Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 July 3

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July 3

Not so respectable search engines

This post got me thinking. Quest09 pointed out that only respectable search engines are going to follow robot.txt instructions for a website like Facebook. I know that we at Wikipedia have the NOINDEX template which similarly politely requests that search engines not point to that page. So my question is, what if I want to search for pages that are excluded from the indexes of respectable search engines. What non-respectable (but still pretty good) search engines could I use for searching these types of pages?. Buddy431 (talk) 01:43, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I doubt it'll be easy to find any public, useful search engine that doesn't follow good webetiquette. For starters, you need a load of hardware (=money) to run a useful search engine given the indexing requirements and size of the web. More importantly, if there really were someone willing to spend all that money, they'll quickly find people don't take too kindly to poorly behaved search engines and it will likely be banned from many sites. Note that this sort of thing does get discussed in various places so even sites which haven't yet been visited may be blocking the search engine (the infamous Cuil had some problems with poor behaviour briefly discussed in our article in the early days, there were discussions aplenty about blocking it). It's even resonably likely that they piss people off enough to report them to their ISP (depending in whether people think the ISP will do anything useful), particularly if you try to evade the ban in some way and this would probably be a TOS violation.

As an aside, I personally was banned from a website when I attempted to run an archiving at a glacial pace, fully respecting robots.txt etc. My only real mistake was I didn't provide contact info (well I put my e-mail in but I later realised it wasn't actually provided by the program to the server) but I somewhat doubt I would have been contacted or it would have made a difference. I was unbanned when I realised I'd been banned after a few weeks of wondering why the site was always down and finally checking it with something and then contacted the webmaster and promised not to run the archiving program again. From what I've read, I don't think it's that uncommon that webmasters are suspicious of bots and ban unknown ones even if they are resonably well behaved, so you can see the problem with a poorly behaved bot.

Some sites may have their own internal search engines that are allowed to index things forbidden to normal bots (wikipedia is obviously one) so if you have a specific site in mind it's often best to try that.

Nil Einne (talk) 17:50, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Building an asset register

Any suggestions for quick and easy (and free!) software I could use to create an asset register for a charity? Ideally, I'm looking for something that will run in Windows, scan the entire network of ~30 Windows PCs and list stuff like computer name, IP address, technical specifications, software installed, etc, then store the resulting report in a commonly used format like an Excel Spreadsheet or an Access Database so I can add other assets like printer, photocopiers, faxes and so on. Astronaut (talk) 03:23, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

The Dude from MikroTik is a excellent at mapping the network. It won't show you what software is installed on a PC, although if there are open ports you can make a guess.--TrogWoolley (talk) 13:00, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Securing Vista Home Premium on a shared computer

Any tips please for locking down program settings in Windows Vista Home Premium, especially Firefox and the NoScript addon? And how about software to automatically close all programs and log users out if the computer is left idle? I need to stop my baby sisters from messing up the computer my mum uses for web banking. Many thanks in advance! 86.136.139.69 (talk) 15:02, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

With the caveat that I use 'Win XP Pro' still, you could set up seperate Windows user accounts on the PC for each user, and one specifically for banking alone is a very good idea. If your baby sisters are old enough to use a PC a 'guest' or similar account for them is ideal, as it has limited user privileges, meaning thay can do less accidental damage. If you set up the PC to go on standby or sleep after a short period, in XP at least there is a checkbox that requires you to use your log on password to log back onto the PC. There should be a similar setting on Vista, though I am not certain Home Premium has this, I would be surprised if it didn't. Note that standby mode will NOT close all programs, merely require you to log on to the PC again after it goes on standby. Also try looking up "password" or "log-on" with the inbuilt Windows help functions (usually function key F1), it should lead to the info you require. -- 220.101 (talk) ^\Contribs 17:05, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

For your sisters use Windows SteadyState to create a completely locked-down account that deletes itself after logging off. I use it at work for our breakroom computers. It is an amazing program. --mboverload@ 21:36, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Merging Feedburner Feeds

I'm in the process of moving my blog to a new domain. I'd like to know if it's possible to keep all my RSS subscribers from the previous domain automatically -- can I move them over to the new feed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.189.6.78 (talk) 16:21, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Arithmetic result exceeded 32 bits

Hi everyone.

I got a new camera recently and accidentally set the date as 2009 rather than 2010, so all my photos show the wrong date. I used Windows Photo Gallery to fix them, but some refuse to be fixed. I try editing them individually and it says "Changes to the taps, caption, rating or date taken could not be saved to this file" (it does the same when trying to change a rating on the files). I then tried editing them via the right click peoperties command, and it came up with an "unexpected error" - "Error 0x80070216: Arithmetic result exceeded 32 bits". I tried editing the source file (rather than the copy) and the problem persists. I am running a 32bit Vista install on this pc. Does anyone know why this is happening, and whether it can be fixed? -mattbuck (Talk) 20:39, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Before someone comes along with a proper answer have you applied all the latest patches from Microsoft Update? --mboverload@ 21:26, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Also, could you find one of the images that you're having a problem with and try and edit it on another computer to see if you get the same error? --mboverload@ 21:34, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Computer is up to date. I'll try anotehr pc tomorrow. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:40, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

MATLAB Query

I am currently teaching myself to program (very basically) in MATLAB and am having trouble in understanding part of the code that is used in the guide I am working from. I would much appreciate it if someone could help me understand. My question is as follows: the code I used originally listed for me the squares from m to n for m<n and 0<m, with m and n integers. The code was then adapted to list the squares for m≤0 and also m>n. Ultimately there is only one line in the new code that I don't understand but the problem is that it completely baffles me as to how it works.

Original Code:

   Isquares=zeros(Ihigh-Ilow+1,2)
   for I=Ilow:Ihigh
      Isquares(I,1)=I;
      Isquares(I,2)=I*I;
      disp(['I = ' num2str(Isquares(I,1)) ', I*I = ' num2str(Isquares(I,2))])
   end    

New Code

  Ilow=round(Ilow); Ihigh=round(Ihigh);
  range=abs(Ihigh-Ilow)+1;
  Isquares=zeros(range,2);
  for I=1:range
      Isquares(I,1)=Ilow+sign(Ihigh-Ilow)*(I-1);
      Isquares(I,2)=Isquares(I,1)*Isquares(I,1);
  end
  end

Could someone please explain to me, step-by-step, what the bolded line is doing? Thanks 92.11.130.6 (talk) 21:32, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Never mind, solved it. 92.11.130.6 (talk) 11:31, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Engvar in firefox

Running Firefox 3.0.19 under Ubuntu (9.04 I think; not sure how to check quickly). After a recent update the spell-chequer apparently switched from US English to Commonwealth English. How can I change it back? I can't find a preference for it in either the Firefox or OpenOffice.org menus — bizarrely, a Google search suggests that the latter is relevant. (OpenOffice.org 3.0.1)

(Actually, my real preference would be to take the union of US and UK English — if I type the word furore it's unlikely to be by mistake. But if it has to put the red line under either aluminum or aluminium, I prefer it to call the second one the error.) --Trovatore (talk) 21:54, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

• I don't know about OpenOffice, but you can install dictionaries for different dialects of English here and switch between them by right clicking in the edit box and selecting from the "Languages" menu. --59.95.108.152 (talk) 17:06, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Ah, thank you very much! I hadn't noticed that right-click menu.

Anyway, I did eventually find my own solution, which I also reproduce here for anyone interested: Go to about:config (that is, literally type about:config with no http or anything into the location bar) and change the value of the string spellchecker.dictionary . --Trovatore (talk) 20:32, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

How electronic voting works??

I am posting here because its more computer related. How electronic voting works?? I mean, they ones that created the machine coulndt just put, that 1 in x votes to guy A goes to guy B, but still saying that he voted in the guy A? How electronic is reliable? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.78.131.252 (talk) 22:48, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

First, you have to define what you mean by "electronic voting". That could simply refer to having some sort of electronic machine tally paper ballots, such as an Optical scan voting system that reads marks made on a paper (or holes punched in a ballot, or whatever). In these cases, there is a physical document (the paper ballot) that remains, which could be looked at by hand in case the results from the machine counting were in doubt (as happened in the United States Senate election in Minnesota, 2008. These types of machines can be quite reliable (or can be relatively unreliable, if they aren't built well). There is less of an opportunity for fraud, because if the machine's accuracy is in doubt, you can always go back and look at the paper ballots that it counted.

On the other hand, there are now some systems that use an electronic direct recording system to count votes. Direct recording systems are by no means new. It was common in the past in the United States, for example, for voters to literally "pull a lever" to indicate which candidate they wanted to vote for, which would mechanically increase some counter by one for that candidate. In a direct recording system, there is no physical ballot to fall back on if the machine's results are in doubt. This can increase the chance of miscounts (either mistakes, or deliberate fraud). With electronic (rather than mechanical) direct recording systems, it becomes even harder to ensure that votes are being tallied correctly, mostly because computers are a lot more complicated than even the most elaborate mechanical vote recording systems. Generally, the government running the vote would set strict standards on the electronic recording devices, to minimize the potential for these types of vote counting errors.

Our article Electronic voting is pretty detailed, covering both document based voting systems (filling out a ballot and having a machine read in) and direct voting systems. Additionally, the Voting machine article may be of some interest, for a broader look at how votes are (and historically have been) tallied. Vote counting is a logistically difficult task, and there are problems associated with nearly any method of tallying that you could come up with. Buddy431 (talk) 23:30, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I was talking about DRE voting machine —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.78.131.252 (talk) 05:08, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Greasemonkey links

I'm trying to write a greasemonkey script that can list all the links on a page that start with

[<a href="page/

So for example "http://example.com/page/30" and "http://example.com/page/9" will be listed, but not "http://example.com/images/logo.jpg". Thank you for your help :) 82.43.90.93 (talk) 23:18, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

var allLinks=document.getElementsByTagName('a');
var pageLinks=[];
for (link in allLinks)
{
    if(link.href.match(/page\//))
       pageLinks.push(link);
}

//The array pageLinks should contain all the desired links at this point.

--59.95.108.152 (talk) 16:36, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

program that will record anything

whats a program that will record anything on my pc screen and the audio too. i need it for a sporting event thats live streaming online tonight but i have to work so i wanna record it and watch it later —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexsmith44 (talk • contribs) 23:48, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I think Camtasia Studio will do the trick? There is a 30 day free trial version. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:16, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Bear in mind, such recording may well be illegal. --Tango (talk) 00:28, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

It's just time shifting, which is covered by fair use provisions in the USA, anyway. But we aren't here to give legal advice one way or the other... --Mr.98 (talk) 01:42, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

FYI: Fair use says nothing about time-shifting. The right to do this is covered by the Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. ruling. SteveBaker (talk) 11:39, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

The case ruled that time shifting fell under "fair use". That a case clarified this is not unique; the fair use doctrine itself says nothing about much of anything specific (indeed it is maddeningly vague, putting basically all discretion at the hands of individual judges), and it is only through caselaw that specifics and precedents are ironed out. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:24, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

I recommend Fraps. Our article List of screencasting software lists others. Comet Tuttle (talk) 05:27, 4 July 2010 (UTC)