Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 October 24

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 24

Editing my website

So someone saw fit to make me the web-master of an organization's website. The site itself is up and running and they just want me to update the site regularly.

How do I do this?

Sorry for sounding like an ignoramus, but it's only because I have no idea how to do this. Thanks in advance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.40.50.242 (talk) 02:18, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

That's not an easy question to answer. It depends on a number of factors. Is the site basically just a blog with reports on the recent goings-on of the organization or does it have some sort of content management system? Or, and this is the one option that it doesn't sound like you're ready for, is it all hand coded HTML for which you'll need quite a bit of training? If it's not too much to ask, could you provide the address of the site so that we can look at it and maybe tell a thing or two from there? Dismas|^(talk) 02:23, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Say, here's the page. http://www.umich.edu/~bengalis/ This isn't exactly my page, but mine is similar. I don't feel to comfortable sharing my own page. Sorry about being cryptic and all.68.40.50.242 (talk) 02:29, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

A website is nothing but a collection of text files. You open a text file in a text editor and edit it. However, we don't know WHERE the text files are. We don't know if you have access to the server they are on. We don't know how you are supposed to transfer files to and from that server. Editing a web page is very simple. The file transfer is the hard part. -- kainaw™ 03:26, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

That site is being served by the Apache web server, and that "~bengalis" feature is an example of the per-user web directories feature. By default apache is configured to take the public_html directory in a given user's account and make that answer to the URL you've given. So, if this were hosted on a Unix machine, you'd typically expect http://www.umich.edu/~bengalis/ to be kept at /home/bengalis/public_html     This all depends on how the Apache on that site has actually been configured, and how user accounts are set up, and only the university's system administration people can answer that. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 13:31, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

If you go to your web site in a browser and do "View Page Source" (exactly where this is depends on what browser you're using, but it's sure to be in the menus somewhere), you will see the HTML code that generates the page. The first thing you need to do, if you want to do anything useful, is get hold of an "HTML for Dummies" book, or something on that level, and read at least the first couple of chapters. Without a basic knowledge of HTML you'll be helpless. Looie496 (talk) 21:56, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

You will need to get in touch with whomever does the information technology services on your campus and find out their way of accessing the site. Usually student organizations have their own special place to go to for their web support, e.g. at Berkeley it was the Open Computing Facility that did support services for student groups (and hosted the sites). You'll have to ask around to find out what the appropriate office is at your own university. If it is a personal (departmental) webpage, there is probably a totally separate organization for that. You need something like FTP or SFTP access, a program that will let you download and upload files (an FTP program), and then you will need a text editor to edit the files, and some knowledge of HTML to know what you are doing. If you haven't done any of this before, it will be hard the first time. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:24, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

InDesign Middle Eastern Version Fonts

I am using Adobe InDesign CS5 (7.0) middle eastern version to design Urdu-Arabic documents. I want urdu fonts, of type Nastaliq script. Where can i get some nice Nastaliq fonts? (truetype\opentype) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Umar1996 (talk • contribs) 07:32, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Nastaliq has been a script style that is notoriously intractible without special "script manager" support in the operating system (AAT, QuickDraw GX, Graphite (SIL) etc.), or specialized Urdu-specific application programs, so I'm not sure how far just fonts alone will get you... AnonMoos (talk) 16:39, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

You mentioned Mac software here, but i use Windows 7. Indesign CS5 has good font support. I found two fonts, jameel noori nastaleeq and alvi nastaliq which work perfectly with indesign ME --Umar1996 (talk) 14:37, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Emacs Follow-up

This follows on from the thread above. I'm working on MS Windows Vista and have a copy of SINGULAR. This includes a "bundled" copy of Emacs. It was an old version, so I downloaded version 23.2 for MS Windows. In this section of the SINGULAR manual it describes how to run SINGULAR in an already up-and-running, stand-alone version of Emacs. It tells me to add the following "lisp code" to my .emacs file:

(setq load-path (cons "<singular-emacs-home-directory>" load-path))
(autoload 'singular "singular"
  "Start Singular using default values." t)
(autoload 'singular-other "singular"
  "Ask for arguments and start Singular." t)

Now, this code looks like Linux code and not MS Windows. It talks about the singular-emacs-home-directory. Isn't that a directory in Linux? Besides that problem, I can't find my .emacs file. I have gone to the lisp folder, but there are 20 subfolders and maybe 100 EL and ELC files (whatever they are). Nothing ends in .emacs. I;ve run a search and nothing turns up.

• Does anyone know where I can find this illusive .emacs file?
• How can I adapt the above copy so that SINGULAR looks in the right place?

Hopefully someone will be able to help me. This is starting to annoy me! Thanks in advance. — Fly by Night (talk) 12:16, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

The code you see is actually Emacs Lisp code. Emacs consists of a basic LISP engine with some specialized primitives, and a whole lot of LISP code. You configure it by writing some more LISP code, in this case telling it to load some libraries, and set some variables. You put this code into your Emacs configuration file, which traditionally has the name (not the extionsion) .emacs. But see the link to the FAQ above ([1], section 3.5) on how to find and how to name your config file (in particular, I'd try the last line of 3.5). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:01, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Right, so I did C-x C-f and then ~/.emacs. I pressed enter and a blank page opened. I pasted in the code and then did C-x C-s to save. It saved it to C:/Users/My Name/AppData/Roaming/.emacs, which is a different folder to the one than SINGULAR is saved in, and a different one than Emacs is saved it. I did M-x singular as the manual suggests and it just says [no match]. What should I do next? — Fly by Night (talk) 13:31, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

The .emacs file is only evaluated on startup, or when explicitly requested. Have you restarted Emacs after creating the config file? If you want to go the more interesting route, navigate to the buffer with your .emacs and type M-x eval-buffer. Also, I strongly suspect that the <singular-emacs-home-directory> should be replaced by the path to your Singular installation.--Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:50, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

I found a folder call Singular which contained a program called Singular. But when I replaced <singular-emacs-home-directory> with <C:\cygwin\lib\Singular> and try to run it with M-x signular it returns cannot open load file: singular. I tried removing the angled brackets but Emacs starts up and tells me there's a Syntax error. If I put them back then there's no syntax error. If I type M-x Singular then it says [no match]. Any ideas? — Fly by Night (talk) 15:08, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

This goes into weird Windows territory. Under UNIX-like OSes, the path is certainly a simple string - no angle brackets. Here is an example from my .emacs:

(setq load-path (cons "/Users/schulz/SOURCES/ELISP/" load-path))

It should be the path to the directory that has singular.el in it, as far as I can make out. I don't know how Emacs works under Windows, but under UNIX file names are case sensitive. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:10, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

If you're running emacs for Windows instead of cygwin emacs, then the correct way to enter the directory name in lisp code is "C:\\cygwin\\lib\\Singular" or "C:/cygwin/lib/Singular". Both should work, assuming that C:\cygwin\lib\Singular is the "singular emacs home directory". 130.188.8.15 (talk) 12:02, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Good catch! Of course \ is the escape character used to encode various special characters in strings. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:42, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks 130.188.8.15, but I've tried everything and nothing works. I paste the code into my ~/.emacs file, save, close and re-run. Then I do M-x singular and get cannot open load file: singular. Emacs has to be the most un-user-friendly program I've ever used. I downloaded SINGULAR and Emacs at work (on Ubuntu) and couldn't even find where the files had been saved! No icon, no search result; nothing. After using locate singular and sifting through the 40 or 50 locations, I finally found it. From download to running the thing, it took me an hour. Why does it have to be so hard? I'm no idiot and I've had the help of three or four reference desk regulars, and still no joy. I give up. Thanks to everyone for trying to help. — Fly by Night (talk) 21:52, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Emacs isn't exactly unfriendly to its users, but it has such a long history that it cannot quite follow modern interface conventions. Installing packages like the Singular interface shouldn't really take more than a couple of minutes (I just did it myself). Your best bet is probably to find a local Emacs user who can show you where you went wrong and help you with the installation. 84.239.160.59 (talk) 20:44, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Comparing two nVidia cards

I have two nVidia graphics cards (in two different machines, one of which runs Windows 7 and the other Ubuntu Linux). One is an older (but at the time rather expensive) GeForce 9800 GT, the other is a newer (but cheap) GeForce 210. Right now the 9800 is in the Windows machine, where it's used for games (e.g. Bioshock 2, Starcraft 2); the 210 in the Linux box doesn't have much real work to do (a bit of Google Earth is probably the limit of its labours). It occurred to me that the 210 would be the better gaming card. I'm having some difficulty reading the complicated tables in the two articles for them: if I understand correctly, the 9800 has a much higher texel fill rate than the 210. I can't find an online benchmark that reviews both cards (not surprising, as they're from more than a year apart). Some sites quote Futuremark scores for the 210 that are incredibly low, but I don't know if they're comparing like-for-like (as there are so many versions of Futuremark). I'd happily just run a benchmark myself, and swap the 210 in to see if it scores better or worse, but I don't know what benchmark to run. Futuremark now costs money (and frankly I'm reluctant to pay for something I'll run exactly twice) - can anyone recommend a worthwhile Windows graphics benchmark program? It doesn't have to be terribly accurate: I don't care about numbers, or about rating my card against others I don't own, I just want to know which card is the faster. Thanks. 87.115.213.248 (talk) 13:12, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

This article compares the 9800GT's little brother the 9600GT against the 210, and the 210 gets very bad results indeed. It says of the 210 that it can "hardly be of any interest for a gamer." -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 15:34, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Considering the specs, 64 bit memory bus 16:8:4 shaders vs 256 bit memory bus 112:56:16 shaders, you don't have to look at a benchmark to tell you the 9800GT is going to destroy the 210 in nearly everything (the 210 has DX 10.1 support I believe) and I didn't even look at clock speeds. That BTW is another key reason why you have trouble finding reviews comparing the two, it's a pretty pointless comparison. The 9800GT was close to the top of the line of it's time and it's not that old, the 210 was always the extreme budget end and is only really one generation later and not even a major generation change. BTW, the reason any single benchmark is usually fairly useless in properly comparing cards is because cards tend to have advantages in different areas so you need to compare a variety of different benchmarks to get a proper idea of where cards stand relative to each other. Although in this case, any decent benchmark will tell you how crap the 210 is compared to the 9800. If you actually have games you are interested in with some sort of benchmarking and the cards it's probably better to compare with these real world stuff anyway. Nil Einne (talk) 18:40, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

archive

For storing thousands of txt files, what is the best format? .zip has limits —Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.120.33.249 (talk) 14:10, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

"Best" for what? For compression size? For compression speed? For decompression speed? For random access? For error-tolerance? For compatibility? And what features of ZIP is it that you find limiting? -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 15:32, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

If you have lots of small files, ZIP won't compress all that much, because it's not a "solid" archive format. In that situation, .tar.gz will be smaller (possibly much smaller, depending on how much redundancy there is between the files). AnonMoos (talk) 16:31, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

WinRAR (for Windows) is one popular alternative. Comet Tuttle (talk) 15:44, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

7zip compresses pretty well too. It also has many options like compression method and dictionary size, which you might have to play around with to get the best results. KyuubiSeal (talk) 14:38, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Generally 7-Zip's best (tightest) compressor for natural language text is PPMd, but it's very slow, and there aren't very many situations where the extra compression ratio is worth it. According to the article, the Rar and Zip formats also support PPMd, but many Zip decompressors only support old versions of the Zip specification that don't include PPMd. -- BenRG (talk) 07:12, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I need help on recording sounds...

I need help on recording sounds. I have Windows 7 and I pressed the record button in my Windows Sound Recorder, it picked up sound from my microphone on my headphones, but it didn't pick up sound on the monitor. When I play back the file, the sound from the microphone is there, but the sound from the monitor was really low, I could barely hear it. I checked the recording devices and saw the microphone ready, the stereo mix ready, but the Line In was not plugged in. My sister said that it might be because of the Line-In not plugged in. I want to record both the sound from the microphone and the sound from the monitor. Is there a solution to fix this problem. Please answer. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sirdrink13309622 (talk • contribs) 17:05, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

This depends on whether your sound-card hardware supports "loopback" - in other words, if it can pipe the audio-output to an input signal. If so, Audacity (or Windows Sound Recorder) can select the "stereo mix" or similarly-named input channel (instead of microphone or line-in). If the sound-card does not support this internally, you can always fake it by piping through a male-to-male 3.5mm audio cable from your line-out back to your line-in. The biggest hazard with this setup is analog noise, but it usually is pretty bit-identical unless you wrap the line around a power-cable or something. Nimur (talk) 17:16, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

And FWIW the really low sound from the monitor on your original recording was probably just from your microphone picking up the sound from your speakers, not from something functioning incorrectly. Incidentally this is another (rough and ready) possible solution - crank the sound and keep the microphone close to your speakers, though sound quality won't be great; Nimur's suggestion is preferable. Now, if you find you are unable to record the sound from the monitor and the microphone together, you can record them independently and then combine them in a program like Audacity. Alternatively, as you don't say what the source of the 'sound from the monitor' is, you may already have the sound on your computer such as an MP3 song track; if this was the case you could just record what you want through the microphone and mix the tracks straight in Audacity without re-recording what's coming out of the monitor. --jjron (talk) 13:40, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Yahoo Posts

How do you delete old yahoo posts? I clicked on my link when I posted a comment to a news story and I saw my old posts and I was wondering how to delete those? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.147.4.245 (talk) 18:04, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

reading a pen drive

So I have a USB pen drive and a laptop with windows 7. recently I gave the pen drive to someone, I know they read some of what was on it, but is there any way of finding out what? I mean by finding out when each file was last opened, can that be done? Is there any other way? The files are all on microsoft works, if that helps.

148.197.121.205 (talk) 18:05, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Probably not. If you open the drive in Explorer (the file viewer thing, not the web browser thing), view-as "details", right-click on the header (that lists name, date etc.), click on "more...", and then check the "date accessed" field, that will add a "date accessed" column to that view. If you view a folder on your hard drive (which is surely formatted in the NTFS file system) then you'll see the actual dates and times those files were viewed. But flash drives seem mostly to be formatted in the FAT32 file system, which (at at least for me) doesn't store date-accessed data, so you'll just see a dummy value there. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 19:03, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

FAT does store access times, though only with 1-day granularity (ref). You can add "Date Accessed" as a column in Explorer's Details view by right clicking on the column headings. -- BenRG (talk) 19:33, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

How is the access date determined? I have mplayer.exe on my computer which I use every day and it's access date is ‎November ‎2009. NTFS drive 82.44.55.25 (talk) 19:47, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

AFAIK an interaction between program and OS Nil Einne (talk) 01:40, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Alright, thanks for your help. I'm sure it would have worked, but it seems at some point I picked the wrong one up, so now, I have lost all my saved files, which are lying around somewhere waiting for someone else to read them. 148.197.121.205 (talk) 20:00, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

The New Windows Live Messenger

I (read: the Windows Live system) just updated Windows Live Messenger to the latest version. I guess a lot of Windows users have done this lately. The new version is OK (I have never really liked MSN); is is a more well-integrated application in Windows 7 (we all know the old msnmsgr.exe was't working well with respect to its taskbar button). However, there is one thing that really, really annoys me: If you press the X button of the main window, the msnmsgr.exe isn't closed, but only minimized. But if you press Alt+F4 (or Alt+Space, Arrow up, Enter), msnmsgr.exe is closed, and you have to restart it. Is there a known solution? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 21:02, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

The Windows Live Messenger forums might be a good place to ask, if you haven't already. Vimescarrot (talk) 23:03, 24 October 2010 (UTC)