit, as they're really only written once and read a small number of times. I suppose each game designer decides whether to write to a new file or rewrite-in-place.
• Two of my email systems manage their own databases themselves, periodically compacting folders, so there's probably not much to be gained there?

So, although I dutifully cleanup and defrag once every two or three months, I'm hard pressed to know where I would most see a difference for my efforts. Experts? --DaHorsesMouth (talk) 01:45, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, what you are saying is that every operation gets faster - but none individually matters to you. But each one DOES make your machine run faster - programs start up only a little bit faster, they read their initial data only a little bit faster, they write results only a little bit faster...but every disk-related operation is faster - so there is a net win.

• You are right that once the program is loaded, it doesn't read the .exe file again - but lots of programs are starting and stopping in response to who-knows-what going on in the background. Your browser is loading plugins and helpers as you work, for example. DLL's may be loaded, unloaded and reloaded during the operation of some kinds of program.
• Documents and images will indeed tend to defrag themselves 'automatically' as they are written out - but lots of documents are read over and over without ever being re-written. Also, if your disk is horribly fragmented, the system may have to move the disk heads a long way to get to a sufficiently large contiguous free area to write new files out to - which slows things down.
• Game 'savefiles' are typically small - so yeah - not much benefit here. But the massive level files get a huge win from being contiguous...especially if the game 'streams' from disk continually as you move through the virtual world.
• Email systems aren't "defragging" (in the usual sense of the word) when they "compact" a mail archive. They are de-fragmenting within the blocks occupied by the file - but the file itself might still be scattered all over the drive if it's badly fragmented. Even the act of compacting will go a lot slower if the mail file is fragmented badly.
• In general, having gaps scattered all over your file system means that disk heads have to move further on the average...so EVERYTHING goes slower when the drive is fragmented...even operations like using swap-space that use contiguous blocks will run more slowly if the heads start off further away (on average) than they would with a defragged drive.

I don't think there is any one specific place where you'll see a speedup - but every operation gets a small benefit from having a nicely defragged drive, so there is a net win.

As a Linux user, I look in puzzled amazement that Windows STILL needs to have it's drive manually defragged after half a dozen major OS revisions. Linux systems NEVER needed to be defragged.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:13, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about never... every time you save something on your hard drive, it will put it in the first available block of adequate size (according to my understanding). So over time, as you delete files, there come to be gaps. Defragging may not be necessary (as it's not necessary with Windows) but it will stillincrease system performance on badly fragged drives, especially on slower HDD's. Heck, even my iPod could use some defragging from time to time. DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Qwerty vs Dvorak: why no scientific evaluation?

I taught myself to touch type when I was about 16, and on a portable manual typewriter. It was about the handiest thing I have ever done, because I have always done my own typing, and average about 60 wpm on a computer keyboard. I have often wondered why the outmoded QWERTY is STILL standard, even when everything else about typing has changed so much.

I read many years ago that Dvorak minimised the distance the fingers had to travel by putting the most used keys on the home row, as well as on the keys used by the strongest fingers. Figures I read earlier were that Dvorak cut finger distance travel by about 30% over Qwerty which means you could either type a lot faster, or type at the normal speed but go easier on your fingers, with less chance of Repetitive Strain Injury.

I find it astonishing to read—here and elsewhere—that tests on the merits of the two systems “are inconclusive”. We are talking about entirely measurable quantifiable operations here, which can be researched for next to nothing in monetary outlay, by just about anyone. What, we have a Large Hadron Collider looking at the early universe, but tests on keyboard layout efficiency “are inconclusive’? Bollocks!

My idea would be that someone could write a simple program that begins by randomly allocating a virtual keyboard position to every letter and adds up the distance that has to be covered by moving from one letter to the next in a piece of input text. So the program would generate a particular keyboard layout, and the operator would then input a sizeable piece of text, say about 100 pages, and the program would measure how far fingers resting on home keys would have to travel to type the entire piece of text. If the program also included an average finger movement speed, it could also tell you long a competent typist would take to type that text.

The first thing you would measure would be the performance of Qwerty and Dvorak and the other candidate arrangements. At least such a system would give you measurements on the notional efficiency and speed of one system over another which had scientific and mathematical credibility.

By getting the program to test ALL the possible keyboard layouts, we could well come up with one which is better than any of the other candidates, and would be notionally the most efficient layout of all. Of course, there are other criteria to be considered apart from pure finger movement distance. The stronger fingers should have more work to do than the weaker ones, the work should be roughly equal for both hands, and awkward movements when fingers have to move down a row should be minimised, speed and dexterity measures would have to be adjusted for the different fingers, digraphs should not be adjacent and so on. But the initial program could be rejigged to give weight to all these other variables. Why has nothing like this been done? A program like that could be written by any amateur coder.

Of course the usual anal retentive will now post in and tell me that “this is not the place to canvass new ideas, no matter how brilliant”, so I am going to post this on the Wikipedia Computer Research Desk. As well as here. Myles325a (talk) 02:31, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Short answer: Because it's not "evaluation" that we need.

The problem is that we know that Dvorak (and other) 'new' keyboard layouts are faster...we don't need experiments to tell us that. The problem is that people won't switch - even though we know that we're using an inefficient layout and we know that better layouts are out there. If you made Dvorak keyboards and sold them for $10 each at "Best Buy" - you'd hardly sell a single one. So doing further research doesn't really get us anywhere...what's the point in knowing (even in mind-numbing detail) that QWERTY/AZERTY is a pile of crap if nobody will switch as a result of that knowledge?

Worse still - we're inadvertently training an entire generation into thinking that using a twelve-key telephone number pad is the best way to enter text!! (My grumbling tendonitis twitches in sympathy when I even consider that prospect!) So far from adopting better designs, we're actually heading backwards at amazing speed. I guarantee that by the time present-generation teenagers reach 40 to 50 years old - they're going to have terrible repetitive strain problems due to appalling user interface designs on cell phones. The replacement of the PDA by the up-market cellphone means that our brief foray into handwriting recognition has fallen by the wayside.

FWIW - there is an even better way than Dvorak. We should really toss out the gigantic, bloaded 101 key keyboard altogether and switch to using chording keyboards. In those setups, you mostly don't move your fingers at all - you type by entering 'chords' (like on a music keyboard) with the gentlest of fingertip pressure only.

• You don't move your fingers - so RSI issues disappear.
• You only need one hand to type - the other is free to write with a pencil or turn pages in a book or whatever.
• The "keyboard" is small enough that you could mount it onto a mouse - and move the entire keyboard around instead of having to move your hand off of the keyboard and onto the mouse a bazillion times a day.
• You need almost no desk space for the device. You can sit it comfortably in your lap if you want.
• You could easily adapt the design to work in the confines of a cellphone format.
• With fewer keys - it's cheaper than a 101 key contraption.
• It's SO different from QWERTY that it's actually easier to learn than Dvorak because there is no temptation to slip back into your old ways.

I have a hand-held wordprocessor called "The Microwriter" that dates back to the early 1980's - it has just six 'keys' (there are two 'thumb' keys - one acts as a kind of 'shift' key) and with about a day's practice, you can use it as well as your QWERTY keyboard - and most users get proficient enough to take realtime dictation on the things. (The photo of the Microwriter in the article is actually my machine). It's horrifying that this vastly more efficient technology is not standard - but getting all of the two billion keyboard users around the world to switch is impossible - and doing a 'gradual' change over would be utterly disasterous.

Just about the only problem with chording pads is that you need separate left- and right-handed versions. However, I'm left handed and I learned (by necessity) to chord with my right hand - and the ability to use a pencil in my left hand and do all of my keyboarding with my right is an enormous win. Sadly, the drivers for the Microwriter to allow it to drive a regular PC have long ago ceased to be supported...so I'm back with QWERTY.

But sadly, despite all of the huge gains to be had...it really doesn't matter how amazing the alternatives are - we're effectively stuck with QWERTY into the indefinite future.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:43, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Just a thought, regarding your suggested program... perhaps you could add a feature to give more weight to common usage? For example, the word "the" is very common, so since this word is very common, perhaps the letters contained in these common words would be on the home row and towards the middle more?

Seriously though, I don't think it would make any difference in the long run, because naturally almost every keyboard on the planet is of the qwerty variety and it will be impossible to change... like America's continual clinging to the imperial system? (On an interesting side note I remember reading that the qwerty keyboard was originally set up in a way so that it would be more difficult to type on... since typing too quickly on a typewriter will jam the lever thingys...) DaRkAgE7_[Talk] 04:44, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

For most uses it doesn't make much difference. It's the human being trying to think best what to say that's the bottleneck. It's like the Heisenberg principle Time x Sense >= some constant. Is it a good idea to cut down time when so many people already dash off things they regret? Dmcq (talk) 05:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Free web hosting request

 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.172.182.169 (talk) 06:07, 13 October 2008 (UTC) 

Can anybody with room to spare on their website/web server give me something to play around with? I want (need) at least a few hundred megabytes of space, some bandwidth, local .htaccess control, Ruby on Rails, PHP (safe mode off by default), and MySQL. All the free webhosts that have the above features that I've seen (believe it or not) have really crappy signup systems. I might use the site as a pilot for a project or simply as a sandbox for educational purposes. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 05:33, 13 October 2008 (UTC)