Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 May 22

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May 22

Registry Errors, Junk Files and Broken Shortcuts!

Hey everyone! According to AVG's performance checker, the three things above (Registry Errors, Junk Files and Broken Shortcuts) are very plentiful on my laptop. I have a "high" severity of registry errors, a "high" severity of junk files and a "fairly high" severity of broken shortcuts (I had 13% disk fragmentation as well but I fixed that myself.) Now, AVG says I can download their fixer tool and use it once for free; afterwards of course I'll have to pay for it. So, before I do anything I'd like to know: are there any reliable, free tools I can use to fix these errors that anyone can reccomend? (I've heard of CCleaner but apparently it can malfunction.) Also, should I bother with AVG's tool or should I just go with a free alternative from the start (if there is any good free tool out there...)? PS: I have not run any of these "fixer-tools" ever on my laptop (5 years old!) - yeah I know...but I want to fix them now, at least! :) Thanks for any suggestions! --Yellow1996 (talk) 01:17, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Presumably if a person installed or otherwise submitted themselves to an installation of an “antivirus” application that wasn’t constantly yelling about things, that person might think the application was not worthing having (or, rather, paying for [or potentially paying for in the future after seeing a nag screen]). There is no antivirus package that will make Microsoft Windows not a mess, but there are antivirus packages that will not spout utter nonsense 24/7—try one of those other ones. ¦ Reisio (talk) 04:22, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

So, you're suggesting that AVG is lying to me? I don't think so; as my computer's slowness (not unbearable - but noticeable) cannot be entirely blamed on my near-full hard drive (please correct me if I'm wrong.) And AVG certainly does not nag me about its other features. I initiated the check myself, at no recommendation from the software itself. I've been using AVG for years and aside from one problem it gave me back in April, have found it to be noninvasive and reliable. However, after reading some negative reviews I will not be trying out AVG's tune-up tool; so does anyone have a free cleanup tool they can reccomend for fixing the above errors? --Yellow1996 (talk) 01:25, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

No, I’m only suggesting that AVG like most AV companies makes more money off of perceived user satisfaction than actual protection (and that using an antivirus company’s application to attempt to make Windows more efficient is probably the wrong approach). :p ¦ Reisio (talk) 01:31, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Probably not going to help you re slowness, etc. (despite all those ads on tv for programs that will fix your old computer that got all junked up) Current versions of Windows are less susceptible to actual registry corruption; most of the "errors" are stray entries left behind by programs that don't uninstall well. This doesn't really "corrupt" the registry in the sense that it makes errors, it just adds a bunch of entries that are never accessed. Now you might think that this will slow things down in terms of accessing the registry, but realize that the registry has millions of entries; even a thousand dead items aren't going to make a dent in it. On the other hand, registry cleaners are better in the hands of experts than the average user they're targeted towards. They're not 100% capable of identifying good vs bad entries, as they imply; it's possible to create registry errors with them. I've done that, which is what started me reading up on the subject, resulting in my change of mind. As for broken shortcuts and junk files, they're even less likely to be a problem or slow things down. Junk files may eat up disk space, depending on their size, but shortcuts aren't very big, just clutter up your directories or your desktop. There are all kinds of junk file deleters, (i think even built into windows?). Broken shortcuts are another leftover from badly uninstalled programs, they can leave junk files too (in addition to all the .tmp files, etc). You might do better with an uninstaller program, that are specifically designed to clean up the debris left by known culprits. i haven't any experience with them myself. the other possibility is that the uninstalled programs are leaving dlls, etc. that are still getting installed into memory, but you need to tread very carefully when entering this territory; very easy to delete something crucial thinking it is vestigial. i imagine you've been advised to try defragging your drives, but again this is less of a problem these days; i can also recommend from my experience a freeware called Soluto which allows you to control what gets automatically loaded/run when you boot, what plugins are installed in your browser, etc. Gzuckier (talk) 05:34, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Ah - now I understand. Sorry about the misunderstanding, Reisio. And wow; thanks for the detailed explanation, Gzuckier! I had no idea how negligable the performance drag can be. And personally I would rather leave it then go into a potentially dangerous situation! Well I think now I'll focus my efforts on freeing up some room on my hard drive instead (which definitely needs doing!) - thanks to the both of you! :) --Yellow1996 (talk) 00:49, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Classification of computer language

I'm sure I read a wikipedia article that described a classification system for computer languages, including things like whether two identical objects declared with different names were the same or different, whether there were type declarations, whether methods could be added to existing objects and so on. I can't find it now, and I am wondering whether it was not a wiki aritcle but something else. Can anyone tell me where it is?

List of programming languages by type Comparison of programming paradigms perhaps?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 13:16, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

That's partly it, though I'm sure I saw a structured pages with the types (structural, nominative, etc.) explained on one page. -- Q Chris (talk) 16:23, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions/Comments on Material and Website

The Tab pages of site are not well defined. User can not know how to enter his comments or suggestions regarding material provided. In my opinion, there should be clearly defined window with the heading user comments/suggestions. I think calling 'Muhammad Akram Awan' is not suitable way of regarding spiritual personalities. It should be written in the way 'Hazrat Muhammad Akram Awan'. The history (biography) of Hazrat Muhammad Akram Awan should be as follow: 1. Birth: Date, Location and Family background etc. 2. Primary Education: School/Madarsa etc with Dates and Locations. 3. Higher Education: School/ College/University/Madarsa with type of Education. 4. Occupation Adopted: 5. Achievements/Services in Social Area: 6. Achievements/Services in Religious Area: 7. Spiritual Training with School of Thought: 8. Publications: Urdu/Arabic/English/Etc. 9. Present Services for Public/Govt: 10. Aim of Life: — Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.209.74.130 (talk) 09:38, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

The place for suggestions of this sort is on the talk page of the article in question. This page is for general reference questions about computing.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 14:44, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Web Development Ideas

[This is perhaps a slightly unorthodox question, but I'll go for it all the same.]

I am currently studying Java, JSF and Hibernate in preparation for a web development role. This is all going well but the big problem is that it's hard to actually find examples or, better still, ideas for larger scale projects. Any examples in the books that I'm learning from are typically covered in only a few pages before moving onto the next topic. Combine this with the fact that I'm really just copying out of a book and not thinking for myself that much and it becomes obvious that this learning process is left wanting.

Does anyone have any suggestions for books, or articles or websites or..., that would guide a reader through the stages of Java based web-development and database persistence that I could use? I think this would be extremely beneficial for my education. If I haven't been specific enough in my question, please do ask for more information. Thanks. meromorphic [talk to me] 11:44, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Have you gone through Java Pet Store, the reference web application for Java Enterprise Edition? It is a well-documented example using GlassFish server, Java, and related technologies. Nimur (talk) 13:08, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

GLEW

Hello, I'm experimenting with GL 2.x programming, following the wikibook. Or I would be, if I could even get off the ground.

GLEW is the GL Extension Wrangler, and loosely speaking "extension" means "shader" which means "modern". Using glew seems like a good first step.

So first I've tried to replace gl.h and glu.h with glew.h - as instructed - just to make sure I can use glew at all. (This is just in a small, simple old style GL 1.x program, for a test.)

(I use Windows XP and Pelles C.)

I got these errors:

...gl.h(668): error #1050: Macro redefinition of 'GL_LOGIC_OP'.

...gl.h(669): error #1050: Macro redefinition of 'GL_TEXTURE_COMPONENTS'.

Why, I wondered, am I getting errors from gl.h when I'm not even including it? Well, it turns out glew.h includes glu.h, and glu.h includes gl.h, which does indeed define those labels a second time.

They resolve to the same values, so I could just comment the lines out, but that seems unwise. Clearly this conflict isn't supposed to happen. What's the matter here?

My glu.h and gl.h files were created 13 years ago, so it's conceivable that I need to update them. Where's the proper place to get new versions? (Or is the problem likely something else?)

- I see I can define GLEW_NO_GLU to stop glew.h including glu.h. That's kind of OK, but means I have to throw out a couple of things (gluPerspective, gluBuild2DMipmaps).

 Card Zero  (talk) 15:47, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Typically C and C++ headers protect themselves from errors caused by multiple inclusion by having code that looks like:

// source for foo.h
#ifndef _FOO_H
#define _FOO_H

// do stuff

#endif

Doing this isn't mandatory, but it's certainly good practice. It's done in gl.h on Linux (which uses Mesa), in Visual C++ (which uses Microsoft's own), and Android (which uses SGI/Khronos'). Looking at the SourceForge page for GLEW, they only talk about VisualC++ on Windows, and it's reasonable to infer that VC++ is the only compiler GLEW necessarily supports out of the box on Windows. You might try either the LCC/Pelles mailing lists or the GLEW ones, to see if anyone has managed to wrangle things so they work together - but the path of least resistance (where you're learning about GLEW, not trying to fix it or port it) is to use VC++. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:46, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

There's no shortage of #ifdefs in the GLEW header, making distinctions between MINGW32, CYGWIN, BORLANDC, and UNIX, GNUC, SUNPRO_C, APPLE, and (eventually) WIN32. I kind of assumed the WIN32 path would be well-trodden, but it could be as you say that my choice of compiler is causing a failure in the #ifdef logic.

They do all seem to be clearly laid out, though - indented when nested, and with the #endif commented if the block is a long one - and as far as I can see the offending #definitions of GL_TEXTURE_COMPONENTS and GL_LOGIC_OP are outside of any block, apart from #if defined(_WIN32). So the conflict is a bit inexplicable, it should have shown up the first time glew was tested under windows.

Probably this is too involved for the ref desk and I should take it to either Pelle's forums or the (very slow) GLEW mailing list, or perhaps stack overflow. (I guess in the back of my mind I was hoping the wikibook author might turn up here. I've completed the introduction of the wikibook now - without GLU - and succeeded in drawing a large blue modern triangle! Exiting times.)  Card Zero  (talk) 21:35, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Charging my phone via computer USB compared to wall socket USB plug

Hi, My phone charger is a USB wire that connects to a plug for a wall socket. If I charge my phone using the wall socket, my phone charges just fine and stays a normal temperature. But, if I take the USB cable out of the plug and put it in my laptop for charging, a method of charging that is allowed by the phone manufacturer, my phone charges fine but gets quite hot. Why is this? I know that charging via computer USB is slower than through the wall, so perhaps the more time it spends charging it has more time to heat up. That's my guess. I Googled, and other people seem to find the same thing, but I haven't found why, or if it is indicative of something bad. Given that my phone gets hot charging from my laptop, is it better for it to charge through the wall? Many thanks for any information you can provide! 78.42.201.216 (talk) 19:02, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

What model of phone is it, and how long does it take to charge in each case? Looie496 (talk) 19:48, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

If it's a USB2 device and port, it (probably) can't draw more than 500mA from the USB port (it depends a bit on which charging specification is implemented - see the Universal Serial Bus article), but on the dedicated charger it can draw 1800mA. So on the dedicated charger it draws a lot more current and thus charges faster. I don't know why it gets hotter on the real port rather than the dumb charger. One possibility is that, because it's having to actually be a working USB peripheral (because it appears to the PC to be a disk drive; see USB mass storage device class) the phone can't sleep, and so is using more power (power-miserly devices like phones try very hard to wake up for a new mS to service an event and then immediately go into a low power sleep mode again). My Android phone, when first connected to a port, allows me to chose what mode it should be in - one option is "mass storage", but another is "charge only". In that latter mode it doesn't appear as a disk drive. If your phone has a similar option, try that, and see if it gets warm even when it's not partaking of a USB connection and just leeching USB power only. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:14, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi, thanks, it's an HTC Wildfire S, and I don't know how long each case takes, but I've the feeling that it's shorter from the wall.

Finlay McWalter, your theory was right. Most times I just plug my phone in and don't use my phone to use that screen, but I tried putting it in charge only mode, and in that mode it doesn't heat up.

Thanks! 78.42.201.216 (talk) 13:29, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

edgers

I have q 6' circle that I want to put edgers around. The edgers 1 15/16 thick and 15 3/4" long. What angle do I need to cut the edgers to make this work. Does not need to be perfect but close would help.

-Bill Dill — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.44.72.231 (talk) 20:06, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

OK, I assume the circle has a six foot diameter. You can draw it (as a polygon) with sixteen line segments of length 14 inches. Those lines could represent the inner or outer edges of the "edgers" (I'm not enquiring what those are for, I assume gardening), or even the centre lines. The angles at the corners should be 78.8 degrees (acute angles) and 101.2 degrees (obtuse angles). You'd have to cut them a bit shorter at the same time (14 inches for the inside or outside edges, depending whether you want them to end up outside or inside the circle, respectively).  Card Zero  (talk) 22:27, 22 May 2013 (UTC)

Or! With 15 edgers, the length becomes 14.96 inches and the angles are 78 and 102 degrees. That way you save one edger, lose one plane of symmetry, and possibly cut things too fine.  Card Zero  (talk) 23:17, 22 May 2013 (UTC)