Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 January 24

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January 24

Mac OS X weirdnesses

I'm using the up-to-date version of Mac OS X on a MacBook. When I click on several sorts of things I am getting no response. For instance when I click on a Saved, TextEdit document, it does not open. Ditto for regular folders—they do not open. There are other weirdnesses, but those 2 basic examples might be enough for someone to diagnose the problem, which I can't. The happy thing is that I have set up a separate "Test" account, which I'm using right now. This account, on the same computer, is quite separate from the usual account, and everything seems to work fine in this account. Anybody know what's going on? I haven't a clue. Bus stop (talk) 00:39, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but have you tried relaunching the Finder? Apple > Force Quite > Finder > Relaunch. I find when I occasionally have weird user interface glitches that deal with Finder, that relaunching usually fixes it. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:59, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Nope. It do not help. Good try, though. I was hopeful for awhile. I am back at my usual account now, and these things don't work. It is so insane not to be able to open folders or open closed TextEdit documents. Thanks. Bus stop (talk) 01:11, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

I assumed you tried rebooting? Again, I do find that every once in awhile, Finder glitches out on me in weird ways, but that it usually goes away with a reboot or relaunch. If that's not the case, I'd take it by an Apple store and see what they said. The other thing to check, which might be too obvious, is to see whether it is fixed by plugging in an external mouse — e.g. if it has something specifically to do with the trackpad or not. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:40, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Mr.98—yes, I have rebooted. I actually had been using a mouse. The problem persists identically with mouse or trackpad. My plan is to move all my files onto a thumb drive, and then move them from the thumb drive to a new account. The "Test" account that I started works fine. Bus stop (talk) 05:17, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Two possibilities come to mind: You may have set permission on files in a way that you cannot access them with the main account, or you may have broken the association of file name extension and program. If you feel comfortable with the shell, open a terminal, navigate to the file, and try to open it with file or less, and see if that works. ls -l will show you the permissions. For a typical Mac user, select the file in the Finder and select File->Get Info. Check the owner and the permissions. If all is ok, try to open it by right-clicking or Ctrl-clicking and select "Open with", then specify the particular application you want. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:00, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Stephan Schulz—it is all files—old and new—so I don't think it is "permissions" as the problem. Also, checking "Get Info" seems to say that I have the "Privilege" to "Read" and "Write". I'm pretty lost when it comes to the Terminal. I ran the "Disk Utility" for "Repair Disk Permissions"—to no avail. I'm just going to move everything to a new "Account". While my files are on a thumb drive I may try to erase the disk and reinstall the operating system off of the DVD for OS 10.6. The trouble with that is I think that will entail a lot of "updates" because we are up to OS 10.6.6. Bus stop (talk) 05:17, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Weird indeed. Before you try to reinstall, try to repair the disk. Boot from the OS disk provided with the system, select "Disk utility" from the menu, and then "Repair Disk" on your main drive. Or boot into single user mode, remount the disk, and run fsck manually - but if you are lost with the terminal, this may not be the best way... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:05, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks everybody. I still can't figure it out. But I am making slight progress. I have found a ludicrous "workaround". The workaround might shed light on the problem. This is what I have discovered: it seems to be only in the Finder that things don't work. For instance I can not launch an Application by clicking on it in the Application folder, but if I drag it to the Dock, at the bottom of the screen, I can then click on it and successfully launch it. The same thing with TextEdit files—if I first drag them to the Dock, I can then click on them in the Dock, and access their contents. And also for folders as might be found on my Desktop—I cannot open them on my Desktop but I can drag them to the Dock and then open them from the Dock. What would cause the Desktop or the Finder (not sure what the difference is) to become dysfunctional this way? And how would that which is in the Dock escape a problem that seems to exist everyplace else? As far as I can tell, that which is in the Dock seems to act similar to an "alias" of a file. But I definitely know little about this stuff. Bus stop (talk) 16:31, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't know; but when Finder wigs out, which is not entirely unheard of, you get weird results like this. If you do figure out a solution, please come back and tell us, for future reference... --Mr.98 (talk) 13:13, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

I've just abandoned the account. It's as simple as that. I'm not messing with it. All my stuff has been moved by thumb drive from one account to another. I even gathered up my bookmarks from Firefox and brought them to Firefox at the new account. It's like a ghost town back there. Maybe I'll eventually bring it into an Apple store and let the "Geniuses" see what Steve Jobs has wrought. (I'm really a big fan of Apple products.) Bus stop (talk) 16:46, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

The crazy thing is I had a problem with this computer some months ago that was similarly frustrating and it solved itself mysteriously. I asked about it here. This is the thread in Archives. I feel like one of those Münchausen syndrome by proxy kind of people, but this is real. The computer does weird things. Bus stop (talk) 15:11, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Future 1TB DIMM

Hello,

  I remember a time (when I was in lower primary school) when the largest RAM module available was 256MB, and now we have 16GB DIMMs. In another decade or more, could we have one-terabyte DIMMs? Or would we have reached the point where Dual-Die Packages cannot be shrunk any further. Thoughts?

I'm the one who asked the Future 128-Core Processor question yesterday.

  Thanks. Rocketshiporion♫ 00:45, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Based purely on physical space, a DIMM could hold several orders of magnitude more data than any modern-day PC has in hard-drive space. If you could use a cube with 10 nm sides to hold a single bit, a 1.5 cm × 10 cm × 3 mm chip of such a material could hold over 500000 (five hundred thousand) tebibytes of data. It could well be possible to manufacture a transistor less than a cubic nanometre in size (considering it's possible to use a single atom as the active region, per [1]), meaning such ultra-high-density RAM may likewise be possible. The main factor here, though, is whether it's economically feasible. If Moore's law continues to hold all the way down to the single-nanometre scale, we might see 1 TiB RAM DIMMS by 2023.

Of course, it's also quite conceivable that by then, we've moved away from our present-day computing paradigm altogether. For example, there is a very real possibility of non-volatile random access memory becoming the next big thing. Essentially, if you have a medium that is as fast and durable (in terms of rewrite cycles) as modern-day RAM, but capable of holding its data on power-off like magnetic storage, I would imagine that before long, this would be pushed to vast sizes (just look at modern-day SSDs: their capabilities are quite limited, and they are prohibitively expensive, but 1TB models already exist). In that case, it's quite likely the separation between storage and memory will disappear entirely, and that you could partition your NVRAM drive with 1TB intended as memory. --Link ^(t•c•m) 09:50, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

We were happy to have a 7489 RAM. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 19:13, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

What an interesting video - such a shame it told us nothing about RAMGeneral Rommel (talk) 04:30, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

@Cuddlyable3 - I fail to comprehend the relevance of those four distinguished Yorkshiremen to a 1TB stick of RAM, or even to the 7400 Series ICs. Rocketshiporion♫ 11:18, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Wgetwin mass download

I would like to download a lot of pictures from a server with wgetwin. Here is the URL for the 1st picture for example:

http://img2.iwiw.hu/0201//user/00/96/24/28/6/user_9624286_1293029264899

These pictures doesn't have extensions. The rest of the picures have roughly the same URL, the last five numbers change. My first idea was:

wget -r http://img2.iwiw.hu/0201//user/00/96/24/28/6/user_9624286_12930292*

but this doesn't work, neither does

http://img2.iwiw.hu/0201//user/00/96/24/28/6/user_9624286_12930292[*]

or

http://img2.iwiw.hu/0201//user/00/96/24/28/6/*.*

I tried a few other syntaxes as well and Flashget too but none of them seems to work. How could I do this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.70.54.59 (talk) 13:21, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Globs, in most circumstances, only work when used on local filenames. They are typically interpreted by the shell, which expands to glob (for example) /usr/bin/*hat* by looking through the contents of /usr/bin/, and seeing if any of the files in there contain "hat". But there is no ls (or, since you're using Windows, dir) command for URLs; there's no general way to ask a webserver "what are all of the valid URLs beginning with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?" You'll need to find a list of the URLs you want to download, and run wget on each of them in sequence using the shell. I can't offer advice on shell programming in Windows, though. Paul (Stansifer) 15:36, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

for i in {00000..99999}; do wget http://img2.iwiw.hu/0201//user/00/96/24/28/6/user_9624286_12930292"$i"; sleep 2s; done You could also presumably do curl 'http://img2.iwiw.hu/0201//user/00/96/24/28/6/user_9624286_12930292[00000-99999]' -o '#1.jpeg', but I'm not personally aware of how to tell curl to have a delay before moving to the next item, and IME no delay will get you blocked fairly quickly by any server that's been decently configured. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:46, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Some web servers, like Apache, provide directory listings to show all files available. Other web servers are intentionally configured to deny listing all files - because they don't want you doing what you're doing. If the server admin wanted you to bulk-download the files, they would have made it possible to list all files through HTTP, or given you access via some other protocol. Nimur (talk) 01:02, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Where to post an idea of improving WikiMedia engine?

Hello! Where should I post a concept of enhancement that could be introduced to the WikiMedia engine? The idea deals with making it easier to trace one's own watchlist (in Wikipedia and other Wiki projects).

MusJabłkowy (talk) 16:59, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

You could vet it through WP:VPD first if you like, or go straight to http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/. Bug reports usually go farther if you go ahead and attach a patch that does all the work already, but if it's a truly good idea, someone will get it done regardless. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:49, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

ocropus examples

I just installed OCRopus, but I find the documentation lacking. Can someone point me to some examples of how to use Ocropus to define a form and then read in filled out forms as data? -- kainaw™ 18:14, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

I doubt it exists at the moment. Ocropus isn't really designed for that sort of application. 67.122.209.190 (talk) 05:45, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Compiling Darwin (NOT Mac OS X) or XNU (Darwin's kernel) on Linux

Is it possible to compile Darwin or XNU on Linux? I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx). --Melab±1 ☎ 22:16, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm sure you can in one way or another, but I wouldn't want to bother myself. ¦ Reisio (talk) 22:22, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Here are official instructions from Apple for XNU: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1504.9.26/README - it looks like all you need is compliant C compiler and Make toolchain (sourcecode for both are provided if you don't already have gcc and make). I haven't independently verified that the build works, though. Other open-source tools for Darwin are listed here. Bear in mind that not everything in OS X is open-source - so even if you manage to get all of these tools to build, you won't have a ready-to-boot OS X clone. (You might not have anything that you can boot). These projects are just the kernel. Apple's ports of a few GNU tools, some shells, and some other programs, are also available. But the kernel alone is not the "operating-system." If you aren't sure what the distinction is, you might want to read our article on the kernel. Also read Apple's Darwin & Core Technologies tutorial. If that document does not provide the information you need, chances are high that you are seeking information that's not available. Nimur (talk) 00:44, 25 January 2011 (UTC)