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April 27

Floating Windows logo screen saver

So you know that floating logo XP uses as a screen saver? How do I replace the Windows logo with another image but still have it act the same? I'd like an image of my choice to float around in the same way as the default Windows logo does now. Ideas? 69.180.160.77 (talk) 00:36, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

A (rather convoluted) Google search led me to Any Logo Screensaver Creator and WG Screen Saver Creator. You can find a number of other options on cnet. – 74  02:58, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Removing write access to previously mounted partition: Ubuntu

I have accessed my NTFS partition in Ubuntu and suspect that it's caused Windows XP to lose theme settings and messed up IE toolbars on separate occasions. A check for bad sectors on the hard drive turned up nothing, but Windows's indexes contained an error after the latter incident. I remember granting automatic access to the NTFS partition, so I'm wondering how to remove that privilege. Thanks. Imagine Reason (talk) 01:32, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Edit /etc/fstab, find the entry with a type of ntfs and change the 'rw' signifier in the options string to 'ro' (or if there is no 'rw' present then add ',ro' to the end). You can then umount and mount the partition again or just reboot. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab for more information. Truthforitsownsake (talk) 13:34, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

PostgreSQL: Use transactions to suspend constraint checking?

In PostgreSQL, if a transaction contains an update that violates a constraint followed by one that rectifies the violation, can constraint checking be suspended until the entire transaction's end state is reached? NeonMerlin 05:56, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

See the doco and (many) caveats for "SET CONSTRAINTS". --Sean 12:35, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Fixing magnetized hard drive from working partition

My friend, messing about with a Neodymium magnet in an rather stupid way (if you must know, he was testing the magnetic switch that detects whether the screen is shut or not), has managed to apparently corrupt the hard drive of his MacBook, and OS X now refuses to load (instead, it hangs at the screen with the Apple logo and the loading sign). Booting OS X in verbose mode gives me the error message "disk0s2: I/O error", which sounds pretty serious. Fortunately, he had it Boot Camped, with Windows XP on the other partition, which works fine. Is there any way to CHKDSK or fsck the Mac OS partition from either the Windows XP partition, or on boot (i.e. before loading Mac OS)? Or is the hard-drive just ruined, and he should just try to salvage what he can off it? Laïka 13:07, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

All signs point to the drive being totally fsked (if you'll excuse the pun) because of how powerful the magnet was. 212.219.8.233 (talk) 13:22, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

If you're getting I/O errors, in my experience it usually means a hardware error. But my experience is mostly with Linux, not OS X. To recover his OS X files from Windows, see this [1]. I would pull everything important off the OS X partition and reinstall OS X. If you're lucky, that'll fix it. It might be time to get a new drive, though. Indeterminate (talk) 05:01, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Linux context sensitive layout optimization

Somebody might remember the context sensitive layout question a while back. I made a program that allows to have context sensitive layouts on Linux (available at http://cslh.sourceforge.net but with a quality warning). In addition to what was described in that question I added the possibility to bind not only single characters to buttons but character sequences too (ie pressing the 'z' key and then the 'a' key could result in 'that'), but it didn't make the optimization problem any easier, so I need help. If somebody here has a godlike "I can see a graph" vision, now it would good time to share it. If not, to get you on (or maybe off, I don't know :( ) the track, I'll give out some of my initial thinking. Let's assume the keyboard has only 26 (a-z) buttons. Let's forget all that home row, finger roll, and avoiding same finger repetition stuff layout fanatics like to talk about. Let's also forget about the "context" in context sensitive layout, instead just assigning varying length button press sequences to character sequences . Notice that this starts to sound a bit like Huffman encoding. If we then consider the human memory is limited, we need to put some restrictions on what is allowed, maybe so that the maximum character sequence length that can result from a button press sequence is X, and there must at maximum A character sequences that result from a button press sequence of length 2, B that result from a button press sequence of length 3, and so on. For a sane layout, all the single characters a-z must be typeable within Y button presses. Given a lot of sample English texts, what should be used to optimize that? --194.197.235.70 (talk) 19:36, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

It sounds like you're working on a sort of predictive text input system somewhat similar to T9. Also see if the description for pinyin abbreviation input method sounds interesting; the article doesn't describe it very much, but it's pretty neat. Indeterminate (talk) 04:56, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

It also sounds, sort of, like Microsoft Word's "AutoCorrect" feature (but you're doing it for the entire system, if I get you right). Jørgen (talk) 12:58, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Master's Thesis No 85 need copy and Info:

Violet Houser, Thesis for her Master's Degree,(MA) Business Education, 1955. For use in providing information to the public in connection with the anniversary of the "Town of North Kansas City " celebration of November 12, 1912 and "December, 24 1924 when the Town of North Kansas City became the City of North Kansas City". ? Copy of the Thesis currently available? ? Violet Houser, author, alive, deceased, information would be helpful.

Inquiry by James R. Rich, member of the North Kansas City Historical Society. Any information would be appreciated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.229.47.4 (talk) 20:06, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Per Ref Desk policy (see the infobox at the top of the page!), I've removed your contact information for your own protection. Sorry, you're gonna have to check back here for an answer. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 20:24, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

It seems to be in the archives of Truman State University's Pickler Memorial Library, presumably the institution that awarded the MA. Their catalogue lists:

85
Houser, Violet
A Teaching Unit on the Industrial Development, History, and Commercial Aspects of North Kansas City, Missouri
1955 

On the catalogue webpage they have an email address for contacts, so writing there would probably be the best move. You will probably be able to view the thesis in person at the library or it might be possible to arrange an inter-library loan.[2] --Maltelauridsbrigge (talk) 16:18, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

PC help.

everytime i give my PC a tough job to do it reboots. Like copy a cd or dvd and if the dvd or cd has a scratch the machine reboots and acts as if it's really struggling. What could be the problem and do i need to buy anything. Also if the dvd has many files and i open it in thumbnail view it reboots or brings the "windows explorer has experienced a problem...send don't send report " error message ...Please if you know what's up holla. By the way the problem just started recently...it's a P4, 3.2ghz, 1 gb ram. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.220.225.251 (talk) 21:50, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

The first thing I would check is whether your computer's cooling works properly, because it sounds like your problems appear whenever things start to heat up -- and when an optical disc spins up, that certainly produces extra heat. Are all the fans inside the computer turning properly? Is there excessive dust build-up in there? Just replacing a faulty fan and using an air duster to clear things up may solve the problem. And, of course, with a Windows machine, reinstalling the operating system often fixes problems like this. How long has it been since the current operating system was installed? -- Captain Disdain (talk) 21:57, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

A good way to diagnose a heat problem is to remove the case and point an external fan at the innards. If this solves the problem, then you know heat was the issue. StuRat (talk) 13:30, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Another thing that makes a PC struggle is having to do a lot of page swapping, into a very large swap file and/or on a very full hard disk. 1Gb is borderline enough for an XP box expected to do large copying jobs or screen displays (like multiple thumbnails) if you have integrated video. Go to Control Panel - System - Advanced - Performance settings. Choose the Advanced tab, virtual memory. Change to User-managed,and type in 50 Mb for minimum and 1000 Mb for maximum. Save it. Reboot the machine. This will kill the automatic paging file, which might be as big as 3Gb if you've never killed it before. Every few weeks you can change between Windows management and User management, thus keeping it always small. (Also turn off automatic updates and "quick launch" options for everything, as they waste memory the machine is better off using for what you are actually trying to do right now).KoolerStill (talk) 09:05, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

XP System Restore won't work, possible Conficker infection

Resolved

Case concluded. Unlikely any infections remain. Registry might be a bit weirded out but that's it. Malicious modification of system file appears to have been resolved. Software to prevent future infections is now in place. Case concluded as successful.

Bear with me, this is a long one and I'm not the most knowledgeable about computers. Sometime yesterday I started getting popups warning me that my computer was infected and recommending I purchase Spyware Protect 2009. I actually used the article here as a reference and deleted two "sysguard" files, stopping the popups. I assumed that this was Conficker-related, but I am not entirely sure; a free program I ran stated I did not have Conficker, so I gave no thought to it.
Today, I noticed a small error on my Internet Explorer browser: the small symbol on the left side of the browsing tabs remained the default IE logo, and did not change to the symbol of whatever site I was on (Wikipedia's symbol not appearing right away as usual caught my eye). Thinking it related to yesterday's virus attack, I tried to use the System Restore function. I get as far as the page showing which restore point I have selected and displaying the disclaimers about the process, but when I click Next to allow the restore to proceed, nothing happens. I've tried waiting for an hour, clicking it repeatedly, restarting my computer (5 times now), but it won't work. When I last tried it, a notice popped up saying System Restore could not protect my computer. I know my computer's infected, there are dozens of errors on my browser now, and now certain webpages are showing bright red headings saying "Too many errors and faults WERE found in your system. Possibly that IT WAS THE RESULT of virus attack.YOU MUST scan your system." I'm running the free edition of AVG in the hopes that will work, but the scan won't be complete for another hour at least (a whole scan takes 2 hours for my computer); it's currently picked up 8 threats.
Anyway, I've got no where else to turn. I don't want to have to reset the whole thing to factory condition because I've unfortunately never made a separate backup disc. Is there any way for me to get System Restore to work, and if not, is there a simple way to confirm I have Conficker and remove it if present? -- Commdor {Talk} 22:29, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

It is likely System Restore will be of little use here. The restore points may have already been infected and System Restore can only help so much even if the restore points were good. In this case, malware on your computer appears to have disabled it. System Restore should be disabled when removing malware anyways; please check to make sure it is disabled before moving forward with the following clean-up instructions. Spyware Protect 2009 is a rogue that Conficker does distribute. However such rogues can be encountered by accident online through regular web browsing. Under no conditions should you offer up your credit card details to the rogue! There have been cases of people being forced to cancel their credit cards because they were charged $30-60 every hour! The notices in web pages may be indicative of an active rootkit or Trojan. Adware could also be used to this purpose. Scans with Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and SUPERAntiSpyware are needed immediately! Please tell us if you encounter redirection while attempting to visit security-related sites. Please post the Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and SUPERAntiSpyware logs here after both finish scanning. (Update both then run full scans with both; one at a time; they may ask you to reboot to remove malware) AVG Free stopped being that effective after version 8.0 (In my opinion; it lost anti-rootkit!) so remove what you can with it but dump it and replace it with avast! or Avira AntiVir afterwards. You should quarantine any threats that AVG Free detects and give us the list of items before installing avast! or Avira as all items in the AVG quarantine area are lost after is uninstallation. Note that AVG Free has suffered false positives in the past so do be alert. I cannot determine if Conficker is on your machine. Rogueware can come from many sources. Also, for the purposes of cleaning up your computer and because we do not exactly what is on it yet, consider not using it for any online banking and such for the moment. Good luck.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:42, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I'm not saying you aren't infected with any viruses, but if you get websites saying things to you like Too many errors and faults WERE found in your system. Possibly that IT WAS THE RESULT of virus attack.YOU MUST scan your system — these warnings are fake. They are trying to get you to click on them to pay for some service, or to download some malware. Tempshill (talk) 05:05, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

The user is infected (See the logs)--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 13:38, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Malware on user's system is removed. Case concluded as successful. [Note: There is isn't really a way to know a system is 100% clean of infections unless it has been newly reformatted]--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 02:28, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

m4b help..

I have just purchased a HUGE audio book from Itunes, it is 3 x 2hrs in length and now I cant do anything with it other than play it back on my computer.

The plan was to put it on CD and mp3s for my car and travel... I tried some kind of "m4a" converter but it keeps saying that it is all "protected".. what can I do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.148.202.217 (talk) 23:33, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorry the audio book appears to be DRM protected.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:47, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

FairPlay#Circumventing FairPlay F (talk) 06:03, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't use it, but didn't iTunes just make a big publicity push about how all their stuff was now free of DRM? APL (talk) 13:54, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

They have refunded me my money...("as a one off")...this one was not DRM free however. Very silly for an audiobook! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.13.87.142 (talk) 15:32, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Closed source freeware OS

Are there any operating systems that are closed source and proprietary but free? --Melab±1 ☎ 23:52, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I doubt you'll find it useful for anything, but WinPE is closed source, proprietary, and free. Made by microsoft. Take a look at some of the OSes in List of operating systems if you're looking for more; I don't know of any others. Indeterminate (talk) 04:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Mac OS 7.5.5 is available for download from Apple. Of course, it only runs on Old World Mac hardware. --76.167.241.45 (talk) 05:11, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Old versions of the Mac system software were freely available at the time of release. It wasn't until around version 6 or 7 that Apple started branding it as a separate product (called Mac OS); before that upgrading your system software was like (these days) getting a firmware upgrade for your router or a new driver for your video card. A lot of operating systems that are bound to proprietary hardware use a similar model. Comparison of operating systems lists some others. It doesn't seem to list anything that's closed source, free of charge, and runs on x86 boxes. WinPE seems to be available only to people running a licensed copy of Windows (there's an online validation process before you can download), so I'm not sure it counts either. (If the requirement is only that some people can get it for free then any OS would qualify—Microsoft gives free Windows licenses to students, for example.) -- BenRG (talk) 12:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

The trouble is that most of the operating systems that are closed source and proprietary (with the notable exception of Windows) are pretty much tied to a particular piece of hardware that's sold by the same manufacturer who wrote the operating system. Hence, for example, I believe that Silicon Graphics IRIX is "free" (ie you don't have to pay extra to get it when you buy one of their computers) - but since it only runs on Silicon Graphics hardware (which costs a small fortune) - and the hardware is basically worthless without IRIX - it's hardly relevant. The same thing is probably true of IBM mainframe operating systems and such. If you're asking about proprietary-but-free for PC's - then I don't know of any. SteveBaker (talk) 05:44, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Some social site about documents or source codes

Can people give me some social sites that are about posting documents or source codes? I'm trying to find one that I can't remember but telling me some of the sites I asked for might jog my memory. --Melab±1 ☎ —Preceding undated comment added 23:57, 27 April 2009 (UTC).

Pastebin? "Collaborative debugging tool" — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 09:41, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

April 28

Quick MySQL question

If I create a database on MySQL on WinXP, are there going to be any "gotcha" issues if I want to use this database on a linux installation of MySQL? (i.e. is it as simple as just copying the database file(s) from one OS/filesystem to the other, and mounting/attaching the database, or would I have to script a bulk INSERT via SQL or something along those lines?) Thanks!! 68.40.217.217 (talk) 00:38, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

You'll want to do a database dump on Windows, and then load that dump onto the Linux MySQL install. Databases often provide very few guarantees about their on-disk formats when moving across platforms or (even minor) version numbers. Read about mysqldump and/or mysqlhotcopy. --Sean 12:18, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! 68.40.217.217 (talk) 04:09, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Changing pitch in WMP 11

Is there a way to alter the pitch of tracks in Windows Media Player v11 (Vista) – possibly involving some sort of slider control? I think there may be plugins that do it, but I'm not sure how to add those on. 137.205.74.169 (talk) 00:59, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about pitch control, but there is a playback speed slider already in WMP11 which might change the pitch as a side effect. From WMP's menu choose View -> Enhancements -> Play speed settings. Astronaut (talk) 02:56, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

HELP! Tried to reinstall Windows XP...

Hi, I removed Ubuntu 8.10 in preparation for 9.04, and got rid of the partition it was installed on. That uninstalled GRUB, making the computer unbootable. So I put in the XP recovery disc, and now it has a dual-boot with two Windows XP's... Easeus Partition Manager doesn't show a partition, neither does the Disk Management thing in Administrative Tools... how do I get rid of this second XP? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.40.181.237 (talk) 01:30, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

This happens when you choose to reinstall XP without formatting the partition it was previously installed on. To prevent the dual-boot menu from showing up, you can [edit your boot.ini file] to delete the "Windows XP" entry that you don't want. Make sure to back it up! Indeterminate (talk) 04:28, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

search the refdesk archives for "attack of the undead boot.ini file!" I had this same problem and this worked for me.  Buffered Input Output 13:01, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

What's new in Firefox 3.5b4?

I could only find the list that lists the new features compared to 3.0.x. What's new in Firefox 3.5b4 compared to 3.1b3? 121.72.172.232 (talk) 13:20, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Until 3.1 is released, I doubt you'd find an official list. Your best bet is to compare the changelog of 3.1 vs 3.0 to 3.5 vs 3.0 and work out what features are in 3.5 that aren't in 3.1 Nil Einne (talk) 14:45, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay I just realised 3.5 is basically 3.1. Well in that case, the release notes or changelog should say what's new in this beta Nil Einne (talk) 14:47, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually surprisingly you seem to be right, the info seems to be missing. Maybe ask someone their suppor forums or whatever Nil Einne (talk) 15:08, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Actually looking more carefully none of the 3.1 betas have the info either. Only the 3.0 betas seemed to offer some explaination of the differences between betas. Your best bet appears to be [3] if you're desperate Nil Einne (talk) 21:51, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Trying to understand why others use the IP address I've used

I think I'm understanding this right, but let me know if I'm off.

I understand that DHCP, because it's dynamic, is what causes my IP address to change. I read on an answer from the archives that AOL, in fact, has it change every time I load a new page. My question is, why do I see on here occasionally that someone else has used the IP address I used only last week, for instance? Even to the piont of it being blocked a number of months back.

My theory is that AOL only has a limited number of IP addresses; it's large enough that it's still rather rare for it to happen. But, if two people have AOL, it is possible for each to happen to have the same IP address at different times when they load this page. Am I right? Close? Way off? Thanks.209.244.30.221 (talk) 13:48, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

AOL does change IP addresses for users at a much higher rate than most internet service providers. The probability that someone else using AOL has used your current IP address (whatever it is) is very high. The probability that someone else on AOL has caused the IP address to be blocked is also high enough to note. It is very easy to avoid this problem. Create an account and log in when using Wikipedia. Your "identity" will always be the same and only you will be responsible for behaviour that could get it blocked. -- kainaw™ 13:53, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

They certainly reuse your old IP after they assign you a new one. They would be out of business if they didn't. They could not possibly assign a fresh, single-use IP every time you log on. There aren't enough IPv4 IPs in existence, let alone allocated to AOL. APL (talk) 14:19, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

And what is the advantage for the ISP of changing the IP of one specific user? I understand that if the user is not connected anymore, they could assign his old IP to a new users.--Mr.K. (talk) 14:49, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

If requests from AOL users are showing a different IP address for every request, then it's probably not the user's DHCP-assigned IP address changing that frequently, but rather AOL using a pool of proxy servers to cache web pages. The IP address that the web server sees depends on which proxy is handling the request. -- Coneslayer (talk) 17:57, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

The whole point of DHCP is so that they can have more users than they have IP addresses available - hence it's very likely that the address you had not long ago will have been given to someone else sometime later. The odds of you getting the same address back again sometime later are harder to estimate...but it certainly happens. Probably they allocate a block of addresses to a particular DHCP server - which might maybe only serve a few hundred addresses. It's easier for them if they don't hand them out totally at random - for example so that it's easier to track ill-behaved net users down to a smaller subset of people than "All of AOL".

Complicating the matter still further is the meta:XFF project - which AOL are (kinda) supporting. This might explain an unusual amount of constistency of address when editing Wikipedia.

But hold on a minute. If we go to our OP's Talk: page (where there are a ton of vandalism complaints) we see that someone did a check on this IP address and it resolves to Level 3 Communications - not AOL. Anyway - the range of addresses they use goes from 209.244.0.0 to 209.247.255.255 - which is something like half a million addresses - so the odds of getting the same one again by pure chance is VERY small. SteveBaker (talk) 05:34, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Level 3 is a Tier 1 provider, i.e. an ISP's ISP. I don't really know how the system works, but presumably AOL contracts its proxy service out to Level 3 in some way. -- BenRG (talk) 13:03, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

To clear things up, the entire "ip changing" thing with AOL is nothing to do with DHCP - it's to do with proxying and caching as mentioned above. 78.110.170.207 (talk) 21:40, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Windows Portable Executable

I know that when using Visual Studio it is compiled into the .NET Common Intermediate Language and not machine code. But when I compile a C++ or C program for example is it compiled into CIL or straight into machine code and CIL is just for programs made using the .NET framework? --Melab±1 ☎ 14:12, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

.Net executables are PE files, but mostly contain IL data sections. They are JITed before execution. C/C++ executables, even those compiled via Visual Studio .Net, are also PE files, but contain machine code instead of IL. They are executed directly without need for JITing. (There is also C++/CLI, which I will ignore since your question does not seem to be asking about it.) Regards, Bendono (talk) 15:33, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Firefox 3.0.10

Just days after letting my one surviving Windows machine update Firefox to 3.0.9, I've just let it update to 3.0.10. The latter seems to be a turkey, Firefox often deciding not to "respond", as even Windows points out. (This prompts the three-finger salute.) Is it a turkey, or is it more likely that there's something wrong with this ageing system? (A Ubuntu replacement is already on its way to me, so I don't particularly care; but I'm curious.) I really don't have to describe the symptoms to you: Firefox here is so obviously "off" that if it's like this for you as well then you will very soon realize it. -- Hoary (talk) 14:43, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I've been running 3.0.10 and have not even noticed the update, so you're going to have to discuss individual symptoms. Tempshill (talk) 00:42, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - I caught the automatic update on my work machine this morning - I've been using 3.0.10 under WinXP all day with no problems whatever. My SuSE 11.0 Linux box here at home is running last night's nightly build of Firefox 3.5 beta 5...so 3.0.10 is quite a way back from the 'bleeding edge' ! :-) SteveBaker (talk) 05:17, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Automatic updates can get damaged if they happen while you are doing something else (one good reason to do them manually, when YOU want to). One possibility is a corruption in the cookies. First use Tools - Options to clear all your cookies and caches, and restart the browser. If that makes no improvement, then the containing file itself is corrupt. Change your folder view settings to show hidden files, then go to C:\Documents and Settings\(your-name)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile folder and find a file called cookies.sqlite. Delete it. This is the actual file that controls your cookies. After you delete it, restart the browser, and it will create a new clean version. If it's still no go, try downloading and installing the latest available FF (though this involves the nuisance of having to get all the add-ons again....use Tools - Add-ons to record what you have before you start the upgrade). KoolerStill (talk) 08:42, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, but no, it wouldn't be cookies.

I use Firefox, then I use OOo, then I return to Firefox: it doesn't respond. Closing Firefox often (but not always) brings the Windows message that the program isn't responding. Today for the first time ever I got the message Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low / Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file [...] Well, my system is low on everything (notably resale value), but it was pretty happy with FF 3.0.9.

Not that I mind much, but it is odd. -- Hoary (talk) 15:45, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

K-Meleon

I'd hoped, even half presumed presumed, that FF 3.0.11 would be out in days. Well, it hasn't come out. Using FF 3.0.10 was like walking deeper into a bog. Not that 3.0.9 had been all that great; indeed, I was regretting having upgraded from 0.9.2 (I think it was), which seemed much faster and only had a few irritations, which I knew very well. (A notable one was that any attempt to access worldcat.org would cause it to terminate.)

Firefox is fine with the other computers I use, horrible with this single Windows holdout. I thought I'd try K-Meleon. In particular, I thought I'd try K-MeleonCCF ME. That wouldn't even start up, so I deleted it, but running plain K-Meleon (ver. 1.5.2) after Firefox (or anyway after Firefox after the latter has been running for half an hour) feels like being out of a cast. -- Hoary (talk) 11:19, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm still using ff 2.8 or something. Oh and I've found K-Meleon to be quite resource hungry and takes ages to start up, but a good solid and reliable browser for the most part —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 12:06, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't think of the virtual memory/paging file possibility (probability??). Go to System, Advanced,Performance,Advanced, Virtual Memory. Turn off Windows management, choose user management, and set it up to be 20Mb minimum and 100Mb maximum. Apply, save and reboot. This will kill the existing swap file, which might be enormous (full of things from last month and last year it will never be able to access anyway) and give it a small faster-loading swap file to work with. Every week or two, change back to let Windows manage it for a few days. This keeps killing off the enlarged swap files and making new, smaller, usable ones. Firefox itself also has memory leaks, causing it to hold on to real (RAM) memory, which makes more swapping necessary. To partially control this, into the address bar type 'about:config' then right click anywhere on the page. Choose "New, Boolean" and into the resulting dialog type 'config.trim_on_minimize' then in the next box select "true". Restart the browser. Every time you minimise your open windows, excess memory will be released and returned to the pool. Try to do it while the usage is under about 170,000kb (as seen in Task Manager) as above that it seems to return a lot less. (This is about 3 hours with 30 tabs open and infrequent new pages; opening and closing 40 new tabs in 10 minutes might be enough to push it over. Most of the leakage is from holding data for the Re-open Closed Tabs and Recover from Crash features).KoolerStill (talk) 12:15, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Now that does sound like the fix to my FF problems. FF assuredly does have memory leaks, as is plainly visible in Win2k's task manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) after FF has been (it has seemed) closed down. Yes, the amount of stuff this program remembers is staggering, and it's no surprise that it's a slug on this machine (192MB RAM).

In the same spirit, I've just told OOo to be prepared to undo not the last 100 (!) edits but merely the last five. (I'm not sure I've ever undone more than three, and if only XyWrite, with no undoing whatever, could handle UTF-8, I'd swap it for OOo in an instant.)

At least in the short term, I'll continue to use K-Meleon. (As I need no add-ons, I don't see what I'm missing.) It now has a pile of pages open, and is as spritely as if it were Netscape 3. But I'll keep your advice for future reference. -- Hoary (talk) 13:24, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Hoary, you should have mentioned your OS and RAM limitations in the first place. Never upgrade to software newer than your OS; they'll limp instead of running. You'd do better with FF2 (from www.oldversion.com) which I've 'run' with Win98 and 64Mb RAM.(But K-Meleon is great). Two small fast UTF-8 compliant text editors you could try are [CrimsonEditor] and [Superedi]; both WYSYGIG and no choice of fonts, but good project management and syntax highlighting. Largest choice of langauge formatting is in [Notepad++]with a million text manipulation features.I happily under-utilise all three.KoolerStill (talk) 14:37, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Harddisk problems on a laptop

The hard disk shows damaged sectors using a diagnostic tool. when I try to partition it, it shows 1555 error. I run chkdisk and that does not solve anything. Do you have any solutions please?

Iam also thinking about buying a larger HDD as the older HDD seems to be dying. This laptop ( ZE5700 by HP )supports ATA-100 according to some parts resellers on the internet. Iam trying to buy a HDD in ebay as it is cheaper. IDE/P-ATA is the only option in ebay.de, would that be compatible with this laptop?.

131.220.46.33 (talk) 15:37, 28 April 2009 (UTC)HDDdeath

If the size of the hard disk and the connector type are the same as your old hard disk, then yes. "PATA" is a synonym for the old-style "ATA" (and an antonym for "SATA"). Tempshill (talk) 00:41, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

By size, you mean the 2,5" form factor?. How to find out the connector type? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.220.46.24 (talk) 14:20, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Klein bottle gnuplot

I found the following gnuplot script in the Commons for a Klein bottle. I don't understand what the colons indicate (example: sin(u): sin(u)), so could someone "translate" this into, say, Mathematica syntax or something more standard?

x(u,v)= v<pi ? (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*cos(u): \
        v<2*pi ? (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*cos(u):\
        v<3*pi ? -2+(2+cos(u))*cos(v): -2+2*cos(v)-cos(u)
y(u,v)= v<pi ? (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*sin(u): \
        v<2*pi ? (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*sin(u): \
        v<3*pi ? sin(u): sin(u)
z(u,v)= v<pi ? -2.5*sin(v): v < 2*pi ? 3*v-3*pi:\
        v<3*pi ? (2+cos(u))*sin(v)+3*pi: -3*v+12*pi

Lucas Brown (talk) 17:39, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I think the syntax is the same as the conditional operator in C and related languages. a ? b : c evaluates to b if a is true; otherwise, it evaluates to c. I don't know Mathematica very well, but it looks like you can translate a ? b : c to If[a,b,c]. -- Coneslayer (talk) 17:49, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes - so if you look at that first line:

x(u,v)= v<pi ? (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*cos(u): \
        v<2*pi ? (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*cos(u):\
        v<3*pi ? -2+(2+cos(u))*cos(v): -2+2*cos(v)-cos(u)

...it translates to:

 if ( v<pi )
   x(u,v) = (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*cos(u)
 else
   if ( v<2*pi )
     x(u,v) = (2.5-1.5*cos(v))*cos(u)
   else
     if ( v<3*pi )
       x(u,v) = -2+(2+cos(u))*cos(v)
     else
       x(u,v) = -2+2*cos(v)-cos(u)

Ditto for each of the remaining lines. SteveBaker (talk) 05:11, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

You could try with the switch statement or its Mathematica equivalent (if available). This would make reading the code significantly easier. --Pero-- 93.136.110.115 (talk) 12:47, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Mathematica has a Switch construct, but what is desired here (the equivalent of if-else-if-...-else in C) is Which. You'll need to provide it a True condition to get a default value at the end. --Tardis (talk) 20:22, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Blu-Ray player needed for Ubuntu 8.10

I've installed a Blu-Ray drive, and now I'd like a player, or better yet a ripper. Any recommendations ? StuRat (talk) 18:14, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand the question; I know nothing about Blu-Ray but isn't a Blu-Ray drive also a Blu-Ray player, and you can rip the disk contents with it? Am I missing something here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 20:31, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

The Blu-Ray drive came with PowerDVD for Windows, which is a player only. What I need is a player for Blu-Ray under Linux, and preferably also a ripper under Linux (although a ripper under Windows would also work). StuRat (talk) 13:35, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

You can't rip BD movies yet, the format hasn't been cracked. Hideki (talk) 20:54, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

What about AnyDVD? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 21:16, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

To explain it in a better way, you can easily rip BD movies. Go to any torrent site, search eMule or usenet or whatever if you don't believe me. I don't believe there is anything for Linux yet and Blu-Ray is not permanently broken since they could change various things and you'd need a new version of AnyDVD but it's sufficiently broken on Windows for now. Note you may still need a commercial software player which often have silly restrictions imposed by the studios (e.g. refusing to work with BluRays in folders) since some BluRays only come with TrueHD or DTS HD MA audio streams, neither of which are supported by any free solution at the moment AFAIK. Anyway presuming you are talking Windows, there are basically only 4 commercial software suites I'm aware of that have more or less full support of BluRay. WinDVD, PowerDVD, Total Media Theatre and Nero ShowTime. Nero doesn't seem so popular. The other 3 are more popular. Bear in mind you may need specific versions for BluRay playback and that silly limitations imposed by the studios due to DRM are common. The folder one for example (most used to support it but it was removed) and many no longer provide DirectShow accessible/usable codecs so you can't use the codecs that come with them for any other purpose. From memory, WinDVD and TMT and probably Nero are available as free trials which at least support BluRay. PowerDVD trial lacks BluRay playback I believe. Bear in mind as well compatibility issues are not uncommon largely due to the DRM. WinDVD and TMT were recently updated with new releases but old versions are usually updated for disc compatibility AFAIK. You may end up finding using AnyDVD HD rather then worrying about the software updates, I've heard it tends to provide better compatibility. If you can't decide for BluRay reasons alone you may want to consider other issues like DVD upscaling. As already mentioned with AnyDVD HD you can in theory use something else, like MPC except for the audio codec issue. I don't believe there's any current solution but haven't looked in to it that well. Edit: Well I was wrong. TrueHD is supported by FFDShow. DTS HD MA is to a limited extent (it supports the DTS portion not the lossless additional portion). I believe it should be possible to play back BluRay with something like MPC and AnyDVD HD and with no other commercial software suite but I'm not certain if this requires an intermediate ripping step (and you also won't have menus [4]). It also works with VLC but I'm pretty sure you need to rip the disc first in that case. BTW if you live in the US, bear in mind AnyDVD HD probably violates the DMCA so depending on various things you may or may not be breaking the law. P.S. There are rumours of a SlySoft Player coming but the details are slim and it's unlikely to be any time soon [5] Nil Einne (talk) 22:18, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

well that was an epic post! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 08:37, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Which of those products will rip Blu-Ray for free (and how much do they charge for the rest) ? Overall, what would you recommend for ripping Blu-Ray under Windows or Linux ? StuRat (talk) 13:55, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately I'm not aware of anything which will reliably rip Blu-Ray for free (although I emphasise it's not something I've looked in to much, I don't have a Blu-Ray drive and I only know a bit primarily because of stuff I've come across when assembling a PVR without a Blu-Ray as well as once when I wanted to test a Blu-Ray rip). Any-DVD HD appears to be a good solution for ripping and the most recommended but far from free, EUR79.99 currently including a 2 year subscription (I believe it was lifetime a while back but changed possibly because they realised maintaining it was going to be a lot more work then they realised). However there's a fair chance the FLOSS people would have caught up by the end of the 2 years anyway. The other stuff is quite expensive as well (if your using Any DVD HD you can probably go with the cheapest Blu Ray compatible commercial software player you can find since you won't have to worry so much about software updates and other such stuff, WinDVD 7 appears to be a common recommendation, it also has the advantage of not suffering the silly 'won't play folders' limitation of new players I believe). But if you're primarily going to rip, I'd recommend you see how AnyDVD HD + free codecs + MPC (or something) first and only worry about commercial players if you have problems. Indeed you should be able to do your rips under Windows and playback under Linux (I believe both Mplayer and VLC should be fine). Any DVD HD does have a 21 day trial so you can see how it performs first (although that's not going to tell you if it will suddenly break with new disks 6 months from now). I don't think you have much chance of getting it to work in WINE BTW since it integrates at a fairly low level. The only issue here is you may need to rip every time (in Windows) and obviously wait for it to finish. You may want to take a perusal of the Doom9 forums particularly [6] (note it isn't updated for a year) and [7], they tend to IMHO be the best forums for this higher level video related stuff ([8] are good for more general PVR stuff). Bear in mind Doom9 does have strict rules, I wouldn't recommend you mention anything about timeshifting Netflix/rented Blu-Rays if you're going to ask questions. P.S. I didn't notice the Ubuntu part in your topic so sorry if I completely ignored it in my post. (I tend to ignore topics and only read the question even though ironically I'm pretty sure I'm often guilty of neglecting to mention something from the subject in my questions elsewhere.) P.P.S. You may also want to check out BD+ and [9]. As I understand it this is the big problem for rippers (or for that matter playback on unauthorised players) at the current time. Any DVD HD appears to be ahead of everyone else although even they still have problems [10] [11]. The current effort in the FLOSS movement appears to be at [12] P.P.P.S. I believe BD+ may still be somewhat rare [13]. You could try something else like MakeMKV [14] which is free at the current time because it's in beta and has a Linux version Nil Einne (talk) 20:01, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Recording from HDMI

Now for a completely different approach to the problem. Is there any product which will take input from an HDMI cable (up to 1080p) and record it, as is, no questions asked, and then send the same HDMI output back out, exactly the same, at a later time ? (I'm assuming here that what goes over the HDMI cable is basically the pixels that display on the screen, not some encrypted data that needs to be decrypted to get the pixels.) StuRat (talk) 13:55, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

It is encrypted, see HDCP. -- BenRG (talk) 18:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. So much for that idea. StuRat (talk) 10:11, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

There are products that are capable of converting data from a HDMI output to component and other analog formats including [15] HDfury. There may be more but it's not something I've look in to much. And it's possible that these devices may break in the future without firmware upgrades as HDMI operates under a handshake system, the device outputting (video card or player) is supposed to identify the receiving device and refuse if it's an unauthorised/disallowed. And there are also devices capable of recording a 1080i source from component [16]. You will get some quality loss due to the DADC but it may not be great enough to notice. So you can effictively record up to 1080i from HDMI. It's possible there are devices capable of recording analog 1080p but I'm not aware of any (again not something I've looked in to much). There are I believe also other HDCP strippers (since the HDfury is also effectively one) [17] and in theory these devices should be able to convert the video portion into DVI without HDCP. But again I'm not aware of any device capable of recording either DVI or HDMI even without HDCP. One of the issues is there's little point, how often do you want to record a DVI stream? And since HDMI without HDCP isn't even supposed to exist... Clearly these devices will be targetting those trying to do what you want to do which is a somewhat risky market to openly target and given that's it's probably not that easy to develop (the HDfury I believe largely use pre-existing parts with some additional code). The HDfury and HDCP strippers are of course already probably of questionable legality in some jurisdictions [18] but they're at least sold, and have a less 'legally questionable' raison d'être of being for display devices that lack HDCP. There may eventually be devices but it may take a while. Plus at the current time it's not necessarily that interesting since Bluray rippers are working fine so it's likely to be a small market (mod chips for gaming probably operate in a similar environment but have a much larger target audience). It's probably a similar reason why there's no device capable of recording 1080p. The HD PVR, and other devices like it are targetted primarily at those with cable/satellite box with component output and since for transmission standards, 1080i is the maximum there's no reason why most people would want to record 1080p. Nil Einne (talk) 18:45, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Recording from video stream

Now for a final approach (to time-shifting Netflix Blu-Ray movies, so I can return them before I watch them): Is there any way to intercept the video stream, say with a video capture card, and record that ? I know it can be done for TV, but how about Blu-Ray ? And can it be captured at full resolution, color depth, and frame rate ? What products come closest ? StuRat (talk) 14:37, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty confident that "time shifting" only applies to broadcasts, in particular video broadcasts. Suggesting that you are going to "time shift" a movie in full definition is a pretty long way from the legally accepted definition; what you are doing is simply copying (and breaking the law.) Nevertheless, good luck with that! --66.195.232.121 (talk) 17:26, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I semi answered the question above Nil Einne (talk) 20:01, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Replace sort-values with names in PostgreSQL view

I have a PostgreSQL view whose definition is:

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW unique_card AS 
SELECT card.name AS name,
   array_to_string(array_accum(card.set), ','::text) AS sets,
   max(rarity.sortvalue) AS greatest_rarity,
   min(rarity.sortvalue) AS least_rarity,
   sum(card.foil_copies) AS foil_copies,
   sum(card.nonfoil_copies) AS nonfoil_copies,
   sum(card.foil_copies) + sum(card.nonfoil_copies) AS total_copies
  FROM card
  LEFT JOIN rarity ON card.rarity = rarity.abbr
  GROUP BY card.name;

How can I change this query so that instead of containing values from rarity.sortvalue, it returns the corresponding values from rarity.abbr? (rarity.abbr is the primary key in rarity, and rarity.sortvalue is also constrained to be unique.) I've tried replacing max(rarity.sortvalue) with the nested query

(SELECT abbr FROM rarity WHERE sortvalue = max(rarity.sortvalue))

but this yields an error message saying that WHERE clauses can't contain aggregate functions. Note that min(rarity.abbr) and max(rarity.abbr) won't do it because the rarities don't ascend alphabetically. NeonMerlin 20:25, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Subqueries, while slow, are easy to work with: select abbr from rarity where sortvalue = (select max(sortvalue) from rarity) -- kainaw™ 07:00, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Hide columns in a PostgreSQL view

In a PostgreSQL view, is it possible to select columns to use in the ORDER BY clause, but then exclude them from the view's output? NeonMerlin 22:24, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

You can wrap a query in a query, such as: select a from (select a, b, c from table order by a, b, c) -- I don't remember if Postgres requires to you name the subquery. -- kainaw™ 07:01, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

April 29

How are tactical maps made?

I am looking for a program or explanation on how tactical maps involving NATO symbols are made? Such as this: /media/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Map_of_dnieper_battle_grand.jpg

But also on the smaller, batallion-scale, or any scale. What program is used? I have found military fonts online, but ideally i'm looking for a program that allows me to map tactical movements with proper NATO symbols. Autorealm is a program which I have used in the past, and there are some references of a military symbology pack online, but the links are broken. Any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated. --Baalhammon (talk) 04:21, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Autorealm uses True Type fonts, which is the format for most other specialist fonts as well. http://www.mapsymbs.com/maphome.html has NATO APP-6 and APP-6a symbols, for free. They should work with Autorealm. KoolerStill (talk) 09:12, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Um you do realise that NATO was formed in 1949 right? That map was from 1941 or 1943 Nil Einne (talk) 21:17, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

linker

I need a linker that can connect my Samsung U708 Earphone and Microphone with my computer Audio and Mic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stool8888 (talk • contribs) 07:23, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

You probably mean that you need an adapter. I don't know if such an adapter exists, but if it does, a well-equipped electronics store that sells Samsung cell phones would probably be a good place to ask for one. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 19:12, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

pc2mac, end of lines in text files

I transfer a simple text file from PC into a memory stick, then transfer it to Mac-System-9.2. Due to different encoding, I have too many additional blank lines. Question: Is there any FREE script of Mac-System-9.2 that would take care of the end of lines when I drag and drop a simple text file on its icon? Thank you in advance. twma 09:27, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

TEXT<->.TXT Converter seems to do what you want, though with a somewhat annoying interface (it defaults to converting Mac->Windows, and you have to change this for every file). -- Speaker to Lampposts (talk) 19:29, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to Lampposts. Our supporting staff managed to download a copy for me called TextConverter without any extension. I double clicked it on Mac-system-9.2 but did not work. I inserted the extension .exe and then double clicked it on my PC. A dos-window appeared and disappeared quickly. I do not know what to do now. Be grateful if you could advise. Thank you in advance. twma 06:14, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like it is meant to be run on the Windows machine, to pre-convert into Mac format, not much help if you are being given Windows format files by someone else. http://www.filetransit.com/view.php?id=34958 is another converter that works on the Windows end of the transaction. But you should have a File Exchange Control Panel incorporated in your Mac OS which would do the conversion automatically. For plain text files, it is merely a matter of stripping off the Line Feed character at the end of every line (which is what is causing your double-spacing). Once the control panel is set up correctly, double-clicking files with the registered extension will do the conversion.KoolerStill (talk) 13:08, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to KoolerStill. File Exchange Control Panel solved my problem. Thank you again. twma 07:38, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

sound card volt meter

I want to measure a DC voltage with my computer cheaply. It should be possible using the sound card which has a high resolution ADC but is AC coupled. The DC would need to be chopped up, possibly using the sound card audio output. I've had a good look but I can't find references on the web. What would be a good, simple circuit for this? Cheers! PeterGrecian (talk) 10:52, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

This would be an interesting proof of concept, though not exactly the most practical way to measure DC. One way to chop up the signal would be to get an analog mux (such as Maxim's), run your signal to one input, ground the other, and use a 555 to toggle them. Conceptually it'd be straightforward. But I think you could also figure out some way using a 555 and an op-amp or two.

Note that you need a reference voltage of some sort in order to calibrate your measurement system. And don't apply too much voltage to your sound card inputs... they're probably not as forgiving as multimeters. (Multimeters are pretty cheap, btw.) - mako 20:53, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks mak. I'll have a look at the mux, but I'll probably use op-amps because I have some handy. The application I have in mind is testing battery capacities which requires measurements over several hours or days. Cheers. PeterGrecian (talk) 09:53, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

You may find this link useful: http://lea.hamradio.si/~s57uuu/scdsp/CheapChop/cheapchop.htm I was looking for exactly the same thing and found the link. I'm now happily using my sound card to record switch open/close events.--Phil Holmes (talk) 14:36, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Phil, just what I was after, and I'm happy to know I'm not the only one who thinks like this! PeterGrecian (talk) 09:05, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Radio Button script

I was wondering how hard it would be to make a script that would automatically fill in online forms; specifically those that contained radio buttons. The script would just randomly fill in all available buttons.

--Drogonov (talk) 12:25, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Not too hard. The Javascript below does the radio-button thing you mention. You could save it as a bookmarklet for whenever you feel the need to randomly choose a radio station. --Sean 13:45, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

  javascript:  var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName('input');
    var radios_by_name=%7B%7D%3B
    for (var i = 0; i < inputs.length; ++i) {
        var t = inputs[i];
        if (t.type != "radio")
            continue;
        if (!radios_by_name[t.name])
            radios_by_name[t.name] = [];
        radios_by_name[t.name].push(t);
    }
    for (var name in radios_by_name) {
        var group = radios_by_name[name];
        var random_index = Math.ceil(Math.random() * group.length) - 1;

        group[random_index].checked = true;
    }

It kind of works but once you use the scirpt it checks the radio button ,as planned, but then goes to a blank white screen saying "true" --Drogonov (talk) 16:05, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Stick a "void(0)" at the end to prevent that. --Sean 13:16, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

what would this do?

 

    $("input:radio").each(function() {
        $(this).attr("checked","checked");
    });

I think it uses jQuery to check all the radio button inputs on the page. I don't don't know jQuery, so I'm guessing. --Sean 13:16, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

P2SP exist or not ? Or the real name is?

http://downloads.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=960617 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ice77cool (talk • contribs) 15:06, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

http://article.ednchina.com/CE/20090330084408.htm http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Farticle.ednchina.com%2FCE%2F20090330084408.htm&lp=zh_en&btnTrUrl=Translate

As hardware already come out P2SP technology.. May be it is a marketing trick. I mean fake technology. But P2P mean Peer to Peer. Client-Server is connection between Client and Server.. Then how about connection with/without torrent server (DHT) to both Client (Peer) and Server? Is it so call Peer-to-Peer-Client-Server? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ice77cool (talk • contribs) 15:01, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinacache (P2SP stated.. Funded by INTEL too) Hm... My P2SP deletion log also being deleted.. P2SP so hated by people? Ice77cool (talk) 10:17, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

ITQ portfolio work

Could someone with experience of teaching or marking ITQs (ie, the final "Making Selective Use of IT module) give me some tips on what is expected? Or a link to a course syllabus - I can't find any detailed information on what I should cover.

I'm taking a level 2 ITQ course at my local community college in Liverpool, England, one evening a week. I only have to do the final portfolio module, because I already have a basic ECDL certificate which excuses me from all the other work. However, being let off all the learning modules means I have no experience of the work an examiner will expect. My ECDL was assessed thru multiple choice tests (and one short intray exercise) so it doesn't help, and my tutor says the things I'm suggesting (based on my work & study experience) aren't complex enough. I can only go to college once a week for 2 hours, my tutor is too busy with people who started at the beginning to sit around holding my hand, and without background knowledge I can't ask intelligent questions.

I haven't been able to find a syllabus anywhere, and my tutor's instructions seem to change every week. At first I was told a copy of my CV was an adequate piece of work (even though I'd already written it) but the following week that had changed, for no clear reason.

I've been asked to produce three separate pieces of work, each using a different module of MS Office 2007, but also told that one module can be research on the internet. These are my ideas so far:

• A training pack for new library counter employees (Word and/or Powerpoint)
• A budget for a student society exchange visit, with income & expenses shared among the participants to give a minimum fee (Excel)
• A presentation of the society's activities, to show to new members at the first meeting (Powerpoint)
• A relational database to track job applications and followup (Access)
• A web search for sources to use in a history essay, covering Google Books, the library catalogue, JSTOR, and relevant websites thru Google. I could print the search results from each place I looked.

Please let me know if any of these are good ideas, and how much detail & complexity I'd need to show. Many thanks!! 86.143.231.244 (talk) 16:50, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Access takes a LOT of learning, to produce anything good with it. Do the training pack, in Powerpoint. Avoid too many fancy transitions. Look into the feature that lets the user click on some part of the screen to "jump" to the next item of interest. Do it on a Master template of your own design, and print out written handouts from them. Then do the student budget, in Excel, with calculations all done with formulae. Allow for variable amounts to be entered by the user. For both of these you actually DO need to do a lot of research, to get the material for your content. Document that search process, with links and quotes. Organise it into a Word document, making use of the Table of Contents and Footnotes features. They would expect relevant content, but mostly you need to demonstrate proficiency in the software modules themselves. So read through the Help to find features the average user wouldn't use, and incorporate them into your design. Go more for function than appearance. Expect to spend two evenings experimenting with the features, another outlining the flow of data, maybe two researching the content you need. Then two days for each section putting it all together. Good luck. KoolerStill (talk) 15:53, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Wireless network security

How safe is it to use unsecured wireless networks to access sensitive websites such as internet banking? In case I'm using the wrong jargon, the situation is thus; I live in an apartment complex, many people have wireless routers- most are secured by password but I can access the net with my ps3 using one which isn't. Leaving aside any possible ethical issues for the moment, is it safe to access internet banking (an encrypted website i'd hope) using this connection. Thanks in advance for any replies. Stanstaple (talk) 17:28, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

In theory, if you have access to unsecured wireless you could log into the router with the default password and set up encryption for the duration of your internet banking. I'd do this when you're sure the other people are not using the net, like 3am early morning time. Then remove the security when you're done. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 17:33, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

That is particularly inadvisable. Altering someone else's router settings may be sufficient for criminal computer trespass, whereas using an unsecured wireless network may be somewhat less clear (depending on jurisdiction; this is not legal advice). – 74  00:19, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

If it's not his network (as is the case here), he probably doesn't have the router password (unless the router's owner is particularly incompetent), so he probably won't be able to change the settings. --128.97.244.41 (talk) 21:55, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Is that neccesary though? If I'm using an encrypted (?) website does that scramble the information being sent between the ps3 and the router or just between the router and the rest of the net? (I'm no techie in case thats not patently obvious]]) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stanstaple (talk • contribs) 17:50, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

It's just an idea, a bit extreme I guess. An encrypted website that uses https should scramble the data from your browser to the banking site, so all data traveling over the wireless connection is scrambled too. But with wireless, anyone could use packet capturing software like Kismet to record all wireless traffic between your computer and the wireless router, then go through the data and extract your passwords, visited sites etc. Even if you used secured wireless they can still be cracked. But, the likelihood of someone doing this, especially in a residential situation, is quite low. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 17:58, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

(HTTPS also makes phishing very difficult when correctly used with modern browsers. MTM (talk) 18:05, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's safe to access an HTTPS website using an insecure wireless connection. An eavesdropper could tell the name of the server (www.bank.com), and roughly how many bytes were being transferred in each direction, but nothing more than that. An active attacker could break the connection (denial of service) but not add/remove/alter any data. -- BenRG (talk) 18:10, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Though if it's not a wireless network you are supposed to use, accessing something important like your bank with it could be a bad idea. Because the owner can then inquire the bank and be like, "someone hacked into my network and accessed your bank with it", and that would look bad on your bank and it might make them suspend your account or something because either you did it and you dragged them into this mess and they are taking heat for it, or someone else hacked into your account, and in both cases they would really want to talk with you. --128.97.244.41 (talk) 21:55, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the input- I'll believe it because it's what I reckoned anyway- just wanted confirmation really. ' Appreciate your help.

TBH, do you really want to take the risk that your irate neighbour might hack your bank account and clean it out; and them come knocking for a reason why you were using his wireless connection without his permission. Maybe your neighbour is stupid unskilled in securing his network, or maybe he is a skilled criminal waiting for a sucker to use his network for something important. Astronaut (talk) 02:41, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Another possible attack vector: The neighbour could set up his router to redir all traffic to www.bank.com to his web server, which is set up to look just like www.bank.com, except it has an invalid certificate (or simply uses a plain HTTP connection). He forwards the data sent to his server to the real www.bank.com, and relays the data from www.bank.com back to the user, capturing the username/password, and all the transactions in the process. decltype (talk) 22:46, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

For that reason it's important to check that you're connecting by HTTPS and never accept a certificate your browser flags as invalid if you care about connection security. (An invalid certificate is fine if it's a website you wouldn't mind connecting to by HTTP in the first place.) If the certificate is valid, there is no danger of an irate neighbor hacking your account. I don't mean to endorse stealing Wi-Fi bandwidth, which is a criminal offense in many places. People have been arrested, and I believe fined/jailed, for doing it. Furthermore, the owner of the connection could contact the bank you connected to, which can identify you from their logs and might notify the police. The connection owner can also see your DHCP host name and your MAC address, which could be used to ID your computer if it was seized. So don't do that. But I also don't want people to get the impression that online banking over an insecure net connection is dangerous. It's not, it's safe, which is a good thing since all net connections are insecure to one extent or another. -- BenRG (talk) 23:57, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Flawed PHP code

I was writing a short application for a couple Wikipedian IRC users (it will be an RC notice script if it ever works), but I have a problem in my test bot; it can't write data to the socket. If anyone would like to, I'd be very grateful if you reviewed the code. I get an error from fwrite() at the end, on line 222. Thanks! --Yamakiri 20:30, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I see no fwrite() (nor anything that should call it) on line 222. --Tardis (talk) 02:28, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

which generally indicates that there is some error in parens or something like that. If you get functions causing errors right near the end of your project it means you should double check all your brackets, etc. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 09:55, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Err, I meant fgets ._. I'd checked my brackets, quotations, etc. but I didn't see anything. The thing is, how it won't recognize the socket I use ($YamaBot->socket) --Yamakiri ^T_C 04-30-2009 • 19:38:00 19:37, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

SoftSell

A friend of mine owns a consignment clothing store, and uses SoftSell on an ancient Windows 98 computer (yes I know...). Today, my friend started getting an error message: "Errpr DBFAT x/1104 Create error \\maint\softsell\Defentry.dbf (DOS Error 53)" and then gave quit, retry and default as options. The store has two computers, linked with a wire. This error only occurs on the front computer. The one in the back is the main one.

I know this is pretty much a lost cause, but any help at all is appreciated.

P.S. SoftSell Business Systems, LLC became Ascert, LLC in 2002, and the support website requires a customer login, whcih I don't have.

Thanks, Genius101 ^Guestbook 20:34, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

DOS Error 53 occurs when trying to map a network drive from a DOS PC (I assume this applies as Windows 98 is based on DOS) to a Windows PC that does not exist. First, try remapping the drive. If that doesn't work, check that the computer "maint" is correctly connected to the other computer and that its network settings (workgroup, name, etc.) are correct. Xenon54 (talk) 20:47, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I know how to remap in XP, but how exactly would you do that in Windows 98? Thanks, Genius101 ^Guestbook 12:17, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

In Windows 95, it's Network Neighbourhood -> File -> Map Network Drive. I'm not sure if it's the same in 98, but it likely is. NN should also show you "maint" if it's correctly connected to the network. Xenon54 (talk) 20:51, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

The first thing to do is to make sure the network cable is intact and has a good connection at both ends. StuRat (talk) 09:59, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for all your help, but it turns out that the network cable was completely unplugged. *sigh* If only people would check that first... Thanks, Genius101 ^Guestbook 21:13, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

StuRat (talk) 04:16, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

New Retail System

Because of my above problem, I am looking for a free alternative to SoftSell, which is a retail management program. It needs to be free, because I think taht is the only way I can convince my friend to switch over. Also, it needs to work on Windows 98. Thanks, Genius101 ^Guestbook 20:36, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

The problem is not with the SoftSell, so there is no point in replacing it for that reason. There may be some old (no longer supported) programs around. But it is not a simple matter to change from one to the other,as all the data would have to be re-entered, unless you can find one that uses the same database format (not likely with proprietary software). The only way it would be worth doing that work would be in conjunction with upgrading the computers, too. Going to Win XP3 would be enough, and would run on as little as 512Mb RAM (although 1Gb or more is better). If money is an issue, excellent used XP boxes can be found for a few hundred dollars. The existing program might in fact run on XP (in compatibility mode) but faster.For a business machine, all these factors have to be considered before making any changes. KoolerStill (talk) 18:05, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

April 30

MSN Question

Is there a way to re-add an email address you recently deleted by accident? Note : Not having the email address does not give me the option of asking the person whose email address it is what the email address is because I can't contact them by email, otherwise this would be a pointless question.--KageTora (영호 (影虎)) (talk) 07:00, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

If you sent or received an e-mail from this address, you may still have it in an old e-mail, possible in the trash bin/recycle folder. StuRat (talk) 09:56, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

computer /network security

1.how to detect ,prevent and remove from infected computers the following vuruses,bacteria,trojan,worm,trap door,logic bomb,spyware,adware and password sniffers.

2.with reguard to computer security what are the definitions ,advantages and disadvantages of the following a)physical biometric accesss control methods,behavioural besed biometric access control,intrusion detection sysytems,one time passwords,and passphrases.

i have problems with above issues am just operating a small network and want some information on the above thank u am Mbabs —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mbabaali1 (talk • contribs) 07:14, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Despite your claim that you're operating a small network, these look very much like homework questions to me. You should probably start at computer security and go from there. If there are specific things you don't understand, we can probably point you in the right direction, but we're not going to do the work for you. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 19:08, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Installing software on an MSI netbook with Suse Linux

Whenever I use Yast on my MSI Wind netbook to install something, it complains

Cannot access installation media

Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1 10 1-0.

Check that the directory is accessible.

When I check 'show details' it says

File /suse/i586.gcc-4.1.2_20070115-0.11.i586.rpm not found on media dir:///usr/share/lang

And indeed in /usr/share/lang/suse/i586 I only see two files, both beginning with 'aspell'. DirkvdM (talk) 07:22, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Opera Mini on PC?

Can I run the Opera Mini browser on my desktop PC? Whether it be Windows, Mac, or Linux? The reason is that I read that Opera Mini utilizes this proxy server to compress and reformat web pages. But presumably this functionality might also be useful to desktop users too. So I was wondering if there is a way to run it directly on my PC. Thanks, --71.106.173.110 (talk) 07:38, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

It is possible, albeit under a J2ME emulator such as the Nokia Series 40 SDK. I often use it for previewing applications and/or games that I downloaded prior to installing them on my phone. You can get it at forum.nokia.com, although you have to be registered (which is free of charge). Blake Gripling (talk) 08:47, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I recommend using MicroEmulator, it seems to be fastest for me. --grawity 06:41, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

What is the name for this technique or design pattern?

I am trying to remember the name of a design pattern/technique of emulating calls to a client from a server. This technique involves the client making a call to the server, which is not replied to immediately. When the server has data to send it replies to the call with this data. The client responds by making another call, passing the response to the call as a parameter, and this call then waits for the next time the server needs to call the client. I think it is something similar to "reverse callback", and it is used a lot in AJAX. Its one of those terms that is on the tip of my tounge and I will kick myself for not knowing when I hear it! -- Q Chris (talk) 09:18, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Inversion of control? Jay (talk) 14:45, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

It is certainly not what I would normally think of as IOC, I am pretty sure I have heard a more specific term. -- Q Chris (talk) 15:18, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

We have the article "Reverse Ajax". Is that what you're looking for? --NorwegianBlue ^talk 19:56, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, this might have been what I was thinking of, though I thought there was a more general term to describe doing this independent of architecture. -- Q Chris (talk) 09:48, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Arranging Ubuntu for ease of later upgrades

[As this got no responses.]

Some time in the next few weeks, I'll get a little computer from Dell that will have Ubuntu 8.04 ("customized by Dell") installed ("preinstalled"). Ubuntu 9 is already out, and I daresay Ubuntu 10 is in the works. Before I start fiddling with Ubuntu to make it more like what I want, I'd like to do any juggling around that will make it easier to upgrade to 9, 10 and beyond. I'm rather out of date with (K)ubuntu. I imagine that /home will not be in its own partition. If my assumption's right, would it help later upgrades to retain the changes already made by Dell and myself if I were to put /home in its own, newly created partition? If yes it would, then I suppose I could boot off a Knoppix or similar CD, fiddle with the partitions, copy /home to a new partition and delete the original -- but would the system then recognize the new "/home", or what other tweaks would be needed? Other tips welcome too. -- Hoary (talk) 14:00, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Ubuntu is on a six month release schedule. 8.04 (2008Apr) is a long term support release, which means it will be supported until 2009Sep. 8.10 Intrepid and 9.04 Jaunty have since been released. Separating your /home partition will make it easier to do clean installs, but you can upgrade within the OS from 8.04 to 8.10 (then to 9.04, if you wish.) I like separating by /boot partition as well, but I have not seen anything which demonstrates this as a best practice. Taggart.BBS (talk) 19:01, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Then I'd like to separate my home partition. I don't expect to have much of a problem creating a new partition, plonking a copy of /home in it, and then deleting the original /home (although even this assumption may be ignorant and mistaken). However, I've no particular reason to think that the result would work (that the system would know where /home was, and that the content of /home would still be correct). Would it, and if not then what other preparatory work would be needed? (Or is there some utility that automates all of this?) -- Hoary (talk) 00:18, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

You need to edit /etc/fstab to get that partition mounted on /home automatically. See this for better info. -- 93.106.43.155 (talk) 09:17, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Splendid; thank you! -- Hoary (talk) 09:25, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Webbased email

What web-based email is good for me if I don't care about that 8 GB of Gmail, but do care about price, stability, reliability and privacy?--80.58.205.37 (talk) 16:22, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

GMail is free, stable, reliable, and as private as web-based email will get. What are you looking for that GMail does not provide? -- kainaw™ 17:35, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I have some doubts about its privacy. Google scans it to serve ads. --80.58.205.37 (talk) 17:50, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

But that's an automated process. I mean, of course it's possible that they violate their users' privacy despite their promises to the contrary, but there's absolutely no guarantee that another web-based e-mail service provider wouldn't do the very same thing, or worse. Google, at least, is an established service provider with a pretty good track record of not being evil, and getting caught on something like this would be a terrible blow to their credibility and, depending on the case, would probably be illegal. That doesn't guarantee that they can't do it anyway, of course -- but frankly, it's a hell of a lot more than most, if not all, other free web-based e-mail providers have going for them. I mean, if this is a major concern for you (and it's not an unreasonable concern in itself, I think), then this may be a "can't have your cake and eat it too" situation. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 19:04, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

It is an automated process. Highly specific and efficient computer programs do this. If you were exchanging child pornography the advertisement-minded computer program would neither know nor care. It would ask you if you wanted to buy Spongebob toys. Mac Davis (talk) 18:16, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Another way to look at it... Free services need to turn a profit. Google makes it clear that they turn a profit by context-sensitive ads. If a service doesn't explain how they turn a profit, it is possible that they do it by selling the secrets in your emails to other people. -- kainaw™ 19:51, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't use Gmail and thus write from ignorance. Still: Given the choice, I'd rather be served with ads for products that are of no interest to me than with ads for products that are of interest: there'd be less likelihood that the former would trigger purchases. I have about as little interest in Barbie dolls as I have in anything that I can actually put a name to; thus ads for Barbie dolls would be safely lost on me. If I had no worries whatever about my correspondents' perceptions of me, I might get an account such as barbiedolllover0501@gmail.com, but even without that I might sometimes give myself a signature including Barbie-relevant strings. And I could set up a throwaway account at hotmail.com to and from which I'd once a month send a great wodge of Barbie-related text (copied from Barbie). How does that sound? -- Hoary (talk) 00:38, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I do not have absolute trust in Google, but I agree that you can't get more privacy from any third party based email. If your mail is sitting on someone else's servers, you're pretty much dependent on their honesty. If it helps, a big company like Google is probably less likely to have some bored server admin browsing emails just because he can.

If you're determined to have more privacy, you're going to have to set up your own email server. This is a project, even if you do it through a collocation service that will hand-hold you all the way. You can put Horde on the server and have web-mail that way.

But, and here is the key issue, email is intrinsically insecure. Email has no built-in encryption, and little built-in security. Any email you send is vulnerable at many points along its journey from sender to recipient. If you're sending emails that are interesting enough for people to bother, there are a lot of ways your email could fall into the wrong hands. The way to prevent this is through encryption such as PGP. APL (talk) 22:36, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

run application in background

Please help! tell me how to run a java application in background using windows? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Avitashpurohit (talk • contribs) 18:54, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean as a background process? You can do this with Process Explorer; run the program, right click your java application from the list, go to Set priority and select either below normal or idle 8I.24.07.715 ^talk 19:20, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

How does a website earn money for its owner?

I heard that websites try to get high page views (or web requests?) to earn money. How does this work? 117.0.51.228 (talk) 19:34, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Well presumably they get better ad money if their site has high pageviews as it is then more likely the ads will be seen.  GARDEN  19:37, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

But what if a website doesn't have ads? ARe there other ways to earn money with high page views? 117.0.51.228 (talk) 19:40, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Some websites, like Homestar Runner, gain revenue through merchandise sales. Others, like the Wikimedia Foundation, rely on donations from visitors. These are not directly tied to pageviews, but both revenues are based on how popular a website is. —Akrabbim^talk 19:45, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Additionally, some ads are less obvious than others. Affiliate links can be a good source of income if the website owner knows what (s)he's doing, and like merchandise sales, affiliate link sites need a lot of visitors to make any real income. 168.9.120.8 (talk) 12:17, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Depending on the website and ideology, Donations can be a superior good source of income. Mac Davis (talk) 18:08, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Closed-source project hosting website

Does anyone know of some good free (free as in offers their service for free) project hosting websites for closed source projects that don't own the code and also that enable people to sell software like other proprietary projects? --Melab±1 ☎ 19:38, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Googling for "Template:Websearch" or "Template:Websearch" gets some results, though the free plans tend to be very limited in size (200 MB or so). Buyer beware. --Sean 15:38, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Titles of external links in MediaWiki

Hello, I run my own mediawiki server. Is it possible to make external links to automatically parse the title from linked pages instead of assigning the links numbers like [1], [2], and [3]? thanks. 85.186.103.89 (talk) 21:30, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

No. --Sean 15:50, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

May 1

Ripping Blu-Ray on Puppy Linux

How can I rip a Blu-Ray disk on Puppy Linux ? I asked this before, for Ubuntu, here: [19]. StuRat (talk) 04:23, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Dial-up in Ubuntu 9.04

How do I establish a dial-up connection in Ubuntu 9.04? This is my only way to access the Internet where I live, and I'm annoyed they dropped support for it in 8.10... Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.138.21.132 (talk) 08:53, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

You might want to try this on the [Ubuntu Forum]. I don't know for sure but usually when things disappear they can be added back in via the "Add Software" or package manager. It seems likely that dial-up is now seen as a niche requirement and not installed by default. -- Q Chris (talk) 14:57, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The thing is, I can only get on the Internet via dial-up, so I can't download the necessary packages... 144.138.21.117 (talk) 07:38, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Get someone else to download the packages (or do it on the computer you are using now) and put them on a CD or memory stick. Of course you will need to find out which packages first though. You can load packages from media with package manager.-- Q Chris (talk) 15:49, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

So if I try to download GnomePPP, look at the address it is trying to get the package from, and go the that address on the Windows system I am using now, might that work? 144.138.21.157 (talk) 05:45, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

DVD/GOOGLE CHROME

I have a movie on a DVD-RW disk i place into the laptop i here the action of the CD Drive but nothing happens when i go to my computor the drive is not there any ideas as its the only movie i have and i am working abroad? Secondly my browser is google chrome every 20 mins or so the web page freezes and comes up with kill web page message were i have to reopen the browser very annoying when you are in the middle of something on the web is there a fault with google chrome or with the network or even my laptop>>>>????Chromagnum (talk) 11:57, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

One thing to check on the DVD is that it's properly inserted into the drive. Sometimes they are off-center a bit. I even have occasionally put them in upside down when working in the dark. StuRat (talk) 12:44, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

If, as you say, it's indeed a CD drive you are inserting the DVD-RW disc into, the reason it won't work is that CD drives cannot read DVD discs.

As for the browser freeze, I can say with confidence that it's not the network. Whether the problem is with Google Chrome, your operating system or something else, I couldn't begin to guess with the information at hand. I would recommend that you reinstall Chrome and see if that fixes the problem; if not, I would install another browser, such as Firefox, and see if that works better. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 13:28, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Two thoughts, first check the drive is actually a DVD drive. Secondly, how old is the laptop? Older DVD drives often have trouble reading RW media because they are not sensitive enough to detect the dye layer used in them 8I.24.07.715 ^talk 13:57, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks; The DVD issue i resolved by a reboot it then picked up the DVD but it still doesnt see it if you enter a diffrent one you have to reboot each time but i have a work around so all good; Chrome re-installed no diffrence have supicion it is the network dropping out briefly killing the page thanks peopleChromagnum (talk) 06:04, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Hard disk failure and data recovery

I've been reading a lot of late about the two topics, and I've two questions that are, I'm sure, quite silly to someone who has any real knowledge of the recovery process; I hope you will pardon my ignorance, and I thank you in advance for satisfying my curiosity. First, where there is no physical damage to the magnetic recording media (most crucially no head crash) and where data are not directly compromised (as, e.g., upon infection with a virus), why can't one (in a clean room, and following the same standards under which a drive is originally put together) remove the platters, etc., from the dead drive and swap them into a new, working drive, which can be used normally? Second, several of the sites linked as references in data recovery describe a process in which one alerts the recoverer to the file types he/she wants recovered (simple recoveries, for instance, it seems, usually comprise the various file formats under which are stored documents, photos, music, and e-mails), and one gets the sense that in the recovery process the recoverer does not actually see a complete list of the files on the dead hard drive but only those files for the extension of which he/she searches, which isn't consistent with recovery stories (like this one) I've read. So, does the recoverer see all recoverable files upon his/her accessing the drive, or can he/she only search for the file types the recovery of which the user desires? Thanks, and apologies for the length; not only am I not quite tech-saavy, but neither, although I've been in the States for a bit, am I a native speaker. 68.76.144.42 (talk) 18:08, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I am not sure about your actual question, but I must say, if you hadn't said that you weren't a native English speaker, I would never have thought it. Congratulations! Genius101 ^Guestbook 21:01, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I imagine the method you described would work, but it might actually be easier to do the reverse. That is, instead of moving the platters to another hard disk of the exact same type, just replace those components of the drive which have failed (the motor, for example). I would think this would be rather expensive, though, unless you can ship it to China to have people earning pennies an hour do it. StuRat (talk) 22:02, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The process of removing or replacing parts from new harddrives into old ones or old harddrives into new ones is used as little as possible, because this is less efficient (see:[20]). It is much easier to use a forensic bridge[21]. This ensures that you can use the disk without writing any data to it.

For the second question, programs designed for less technical users like "photo recoverers" come up with graphical lists of files of specific extensions. However, serious forensics tools are usually command-line based, such as fls[22]. This guide is easy to understand[23]. More[24][25] and a book on this[26]. If you want to run the programs for yourself try The Sleuth Kit or Autopsy Browser[27]. Halfway through this[28] Hak5 episode, they Michael Gerling does a demonstration of file recovery. Mac Davis (talk) 18:03, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

A computer that restarts when told to turn off

Whenever I tell my computer to turn off, it restarts instead. I have Windows XP SP 3. I have an ASUS M2N (zip file with overview and spec pdf) motherboard. Originally I thought the problem was caused by XP sending the wrong signal. I did a complete wipe of all of my hard drives and did a fresh install of XP. And it still restarts when I tell it to shut down. Any suggestions? If you need more info about my computer, please ask.--Rockfang (talk) 19:59, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The obvious workaround is to plug the computer into a power strip with a switch and turn the computer off there. (First shut it down the normal way, then, when it restarts, kill the power.) You can use this method until you find a permanent solution. StuRat (talk) 21:53, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Could be a bios setting --h2g2bob (talk)

320 GB HDD; 140 GB (D:, named "DATA") is seperated from 144 GB (C:, named "ACER"), merge them together

Resolved

I have an Acer Aspire AS6920-6968. It has a 320 GB HDD, however this is split up: 144 GB is my C: drive, while 140 GB is my D: drive. I want to reformat my laptop and combine these two partitions together. How would I go about doing this? My laptop has Windows Vista Home Premium by the way.--Pass1019 (talk) 20:43, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

on the windows install disk there should be a partition editor. delete the two partitions during setup and format the unpartitioned space —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 20:46, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

The thing is I don't have an install disc, I had to use Acer's program, eRecovery, to create a backup DVD that will put everything on it in order to reformat. So I'm not really sure what to do. Would this work?--Pass1019 (talk) 20:50, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Is your operating system installed on the drive you want to merge? I'm not sure you'll be able to do it like that. For software, check out PartitionMagic (search google for cracked version if you don't want to pay) or the free program GParted which you can download and put on a Live CD. Again, I don't know how much success you'll have trying to merge a partition with an operating system installed —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.44.54.169 (talk) 20:55, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure PartitionMagic works with Vista. I could be mistaken though.--Rockfang (talk) 20:58, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

There's nothing on the D: drive (140 GB), its empty. It's called "data" so I think its just to be used for storage, but I want all my space on one partition. My C: drive (144 GB) has all my stuff on it.--Pass1019 (talk) 21:03, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

In that case you should be able to delete the D partition then expand the C partition to take up the entire drive. StuRat (talk) 21:44, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

May we ask why you want one huge partition ? That's not generally the recommended way to do things, as it eliminates the flexibility you get from multiple partitions. For example, if you want to install something you're unsure of, putting it in the D drive would make it easier to get rid of it if you decide you don't want it. Also, you could put another operating system on the D partition to test it out. StuRat (talk) 21:44, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Because I just want all my space in one area. Anyway I figured it out, it was really simple. I went to "Computer Management" and then deleted D: and then extended C:. Now C: has 284 GB! Easy. Like I said, there was nothing on D: anyway, it was practically there just for storage.--Pass1019 (talk) 21:51, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

WARNING: Latest Developer Beta of Google Chrome will not load Wikipedia Properly

The latest Developer Channel Beta of Google Chrome (2.0.177.1) does not load Wikipedia properly most of the time. I urge you to switch back to the beta channel if you are on the developer channel. If you already have the latest version, uninstall and reinstall chrome, or hold out for an update to fix this. Problems include not loading pages, problems with gadgets like Twinkle, and improper rendering of formats. I have notified them about this, but I imagine that there are other bugs ahead in line.--Unionhawk ^Talk 21:11, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

FWIW I'm not seeing any of these problems (Vista SP1) — Matt Eason ^{(Talk &#149; Contribs)} 02:52, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

How can this, honestly, be just me? I'll uninstall/reinstall, but, how can this be just me?--Unionhawk ^Talk 04:02, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm really not trying to be as unhelpful as this will sound, but if something is in beta then it's going to have unexpected results sometimes which might be why your configuration does one thing and it works on someone elses. ZX81 ^talk 05:17, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Microsoft Excel question

I have a column of formulas, and they all are a function of a different column. This I know how to do. However, I want to include a value from just a single cell, that would be common to every cell in the column. For example, A1=B1+C1. When I drag down the column, all the values get incremented (i.e. A2=B2+C2, A3=B3+C3, etc.). However, I only want one of the values to be incremented, and the other to stay constant (i.e. A2=B2+A1, A3=B3+C1, etc). How do I do this? I haven't been able to find the answer anywhere else. I suppose if I could describe what I'm trying to do in less than a paragraph, I would be able to perform a more effective search, but I haven't been successful. Does anyone have an idea of how to do this? —Akrabbim^talk 21:38, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

If you want something to stay constant you put a dollar sign in front of it. So to have the column stay constant use $A2, if you want the row, use A$2, if you want them both, use $A$2. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 21:50, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Pressing F4 steps round the options on the current cell reference. -- SGBailey (talk) 22:20, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

May 2

Inexplicably unable to log into my Hotmail account

I changed the password for it more than week ago, haven't logged in ever since but I wrote down the password. Yesterday, I tried logging in, and it kept turning me down because the password was "incorrect". This is really huge for me, because every account for other websites I have is registered to that address (including my account here) and since I've forgotten my passwords to them, the only way I can retrieve them is through email, but now I am unable to check my mail. I don't have an alternate account, and I made the mistake of not writing my answer to the secret question, so now it seems like I have no way of logging into my email account. Still, I wrote down the password and I wrote it down correctly, so I don't understand why I can't log in. Does that mean someone hacked into it and changed my password? I've been losing sleep over it. Whip it! ^{Now whip it good!} 01:16, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The likelyhood of your hotmail account being hacked is quite low - unless you clicked the "invite all my contacts" option when signing up for MySpace/Facebook/etc. All the same, take a look at your info on these other websites to see if they show signs of being compromised (bogus messages sent to others is one thing to look for). However, I think it is more likely you either made the same mistake both times you entered the new password, so now the password is not what you think it is; or maybe it didn't get changed at all, so have you tried the old password?

As for the answer to the secret question, that should be obvious to you (for me, I know 'what high school I went to', but MS offers other examples like 'the name of your dog' and so on). You really should have chosen a question so easy you didn't need to write down the answer. Astronaut (talk) 02:17, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The password change went through, because I tried my old one and it didn't work either (yes, I remember my old password very well). I seriously don't get it. Whip it! ^{Now whip it good!} 02:44, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

One common problem with entering a new password is having the CAPS LOCK key on. Thus, the PW is all uppercase. It's also all uppercase when you enter it a second time, because CAPS LOCK is still on. Of course, it's hidden both times, so you can't see that it's uppercase. The CAPS LOCK key is like a password land-mine. StuRat (talk) 13:24, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005, 0x805ADACC, 0XBACC349C, 0XBACC3198)

Hi,

Every week or so I get a Blue Screen of Death on my PC after using it for a while, but today,when I switched it on it immediatley went to a Blue Screen of Death, so I switched it off and on and it again went to a Blue Screen of Death. I switched it on again and it then went to a Green Screen of Death. The Green Screen of Death said this was the technical information: STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005, 0x805ADACC, 0XBACC349C, 0XBACC3198). What does this mean? I then restarted the computer and it worked fine. I then ran an antivirus and removed a worm that I must have got within the last 12 hours. Could that be what the problem was? My system is: Windows XP Home Edition 2002 Service Pack 3, if that helps.

Thanks. 92.7.18.36 (talk) 05:36, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Do you have a minidump file available? If so, please zip + password protect it and upload it to a file hosting site. 0x7E is SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED. It basically means some sort of driver created a system thread which then made an invalid access to memory (0xc0000005) and crashed your computer. Did you get the error code for the first BSOD? --wj32 ^t/c 07:22, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I have no idea what a minidump file is, sorry. That was the only error code I took down; I just took a photo of the screen because I found it wierd there was a Green Screen of Death then after I thought of asking you guys why it was being wierd. 92.7.18.36 (talk) 07:32, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Look in C:\Windows\Minidump. Is there a file named Mini[date of the crash].dmp? --wj32 ^t/c 07:34, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I have a few, but none for today's date. 92.3.192.222 (talk) 09:03, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

radio 'loop' on laptop

hi all, just this morning, whilst downloading, my laptop has suddenly started playing a loop of a radio political sketch/skit show - someone pretending to be bush etc, between skits there is a silly voice saying 'heads up' then a poping noise, every now and again there is an advert for a BUPA care home, then another skit. It sounds like a radio show. There is no application open other than bitlord (and when that is closed it doesn't stop) i'm scanning using AVG 8.0 just now. Has anyone come across this before? Perry-mankster (talk) 12:24, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

When you say that there's no application open other than Bitlord, do you mean that it's the only one that shows up in the list of applications when you open Task Manager? Because that doesn't mean that there isn't a process running in the background. You want to click on the Processes tab and see what's actually cooking. You'll see a lot going on there, and one of those processes is probably running in the background and playing this stuff for you. One possibility is that you have a hung process there that doesn't show up on the Applications list, but is still kind of going on. A web browser that's still playing a stream from the internet could do this, for example. I doubt it's a virus. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 16:08, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

C++ help..

Hey!I'm basically a beginner in C++.I'm in search of a website where i can easily found problems and the coded programs as the solution of given problems, so that i may develop a program for that problems and check out my progress.I hope i'll be helped out soon!..cheers--59.103.12.242 (talk) 12:27, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Project Euler, although you only get to see the solutions after you have completed a problem. And the solutions are given in multiple programing languages. Taemyr (talk) 12:39, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The best thing to do is just look at life in terms of programming. You need to study for a final exam in English? Use string arrays to create a program that will quiz you on what you need to know. Mac Davis (talk) 18:46, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Specification of Keys

While working on Microsoft Office Powerpoint, Is it possible to specify a key for specific function ? For example KEY Z to change the slide, KEY X to add something in the notes or KEY C to write something in the slide or KEY V to chanfe the size of figure on slide. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.55.135.211 (talk) 14:22, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Help touching up an image

Can anyone help me touch up this image, which is of not-brilliant quality? I've only got a rubbish version of Photoshop, but anyone with anything more advanced... fancy a challenge? :-) A vectorised version would be brilliant, but I see that that might be hard due to the dot-printed scan - not mine, I was emailed it. Anyway, thanks! ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 14:55, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Targeted advertising

Nearly every time I use Facebook, I notice adverts targeted at what I have searched for recently during the last forty eight hours. I am sure that they are targeted. For example, I recently looked for new batteries on Google, and then data recovery software - Hence my earlier question from this IP address. Both of these topics have arisen in adverts.

Is there anything I can do to stop it? There are apparently no such settings within Facebook. Normally I use Firefox, but Safari for Facebook (reasons are complex). When I use Google, I always do so logged out.78.33.187.186 (talk) 16:46, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

The only things that come to mind are using a proxy server or never going to Facebook at all. I advocate using both at all times. Mac Davis (talk) 18:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Phorm springs to mind. Either that or some other tracking cookie or adware program. What antivirus program are you running? Some of them (Kaspersky for one) do a good job getting rid of such things. If it's Phorm or tracking cookies, you can also nuke the cookies manually, and you should be able to set your browsers to decline cookies or ask you if you want to accept. CaptainVindaloo ^{t c e} 18:21, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps this would be helpful then[29]. I do not know which one to recommend though. Mac Davis (talk) 18:24, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I've just deleted all of my cookies from both Firefox and Safari, they refuse them in future, and Firefox deletes them all when I close it. But whatever it is, it it browser independent: do the browsing in Firefox, but the ads appear in Safari, where I use Facebook. I've also upgraded the Mac native firewall, to "essential services only," and "stealth mode" which ensures that uninvited traffic "is given no response.

Yes, I'm concerned about Phorm and privacy, but I understand it isn't yet operational. As for antivirus/security, I don't use any - which would be less necessary on a Mac anyway. I have a proxy, but a very slow one. Might it be useful if I changed my facebook tied email address away from what I normally use?78.33.187.170 (talk) 22:04, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Google has AdSense, Yahoo has Web Beacons. They track your searching for the purpose of serving up "relevant" ads. Google was keeping search results for 3 months at one stage, and proposing to keep them longer. They are supposedly "de-personalised". But the day you search for batteries, they'd know at least for the rest of the day. These are not stored in the cookies that your browser can clear. Something like CCleaner will find them for you, disguised as Internet Temporary Files from several hidden locations (and it is an eye-opener to read down the list before deleting them).

Be aware refusing cookies, for many sites, will prevent the site from loading at all. If you have one of the newest versions of Firefox or Safari, try the "Private Browsing" setting, which records a lot less about your activities (but may or may not prevent the advertising cookies).KoolerStill (talk) 07:31, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

The best method I found for ridding ads is Adblock plus for firefox. Also, you can customize it with this helper [30]-- penubag  (talk) 09:19, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I've noticed that I've had to except several sites from the cookie block - like the bank, for example. But I would rather do so manually and know what I'm doing. The Firefox version that I am using is v3.0.10, which wouldn't appear to have private mode yet - in any case, I would be concerned about missing an edit history (which I do use). CCleaner is Windows only, I'm using a Mac (which should actually help my security). As much as ridding ads would be great, I would rather mask the path of what I'm searching for - ads are OK, targeted ads aren't when they come from another source than the site that I'm on.

I'm less annoyed by Google/Gmail Adsense, because it scans your emails/search terms, and returns targeted ads on the same activity. I haven't a clue where Facebook is getting its sources from, but it definitely isn't itself.78.33.187.162 (talk) 09:46, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Missing audio codec?

There's a video file I haven't played for some months, and it now seems to be missing the audio. I ran it through VideoInspector and got this result - how would I go about getting the sound? Thanks! ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 17:33, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Try installing VLC media player, and see if you can get sound on it. If that doesn't work, there's always the possibility that the sound may have become corrupted. Until It Sleeps 02:05, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

It won't play with sound on VLC either. How might it have become corrupted? ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 07:27, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

File Downloading Protocols

Hi, I just downloaded a massive 154 MB file over a dial-up and the download's been corrupt. Is there some way by which a download manager will block-by-block check the checksum of the file downloaded with the server copy and downloaded only those blocks which are corrupt ? The server should send the checksum of a block and the client would compare that with the client side checksum, to be specific. 218.248.80.114 (talk) 18:55, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Bit torrent does something similar to what you've described. That large of a file over a dial up is always going to be tricky. If you know someone with access to the noncorupt file, it is possible to figure out which sections are corrupt (check summing sections of the file and comparing) and then send just the bad sections, but I don't know of a program that will do this for you automatically. Shadowjams (talk) 20:06, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

rsync? --76.167.241.45 (talk) 22:22, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh yeah, good point. I was thinking rdiff, which would be hard to create the deltas without the two together, but rsync should do it on its own. Shadowjams (talk) 23:00, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I actually want that feature in a standard download manager over http or ftp. Do the protocols have this provision? Why not? 218.248.80.114 (talk) 05:27, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

FTP and HTTP weren't really designed for this sort of thing, they were quick and dirty hacks that became far more popular than their creators expected. HTTP does have an optional Content-MD5 header, but I think it would be hard to convince server administrators to enable it because of the cost in CPU time (especially when you add in the potential for denial-of-service attacks). On the other hand, if you can find a .torrent for the file you downloaded, many if not all torrent clients will scan your existing file for you and redownload only the parts that are broken, and there may even be hybrid HTTP-BitTorrent software that will download the broken parts via HTTP. It might be possible to convince server admins to provide .torrents for large files they distribute by HTTP, since it has the potential to save them money. -- BenRG (talk) 14:55, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Page numbers in Word

After many hours of formatting numerous Word documents, each chapters in a longer work, I have outputted them to PDF and merged the PDFs only to find that despite having identical margins and settings in each file (as far as I can tell), the page numbers in some of the files are inexplicably a little off-center and some are even down half a line where they should be (something which is obvious when you merge them together and are turning from one page to the next). I've checked all the document margin settings, tab settings, etc., and found NO differences between the documents. What could be causing this?

I am using Word 2004 (sigh) on OS X 10. I generate the PDFs with the standard OS X Print > PDF > Save as PDF function. I merge them with Adobe Acrobat though it is clearly in the originals and not a function of the merging.

Thoughts? Things to check? God, I hate MS Word. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 22:35, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Thought One: I concur with the sentiment, but you will hate it less if you automate it more.

Thought Two: double check the page numbers are in the same font and size. A wider left margin will move the figure to the right, and vice versa. If the margins are identical, check that your paper size is also identical.

Thought Three: did you go to all the trouble of formatting each document separately? Highlighted and selected fonts and sizes for every heading?

The only sure way to get them the same is to mark them as Head1 Head2 Para2 etc, without worrying about how they actually look. Then make up one sample-text page with the styles you want, marking them with the same labels (highlight, choose style from the drop-down). And make one set of headers and footers (which is where the page numbering happens). Then you delete the actual content and save it as a template (or just as a document with one word in it - empties won't save). Then you use the merge function to add in all the other documents, which will pick up the same style.

A shortcut.If the other formatting is all identical and 'done by hand',no need to worry about the heading and para styles. Just merge all the documents together, onto the first chapter. Once it is one document, it is easy to reset the margins, footers and page numbering globally. If it's too big for one file (I think Word 2004 does 2gb files) make a copy of the first file, delete all but the first line of it, merge the remaining documents onto it, then delete the place-holder line. The merged items will pick up the formatting of the base file, including the new margins and numbering.KoolerStill (talk) 08:33, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Merging the documents is not really practical for this particular workflow -- it becomes unmanageable to edit a 300 page document from a human point of view (even if Word can technically manage it, which even then I'm doubtful of — seems like a recipe for crashing). Styles are done by hand just because at this point setting up and tagging them would be prohibitively difficult. Anyway, I figured out the centering problem—Word has two different ways to center footnotes. One involves a center tab stop in the center of the margins, the other involves the "center" paragraph alignment that apparently uses somewhat different margins (there is maybe a 1/12th of an inch difference in my case). I have converted them all to the same approach which fixes that problem; the random chapter with the vertical difference I will just try to manually fix by tweaking the footer margins. Thanks for your input, though. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 17:53, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

And the vertical thing appear to be caused by some of the footnotes being in Times and some in Times New Roman. arrhghghgg... but fixable. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 18:28, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

May 3

Why do you need Java for downloading Limewire now

Why do you need Java in order to download songs off of LimeWire now? It was never required before. What's up with that? Ericthebrainiac (talk) 01:30, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Read the articles you linked to. You can't run a program written in Java without the Java Runtime Environment. What was it written in before?--24.9.71.198 (talk) 01:54, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Maybe you had the JRE before, but it was an old version and LimeWire added some functionality that needs a more recent version. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 06:25, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

text image to plain text recognition

I have some PDF files from a scan in good condition and I need to copy the text from the document onto a form. Copy-Paste doesn't work, but is there some software or web app that can look at the text in the pdf (or any other text scan) and generate plain text? Like text recognition software?-- penubag  (talk) 09:39, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

If you have Microsoft Office then you can load your picture into Microsoft Office Document Imaging or whatever it's called. That converts scanned images to text, and it's surprisingly accurate. --Heron (talk) 10:54, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

For free solution, see tesseract (software), GOCR, ocrad. If you are on Windows, you should be able to run them under cygwin even if no other windows version is available. Also, there exist a program called pdftotext, but it won't help unless the "text" in your pdf is really in text and not image format. --88.194.216.207 (talk) 10:59, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

MS Office Imaging takes files only in TIF format, so you need some way to convert PDF to TIF. Moreover I doubt if its good for scanned hand-written text. The OP hasn't mentioned whether the PDFs have typed text or a hand-written one. Jay (talk) 17:02, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Linux, adding user to group without having root access

I have an account at a web hosting service, and need a directory to be writable for the web server daemon (user www). My user account is myname, and I am a member of group myname. I would like to add user www to group myname, so that I can make a directory writable for user www without doing a chmod 666. Is that possible without having root access, and if so, how is it done? Thanks, --NorwegianBlue ^talk 11:07, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Free handwriting font?

Does anyone know of a website like this one but free? Thanks! ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 11:33, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

You could use some font creation software. here is a tutorial. IT's a little bit more dificult, but you may be able to tweak the results better. And it'll save you the nine bucks that yourfonts.com or fontifier.com APL (talk) 15:46, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

That will, of course, entail buying the HighLogic software used in the tutorial... ╟─TreasuryTag►contribs─╢ 16:05, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

PDF TO WORD

What kind of programs do I need to convert pdf files to word files (or txt files)?? I do know that Adobe Acrobat Pro is one of such programs, but 500 bucks for just a program seems too much of a price to pay. And since I'll be needing to convert pdf files frequently from now on (pdf to word AND word to pdf), free trial programs aren't exactly ideal for me. So does anyone know of any FREE, easy to use softwares that converts pdf files??? (or if possible, a link where i can download the full version of adobe acrobat pro for free?)Johnnyboi7 (talk) 14:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

OpenOffice probably can do it. For windows, you can get a few different command line pdf convertors with cygwin, like pdftotext, but I don't think any of them will convert to "word file" (whatever it is). --93.106.46.15 (talk) 14:49, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

By "word file" I think Johnnyboi means a native Microsoft Word document (a .doc file). No, OpenOffice won't do this; it doesn't even read PDFs correctly (not that it's intended to). It can create PDFs but not import them. Tonywalton ^Talk 14:57, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Are the PDFs scans, or digital outputs from a Word processing program? (That is, are they pages that were scanned in or were they just exported as PDFs.) If the former then you are really not going to likely be satisfied with automatic conversion — OCR for long documents is piss-poor and requires about as much editing time as it would take to just type it all in right the first time. If they are digital outputs, it is relatively easy to find things that will take all the text from the life (like pdftotext) and dump it into a big text file. It is not very elegant and sometimes has problems depending how exactly the PDF was created. As for converting PDFs to DOC files, there are a lot of non-free "converters" out there but they are not, in my experience, very accurate.

The basic problem here is that PDF is meant to be a write-once format — it is an output state meant for printing, not for document editing or distribution. Once something is in a PDF format it is NOT easy to edit it or to get it into any other type of file format. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 17:58, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Watching an AVI file on a DVD player

I've got an avi file (700MB) that I can watch on my pc no problem using VLC media player or whatever. How can I put this in a format where I can watch it on a standard DVD player? I know I could run it through Final Cut Pro or something and convert it then burn it through DVD Studio Pro, but that seems very long winded and would take ages. So is there a quick way to do it? My DVD player says DiVX on it, so can I just burn it to a DVD? Thanks.Popcorn II (talk) 18:20, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

google search

If foo yields a hit, you would expect foo -"blah blah blah" to also yield a hit. This search yields a hit, and this search does as well, as expected. However, this and this do not yield anything. Why? Thanks. --VectorField (talk) 18:43, 3 May 2009 (UTC)