Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 September 26

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September 26

Qbasic Programming Question

Alright, I suck at programing tests and quizzes, and the equation/math part of the programming, and flowcharts (this is Qbasic), so I need some help with this problem.

2. Reserved words are words that are used by Qbasic and we can not use them for variable names (True/False)____. Now give an example of a reserved word ____________

3. You are given an allowance of 20.00 dollars a week. Last week you spent it as follows : $3.50---Fast food, $8.00---Movies, $14.00---CD. You also won a wager with a friend for $5.00, and found another $5.00 in the parking lot of the Mall. Write a Qbasic program which displays your fund Balance on Sunday night (when you get your allowance), all of your transactions, and the amount you have left on next Sunday morning. DO A FLOWCHART!!!!!

Use this space for your work: —Preceding —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.203.57.167 (talk) 00:19, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Fixed this [1].) APL (talk) 01:20, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Sadly, the Wikipedia reference desk has a rule - we aren't allowed to do people's homework. Sorry. SteveBaker (talk) 00:32, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

(fixed this [2].) APL (talk) 01:17, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Use this space for your snarky refusal to do homework: --98.217.8.46 (talk) 01:11, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

16:9 monitor

I've recently switched to a 16:9 1920×1080 monitor. While I am really happy about this at first since now I don't have to watch my videos with letterbox anymore, I find it kind of annoying also, because when viewing certain websites, Wikipedia included, the text is just stretched across the whole screen, making the shorter paragraphs (Four or five lines when viewed in 1024×768) feels like proseline. I am wondering if there's a way to force my web browser (Firefox), or just the Monobook skin (That'll help editing greatly), to adjust the resolution to perhaps something with a lower horizontal resolution. As for some reason it really does makes me feel frustrated to see proseline. -- クラウド６６８ 04:16, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

One thing about using a widescreen monitor is that you really need to stop your habit of maximising windows. Just un-maximise your window and adjust it to a comfortable width, because even if such plugin exist it'd only fill up your page with blank space: why put your desktop space to waste? --antilived^{T | C | G} 06:04, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Antilived. With my wide-screen monitor I simply have my browser set up taking up the normal width of a monitor then the spare desktop space is ideal for dragging/dropping files or getting fast access to my HD. Certainly that's the best policy - it does take a bit of getting used to but once you do you'll find switching between your screen and others more 'normal'. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 12:40, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Telephones ringing

For the purposes of a theatrical production I need to have several normal telephones ringing on demand. Does anyone know of a method to send a signal to the phones to cause them to ring. My initial idea was to get a laptop and plug them in but I would have no idea what kind of software to use to send the signal. MHDIV ɪŋglɪʃnɜː(r)d(Suggestion?|wanna chat?) 11:31, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Here's a rather technical discussion on doing just that. If it's too technical (it is for me) why not just use a sound effect? Fribbler (talk) 11:47, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

That page is essentially how to make a program that creates a WAV file that sounds like a phone ringing, which you'd then burn onto a CD and play using a (person operated) cd player. -- 84.45.132.96 (talk) 12:19, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure? It seems to involve hooking up the phone to the cd player. I'll admit I don't understand all of it. Fribbler (talk) 12:27, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

You're indeed correct. The software creates a CD that produces the correct Voltages, so that when hooked up to a telephone a ringing sound is formed. It also provides information on hooking up the phone. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 12:49, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Ringing isn't really a "signal" so much as a "blooming great AC voltage" - the phone exchange sets enough juice to waggle a little iron hammer in a solenoid at a distance of several miles. So this is proper electricity, rather than wimpy-dimpy computer type electricity. Other than Fribbler's excellent sound effect suggestion (which is what most theatres seem to do, in my limited experience) you can have someone electrically competent build a ringer circuit (this has more info: http://www.tkk.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/telephone_ringer.html) - but as the voltages required are nontrivial, it should be someone skilled in the electrical arts. Alternatively you can buy (for cheap) a used analog PBX (aka PABX), the little analog phone exchanges small offices had a decade or two ago before they switched to digital. You can get these on eBay (and probably car boot sales and the like). Then you can plug in a coupleof regular BT phones and you just dial one to make it ring. The trouble with using a real phone (rather than a sound effect) is projection - in a large theatre that phone might seem quiet (the sound radiates in all directions, whereas the actors project into the audience). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 12:08, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Does your cell phone have a "old phone" ringtone? Play that through an off-stage mic to a speaker hidden on stage. Astronaut (talk) 05:05, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Music metadata

Is there a free and easy way to update metadata on downloaded music files from P2P programs (ie not iTunes etc which already come with the correct metadata)? --RMFan1 (talk) 12:21, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

How about this? Fribbler (talk) 12:23, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Ill try that. If anyone knows of anything that actually updates the metadata automatically please let me know. Also I have a question about metadata: Why is it that on WMP there are so many different types of metadata (for example, theres an "album artist", "artist", "composed by" etc) but the files themselves seem to have less (usually just "title", "artist" and other basic tags)? --RMFan1 (talk) 12:32, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

In MP3 files, the metadata is stored in ID3 tags. The current version, ID3v2, allows for 84 standard tags, plus an application can add its own tags. Windows media files such as WMA, have their own metadata format but can support ID3 tags, so WMP probably shows all the tags that Microsoft has defined. As far as automatic updates, it depends on what you want to happen. If your files have a very strict naming convention, e.g. (artist)-(tracknumber)-(album)-(trackname).mp3, then a program can determine which portions of that name to put into the tags. If you have a bunch of randomly named files, then it becomes a much more manual process. I've used MediaMonkey to assist in the process. --LarryMac | Talk 13:42, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

MusicBrainz Picard. --antilived^{T | C | G} 03:01, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Can you block email via iGoogle

The iGoogle personalised homepage used to give a summary of the last half a dozen gmail emails (who sent it and start of title). Today it has been upgraded so that it gives full access to gmail. Our company has a strict policy of blocking webmail. This means that we will have to block google if there is no way to disable email access.

I know that google provided a [mechanism for disabling chat] on a network by blocking access to http://chatenabled.mail.google.com. Is there a similar way of disabling the access of gmail through iGoogle and the [google mail gadget]? I really hope so because we all find google search, etc. very useful -- Q Chris (talk) 13:53, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Blocking access to mail.google.com should prevent access to their email service, though it may not prevent the previews from displaying, depending on how you choose to block it. Ale_Jrb^talk 16:15, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

It used to block google mail but now it is accessible from http://www.google.co.uk/ig and http://www.google.com/ig that won't work any more. Unless there is some way of disabling it we will have to block the whole of google. -- Q Chris (talk) 17:33, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Question - even with the gadget, it is not possible to view, read, compose or send emails/attachments. It is only possible to view the first few words of the message. Is blocking access in the other way insufficient? If so, I think you would have to block iGoogle entirely (e.g. the google.com/ig folder). The ability to do that depends on your proxy/blocking software. Ale_Jrb^talk 17:38, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Until this morning you were right, it only displayed the sender and beginning of the subject. Today that has changed (though possibly only for Firefox users, I have had conflicting reports), as Google has updated the iGoogle pages. You can read whole messages, send messages and generally do all the things that we want to prevent people doing from in work. -- Q Chris (talk) 18:11, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, if you figure out how to let it do that, tell me. Sounds like a great feature that I can't find anywhere! I'd suggest blocking iGoogle, then - at l;east normal search would still be available. Ale_Jrb^talk 19:46, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

QChris, if you're still reading this question, I'll give you some advice that might help you out. Generally speaking, you fall into the category of enforcing policy via technical means. This is, unfortunately, a losing battle. Let's say in your example, you've blocked "gmail.com", and that works. The problem is that there are many many other webmail sites out there. Do you know all of them? What about yahoo.com in other countries? Someone could sign up for say, yahoo in new zealand and access it via yahoo.co.nz and your filters would not find it. So URL blocking is a no-win situation. And unfortunately this ends up being an "arms race". People banned IM at work, and then web sites like meebo became available. The answer is to *enforce* your policy via administrative means. If you make it your policy that people can't use gmail at your location, then you take administrative action (suspend them, etc) when they violate the policy. I refer you to the spirit of #1 and #2 at [3] . Blocking "that which is bad" will never work. People will always try to work the technical side of the system. Aaronw (talk) 19:57, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Using webmail certainly is a serious offence at our company, all email has to be stored monitored and have an appropriate disclaimer. It is our legal department's interpretation of the relevant legislation that we should also make best efforts to avoid this possibility technically. If customer data loss was caused by someone making a deliberate search for an unblocked mail gateway, proxy, etc. then the company would of course still be responsible for the loss, but it is unlikely that the company would e found to have acted negligently. Also if a person had to make efforts to find an great unblocked email system we would have much stronger grounds for their dismissal - as it would obviously be blatant and deliberate infringement of the rules. This means that we will almost certainly have to block google entirely, which is a shame because the search is very useful in our day to day work. -- Q Chris (talk) 10:21, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Holy crap. I'm in IT in a company that is fairly strict on webmail access and customer info. However, what you are proposing is utter madness going into the insane. If you do this there is going to be a total shitstorm and your IT department is going to have to take a bite. Security is NOT about closing all the holes. It is about closing all the holes that are most easily filled. There are a billion websites that offer webmail. By the same reasoning you should just block the entire internet. Talk to Google and your filtering company about this. All you need to do is find the string that iGoogle says when you have the gmail gadget loaded and block pages with that phrase. Blacklist it and you are done. --mboverload@ 20:17, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Q Chris, I have a solution. ALL you need to do is block *mail.google*. That should block all languages. The gadget just displays a few words from your most recent emails - practically no information at all. You can not compose or read email in it without going to the *mail.google* domain. Solved. * --mboverload@ 20:19, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid not, the upgraded gmail gadget gives full email access from http://www.google.co.uk/ig. This means you have to block the whole of google. If you just see a summary of a few words you are still seeing the old gadget, not the upgraded one. -- Q Chris (talk) 21:15, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the additional information Chris. So we can better help you, are you at liberty to say what filtering products your company uses? As we do not know what company you work for it should be a fairly innocuous question but I understand if you are hesitant to answer.--mboverload@ 22:30, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Couldn't you just block iGoogle? e.g. block google.com/ig but not google.com? Or does the blocking only take place on a domain/subdomain level? --98.217.8.46 (talk) 22:00, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

We have put in a request to our blocking software supplier, it appears that the current version blocks whole domains only. -- Q Chris (talk) 06:46, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Bad supplier, my company has managed to block google.co.uk/ig without blocking the main google.co.uk page. Not sure which supplier they use, though.--Lgriot (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Ripping data off unfinalized disks

I have a CD that was not finalized. I want to rip the current data off it. I don't have the means of returning to the computer where it was made and finalizing the disk - or even figuring out what burner program was used to create it. Any suggestions? -- kainaw™ 15:04, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

What have you tried so far, and what happened? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:45, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Isobuster worked. Being a Linux user, I would prefer that there was a free non-Windows solution. -- kainaw™ 16:57, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

The first thing I would try is the dd command (which you'll find on virtually any unix system) to make an image of the CD. Don't know how it handles unfinalized CDs though, but in case you haven't tried.

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=cdimage.iso

-- Reep (talk) 23:55, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't get it. Can't discs be read without finalizing them? I mean, I used to leave my discs unfinalized all the time. (Never burned additional data though. Hah.) --Kjoonlee 03:29, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

When unfinalized, the program that is creating the disk can read it. I don't know what version of Windows or what program the disk was created with. I don't want to hunt down a Windows box with various CD burning programs on it to figure out which I should use. Without finalizing, the disk comes up as 840MB of 720MB used - no files. Since the files I wanted were text files, I suppose I could cat the device - but I used isobuster and already got the data. -- kainaw™ 03:32, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

In my experience Nero usually asks if you want to finalize something: if you do finalize it, adding more data to the disc is impossible. If you don't, you can add another session. In either case, all my drives have supported reading from all the discs in all programs. If that's not what you're talking about, then sorry... --Kjoonlee 06:33, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I suspect there may have been something else wrong with the disk other than just lack of finalization. Anyway, I'm glad you got the data off. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:16, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Using OpenID to post comments on WordPress blogs

Hi. I have a Blogger account but want to post comments on WordPress blogs. Both are supposed to allow OpenID but I can't seem to log on WordPress using the OpenID. I can do it easily on LiveJournal though. Anyone knows how to log on WordPress with an Open ID? Thanks. 132.216.22.140 (talk) 17:24, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Adding text via css

Hi all,

I often see very cool things done through CSS, and it seems to me like it's possible to add html/text around text through CSS alone. Is that right?

I'm trying to create a CSS tag that would automatically wrap a word in a table with the words "Important notice!" at the top. Is that possible? So if you type in

<div class="notice">Here's a big warning</div>

You would get something like

Important notice!
Here's a big warning

Any suggestions on how to do this?

Thanks! — Sam 17:30, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

My bad, I didn't look quite far enough. I guess I was looking for Generated Content (:before and :after tags), which is part of CSS 2. Unfortunately, I'm using a java program that only supports CSS 1. I don't suppose there is any way to do the same thing in CSS 1, is there? Thanks! — Sam 17:39, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Only with Javascript. With javascript you can grab the CSS elements (by tag or by id) and then modify the HTML code directly. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 18:23, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Linux GUI -- Fragile? Anyway to uninstall updates?

Last night I saw some available updates in my fedora update manager. I said sweet, bug fixes, and installed all of them. Unfortunately there was an Xorg driver update that broke my system. The guys at Linux Forums tried to help but ultimately I gave up and reinstalled Fedora. So I want to know about safe updating. I have decided not to install kernel updates or X11 updates anymore because I don't want this to happen again.

Is there anyway to "rollback" or uninstall updates? I know in windows I can just go to control panel and remove updates there but in Fedora's (or any other Linux distribution's) update manager I didn't see any such option to downgrade. If there is a manual way of doing this from the terminal please tell me. When I used Ubuntu about an year ago, the GUI screwed itself often and took me into a command prompt, even without any updates -- this makes me wonder is the Linux GUI too fragile? How to avoid this? How do I know an update is safe or not? -Abhishek^Talk 17:57, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Usually such bugs are corrected in later updates. It is a good idea to check if the bug was reported to the project and report if not. Some package managers support downgrading to a previous version which should help in most cases. MTM (talk) 19:41, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, they fix it later, but I don't see any option in my package manager to uninstall updates. Even if my update manager had such an option I wouldn't be able to use it anyway because broken updates just throw you into the command line..I guess I'll just turn off updates. -Abhishek^Talk 03:03, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Many distribution (e.g. Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu) support installing only updates which have been tested for some time (one month without bug reports in Gentoo). When I used Fedora several years ago, there were separate package repositories for less tested updates. They are designed for people who want and have enough free time to report bugs and use command line interface to fix them. MTM (talk) 11:45, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

You can remove packages, not updates. However, you can uninstall a package and reinstall it up to a specific version. The problem is dependency. If you try to remove xorg, you'll lose all your graphics and have to reinstall everything. Basically, Fedora is designed to move forwards, not backwards. -- kainaw™ 14:04, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

The rpm program supports removing packages without removing packages depending on it, so it can be done. In Gentoo and Debian-based distributions packages can be "updated" to any compatible version easily. MTM (talk) 15:44, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

You can download the old package and force dpkg to downgrade (this also skips dependency checks): dpkg --force-downgrade -i xorg_oldversion.deb --wj32 ^t/c 20:58, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

google blogger

Hi, I am on the talktalk isp in the uk and constantly (50% of the time) cannot get access to my google blogger to update my posts....is there a quick fix I can do? 89.241.84.64 (talk) 18:08, 26 September 2008 (UTC)andy

Are you getting an error message? Did you check the google blogger help? Have you tried your ISP's tech support? Failing that, get a new ISP or blog site. Astronaut (talk) 05:26, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

thx....going down those lines now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.148.73.105 (talk) 23:11, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

keep getting "Acquiring network access" on my laptop

I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop and a Comp USA wireless router. Whenever I am accessing internet on my wireless, after every now and then I loose my connection and everytime I loose connection, I get a message "Acquiring network access" on bottom right corner of my laptop. Please note that it shows full strength of the wireless signal. Sometimes it is very frequent like every 5 mins or so and sometimes it goes on for 1-2 hours without this problem. Is this some internet connection or security settings issue? Please help.

Namit —Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.136.192.1 (talk) 21:32, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Is it always with the same wireless router or does it happen on multiple, different connections? Are there any other computers using the same wireless router, do they have similar issues at all? Knowing this can determine whether it is an issue with your machine or the router. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 22:05, 26 September 2008 (UTC)