Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 March 26

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March 26

Converting from flv to image files

I want to convert a .flv video file into a series of video images, one per frame. I used to be able to do it with winamp, but now that i have windows vista, i dont think the operating system allows the program permissions to start making the image files.

How can i convert every frame of an flv video to an image file? This is all i want to do, and it should be an easy solution.

Thanks! 137.81.112.175 (talk) 00:00, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Both WinFF and HandBrake should be able to manage that.
If you have a Unix box handy, it's as simple as ffmpeg -i foo.flv %d.jpg. ¦ Reisio (talk) 00:56, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

GOM Player (sic) can convertat at least individual frames to images, do not remember if it can do a range of them. 84.13.34.56 (talk) 13:45, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

You don't need a unix-box; you can install FFMPEG on Windows. You can use the same command described above, once FFMPEG is installed. The FFMPEG article explains details and links to the main site. This is a command-line tool; WinFF provides a graphical front-end for Windows. Nimur (talk) 08:52, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Google Earth down?

Anyone know what's up with Google Earth? For about the past 8 hours it's been telling me it can't connect to the database. I wonder if their servers are down? —Steve Summit (talk) 00:31, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Seems to work alright here. 5.1.3533.1731 Linux ¦ Reisio (talk) 00:59, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I guess it's just me, then. Strange. (Rebooting didn't help, either.) —Steve Summit (talk) 13:23, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

This is incredibly unlikely, but maybe you're being affected by this alleged problem by which some traffic entirely outside the Great Firewall of China is being affected by it. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:16, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Google Earth is fairly profligate with IP connections; perhaps you have special security or firewall settings that are stopping its from getting what it needs. For the trace I monitored, it talks to a bank of 4 addresses in the 66.102.9.x (to at least .91 .93 .136 and .190) all of which are owned by Google in MTV and resolve to their 1e100.net domain, and and to addresses in 216.239.59.x (with the same four options for final octet), which appears to be their data centre in Wisconsin. In practice it issues standard HTTP GET requests (on port 80) for stuff like http://kh.google.com/dbRoot.v5?hl=en-GB&gl=gb - if you can't get that (with a web browser or wget) then that would suggest you have some networking issue (if it's not firewall, maybe a stale or corrupt DNS cache). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:12, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Apparently it was some firewall issue at work; its working fine for me at home now. Thanks, all. —Steve Summit (talk) 16:41, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Shift+F10 not working in Opera

I don't know if anyone else is experiencing this, but shift+F10 isn't working in Opera 10.51. 24.189.90.68 (talk) 01:18, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

When I need to do spell check, I mean. 24.189.90.68 (talk) 04:23, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

partitioning a new laptop with preinstalled os

My friend bought a Dell Inspiron Laptop with Windows 7 preinstalled. It has only one partition and he would like to have a few more added. Can I do that with Gparted without damaging the existing partition? The Windows 7 CDROM that was bundled with the laptop doesn't have a serial on it, my friend says. How do they provide the s.n. usually?--117.204.86.16 (talk) 02:17, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Look on the bottom of the laptop. There should be an official Windows sticker with the serial number attached. Astronaut (talk) 04:41, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, if you're careful with gparted then this shouldn't be a problem. In addition to the sticker that Astronaut mentions (which I'd recommend you photograph or photocopy, as these can get scuffed up after a few years of laptop use) many laptops also record their OEM licence code in flash memory on the motherboard - so if you reinstall the correct OEM windows (usually from system restore) it automatically gets the licence key from flash and you don't have to enter it manually. (This doesn't work at all if you try to install another version of windows, particularly a retail build, for which that OEM licence isn't valid). -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 11:15, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

That technology is called SLIC if you want to look it up. F (talk) 06:08, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

As a minor nitpick, it isn't really correct that the license key is stored in the flash. The license key and OEM certificate is part of the install DVD. The flash or more precisely the bios or EFI stores information in the SLIC table which the OS uses to verify that computer is entilted to use that certificate and license key. Also if you recover the license key and certificate from the OS you should be able to use another install DVD provided it allows you to install the version you need although you will need to manually enter the license key and then later after install register the certificate into the OS Nil Einne (talk) 16:40, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

vba to android?

I have created a VBA + Excel app, trying to make into an android app for marketplace. Anyone know how android works? Could I just copy-paste vba script? minor alterations? major? Will it run faster/slower?Thanx 173.30.18.29 (talk) 06:27, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

It will be full rewrite I believe. VBA relies on a host application (Excel in your case) and Microsoft haven't released the Office Suite for Android yet. Ignoring that most android apps are written in a Java like language which bears little resemblance to VBA syntax.87.54.40.66 (talk) 11:58, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Yeah. Basically Android applications are written in Java. Totally different language that looks nothing like VBA or Excel. It would be non-trivial to port it over if you are not fluent in Java. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:13, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Insecurity through OS piracy?

Are there any documented cases of crackers intentionally adding security vulnerabilities to their releases of a pirated operating system? NeonMerlin 06:31, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Haven't heard of anyone doing so, although it's quite common that some illegally downloaded software are laced with malware code, which, according to some groups, was added by certain ill-intended people and not by the crackers themselves. Blake Gripling (talk) 07:26, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

It has happened, but it's nowhere near as prevelant as your average Windows user is afraid it is. ¦ Reisio (talk) 07:37, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

In this link, Microsoft points to a German study in which they downloaded 500 pirated copies of Windows 7 and/or activation cracks, and they reported that 32% contained malware. It's in Microsoft's interest to make and inflate such claims, but it's also not in their interest to lie outrageously, in the event they are caught in the lie. Anyway, it's not Microsoft making the claim. I find the claim believable. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:38, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm not saying if you download 500 pirated copies of Windows 7 and/or activation cracks that you won't get malware in 32% of the packages, but I can't find any information on this survey, so it comes down entirely to Media Surveillance's word and unprovided definition of "malware". ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:05, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Related: This link claims that in a study by someone called "IDC" in 2006, they purchased counterfeit Microsoft software at resellers in 17 countries and found that "more than 50 percent contained phony code, had malware, or could not even be installed." "Phony code" could mean a lot of things; I assume they mean to say that the disc was claimed to be a Windows 98 disc but was actually a copy of Windows 95, or the "Windows 98 for Dummies Companion CD", or that sort of thing. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:32, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Same referenceless site everyone links to for the Media Surveillance stuff. ¦ Reisio (talk) 05:24, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Looking for a web annotation program that does certain things

Hello,

I am looking for a web annotation service that combines the following features:

1) ability to highlight text,

2) ability to insert an html anchor so that I can jump people down to a particular paragraph,

3) ability to upload my modified version of the webpage for public viewing.

The purpose is so that when I put urls into footnotes in Wikipedia, I can have them point directly to the section of the document that I'm referring to, and have that section highlighted.

However, I am unable to find a service that provides me with the second feature (ability to insert an html anchor). Does anyone know of one that does this? Thanks,

user:Agradman, editing from an IP address - 207.237.228.236 (talk) 07:35, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I just want to add that you probably shouldn't use this for URLs on Wikipedia, just as you shouldn't use link shorteners or things like that. Why? Because someday the service you are using will probably go down (just how things work on the internet) or changes names or whatever. If the original, base URL isn't completely obvious, that means we've lost a good link. It also means that in the future finding archive.org equivalents to said good links is harder. An all-around easier way to cite specific pieces of text is to just quote the beginning of what you are quoting in the footnote reference. Keep it simple, as they say! --Mr.98 (talk) 12:09, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Depending on third party services can be treacherous, but it's conceivable you could do it with nothing but some JavaScript. You could keep all the highlighting/annotation info in the link itself, no service necessary. ¦ Reisio (talk) 05:26, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Do not use those links in WP, per WP:EL. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 22:46, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

OK, I am glad you intervened, because I was getting ready to start using hyperlinks from web annotation companies in my WP edits. But now, I am thinking that if these are banned per WP:EL (because of the their legitimate weaknesses in stability and reliability and possibly trustworthiness), then we should be actively looking for ways to solve this problem; until we do, we are missing out on a lot of value in being able to anchor and highlight in the documents we cite to.

• e.g. we can host the annotated copies on wikisource?
• e.g., Reisio (talk), are you saying that we could use Javascript? Is that also forbidden by WP:EL (and if so why)? Is it easy enough that you could write up an example of how this would work?

- Agradman 06:56, 27 March 2010 (UTC) (editing from an IP address, 160.39.221.14 (talk)).

You could use JavaScript, but for any link to work streamlined from Wikipedia (or even be allowed to be regularly used on Wikipedia) you would obviously need general approval from Wikipedia users (WP:EL is irrelevant; we already use external links for referencing online content, and you'd have to go through different channels to get any such system approved and included, anyways). You wouldn't necessarily have to include any content whatsoever (so hosting data doesn't need to be an issue), you could just overlay highlights on a page and move the focus to any area you chose. It wouldn't be perfect, and undoubtedly pages linked to would change and any highlights (or whatever) might have to be updated, but the same problem applies to ordinary links as well. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:54, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't see that those highlighting effects have more than minor benefit. For a WP citation to a web page, it's generally trivial to find the relevant part of the target page with your browser's search function. In some cases it might help to add a little bit of text to the citation saying how to reach the relevant info. Sure, putting stuff on wikisource is good if the material is suitable and free. It's still not appropriate to route the urls through those annotation services, because the click stream exposes user's reading habits to an unnecessary third party. If annotation became important it might be ok to run an annotation engine as a Wikimedia service directly on a Wikimedia-operated server, but that's different, and in my opinion not very likely to happen anytime soon. I guess it might be possible to have some javascript in the new Wikipedia UI (try the beta site) that did some annotation effects as layers. I'm not sure if that could be done without accepting a browser download though, because of browser restrictions designed to prevent XSRF attacks. Maybe I'll ask a web coder about that sometime. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 07:27, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Hosting highlighted annotated copies—probably not. If the original page is copyrighted (as most are), we can only quote from it within the bounds of fair use law. That basically means, "quotes, but not full copies."

One could use imagine a bit of javascript that did it (though the above poster is right that the "simplest" solutions that come to mind either involve a third party page processing the content, or would run into XSRF problems with most browsers), but it would be an awful amount of effort for a probably marginal benefit, and even if it worked perfectly it would still suffer from some stability issues (mainly, the stability of the content of the underlying page itself, which your annotations would rely on in order to work).

I again agree that it's hard for me to imagine a situation in which this wouldn't be marginal benefit at best, and easily compensated with other means of citation (e.g. quoting some of the relevant parts and synthesizing the rest). Can you give us a concrete example of a page you really think could be benefitted in this way? --Mr.98 (talk) 12:30, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

It's hard for you to imagine how highlighting or annotation wouldn't be more than a marginal benefit? Also, exactly how much benefit is required for you to get behind something? :p 27% benefit? :p
Here's an example in which this would've been quite useful. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:54, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Enough benefit to justify the time it takes to learn how to use it, or to replace a previous way of doing things, minus the potential downsides of switching. Believe it or not, this is something you CAN quantify if you want to—it's a kind of study that has been undertaken many times to see what gets people to bother switching the way they do things. People will not do it for very marginal benefits because there are costs associated with change. (And I don't really see how annotations or highlighting would have improved your communications on that page, to be honest. The basic problems in communicating seemed rooted elsewhere.) --Mr.98 (talk) 02:38, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

It would be the same as what people do in real life — which is quite popular — only it'd be an order of magnitude less work. Where's Waldo? Would you like a textual description of where he is, or a big red circle? ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:17, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Except that it wouldn't be less work, necessarily. Let's imagine how it might work. There are basically two options here. One is that you require the user to download an applet or control that will manage the annotations. This can open its own can of worms, even if it works correctly. The other is that we route the page-to-be-annotated through another server that takes the content, and re-sends it back with annotations. Both of these scenarios probably require that the URL you send be doctored in some way — either to indicate to the annotator applet what the annotations are it should be looking for, or routing it through the annotation page. Both of these scenarios also require that someone first go through and annotate the page. This might be straightforward (it's not hard to imagine someone rigging up an interface not dissimilar from Acrobat, where highlighting and adding of notes is easy). The latter scenario introduces the problem of the pass-through server working correctly, and also that passing through the data will not introduce new errors (which it might, depending on how it is set up and the content it is trying to pass through). The former scenario requires everyone involved to download a (probably proprietary) applet, which may or may not work on various browsers, systems, setups, etc. (ignoring possible security concerns here).

Now, whether you will find all of the above worth it is not fairly obviously to me. It's not the same thing as indicating something on a piece of paper with a pencil. It's not the same thing as taking a highlighter to a page. It's not even the same thing as highlighting a file in Acrobat and then re-distributing it.

That's what I mean by the various costs. Do I think public web annotation will take off? I really don't. The number of situations in which it would seem to be warranted seems limited. (Annotation of private documents is something different, and already has taken off, with Word and Acrobat and etc.) But hey! You don't have to convince me. I'm not an early-adopter anyway. I'm just trying to indicate that just because something can be done, doesn't mean it is popular, or necessary. I don't see the need, in this instance. (And even with Where's Waldo... the entire point of Where's Waldo is not to have him indicated in a big red circle, as I understand it.) --Mr.98 (talk) 18:04, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Ubuntu 9.10 Monitor Hibernating without Consent (revisited)

Sorry to revive an old-ish question, but the answer I got for this told me what I should do and not how I should do it. After I asked how, the question was archived. Now, I've been advised (specifically by User:Nimur) that I may have my monitor sleep settings set differently from the rest of the computer, and that I should consider resetting them to my desired configuration (if there is such an option). Now, what I want to do is have the computer never go to sleep, never switch off, nor, in fact, ever do anything which does not involve me actually pressing a button. Short and tall of it is, how do I stop my laptop from going to sleep after five minutes when I have not touched it, and I have all of my power settings on 'Never'. I would link you to the previous time I asked the question, but Chrome has the pointless habit of just downloading me a PHP file every time I click on diff links on Wikipedia, so I can't, sorry. Any help, in terms that can be understood by someone who really doesn't know what to do (<-this is important), would be very much appreciated. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:46, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Are you using GNOME (default Ubuntu DE), or something else?
If you want fast help with things like this, checkout the #ubuntu or ##linux channels on irc.freenode.net*. ¦ Reisio (talk) 16:16, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I am in fact using the default Ubuntu desktop environment. I will check out the IRC channels some other time on my Vista computer (this Ubuntu one does have a habit of switching off even when I am doing stuff on it - also, I will need to download and install a chat client on the Vista). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:34, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

http://webchat.freenode.net/ http://silverex.org/ ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:07, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

After re-reading KageTora's original post, I think it's unlikely that my monitor diagnosis was helpful. It seems like the problem is actually with the operating system, or the computer hardware. I'm not really sure if we have enough information yet to diagnose what's causing this hibernation problem. Nimur (talk) 22:20, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

How is bookmarks.html read by Firefox?

Resolved

I don't see the URLs of my bookmarked sites there, but I see long lines of text like iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABA... which I assume is my bookmarks encoded in some way. What is the encoding used there, or in other words, how do those long lines of text get turned into my URLs and human readable descriptions when Firefox is running? I searched through all the subdirectories in the Mozilla Firefox directory on my computer for files containing the text of my bookmarks, but no files were found. That seems to tell me the information regarding my bookmarks is not in another place than bookmarks.html.Thanks. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 17:36, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about you, but I *do* see my bookmarks in there. The long strings appear to be base64 encoded icon information corresponding to the bookmark. The icon data is much longer than the bookmark URL, so you might not be seeing the URLs scattered about in there. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 17:42, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

It's possible you may be looking at the wrong bookmarks.html, particularly if your computer has been through many Firefox upgrades. I believe they slightly changed the organization of the config data, and an old, possibly empty version might be left in the original location. Mine is in my %USER%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\WEIRDPROFILEIDSTRING.default (obviously, your WEIRDPROFILEIDSTRING will differ). This will be slightly different on a Vista/Win7 machine ("%USER%\AppData\Roaming" instead of "%USER%\Application Data" I believe, though I'm on a weird corp system right now, so your mileage may vary). And of course it will differ even further on a *NIX box or a Mac. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 17:48, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, that one had all my bookmarks information. Thanks. It makes sense now because I was looking in bookmarks.html over in Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\profile. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 18:15, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Just to wrap up, virtually no applications keep their user config data in the Program Files directory anymore. It was strongly discouraged pre-Vista, and when Vista released, programs that were still doing it started breaking, or triggering elevation prompts (because writing to the Program Files directory is Admin-only), which annoyed the hell out of users. Nowadays, most apps still being supported use the per-user AppData directories properly. —ShadowRanger ^(talk|stalk) 22:42, 26 March 2010 (UTC)