Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 October 13

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October 13

(beginner questions) PHP, MySQL, and multiple checkboxes // also, Smarty templates

I'm learning PHP & MySQL via Robin Nixon's O'Reilly book and seem to have been left out on a limb of sorts. The book describes how to use multiple checkboxes for a given value and pass the data for all of them by setting the value as an array like name="ingredient[]" -- ok, but I'm confused when it comes to how this data returned from a form would be placed into a database and the book moves on without explaining it. Would the table be named ingredient and each row a recipe, each column thereby being a possible checkbox value?

My second question is more general - the book advocates the use of Smarty templates to separate code from design. I understand the wisdom of the principle, but was wondering if Smarty itself offers functionality that Dreamweaver CS4 does not? Has anyone here used it?

Thank you! 218.25.32.210 (talk) 01:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

On the first one: Well, I don't know about ingredients and recipes. But you'd get back data that looked like this:

ingredient[0] = "checked";
ingredient[2] = "checked";
ingredient[5] = "checked";

Which isn't necessarily useful, unless you know that "0" means "Apples" or "2" means "Sugar" or whatever. And note that it won't return empty values—only checked ones. If I remember correctly.

If you had a large, fixed list of ingredients, and every row was a recipe that included these ingredients, then yes, each column could be an ingredient, each row a recipe. It would be a weird table design, in my opinion, unless the total number of ingredients was for some reason both small and totally fixed (not changing). This is more of a database design question than a specific PHP/MySQL question. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:15, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for trying to help. Let me try and clarify with a limited example:

I would like to know how to structure a form & dbase where I've got 5 recipes, and each recipe requires from one to five ingredients. With my limited understanding I though that checkboxes would be the best way to query that data: by checking 3 of 5 ingredients I could extract all the recipes that could be made with the materials at hand. From the way the book presents the checkbox information, I thought using arrays as mentioned above would be the way to do it. But now I'm starting to think that a single checkbox for each ingredient (need / notneed = essentially TRUE/FALSE) would be enough, along with a WHERE ___ AND ___ AND etc. query on a table with each recipe as a row and every possible ingredient as a column. (seems like a nightmare for a large list of possible ingredients though... :-/)

Am I on the right track? I've only been learning all this for about a week! 218.25.32.210 (talk) 02:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Here's how I would set it up: have one table for ingredients, have another table for recipes, and another table called ingredients_recipes_join.

They'd look something like this:

Ingredients id name 0 Thyme 1 Rosemary 3 Sage 4 Carrots 5 Apples

Recipes id name 0 Herb soup 1 Apple-Carrot smoothie

ingredients_recipes_join id ingredient_id recipe_id 0 0 0 1 1 0 2 2 0 3 3 0 4 4 1 5 5 1

So every ingredient gets its own row in the ingredients table, and every recipe gets its own row in the recipes table. That way you can always add ingredients or recipes. To correlate the two (that is, to say what of an arbitrary number of ingredients are associated with each recipe), you have a join table that just maintains associations between the two tables (each line in the join table corresponds to associating one ingredient with one recipe).

Then you use SQL and the PHP interface to make this sensible to the user—it would list the total number of ingredients associated with a given recipe by either using a complicated SQL JOIN or by simply interating over the results of a query to the join table (e.g. SELECT * FROM ingredient_recipes_join WHERE recipe_id=0, and then you take the results from that and just grab the names of the ingredients from the ingredients table).

Anyway... see if that makes sense to you. A join table design, like shown above, is very common in database design when you have one-to-many and many-to-many relationships (e.g. you want one recipe to be associated with many possible ingredients), because it is easy to set up and pretty flexible. (I wish our junction table article had a useful diagram—something like this). --Mr.98 (talk) 13:59, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

You should separate the concerns of data storage and access to it. Get your database stuff working and work out your queries to answer whatever you need, and then figure out how to get PHP to generate those queries. Given Mr. 98's tables above (which I agree is the way to go), this query will tell you what recipes you can make given two ingredients:

select name
    from Recipes
EXCEPT -- "minus" in some SQL dialects
select Recipes.name
    from Recipes, ingredients_recipes_join, Ingredients
    where Recipes.id     = recipe_id
      and Ingredients.id = ingredient_id
      and Ingredients.name not in ('Apples', 'Sage')

The query returns all recipes except those including ingredients not in the list of things we have on hand. Perhaps some SQL guru can describe a simpler way of expressing it. --Sean 17:02, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

WOW! Thank you so much everyone! Seeing the example structure of the join table was when the light bulb clicked on and it all came together. Thank you very much everyone! I'll absolutely be saving this conversation for future reference. 218.25.32.210 (talk) 01:34, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Computer recommendations

I am looking to buy a reliable Desktop PC that will last pretty well (quality). Not much gaming so I don't need crazy graphics capability. I will need room to store many video and music files, but I don't think that's much of a concern anymore is it? My current PC is over four years old and I've strained its memory a bit but the new standard memory is much larger. What I really hate is lagging. I want, when I open up Windows Movie Player or Adobe or Wordperfect/Word or whatever, for the thing to just open up. I also don't want to wait literally 8 minutes for all my programs to boot when I restart. Anyway, I can talk a bit of skin deep jargon but I really know very little about the nitty gritty of computers. I was hoping someone could recommend where I could go in the New York Metropolitan area to buy a computer (or can I get it by mail, like the old Gateway computers gig?) and 1) not get hustled and 2) maybe get a pretty good deal. Can you guys and gals maybe recommend some specific models and suggest where to get them? I have a maximum budget of $1,000 and have all the accoutrements (monitor/printer/speakers etc.). A few people have told me definitely get a Pentium brand chip but I don't think they know much more than me. Looking for a bit of direction here. Thanks. John in Brooklyn.--141.155.144.177 (talk) 02:47, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

P.S. last week I went to Best Buy and no one knew anything and they only had three models for sale (said everyone's stock is low awaiting Windows 7 bundled) but I could have gone there with 50 models and wouldn't have known what to do and would have been easy prey without any way to know if I'd been had or not.--141.155.144.177 (talk) 02:53, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I have been partial to Hewlett-Packard PCs for the last several years. They have a particularly great Pavilion for about $1200 with an i7 CPU and 8GB RAM. You can probably find a model with fewer goodies (I'd lose the Blu-ray player, for example) for $999. If there is a Costco near you, they should have several models, though those probably all include a monitor. Tempshill (talk) 04:52, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Even though I know nothing about your computer, I bet that it's slow because of accumulated junk running in the background. Windows XP isn't a resource hog, so you might consider just re-installing Windows. There's also fragmentation, and so on. If you still want faster hardware, then you can save about $500 by upgrading the parts yourself. They'd be higher-quality parts, too. Or, you could get on Craig's List and find a technician who'd make you one. You'd order new parts off of Newegg, and he'd put them together. The cost depends on what parts you can re-use in your computer, and how fast you want the new computer to be. If you have to get a pre-built computer, then keep in mind that Gateways, Dells, HPs, and Compaqs are built from the ground up to save the manufacturer money. They're generally designed to be thrown away after five years. So, they're a pain to upgrade, and if you pick a cheaper model from any of the above manufacturers, you will get what you pay for. For example, you might notice after a week that the cheap LCD screen that came with the computer looks really bad. In the store, you don't notice, but once you get it home, you do.--Drknkn (talk) 06:32, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Can you give us the specs of your current PC? What speed processor, how much RAM, how big is your hard-drive? Windows XP came out a LONG time ago and was designed for PCs of that era. It is by no means a resource hog. I've got a 2002 PC with 1gig of RAM that runs it perfectly fine. You probably need to get rid of some junk that runs on startup every time you boot. I bet that you only need a MASSIVE hard drive to store your videos (very cheap) and perhaps more RAM if you have less than 1gig (difficult to get if your PC is quite old). Zunaid 08:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Free lightweight bookkeeping software

Resolved

Archive and Google search gave me no answers. In brief: I belong to a small community-based non-profit organisation that issues interest-free loan bursaries for tertiary education. Previously our accounting burden was not much, basically reporting the financials each year to members at our annual general meeting. We just used to keep track of payments and expenses manually in Excel and/or using paper receipts. The applicable legislation (in South Africa) has recently been tightened and we have officially registered as both an NPO and a "public benefit organisation". This means we have to submit tax returns and financial statements to SARS and issue proper invoices to donors and for membership fees etc. Is there a free accounting/bookkeeping package which can do all this? It needs to be able to issue numbered invoices, keep track of each bursar's debt and repayments in their own "accounts", draw up separate income statements per fund-raising event for the year, and finally tie all the above together to produce the annual income statement and balance sheet. I'd appreciate feedback from anyone in a non-profit/small-scale environment that can speak from experience. Windows XP. Thanks for your help. Zunaid 07:54, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I do not know which of the following will satisfy the specific legal requirements you mention, but a start would be looking at Comparison of accounting software - scroll down to the free section. GnuCash and Grisbi seem to be good choices, but there are other more complicated ones, and more simple ones. If you have a small turnover then rather than trying to learn the complexities of some accounting software you may be far better getting a paper based system designed to be very easy to use for beginning small businesses - unfortunately I cannot remember the name of one of them that I used to use. 92.24.99.195 (talk) 11:31, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

OpenOffice is a free, free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. It includes a great spreadsheet utility. It runs on all major platforms. It may not meet the definition of "lightweight" - but it's very useful; it can open and save to standard (i.e. Microsoft) formats like .xls and .xlsx; and it provides nice integration with plotting, charts, spreadsheets, word processing, etc. If budget precludes the purchase of the Microsoft Office suite, you should seriously consider OpenOffice. You can read our article or go directly to the official website for more information. Nimur (talk) 13:44, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I actually want to move away from an Excel-like solution, I'd like a proper accounting package. Something that can keep track of invoices as well. Perhaps such a thing deosn't exist. I'll have a look at the list of software and chat to my accountant friends as well. Thanks so far, keep the suggestions coming! Zunaid 15:10, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

It's very tempting to think "I can get software for free and so why would I pay for it?". However you really should think about how much effort you need to put into getting it up and running. If your software takes a week of a paid employee to set up (or of a volunteer who might otherwise be doing something else useful) then it isn't really free. There may be reliable, easy-to-use free accounting software packages out there, but finding out which ones they are from that list will be hard, and you might easily waste a week's work trying some bad ones out. Accounting is something I wouldn't mess with. A mistake there can cost you very dearly.

If you were in Canada I would recommend QuickBooks in one of its forms. Easy to use and very popular. However you probably want software that understands the South African system. Talk to a local business, and see what they use. And don't worry about spending a few hundred dollars - the software only has to save you a few hours of an accountant's time to be worth it. DJ Clayworth (talk) 15:57, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree with DJ Clayworth throughout. I would recommend QuickBooks if you were in the US — however, I seem to remember it has no multicurrency solution, so I'd look into that if you need that — and of course I would ask around in South Africa for other South African references to see if it's suitable for your currency. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:49, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Funny enough my dad still has a boxed version of QuickBooks 3 with manuals, on the original floppies! Hmmm...I see TurboCash on the list of open source software and surprise surprise, it is a South African developed package. I'll give it a try as well as get some feedback from friends. Just a quick response to some posts: I'm just looking for software to "keep the books" of the organisation, not necessarily compile tax-compliant documentation with it at the end of the financial year. That we still leave to an external accountant to do for us, it is more for keeping track of day-today monies and accounts, issuing of invoices and making sure the books balance at the end of the year when we hand the statements to the accountant for auditing and tax filing. And trust me, we're not gonna spend any money on this. We are a small organisation comprised of only volunteers, doing it in our free time for the love of it. Thanks everyone for their suggestions, marking this as resolved. Zunaid 17:30, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

SARS has some free software, check "easybooks" on their website. Polypipe Wrangler (talk) 11:51, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Does warcraft 3 work on vista?

Especially the expansion. --Mudupie (talk) 10:41, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it does. decltype (talk) 10:43, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Want to create a paper forms designer - best way to do it?

Paper forms are still very useful. As I cannot find any freeware to do this, I'm interested in creating a stand-alone program myself. Consider the example of a piece of paper with regular vertical and horizontal blue lines on it forming many squares. My idea would be to be able to click on-screen on the sides of the squares so that they change to heavy black lines. And to be able to position text wherever I like (an easier-to-program variant could be one character per cell). The black lines and the text would be saved as a template and printed out. What would be the easiest way of creating the above - I am only familiar with BASIC, but I think some basics designed for making games might perhaps be able to do this, although they may not be orientated to printing. Any suggestions about the best way to do it please? 92.24.99.195 (talk) 12:02, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

This sounds to me to be a good example of a task where writing a program would be overkill. If you add up the time spent writing and debugging such a program and the time for each user to install it, learn how to use it, upgrade it, and the inevitable inflexibility of any program, these cost would likely outweigh any benefits. I'd just create a Microsoft Word template with the company logo on it, or something like that. That way, if they know how to use Word, they can create any form they want. StuRat (talk) 12:49, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

On the other hand, a program is the only way to make absolutely certain that the blanks for each answer are less than 1/10th as long a they need to be, which, as any forms designer knows, is an absolute necessity. If you disagree, please explain your reasoning here: __.  :-) StuRat (talk) 12:52, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

That's not enough room to leave a reasonable answer! Nimur (talk) 13:48, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree that in this instance, it's not worth it, but in general, it would be nice if such software was easily available, because Microsoft Word is a horrible form designer and people are constantly using it to make horrible forms because they lack other alternatives. (Or even worse, they use Excel, which is a horrible, horrible idea.) A freeware form designer that could export to PDF (and allow it to be "editable"), or to HTML, would be wonderful. Alas, as StuRat says, it would take a lot of work to get going right. It's not a good one-man project unless you have got a year to kill. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:07, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

What is horrible is that people use only the most basic features of Microsoft Office - and the results are unusable forms. In all seriousness, Word or Excel can be used to make excellent forms - for both digital or paper use. But, it requires some technical savvy. Microsoft provides examples you can download and several tutorials for Excel and other Microsoft Office tools. Learn how to do this "right" - learning how to use the existing tools properly would be a better investment of time than writing software from scratch. Nimur (talk) 14:15, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Except that Excel and Word don't even port well between the same versions on the same computers—much less other versions, or other operating systems (I can't download any of those demos, since they've conveniently wrapped them in EXEs, and I'm on a Mac). (And not all of those examples look like the same kinds of "forms" we are talking about here — they are "forms" in the sense of MS Access data entry user interfaces... not the same thing as what most people want when they want to use Word to design a form!) There are professional form designing tools that let people create straightforward forms; offices use them all the time. Word and Excel are not very good at this, even when used "correctly", in my opinion. I agree that writing software from scratch is not a time-efficient idea. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:47, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I am sure it would not take a year to do. The idea with freeware is altruism - other people will find it useful too. All it needs is an array for the edges-of-the-squares, another for the strings, a routine to print this to the screen/window, a routine to change the square-edges according to mouse clicks, a routine to change the strings, and then a routine to compile the two arrays into a bitmap image which if required could be converted into other formats probably by pre-existing freeware. 92.26.174.34 (talk) 18:18, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I think it would take a year for one programmer to make something that other people would find useful, something that would be generally useful and not just useful for your specific need. I think you underestimate the difficulty in making something that requires flexibility in the user interface (which a decent form designer would), and the amount of time it would require (assuming you aren't doing this full time), the amount of debugging required, etc. It's easy to imagine a program that would let you easily create elements of a form and adjust them as need be—in practice, juggling form elements is not easy. --Mr.98 (talk) 18:47, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Take a year to make something useful? Nonsense! These for example did not take a year: http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/ 78.149.255.35 (talk) 22:29, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

...and none of those have the complexity of what the above program would require. This isn't just providing a window for some standard API call. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:51, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

That seems like the philosophy behind Bloatware. I prefer TinyApps. 78.146.56.252 (talk) 15:05, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

If you insist on making it yourself, then python and the gnome libraries, especially gtk and cairo are worth of taking a look at. But you'll quickly find it's good only from an educational point of view (not that bad, it is the 21st century, after all) and that you're just duplicating some previous work documented on <editor here> manual page ???. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 19:29, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Really, the problem with this as an open-source project is that while it's certainly true that one person working for a year can make a form designer - but when it's "out there" people will complain that it doesn't support 12 different languages including the ones that run right-to-left - that it doesn't support the right paper sizes, that it doesn't have a spelling corrector or a grammar corrector and that it can't output in 43 different file formats or do it in color...and on and on and on. And for all those reasons, they'll carry on using Word or OpenOffice because, despite the few specific limitations they have for making forms - they are both better text entry and formatting machines than a one-man-year project is ever likely to be. Also, most OpenSource projects come about because the person doing the work actually needs the program for his/her own use. A rational human being would look at the man-year of effort and realise that never, in their entire lives, are they going to spend an entire year making forms...and they'll go off and work on something more interesting. What is much more likely is that someone might make some new functions as a 'plugin' to an existing OpenSource project (OpenOffice would be a good candidate) to extend it to make producing forms easier. That's something that could maybe be done in a couple of weeks by someone who understood OpenOffice's structure already. SteveBaker (talk) 00:41, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

A year is a gross overestimate. A fancy all-singing all-dancing piece of bloatware is not what I have in mind. You earn your living by freelance programming, that is what I'd expect you to say. 78.146.199.239 (talk) 14:22, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

By this logic it sounds gpaint would be ideal for you. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 18:29, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

A paint program would be too much, but this tinyapp called Eve here http://www.goosee.com/ looks like it could make forms quite easily. 78.151.92.101 (talk) 23:43, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I've just discovered the Rebol language, which looks like it may be suitable for writing this in, and seems easier to learn and more powerful (more done in less code) than Python. For anyonme interested see the absolute beginners tutorial http://www.musiclessonz.com/rebol_tutorial.html including the kids tutorial. Unfortunately the Wikipedia Rebol article is just a dry technical description that makes Rebol seem a completely uninteresting langusge. 78.146.204.147 (talk) 15:57, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Special characters missing on Firefox

Following this discussion about Gothic characters, I was advised to turn to the reference desk for my question. Despite me using Firefox the HTML-Gothic characters are still just shown as squares, what do I need to do to be able to have those characters display correctly? (I am using Windows XP, and I gather that it might be a Windows setting that could be the culprit, instead of the browser, but other than that I haven't got a clue how to fix it). --Saddhiyama (talk) 14:29, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Do I understand correctly that you've already installed a unicode font containing the Gothic character set as recommended on the helpdesk? Nil Einne (talk) 15:19, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

No, I must admit that I have not noticed any mention of downloading fonts. Do I have to manually download a font each time I encounter the square thingy? --Saddhiyama (talk) 15:34, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

First, the character that you inputted is U+1D583 (𝖃), the mathematical bold Fraktur captital x. The Gothic letter that you are most likely looking for is U+10347 (𐍇)

Secondly, the newness of your system is fairly irrelevant. The issue is that you do not have an appropriate font to display either character. Take a look at here and here to locate applicable fonts. Regards, Bendono (talk) 15:37, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I have downloaded the Code2001 font from the link you provided. But I am at an loss at how to install it. --Saddhiyama (talk) 15:45, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Take a look at this. Please note that what you downloaded is a ZIP file. You will first need to decompress it before installing the font. Bendono (talk) 16:00, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I had to find the XP How-to, but other than that it went smoothly, and I can now see the Gothic characters shown on the help desk. Thanks a lot for your excellent guidance. --Saddhiyama (talk) 19:37, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Our senor prank idea

Do you think it would be possible to hack into our security cameras, if so how?Accdude92 (talk) (sign) 16:52, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

They are probably controlled by a computer on your network, so you need to gain access to that machine, but how difficult this will be depends on how good your security is, and how good a hacker you are! In many countries, hacking is now illegal. Dbfirs 17:02, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I hope you're under 18, because if you're not a minor, you could go to jail for a very long time. Just joking, man. You won't be able to hack into those cameras. If you did, then you could go to jail, but this isn't the 1990s, when teenagers could do that kind of stuff. Your best bet is probably a wireless exploit. There are books just on wireless hacking that you might want to read before asking any questions in a forum. Wi-Foo: The Secrets of Wireless Hacking is one. Nowadays, most hackers work for organized-crime syndicates in Russia and have years of experience. It takes them days of non-stop testing to break into that kind of stuff, today. I'm not even going to try to answer your question here. It's not like we can just give you a password or something. That's not how it works.--Drknkn (talk) 17:17, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Depending on the system they have in place it may or may not be controlled by computer. Also many systems are encrypted by default, so you will have an extra layer of security to get through before you can even view the feed. If your prank involves changing what the security cameras are seeing by "hijacking" the video feed and changing it, then there's some bad news... it's not as simple as the movies make it look, but it is certainly possible with somewhat expensive equipment and an extensive level of knowlege in the specific system being used. That said, any tampering with the security system at your school could be considered a very severe violation, and the consequences of doing so are not negated because you're leaving soon. I reccomend you stick to something simple and lighthearted that both doesn't cost the school money to fix and is creative enough that people will remember what you did 206.131.39.6 (talk) 18:25, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

There is no way to answer this question, because we don't know what "your security cameras" are; and you don't define what "hacking into the camera" means. Nimur (talk) 19:39, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I would recommend against messing with school security systems... If you are caught in the attempt, you would be arrested, and the penalties would be quite severe, as you would be creating a security vulnerability for the school and students. Think about getting your GED in jail. Senior pranks sound like a lot of fun, and if you do them right, I'm sure they can be, but college/getting out into the real world is just as fun if you didn't do a senior prank in high school. Try going for something a that is mildly disruptive but not at all harmful or risky. I can think of two, and I did mention them, but decided that Wikipedia probably isn't a good place to advocate specific school pranks. Falconus^{p t c} 20:16, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

You don't say what you're trying to do. Are you trying to disable the cameras? (A power failure might do it.) Are you trying to replace the camera's feed with a previously recorded video? Or are you trying to get access to the footage yourself?

If you're trying to get access to the footage yourself, there's a (very small) chance that the system is wireless and unencrypted, and this could be done with a video scanner, but I wouldn't bet on it. Most security cameras are wired and closed circuit, which means that you won't be able to see the feed, or modify the feed without physically patching in to the cables and plugging in a VCR or something.

If you're just trying to get a copy of the feed, consider the low-tech approach of pointing a camera in the window of the security office. APL (talk) 21:05, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

PowerPoint 2007 and ignoring mouse clicks

I'm creating a PowerPoint 2007 presentation, and I want nothing to occur in slideshow mode when I click. How do I do this? (Currently I am creating various invisible, hyperlinked rectangles on each slide for navigation. I can create an invisible rectangle in back of all objects on the slide with a hyperlink that points to itself, but this is tedious because I have to change the hyperlink on each slide to point to that slide; although the hyperlinks dialog box has built-in convenient hyperlinks like "Previous Page" and "Next Page", there is no convenient "This Page" link, so currently I have to go to slide 127 and point the hyperlink to 127.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:02, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Answered my own question. The "Animation" tab has an easy-to-find checkbox in the ribbon called "Advance on mouse click". Unchecking the checkbox does what I want. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:05, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

Trying to find CORBA service in implementation shipped with Sun JDK 1.6

Does the ORB that comes with Sun Java 1.6 implement Persistent State Service (PSS)? Any code examples on the web? Thanks. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 19:14, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes; and take a look at the CORBA documentation and the CORBA book, Chapter 11 (and keep in mind that there may be changes since 1.4.0). Also, are you using J2SE or J2EE? Nimur (talk) 19:42, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! J2SE 20.137.18.50 (talk) 11:30, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Research on a company

How do I find out about a company named IAG (www.infoadvisory.com) on Wikipedia? Nothing seems listed.74.202.65.116 (talk) 20:55, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

After glancing at their website, I am guessing the company does not meet Wikipedia's minimum threshold for notability, and therefore has no article (and will not have one unless and until it meets that threshold). WP:CORP is the policy page outlining notability for corporations and companies. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:01, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Networking/file sharing question

My landlord has an open/unsecure internet connection through the house. I connect my PC wirelessly to the network/internet. 1) She would like to know if there is way where she can only allow residents of the building to have access and 2) Is there a way I can allow the users to access my music files - not being able to delete or add or alter them in any way, but a way I can let them listen to my music? I trust all of my neighbors, but I know mistakes happen. I realize more info may be needed to answer this question, so I will answer the questions the best I can. Thank you all in advance. --67.85.117.190 (talk) 21:16, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Everything you want is doable with passwords and access rights. It's best if read it yourself: https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/serverguide/C/samba-fileserver.html. I can't find microsoft's documentation as google gives me random trash, but I'm sure it exists. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 21:48, 13 October 2009 (UTC) There it is http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304040. --194.197.235.240 (talk) 22:14, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

You could enable WEP or WPA encryption in the router. You'd log into the router using your web browser. Linksys is http://192.168.1.1 (password: admin), Belkins are http://192.168.2.1, and D-Links are http://192.168.0.1 (username: Admin). You then create either a WEP or WPA key that residents have to enter before connecting to the network. Once they're connected, Windows will remember the key, so they'll only need to enter it once. As for file-sharing, you disable simple-file sharing in the folder options inside the control panel, then right-click on the folder or drive you want to share and select the "Sharing" tab. The person who wants to access the folder needs your IP address, which you can find by going to the command prompt and typing ipconfig. If you shared your C drive, and your IP address were 192.168.0.1, then the address would be \\192.168.0.1\C$.--Drknkn (talk) 00:52, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

WPA encryption on the router, and she gives everyone the password (which with WPA can be some easy to remember phrase, not a long string of hex values). Easy-peasy. As for sharing music, iTunes allows you to do that pretty easily, if you're interested in using that. It won't let anybody copy the music or modify it, but they can listen to it just fine if you enable them to. It's a bit easier than setting up file sharing, and if they use iTunes, it's super easy for them to browse your collection (I haven't used it in awhile, but it's easy to see who is sharing on your local network). --Mr.98 (talk) 02:36, 14 October 2009 (UTC)