Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 January 21

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January 21

Web search engines that allow wildcards?

I'm looking for a phrase but I don't know part of a word. Are there still any web search engines where when searching for e.g. "Eco* establish*" will give me hits for "Economics establishes" and "Ecological establishments"? -- Jeandré, 2011-01-21t11:43z

I'm not aware of any, but an alternative solution would be to do the stemming yourself and search for the results. There would only be around 180 things to search for in your example. --Sean 16:02, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

You might have some success with onelook, though it returns no hits for your example. It searches for phrases (in obscure dictionaries and encyclopedias and some other places that aren't specified) and allows wildcards. 81.131.65.219 (talk) 16:49, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

I suspect all the very big (whole web) search engines index on hash codes for performance reasons, so can't do prefix searches. Sean's suggestion sounds straightforward if a bit tedious, if you have just one or two queries like that. If you use a machine client you will probably get blocked by the search engine. 67.122.209.190 (talk) 09:01, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Two or three years ago there was a very good website that told you all about the many different search engines and what they could do for the searcher, including things like wildcards. Unfortunately I cannot remember its name - does anyonme remember it? (It was not about "SEM", but about searching). Now everything except the top three search engines seem to have been forgotten by people, although some of them such as ask.com are still out there. (Would be intteresting to see a list of all working search engines). All I could find was this http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/ which is not the site I remember. 92.24.178.157 (talk) 23:17, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

This site has a section on wildcards: http://searchenginewatch.com/2155981. Tried your search in google - unfortunately, the first * is also standing in for words that come between eco* and establish*, so the results may not be what you want. Using the wildcard at the end of the final word seems to work.

Interference with Browsing

Every time I open a page in my IE8 browser I get Security questions: "A website wants to open web content" that are obviously wrong. The names given rotate among DivX Plus Web Player / McAfee Anti-spam / Microsoft Search Enhancement Pack / Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 6. U... / Adobe Flash Player. The warnings just keep coming regardless of whether I click on Allow or Don't Allow. They make it hard to read Wikipedia! (Vista Home Premium) Cuddlyable3 (talk) 13:18, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

What Anti-Virus software do you have? Have you tried using Firefox? Firefox is a better browser and should solve your problems. Tofutwitch11 ^(TALK) 14:01, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

While I agree that Firefox is better than IE, better is somewhat subjective. And installing Firefox will not solve the problem the OP is having with IE. The OP may be on a restricted computer and cannot use Firefox, or may simply not want to use Firefox. 82.44.55.25 (talk) 22:37, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

OP here. My anti-virus is AVG free 9.0. Until this problem arose I have been satisfied with IE browser. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 11:38, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Has this only recently started happening (you've been round here a long time and I haven't noticed you mentioning this before)? I have a very similar setup to you, with Vista Home Premium/IE8/AVG free 9.0, but don't have DivX Plus Web Player, McAfee Anti-spam or Microsoft Search Enhancement Pack; and I don't have this problem. Perhaps take a look at recent installations/updates or consider using system restore to take you PC back to a time before this was happening. Astronaut (talk) 14:19, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

The problem started yesterday. The only cause I can see is that I downloaded an update to DivX Player. It has added a button below YouTube videos but the warnings come before all sites (including Wikipedia). Cuddlyable3 (talk) 18:42, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Do you actually need/want the DivX IE plugin? If not perhaps just try disabling it from within IE and see if it helps. P.S. While I use Firefox myself I agree with 82 that it's poor advice here. It sounds like the problem is probably with the DivX IE plugin and may not be the fault of IE. Using Firefox may resolve the issue. It also may not if you install the same plugin for Firefox and it has the same bug. Nil Einne (talk) 11:11, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Resolved

 – Thank you Nil Einne. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 18:58, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

ncis

can you please tell me what make & model of mobile phone sasha alexandra ie( kate ) is using in the ncis show it appears to be a black oblong flip phone or pda with the screen on the top half & keypad on the lower half.i have tried to look for this on the net but car't seem to find a model that looks like the one kate is using. is there a web site that shows the gadgets used on the show

regards r a carrington.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.2.45.163 (talk) 15:08, 21 January 2011 (UTC) 

That descriptions covers a multitude of phone models from a multitude of manufacturers — you'll likely have to have some high res shots or insider info to find out. If all you want is a phone _like_ that, just walk into a mobile phone shop, there will be plenty. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:22, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

R.A. is apparently watching the show in reruns: the character of Kate was only in it for the first two seasons, in 2003–05. So this must be a phone that was available then, and given the rate of change in cellphone technology and fashions, it quite likely would not be available now. At least not new. --Anonymous, 05:30 UTC, January 22, 2011.

A couple of people seem to think it is a palm device, one states Treo smartphone - try looking at them from here Palm_(PDA)#List_of_PDA_models Chaosdruid (talk) 14:26, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Vista - Permission to Put things in Folder I Just Made

Resolved

I have a bizarre problem on Vista. I have just made a folder on my desktop. Then I made a couple of other folders and put a few bits and pieces in them. Then I tried to put these other folders inside the first one, and I am told I need to grant permission (which is inevitably denied). I have succeeded in putting one of the folders into the first folder (granting permission which was accepted) but the other one won't be allowed in. The main folder was just made in the usual way (right click on desktop>new folder) and I haven't added any special properties to it. Can anyone help me unlock it? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:31, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

No worries - everything had been set to 'Read Only' for some reason (I have an idea of why). Unchecking that fixed the problem. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 15:52, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Purists might say that the desktop is not the place to put folders (but just shortcuts to folders). Like you, I occasionally break this rule, but there are a couple of minor disadvantages in some situations. Dbfirs 18:03, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Aye, well, I prefer to keep my desktop clear, but I just wanted to make a folder quickly and had nowhere else more appropriate to do it other than on my desktop, because my desktop was already 'open', as it where. Cheers, though. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 18:37, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Size of Wikipedia

Do the following two occasions occupy the same amount of Wikipedia server resources?

• A Wikipedia page has been modified 4,999 times since its creation, therefore has had 5,000 versions including the current one, and the average size of its versions is a given number of bytes.
• 5,000 Wikipedia pages have not been modified since they were created, and their average size is the same number of bytes.

To put it in another way: if one wished to calculate the total size of Wikipedia, would one get the actual answer by visiting every single history page and adding up the indicated numbers of bytes for each past and current version of each page? And could there be some estimation - even if it's a very rough one - about the (English) Wikipedia's total size? --Theurgist (talk) 16:00, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

If I understand your question correctly you're asking whether the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia stores whole articles for each revision, or some kind of diff that would save space. The answer appears to be the former. Here is a database schema for MediaWiki. In the lower right is a table called TEXT which appears to hold complete articles for each revision. So the final answer is "yes" -- they would occupy roughly the same space (excepting the bits of metadata about revision times and so on).

As for the total size, it looks like it's around 5 TB for all revisions of all articles. Note that that doesn't include any images, which presumably take up a good chunk as well. --Sean 16:41, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Previous versions of mediawiki kept a current version and backwards deltas (diffs). This was much more compact, but it meant that if you wanted to retrieve a version 10 revisions ago, you needed to retrieve and apply 9 sets of diffs. The current schema stores the full text of each revision in the old_text column of the text table. This reflects the realities of disk pricing vs cpu pricing. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 16:57, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

But see $wgCompressRevisions, though it sounds like it doesn't compress revisions against each other. Paul (Stansifer) 17:19, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

You wouldn't need to apply N diffs to get the Nth previous version. You could store every tenth revision in full and the rest as diffs from the nearest full revision. That would save an enormous amount of space and never require applying more than one diff. If you're going to use zlib to compress revisions, you could compress every tenth one with an empty initial dictionary and the rest with the nearest full revision (or the first 32K of it) as the initial dictionary. -- BenRG (talk) 21:53, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

To answer the last portion of the OP's question: a snapshot of the current-state of the English-language Wikipedia database, including all revisions of all pages, is estimated to be about 5 terabytes (see Wikipedia:Database download). To de-select all previous revisions of all pages would require a lot of database transaction (CPU time); such a service is not available from the Wikimedia Foundation's servers (so you'd have to download the full database and perform that data culling yourself). Periodically, the latest Pages/Articles are provided through this link in XHTML format. Those are a collection of BZ archives of XML, and appear to be about 10 or 20 gigabytes ("about a three or five DVDs" worth of data). The Special:Statistics page gives approximate counts of latest number of articles. Nimur (talk) 19:07, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

At the download link I gave they list pages-articles.xml.bz2, which is current pages only. About 6 GB uncompressed. --Sean 20:06, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

As a side note, version-control systems have exactly this time/space tradeoff, too, and they have quite sophisticated solutions. Here's a high-level discussion]. Paul (Stansifer) 05:51, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for the replies. But I now have of an additional question: do edit summaries also contribute to the size? I think they must take up the same amount of memory as ordinary readable text, but I can't be sure. --Theurgist (talk) 18:30, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Of course -- they must be stored, after all -- but they're insignificant compared to the size of almost any article. --Sean 14:26, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Command prompt

I accidentally opened a .bat script in Windows 7 which had a line instructing it to start a new instance of itself and loop, which created hundreds of command prompt windows within seconds all making new windows themselves. I couldn't stop it from task manager or process explorer with the "kill tree" command and had to shut the computer down and restart. In this situation, in case it happens again, is there any way to stop this once it starts without restarting windows? 82.44.55.25 (talk) 22:25, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

You have found yourself in a race condition with your computer; it's unlikely you'll win. What you would need to do is use Task Manager to kill the newest instance of the program before it replicates. It's possible, but unlikely, that you could do that. In some versions of Windows, tskill can be used to kill all instances of a process with a certain executable-name, so you could use the command line to execute that; but you'd still have a race condition between the two scripts. Nimur (talk) 23:03, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Depending on the script and your skills, it's best to simply reboot. Alternatively, there are programs that kill all user processes, but in unless you know what you're doing, you're not going to win against the machine=P.Smallman12q (talk) 00:17, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Either log off or better yet, if you have an unsaved document that will prevent logging off, simply try to log off, close all the batch file's windows (all of them), then cancel the log off attempt. It is possible to close all the windows when Windows is in the process of logging off or shutting down because when Windows is logging off or shutting down, no new process can be started (remember "... the window station is shutting down" error message?) 118.96.157.166 (talk) 00:37, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

You could also press the "Pause/Break" key on your keyboard. 216.120.192.143 (talk) 15:31, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Personal information misuse

It seems that someone has mis-used my email address and craigslist advertisement has misused my email, AOL thinks they have resolved that issue, but now I can't connect to your system........... for example I have had calls telling me they are interested in a car I have for sale, I have never had a car for sale,,,,,,,,,,,,,do you have a phone number I can call and have you give me some assistance.......... (removed personal information) thank you ................. Roland A. Mireles —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.218.123.7 (talk) 23:43, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

I've removed the personal information in the original post. Posting your email and phone number on a hugely public site like Wikipedia isn't going to help your situation at all. If you can find the Craigslist ad, you can flag it, and there is a Help link on the main page (at craigslist.org) that offers a "contact us" link, so you can write to them and request help. In the meantime, you probably should let your phone calls go to voicemail or an answering machine until the ad has run its course. --LarryMac | Talk 23:58, 21 January 2011 (UTC)