Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 August 30

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August 30

Out of Focus?

This page in Wikinews has a photo of a museum building.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/73M-year-old_fossilized_fish_found_in_Canada

To me the photo looks seriously out of focus. Yet the larger versions of the image obtained by clicking it are much sharper. I thought it worked the other way around.

Can someone explain this?

Thanks, Wanderer57 (talk) 00:34, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't look bad to me...but it's a hard call. A large (but blurry) image will appear sharper when you reduce the size because the diameter of the "blur" ends up being smaller on the screen. A large (but sharp) image will EITHER appear blurrier or it will exhibit 'jaggies' when you reduce the size simply because it's smaller and there is less information...in general, the information present in one high res pixel can either be distributed over nearby low res pixels in proportion to some function of the distance to that pixel (resulting in some blurring) or it can simply be deposited into the nearest low res pixel - which results in a phenomenon called "aliasing" - which produces "the jaggies" and other nasty side-effects. SteveBaker (talk) 03:18, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

In this instance, a lot of the information that makes the image look sharp is pretty subtle -- the texture of the bricks, etc. In general, there's not a lot of contrast in that picture, so when you make it small, the few things that used to stand out no longer do simply because they disappear along with a lot of other information that goes away when you reduce the size. Hence, it looks blurrier. If the picture was defined more by stronger shadows or darker colors, this wouldn't happen. You can try this yourself by simply opening the large picture in just about any decent graphics editing program, increasing contrast and then resizing the image to 180x217 pixels. It'll look a lot sharper...

...oh, hell, out of boredom, I just experimented with it myself, so I might as well share the results. On the left, you see the original image and thumbnail, and on the leftright the version with increased contrast. You can see the difference in the thumbnail. (The increased contrast isn't doing the original image any favors, but the thumbnail certainly looks more detailed.) -- Captain Disdain (talk) 13:22, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Left, right. WHATEVER, dude, I'm not slave to the Man's relative directionistic fascism, dude, I'm, like, a free spirit. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 14:29, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Thinnest laptop

What is the thinnest laptop? User9156 (talk) 04:00, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

This Intel is the thinnest I can find, but it's not on the market. This Mitsubishi was not quite as thin but was on the market for a while. It's not the Air, despite all of the hype. Paragon¹²³²¹ 04:31, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Wow! Kushal (talk) 18:38, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Although Apple Inc claimed the Macbook Air was the thinnest at the time, it actually was not [1].My name is anetta (talk) 21:24, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

using a bot to disrupt a wiki

I'm trying to decide if this is a credible threat: "I could obviously use technical means to ban User:X from any page I wanted to. I am more than proficient enough with Pywikibot to make that happen." Does this claim make any sense or is it just hot air? --JWSchmidt (talk) 04:52, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

It makes technical sense, but that's all. It sounds like they're threatening to run a bot that reverts user X whenever they edit page Y. Such a spiteful bot task would never get approved. Someone who did that would get banned from using bots, and blocked if it was necessary to make that happen. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 05:19, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Whomever was running said bot would just get banned themselves. It's easily to vandalize a wiki in the short term, harder to do something negative more than a few times. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 15:23, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies. My thinking seems to agree with your thinking. --JWSchmidt (talk) 16:52, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Software Engineering

My question is that which is the worlds best university for bachelors in software engineering. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.71.208.81 (talk) 09:37, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

MIT? Cambridge (UK)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.164.115 (talk) 12:14, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Even the worst engineering school would tell you that it all depends on how you define "best". Cheapest? Most prestigious? Most likely to give you a great education? Closest to your family? Best weather, restaurants, and population of the opposite sex? --Sean 14:18, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Memory

Is it possible to get a list of all the folders stored on my computer in order of those that take up the most memory? My computer says I have over 90GB stored but when I add up the folders manually in comes to less that 40GB. Thank you, FYI: Windows Vista. Donek (talk) 12:06, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm not aware of anything that meets your requirements exactly, but when I need to do a "full audit" of my system, I open an Command Prompt window and enter

cd C:\
dir /a /s > C_drive.txt

You then open that file in write or notepad and review away. It will be in "walk-the-tree" order (i.e., by directory), but you'll have something static you can look at and fiddle around with. --Danh, 70.59.119.241 (talk) 15:30, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Does it have to be a list? A very nice graphical tool for figuring out where your diskdrive is going is SequoiaView. It shows a neat graph of your entire drive with all your folders represented as rectangles. The larger the rectangle, the larger the folder. APL (talk) 15:37, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

WinDirStat (linked from the SeqouiaView article) is a nice tool also. As far as your 50+GB discrepancy, there may be hidden files that are not visible based on your current folder settings. --LarryMac | Talk 12:49, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Alternatives to Adobe Flash tool

What alternatives do I have in Linux to the Adobe Flash tool? I am interested principally in creating simple animations for educational purposes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mr.K. (talk • contribs) 12:54, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

You might be able to run Adobe Flash in Linux under Wine. Ask of search here to be sure. There is also a guide here for creating FLV Movies with Ubuntu. JessicaThunderbolt 14:28, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

XP

What is the difference between Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition? Simply south (talk) 14:19, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Home is for the average consumer. Professional is for businesses and power users - it contains some features that Home doesn't have such as Group Policy and better Remote Desktop support. We have an entire article devoted to the different Windows XP editions. Xenon54 14:25, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Recording streaming video on OS X (or XP)

Hi. I run OS X 10.4 and am trying to record streaming video (which has audio), for the purposes of playing it back during a presentation when I won't necessarily have an internet connection. It's a RealPlayer file, and I've tried to use VLC or MPlayer to download it but what do you know, neither of them work with this particular site or file (VLC gives me typical VLC "I got no idea what you are trying to do but I can't do it" errors) no matter how carefully I try to follow the instructions. I suspect it is because all sorts of authentication has to take place before I can see the video and I'm betting than VLC/MPlayer aren't sending the right headers or something like that.

I thought about instead using one of those programs that could record an area of the screen? Unfortunately I had real problems getting one that could record both screen and audio at the same time. Copernicus did a great job of recording the video but it doesn't record audio. No problem, I think, I'll just record the audio with another program, in this case Audio Hijack. And hey—it records the audio just fine. But I found it basically impossible to sync them together, almost certainly because the two programs record at different frame rates (if I get the beginning of the audio synced, the end is WAAAY off).

So yeah. Anybody have any suggestions? I haven't really looked into Windows options but I can run XP in Parallels so if you know if anything EASY that would be great for me. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 15:21, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

You have done a lot of work into it. Can you use Audacity to squash the audio track so it takes up less time? It won't alter pitch. Let me know if I can help, I have OSX 10.5.My name is anetta (talk) 21:22, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's possible, but it would really be a pain. I'd have to figure out what the different rates were, convert them, then align them, etc., and being wrong on either front would set things out of sync. I'd like to avoid that... --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:26, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

RealMedia is a tricky beast. The best thing I can suggest is to use screen reocrding software like ScreenFlow or SnapZ Pro X. --71.158.215.87 (talk) 12:07, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm looking for free screen recording software. Not $100 software. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:26, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Next battleground for Browser Wars?

Does anybody else have this experience?

• At home, I use Firefox almost exclusively, without difficulty; admittedly, I don't do much that would put a strain on any browser.
• At work, site after site after site refuses to support Ffx. The common response is either "we're a Microsoft site" (implying, "and you should be too") or "Firefox is too buggy and unstable", which would probably be a great surprise to Mozilla.

Here's three different examples: Click on this link, to get to the Pacific Life login screen: [2] At least these folks don't blow you away -- another vendor's site simply says "We don't support Firefox, please go away."

Here's one of the the login screens for a Bank of New York site: [3]. Click on the login button. In IE, it takes you to the login screen (as expected); in Firefox, NOTHING happens, it just hangs.

Here's an internal screen from Redtail Technology page [Image:http://www.fileqube.com/shared/GLxkEShif90293] Note the second dropdown indicator, by Criteria? Not present in Firefox, causes a server error. (This is known to be a .NET application.)

So, am I out in left field here, or is Firefox really not a "commercial-grade" browser yet? --Danh, 70.59.119.241 (talk) 15:48, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

On the second site you referred to, at any rate, I got to the login screen just fine. I'm using FF3- which version are you using? You may want to upgrade, although I'm not sure if that's the issue. I've had very few problems with Firefox, and I prefer it immensely to IE, myself. IE simply doesn't support everything FF does. Oh, and could you explain how to reach the Redtail Technology page, just so I could see it for myself? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 16:53, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

(ec)The stockbny.com site appears to work fine for me in FF3.0.1 (I see a detailed login screen wanting SSN/EIN, PIN, account# etc. info. I'd recommend that you make sure that you have the latest FF, with no web proxies and ad-blocking cleverware, and all firefox addins disabled - a lot of people blame either FF or defective sites for problems that are actually caused by dodgy plugins or defective security aps. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 16:57, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

There are very few reasons why a site would not be able to support Firefox. If it requires ActiveX plugins, well, that's pretty much the only real reason. Other than that, my guess is that their tech people have spent friggin' years trying to work around all of IE's inconsistencies and bugs and have finally gotten something together that works most of the time on IE, and are not willing to work-around their work-arounds to make it operation on Firefox. In general Firefox is about a million times easier to code for than IE. And note that there's a big difference in saying "we target IE" and saying "we don't support other browsers." What they're meaning there is usually, "we have just barely gotten this to look right in IE, which does not interpret many things in HTML and CSS correctly, and if you view it in Firefox all of our workarounds have produced something that doesn't quite look right. So just be warned that if it doesn't look right, it's not (entirely) our fault!" Which is also pretty lame but there you have it. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 17:15, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

OP here, with answers to a couple of questions that have been raised. (1) I only this week have been prompted to upgrade to FF3, and have not done so yet. Initially, I thought I'd wait for a couple of point releases to go out (I no longer feel the need to be on the bleeding edge) before upgrading. I'll get on that. (2) I can't give you access to the Redtail site, it requires a login -- at which point you'd have access to all my client proprietary data! Nor, apparently, can I view the page source to give you something else to look at; every "page" is generated as https:. (3) I apologize for picking a heavily ad-laden site to store the RT image. It looked free and easy, perfectly suitable for one-time use. Has any FF2 user tried the stockbny site? Is .NET another loophole through which Microsoft can make web applications that only work with IE? Thanks! --Danh, 70.59.119.241 (talk) 17:46, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried the IE tab plugin? Coolotter88 (talk) 14:47, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Optimistically, I tried the BNY Stock Transfer thing with FireFox 0.9.2 (which works fine in all sites that tell me stuff I actually want to know). Clicking the sign-in button does nothing, but pretty obviously this is a Javascript problem. The source of www.stockbny.com/index.aspx is a quaint trip back to the last century, what with
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta content="Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.1" name="GENERATOR">
and even our very old friend
src="images/spacer.gif"
(and WtF is "http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5"? According to Microsoft itself, "The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable"). There's extensive user-agent-string sniffing for MSIE and Safari, and people who are way better than I am at staying awake are free to investigate www.stockbny.com/scripts/scripts.js and www.stockbny.com/scripts/MenuContents.js.
So they expect you to use MSIE or Safari. So corporate America talks to conformists. So what else is new? -- Hoary (talk) 01:39, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

External USB HDD

Every now and again my external usb hdd stops spinning and the computer cant save to it, neither can I read from it. I can get it working by rebooting the machine. But how else can I kick it into life, and what is likely to be wrong?--79.76.176.172 (talk) 16:59, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Since it's an external drive, have you tried simply unplugging it and reattaching it? That should be the same as a full restart. I don't know why it would be doing what you describe, but an external HHD is just a normal hard drive in an enclosure, so it could be any problem which affect normal drives. Also, is it powered via the USB port or does it have a power supply of its own? If it's powered only via USB then it could require more power than it's getting (typically USB gives about 5 volts but an external drive could need up to 12). Most portable external drives have a port for extra power, so try that too. Your computer itself might be the problem, so try the drive out on a friends pc to see if the same thing happens; you might have a dodgy USB port or your pc might be switching the drive off as some sort of power saving feature. JessicaThunderbolt 17:35, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

2.5" drives are generally bus powered. That is, via a USB port and not by a socket in the wall. 3.5" drives generally do. My Mac frequently shuts down my drive at random: "System Prefs>Energy Saver>Sleep disks when possible." But it re-starts them as necessary.My name is anetta (talk) 21:17, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Your USB port might well be busted. Most 2.5" enclosures come with a split usb cable so that you can power the drive from two ports. If you plug one in first with the drive already plugged in the other end you could easily zap the port you plugged in first. You should always plug the two ports in first then plug the other end into the drive. This same thing happened to me, lucky it was a work pc and still under warranty. My drive also spun down and stopped after a few minutes. Zunaid©® 20:39, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Digital television on the road

With the upcoming switch to digital television in the US, I am going to need to buy a replacement for my battery-operated television. Is it possible to get a watchable digital signal while in the back-seat of a car? Xenon54 21:10, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Depends a great deal on precisely where you are. Best reliable signals come from a rooftop antenna, but a few portable ones are going around. Quality varies hugely, I wouldn't throw any less than US$20-30 at one.My name is anetta (talk) 21:18, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

hierarchal graph of table

Is there an easy way to convert a table to an outline in Excel or Visio like the easy graph program in Linux? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.4.91 (talk) 22:15, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Which linux distro?My name is anetta (talk) 23:10, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Any —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.4.91 (talk) 00:11, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

You'll have to be more specific - the programs supplied with the distros vary widely. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 05:52, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

My vague question ESP has been triggered. "The easy graph program" means not just any easy graph program but the graph program, /usr/bin/graph! It's a traditional unix utility. In a Linux distribution you're likely to find the GNU version, which is in the plotutils package. I still don't know what "hierarchal graph" means though. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 06:51, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I can't find it now but here is the image from the commons that was developed from a wiki table using the graph program.

beer types

The image show ALE, DARK ALE, and STOUT in a "hierarchal graph" - you know with links to the next level... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.4.91 (talk) 08:20, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't say that at all. It says it was drawn by "graph::easy" - if you'd spelled it correctly with the double colon, it would have been way more clear what you meant (and even more so if the person who wrote that description had spelled it with the correct capitals, Graph::Easy). It's a perl module, not even close to what I guessed. ESP invalidated. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 08:42, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Graph::Easy is one of the top hits for Googling "easy graph", so I had a suspicion that might be it. Of course, that doesn't answer the original question... « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 11:32, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

To remove all doubt, question, indecision, speculation or misunderstanding here is a link to the program that was used. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.4.91 (talk) 13:56, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

outdent

So I guess this is a Microsoft Excel or Visio capability no one here knows anything about. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.4.91 (talk) 01:55, 2 September 2008 (UTC)