Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 March 27

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March 27

Important question regarding Google Voice

I have just started using Google Voice with a friend. They are not local to my but my Google number has the same first digits as theirs, eg (xxx)xxx-???? with x's being the same.

If i text them or they text me, will they be charged? If i call them, or they call me, will they be charged?

I know its free to me but i worry about them. Also, might it depend on the area code and specific location? If so, how do i find this information?

Thanks! 137.81.118.126 (talk) 01:32, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Google Voice to Google Voice texts and calls are free. Texts to Google Voice are free to the recipient. Texts from Google Voice (provided they go through) are free to the sender. Only calls to destinations outside the U.S. and Canada are charged on Google Voice[1]. It looks like your friend is also on Google Voice, so have fun! If they had a real mobile phone, they would typically pay for usage both sending and receiving, depending on the plan. To use Google Voice paid services, you have to deposit money in advance, so you won't incur a surprise bill. -- ke4roh (talk) 01:49, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

My friend does NOT have google voice. I chose my google number to be in their area code. This is what im worried about.

You seem to be saying a person not having google voice will pay money to receive and send texts? Same for calls i assume? 137.81.118.126 (talk) 02:54, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Depends on their phone plan. If it's a land-line phone they can probably receive calls for no charge. If it's a cel-phone, it will count against their voice minutes. They might or might not have to pay for those. There's no way for us to know, you'd have to ask your friend what plan they signed up for.

(My own plan gives me unlimited voice and data, but I get charged for texts! Insane.) APL (talk) 03:59, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

strange behavior of facebook

For about the past week when I view facebook.com on either firefox or google chrome on my home computer, it behaves differently from the way it did earlier and from the way it behaves on other computers.

• I click on my own profile and nothing happens. I cannot view my own profile.
• I click on a picture someone posted, and instead of showing me the comments to the right of the picture it shows me a blank white space. But when I'm just viewing my wall, I can see that people have posted comments.
• At the bottom of my wall there's the perpetual moving icon normally seen while it's loading material that will appear within a matter of seconds, but it goes on for hours and nothing more appears below it.

Another strange behavior began at the same time. When I start typing a URL into the bar to point the browser at it, once I've typed "fac", or maybe less, the whole URL used to appear below that where I could click on it. Similarly with other URLs I've been to before. That stopped happening at the same time.

What's going on? Michael Hardy (talk) 03:57, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

And it's only with Facebook? For instance, if you start typing "en.wiki" then it will complete that to come here but trying to get to Facebook the same way, it will not? Dismas|^(talk) 04:19, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Strangely, this has ceased as suddenly as it began. Michael Hardy (talk) 23:07, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

can SolidWorks 2011/2012 do video export?

My engineer has a detailed 3D model in SW 2011/2012 (we have licenses for both) and I would like a video clip of the model revolving 360 degrees around its vertical axis. The current approach is to export a series of PNG renders at fixed intervals and stitch them together using ffmpeg. I was wondering if such a simple "revolve once" video could instead be created entirely within SW. My engineer is not a SW expert and does not know. Wading through the massive online help for SW was inconclusive. Can this be done? Rendering time is irrelevant, we have good hardware... The Masked Booby (talk) 14:24, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Can you rotate the object 360 now, at full resolution, but can't export this ? If so, perhaps some type of screencasting software could grab that. StuRat (talk) 21:26, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Sort of. You can rotate freely of course but to produce (nearly) photorealistic exports there is a special plug-in that, in this instance, requires about an hour to render one PNG. So manually rotating and using screencapping software would get you a very low-res version of what I want, as it would be capturing the "working" model not the rendered model with shadows, reflections, and what not. The Masked Booby (talk) 23:33, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

If SolidWorks won't do this, another option might be to export the solid model to another system which will. StuRat (talk) 23:56, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Problem with SOAP used from C#

Today I ran into a rather difficult problem at work. We are developing a C# application which communicates with an external web service, written in Java, developed and maintained by a third party. When the C# application sends a SOAP message, using a C# client class generated by the computer from a WSDL description, it throws an exception with the message "No deserializer registered", followed by the name of the root element in the body of the SOAP message, and the WSDL description's root namespace. I have verified both of these are mentioned in the WSDL description. However, when I sent the same SOAP message that the C# application generated through SoapUI, I got a proper response from the web service. I set up a mock web service in SoapUI to always return a direct copy-paste of this response, and changed the application to use that instead. Then everything went smoothly. What possible difference could there be between contacting the real web service directly and contacting a mock web service that returns the exact same response? JIP | Talk 19:05, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Install wireshark on one of the machines, and add a capture filter for the other machine, then start capturing. Rerun the WSDL query, stop the capture, right click on a TCP packet, and select "Follow TCP conversation". You can then see what the client and server sent to each other. Wireshark makes protocol analysis a breeze. CS Miller (talk) 19:19, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

OK, I might give it a try. There is the problem that neither of the machines are exactly owned by our company. The client is our customer's on-site test machine, which we have access to. The server is the third party's test machine, which we don't have access to. This means that I will have to e-mail a contact person at the third party and instruct him what to do. JIP | Talk 19:31, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

You can also install wireshark on a third machine. You'll need a network tap, a hub (good luck getting one), a smart switch with a network-monitor port, or set the third machine to act as a bridge. However, some ADSL/wifi/four-port-ethernet home routers do use hubs; turn off DHCP/DNS on it. SOAP/WSDL are XML formatted request/replies, so as you surmised, white space shouldn't matter, but buggy implementations are a different matter. CS Miller (talk) 20:06, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Alternative to Finder

Finder sucks. I can deal with it most of the time, but dragging files to move them is VERY annoying. Is there a free alternative to Finder that has a "move to" option up in the application menu like Windows File Explorer? --Melab±1 ☎ 20:11, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

mv is available on OS X. Nimur (talk) 20:47, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

You can use automator to create an action applicable to all files that matches this functionality, and add it to the right click on file[s]. Remember to test your programming. Fifelfoo (talk) 02:43, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Looking for free Java editor

Does anyone here know free Java editor that can debug Java script which is embedded in HTML? --Gilisa (talk) 21:03, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

You should clarify: are you seeking a JavaScript or a Java programming language utility? Despite their similar names, and some historical legacy, JavaScript is essentially unrelated to Java. It sounds like you want a JavaScript debugger: we list several in the Development Tools section of our article. Nimur (talk) 21:33, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Answering machine which requires hitting a button to save a message

I recently asked what appears to have been an overly ambitious question: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Computing/2012_March_13#Interactive_voice_response_recommendation_.3F. Let me lower my standards considerably to see if I can get a recommendation (and thanks to everyone who tried last time):

1) I'd like an answering machine that will not record a message unless the person on the other end hits a button on their phone.

2) If they don't have a touch-tone phone, I'm fine with them not being able to leave a message. The object is to avoid having to listen to anything from a robocalling politician or telemarketer.

3) Alternatively, the answering machine can record such messages, so long as they go into a separate mailbox and do not use up space from the other mailboxes. I will then just let the robocaller mailbox overflow and ignore it.

Any recommendations ? StuRat (talk) 22:42, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure where you live, but trueCall had a brief time of high profile in the UK after featuring on Dragons' Den (UK). It doesn't seem to be internationally available or compatible, though. 77.97.198.48 (talk) 23:10, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

I live in the US. I wasn't aware that the UK and US had different formats for phone lines or caller ID (which is apparently required for that product). StuRat (talk) 23:18, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

We have an old GE machine here at work lke this. It has three different boxes. I can't find the instructions but I think if you don't press a button to one of the other boxes it defaults to #1. So with something like that and your message sending the robocaller or telemarketer to the default (they don't press a button) and your friends and family to box 2 or 3 might work for you. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 01:34, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I've seen those, but thought that all mailboxes share the same allocation, so that box 1 overfills not only itself but also boxes 2 and 3. StuRat (talk) 03:29, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

I think I suggested this before - why not register with a do-not-call list? I am very pleased with the results on my phone. Alternatively, my sister has a useful method. Her machine is permanently full and she never picksup the messages. Unknown callers listen to the message and try to leave a message (I'm not sure it tells the caller that it is full - maybe messages just get dumped). Anyone who actually knows her, knows not to leave a message and instead to call back later or call her mobile. Astronaut (talk) 12:34, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Politicians exempted themselves from Do Not Call regulations in the US. --LarryMac | Talk 15:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Exactly, which is why I need to get this settled well before the general US election in November, when my phone will once again become unusable, due to robocalling politicians, as it did during our primary. (Actually, they will probably resume robocalling as soon as a the Republican candidates are decided upon.) StuRat (talk) 18:09, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Why not relocate to Europe until all the Chads have been scrutinized and counted? You will also get the chance to meet all sorts of interesting people, non-people and life-forms that we don't yet have a term for. It'll be fun! --Aspro (talk) 18:37, 28 March 2012 (UTC)--Aspro (talk) 18:37, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps I should move to Chad ? I wonder if Chad Everett lives there. StuRat (talk) 18:40, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

How about the GE 29869? The user manual is found here, which states "You can direct callers to leave messages in a specific mailbox by having them press the desired mailbox (1-4) after the greeting plays. If no mailbox is selected, the incoming messages automatically go into mailbox 1." This seems to meet the requirement of directing robots into a 'junk' mailbox. The only thing I can't ascertain is if the capacity is independent of the other 3 mailboxes. There is a 40 minute capacity, but I can't find anything that says if it's shared or not. However, it is possible to empty mailbox 1 without having to listen to the messages and without deleting messages in the other mailboxes, so maybe you could just incorporate dumping the junk messages once a week or so into your routine. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 15:06, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, if I can't find any answering machine which does exactly what I want, that's what I will end up doing. StuRat (talk) 18:07, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

There's stuff like this (and, since that is apparently discontinued, the page links to alternatives). A better solution would probably be to connect your phone line to an ATA and then use Asterisk or the like to implement a challenge & response system, or perhaps something meaner. :D ¦ Reisio (talk) 23:24, 28 March 2012 (UTC)