Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 November 20

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November 20

ANT build process.

I'm messing around with a system that's compiled using ANT (under Linux) - and I need to see what commands it's actually executing as it builds my project. I can't find a command-line option for Ant to have it display the commands as it executes them - something like 'make -n' ('make --dry-run'). Neither the '-d' (debug) or '-v' (verbose) options to Ant seem to do that.

Help!

SteveBaker (talk) 01:26, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

In this situation I would do:

strace -f -s1024 -o /tmp/log ant_command
grep exec /tmp/log

--Sean 13:12, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks - I think that's what I need. SteveBaker (talk) 20:19, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Darn - it traces three 'exec' calls - then the program locks up and never terminates - so that's a bust. SteveBaker (talk) 02:03, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

That's weird; I've never had strace cause the target to misbehave. Another choice would be to run the program under gdb and break on exec() and examine the arguments there. --Sean 15:18, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

You might wanna try asking at stackoverflow. — Shinhan < talk > 13:11, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Steve, you didn't include a wikilink, and I had never heard of ANT, but you're asking about Apache Ant, right? --NorwegianBlue ^talk 18:10, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes - sorry, I kinda assumed people would know what i meant...and they did! (Yeaaahhhh! RefDesk roolz!) SteveBaker (talk) 20:19, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Amazingly Realistic Graphics

I recall seeing a video a few months ago of a woman speaking about a new computer graphics technology that allows amazingly realistic graphics and later in the interview admits that the entire time she has just been a realistically rendered image. Does anyone know what I am talking about and can anyone maybe give me a link to the Youtube video? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Strifeblade (talk • contribs) 01:34, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't know exactly what you are talking about - but these days, you really can render absolutely anything with complete realism IF you are prepared to spend enough computer time and you aren't in any kind of a hurry. So this kind of thing doesn't amaze me as much as it once did. The difficult problem (and what I do for a living) is getting the computer to draw things realistically at interactive rates - so instead of spending hours to draw a single picture - you've got maybe 16 milliseconds. Anyway - you might want to read our article on the Uncanny valley. SteveBaker (talk) 02:16, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I believe you're referring to this. She's still firmly in the uncanny valley, in my opinion. --Sean 13:21, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes that's it. Thank you. Strifeblade (talk) 16:24, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Strict NAT on DSL modem?

I posted an earlier question about the trouble I'm having with my PS3 and Xbox360. They were both giving me "strict" NAT type 3 warnings when I had them connect to my router. I removed the router and plugged each console in turn into my DSL modem directly (a Moto 2210). And I'm STILL getting the strict type 3 warnings -- even without a router! The configuration settings on the modem doesn't seem to have any settings for opening up specific ports. A call to AT&T (my DSL ISP) assured me that they do not port block except for spam email (which was some low port number like 30). So what to do? Do I need to buy a different DSL modem? Do I need to configure my consoles in a specific way? --71.158.221.237 (talk) 02:35, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Your modem appears to have some limited NAT ability. Here's some information about it from Broadband Reports: Motorola 2210. If you connect the modem to a computer, you can log into its settings page by going to 192.168.1.254 in your web browser. Try selecting the option to "use public IP address" and see if that helps it work with your game consoles. --Bavi H (talk) 03:22, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

HP Compaq Presario

Hey guys, I was wondering if you had any ideas about a HP compaq that has a misbehaving display that looks like this. It just started doing that right now and it seems to be a hardware issue (the video out or the lcd itself) as it just shows the screen immediately after a hard boot. I don't think it had anything to do with Windows Vista which it was running.

Any ideas? Kushal (talk) 04:32, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

That looks a lot like bugs I've seen on LCD panels many times before - so I can only say that I agree with your diagnosis and commiserate over the impending damage to your bank account. There is (I suppose) a remote chance that it's the graphics chip or it's memory that's failing. But sadly, the vertical streaks speak of failures in the column addressing circuit...which is a part of the LCD panel. You can figure that out for sure if you can hook up an external monitor to the video-out from the laptop. If the external monitor is OK (as I expect it will be), then it's definitely the LCD panel that's died - if the external monitor looks the same as the LCD then it's the graphics chip or it's RAM that's at fault. Assuming it is the LCD panel then if you don't actually use the laptop for 'mobile computing' - then an external monitor will likely be a cheaper fix than repairing or replacing the laptop. SteveBaker (talk)

My new-ish laptop did that a couple of weeks ago. I didn't even get to see the BIOS screen during booting. I got an engineer from Dell to come round and replace the motherboard (and it's builtin graphics chip) under warranty. He said there was a problem with some NVIDIA(?) graphics chips that were used in my particular model for a while... maybe your machine has the same chips? The LCD panel itself was OK, and everything has been back to normal since the repair. Astronaut (talk) 11:46, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I found a link that might help explain what to do next - seems only HP and Dell are affected so far. Astronaut (talk) 12:08, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much guys. I guess the next step for me is to connect the computer to an external monitor. I will probably try to dock it in my friend's laptop dock, if the dock supports it. :( Do you think docking would work? I am not sure if I have the proper cables/adapters to connect it to an external monitor. I will be back to you soon with more information. From the above CNet link:

“ Owners of 24 HP laptop computer models need to be concerned. See HP Pavilion dv2000/dv6000/dv9000 and Compaq Presario v3000/v6000 Series Notebook PCs - HP Limited Warranty Service Enhancement and HP Limited Warranty Service Enhancement. ”

Thank you once again and I hope I will continue to get help from you ...

Kushal (talk) 12:35, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

The laptop is a V3019US series with product number EZ680UA#ABA. According to HP^here it is eligible for free repair. We will call HP to find out what they think of this issue. I will be back with details soon. Kushal (talk) 13:10, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Problem in starting Microsoft Age of Mythology Gold Edition.

I've recently bought the Age of Mythology Gold Edition Pack, including the original game and the Titans Expansion. The setup was done correctly and the game was successfully installed. But when I tried to start the game, I found that It is asking for the CD, and saying that 'Please insert the correct CD-ROM and restart the game'.I have inserted both the CDs and tried a lot, but the game can't get started. Then I replaced the AOM.exe file with the AOMTrial.exe file and found that It is running and even I can play the full campaign. But I can not play the Random map fully, nor can I start the editor. So,can anyone please give me an Internet address from which I can download the AOM.exe and AOMX.exe files to start the game without checking for the CD? Any help is heartily welcome.117.201.98.83 (talk) 15:48, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Does anything on this page help? Laenir (talk) 16:22, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

underline in spanish

I know bold is negrita and italics is bastardilla but what is underlined/underline in spanish?63.165.5.103 (talk) 16:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Subrayado means "underlined," assuming the noun you're talking about is masculine.--Rjnt (talk) 17:09, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

so would it be "subrayo" then?63.165.5.103 (talk) 18:27, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I said subrayado. As you can see here, subrayar means "to underline" in Spanish. So, if you were talking about an underlined word, it would be palabra subrayada. If the word it describes ends in an o (i.e., it's masculine) it's subrayado. If it's feminine -- ending in an a -- then it'd be subrayada.--Rjnt (talk) 19:58, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

History of MATLAB's "why" function

This is completely trivial, but I was wondering about the history behind MATLAB's "why" function. "Why" is it included with MATLAB? Is it merely for demonstration purposes? And who is the eponymous "Pete," and why did he want "it" that way? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.100.36.93 (talk) 19:10, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I asked matlab:

>> why
Some very rich and tall and smart and rich and terrified and rich and very young and good and rich and very tall and tall and smart and terrified and not excessively bald and rich and smart and not very young and bald and tall and smart and terrified and rich and tall and young and bald and good and terrified system manager knew it was a good idea.

Doesn't seem like a very good reason, but I trust that the very rich and tall and smart and rich and terrified and rich and very young and good and rich and very tall and tall and smart and terrified and not excessively bald and rich and smart and not very young and bald and tall and smart and terrified and rich and tall and young and bald and good and terrified system manager. -- JSBillings 23:40, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

html/css future.

Hi, I know of "zen garden" but are there any other links you could show me that point to other modern top flight web design?

do you think that html/css is the way to go for the next 10 years as per webpages?

thx —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.148.203.30 (talk) 22:12, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

First, I don't really think that zen garden is "modern top flight web design". Some of the designs are prettier than others but most of that is accomplished through knowing how to use Photoshop. It's really just a demonstration that by putting some sense into your markup you can have a lot of flexibility. Especially if you know how to use Photoshop. Of course, zen garden actually is pretty easy to design for — having one large block of text and one size menu is a pretty simple layout. In my experience, the difficulty comes when you have much more information to deal with and you aren't just running a little "presentation" demo site. Any designer who knows the tools can make pretty pages when the information complexity is low. Compare the type and variety of information on the zen garden with, say, the information that the front page of Wikipedia has, or websites like CNN and Comcast have.

Second, projecting into the next decade is not really a winning game. If you code with compliant CSS/HTML then your web page should be readable by a web browser a decade from now. But given how much has changed with the web in the last decade (1998-2008), I would suspect that the technologies we use today will probably be superceded by then. As an example, in 1998 Javascript was pretty much a toy. The speed of execution was too low to do complicated things and it had not yet been really integrated with server-side languages to allow for AJAX-like behavior on a large scale. And more importantly people hadn't really even conceptualized the rich possibilities of merging the two.

Other issues in how web design has changed since 1998 have nothing to do with the web. Visual hardware has changed a lot. In 1998 my computer ran at 800X600 on a big clunky CTR monitor. Now I do everything from a wide-screen LCD laptop. Webpages need to be much more accommodating for wide-screen resolutions these days, to speak nothing of all of the proliferating little mobile devices like the iPhone. This great variety in resolution and dimensions makes things like good CSS and HTML all the more important, because you need something that'll flow and can be adapted to the space it'll be viewed in (which static HTML, unless very simple, doesn't do very well, and things like HTML table layout does very poorly). What will we view the web on in a decade? Some things will surely be the same, and some things will surely change in unpredictable ways (if you could predict them, you'd be able to make a fortune). This is a pretty vague but conservative view. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:04, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Agree with most of that. But I bet you'll find html and css working pretty much as now in 10 years time. Things aren't changing all that fast. I though we'd have svg and mathml as standard ages ago. Silly me. Get the content right and don't fiddle too much and you'll find you easily have time enough to do things as they change and become standard. Dmcq (talk) 23:04, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, most of the pages on the Net don't validate. This includes well-known ones. I, for one, don't use CSS that much outside of inline styles, and my sites look great. I use tables often, too. Many new, well-known sites use tables for layout, too. The latest standard XHTML was released only in 2001, and it wasn't until very recently that HTML editing programs started getting in your face about it. I'm not sure why the W3C keeps saying tag x is "outdated," since they work great for me. There are sites dating back to the advent of the Net that are still on line, so I doubt any of the browsers will drop support for any of the old styles. If they do, it'll be a while.--Rjnt (talk) 23:20, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

I use styles so I can use the same html on the web as on mobiles. It lets me change the navigation menu, suppress some images and have a single column display instead of double columns for some tables. And I do check everything validates - and even spellcheck occasionally :) I avoid anything more complicated unless I have to, I use very little javascript for instance, just some essential things like cutting down on spam merchants but still making contact easy and then I have to have clunky alternatives for people without it. Dmcq (talk) 10:39, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

p.s. the other nice thing you can do with styles that I think is really worthwhile is to suppress the menu when a user prints a page. Dmcq (talk) 10:43, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Spyware won't let me access YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google Images

At first the spyware was redirecting my YouTube links, and Google wouldn't work at all. Then I ran Spybot, and now Google works again, but YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google images won't load at all (posting this with a different comp). What can I do to fix this? 98.221.85.188 (talk) 22:42, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a host file was tampered with by the spyware. I would suggest reading about the HOSTS file and what it does first. if it's not that then offhand I don't know 66.216.163.92 (talk) 22:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

You can access the HOSTS file and other similar things with the Spybot advanced tools. Play around in there. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 23:55, 20 November 2008 (UTC)