Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 October 1

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October 1

"linking?" (header added by froth^t)

I have about 1500 (html/doc.)files and want to link them.but i dont know HTML coding therefore if you please tell me about a software with which I link them.and want to make an EXE file. usman —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.56.31.3 (talk) 01:49, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

That doesn't make sense- html and doc files are just documents that contain data and have to be interpreted by external code. "EXE files" are executables that run instructions on your processor. Do you want a document that includes the code required to read itself? I've never heard of such a product. It certainly wouldn't be accomplished with HTML coding --froth^t —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 02:29, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Maybe (s)he want something like CHM? --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:50, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

It does require an interpreter though, it's not an executable --froth^t 20:45, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Comparison of CRM Software Solutions - and affiliated (fundraising/donor management)

I am looking for information (non-biased, of course - or minimally) on CRM-type solutions. My specific interest is more in the area of software for a nonprofit fundraising/donor tracking application. The comparisons listed here provide some insights, but not specifically what I'm looking for.

I have looked at Sage, Blackbaud, and some more typical CRM applications.

My general questions/requirements to this community include, but not limited to:

1. I need a database with simply interface to other word processing applications (Microsoft probably) 2. I need a solution that is either Internet-based or can run easily with minimal database admin work on our end

Thank you for your time, and I appreciate any assistance this community can lend.

Thank you.

Rdlevy 03:15, 1 October 2007 (UTC)rdlevy

I'd have a look at SugarCRM if I were you. I have used its interface with Outlook, but couldn't comment on Word. Unfortunately Wikipedia does not yet have a comparison of CRM software, unlike its useful reference for Comparison of issue tracking systems. Wilymage 05:31, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Internet

where are the 10 largest internet nodes that handle the most traffic?

Do a small minority of internet vectors handle a majority of the traffic?

does my payment to my ISP go directly or indirectly (how?) to the companies/organizations that handles these servers?

Otherwise, how are these servers supported financially? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.217.195.89 (talk) 04:58, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You might want to read up on MAE-West. --Mdwyer 16:36, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Or for a fuller, more general article, look at Internet eXchange Point — Timotab ^{Timothy (not Tim dagnabbit!)} 04:19, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

The ISP's and large businesses buy their bandwidth from the telecom companies who own and run the 'backbone' and the interconnect boxes. So your money goes to the ISP and they pay the telecom companies. SteveBaker 14:24, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Yahoo!

What do you mean Yahoo! photos close on Oct.18th? Does it mean that the whole facility will be made unavailable?06:01, 1 October 2007 (UTC)Hedonister

See Yahoo Photos#Shut down of Yahoo! Photos. Looks like it. 138.38.158.152 07:45, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Inputting Japanese kanji

What is the easiest way to input short kanji phrases (such as titles) being read off a printed document, knowing nothing about them but their appearance? NeonMerlin 07:32, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You can look up kanji by radical in most kanji dictionaries. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 07:49, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

wikiscanner

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/dotmil.html

look at how the last entry says "petnagon.mil" which is a typo and doesn't link to pentagon.mil

is there a human typing these things in at wikiscanner or did this domain exist at one point? how could this have happened? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.217.195.89 (talk) 07:44, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I can think of two ways a scanned document could have a transposition error:

1) The original document contained the error.

2) After scanning, a person frequently must edit the results for scanning errors. This provides the opportunity for them to introduce new human errors. StuRat 15:41, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Despite the name "wikiscanner", I don't think document scanning and OCR have anything to do with this question. My guess is that the domain column in that table comes from reverse DNS and someone (a network administrator at the pentagon) made a typo in the zone file, so one IP address or a small group of them returned somehostname.petnagon.mil as its PTR instead of the intended somehostname.pentagon.mil. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:27, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

heheh some overpaid gov't stiff. what an idiot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.217.195.89 (talk) 08:43, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

quesions?

when they say a mouse is optical what do they mean? 2.installing windows vista ultimate on a computer with a speed of 3.2 and ram of 512 mb.is it suicide or my machine can handle it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.202.195.74 (talk) 08:19, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

1. See optical mouse, basically it take a picture of the surface below your mouse lots of times per second and compare them to work out which direction and how fast you've moved it.
2. I don't think Vista is required right now for most uses, and judging by the way you said your specs, it's probably a Pentium 4 Northwood/Prescott 3.2Ghz which, while being notoriously hot, is not exactly a very fast CPU; 512mb is not a lot of ram but it will run Vista, albeit slower than it will run XP (especially if you run the sidebar); And most of all, if you want aero, you need to look at your graphics card, which since is unlisted, I will make an assumption that it will be some integrated chip or a low end card and if that's the case, no you can't use aero. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:36, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

It's suicide. Vista runs smoothly on newer machines (roughly the high end from 2 years ago, and forward) but is very nasty on old hardware --froth^t 20:50, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Froth completely. My suite mate's new Compaq notebook has 1 GB of RAM and AMD 64 X2 something processor (I was told it is one of the latest ones) but still the computer's performance is less than amazing.

You would be pulling it too far. Try MS Windows XP or if you feel adventurous, try Ubuntu (Linux distribution) 7.10 releasing this month. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 22:10, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You didn't tell use what graphics card you have - but you need a REALLY modern one to run Vista decently. Stick with XP or run Linux - you'll be much happier! SteveBaker 14:18, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Problem with Russian characters (solved)

Why when I save the pages these pages [1] in my hard disc, the Russian characters appear as "?????????" I'm using Mozilla Firefox and Windows XP, while browsing the page I see them fine, it's only when I save them to my disc that I have problems. --Taraborn 08:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Gosh, I feel like an idiot. While browsing, the appropriate (Cyrillic whatever) character set was selected, but not while opening the files in my disc. Now I can see the Russian words properly. --Taraborn 09:03, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Linux/Unix: command(s) to return the canonical path to a file

I've been trying to remember a Unix and/or Linux command that returned the canonical path to a file or directory. I've discovered that, at least on GNU, you can do:

matt@matt-desktop:/usr/bin$ readlink -f ls

/usr/bin/ls

I'm sure I used to use another command to this effect, though, but I can't remember it; can anyone suggest what it might have been? — Matt Crypto 11:52, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

For commands, which is what I use, as in which ls. -- kainaw™ 12:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I tend to use the 'stat' program from coreutils. -- JSBillings 13:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

(I'll assume you're speaking of executable files.) where may also work. For example, on my Solaris system under tcsh, it produces:

myprompt> where ls
ls is aliased to ls -l
/usr/bin/ls
/usr/bin/ls
/bin/ls
/usr/ucb/ls
/usr/ucb/ls

Atlant 16:37, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I've seen where on tcsh too, but not on other shells. For many shells, which -a does a similar thing. And where specifically finds an executable in your $PATH.

From the OP's original post, all this which stuff is not what he wanted. He wants to be able to look at a symlink, and determine which canonical path it points to at the end (through possibly more symlinks in between). Although the example is a bad one, since in his case, /usr/bin/ls is not a symlink. --Spoon! 17:04, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I wasn't so worried about whether it was a symlink or not; just that I wanted a path from / to the file (which is what readlink -f does). (I often find that I'm at the command line and I want to just grab the full path to something in the current working directory to paste somewhere else). I could have sworn that I'd used a different command in the past to the same effect, though, and it's been driving me crazy trying to remember it. The related commands that people have posted are pretty interesting, though. — Matt Crypto 10:10, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

There is a namei command whic produces output like this:

$ namei /etc/alternatives/cc
f: /etc/alternatives/cc
 d /
 d etc
 d alternatives
 l cc -> /usr/bin/gcc
   d /
   d usr
   d bin
   l gcc -> gcc-4.1
     - gcc-4.1

showing every step in the resolution of the pathname /etc/alternatives/cc, which involved 2 symlinks. It's distributed as part of the util-linux package. It should work on other unix systems too (it predates Linux according to the date at the top of namei.c) but I'm not sure where else you can get it from. Download util-linux and just take namei.c and compile it if your system doesn't have it. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:17, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

It's a slightly tricky question - UNIX has hard links as well as symlinks. If there are hard links in the path then all bets are off because there is more than one path to the file and there is absolutely no reason to prefer one over the other. Fortunately, symlinks have proved much more convenient than hard links - so you don't see many of the latter anymore. However, there is still a measure of ambiguity to any tool that claims to do this. SteveBaker 14:16, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

This question is pretty old, but showed up near the top in a Google search I just did when I (like the OP) was trying to remember the name of some non-readlink command that I had once used for this purpose. In my case, at least, the command I had used was "realpath", which is installed on my Debian system. Here's the Debian PTS page for more info. Nathan 314159 (talk) 19:31, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Cross posted Microsoft and Google question

I posted this in Humanities because it's more of a business/finance question, but take a look at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Humanities#Microsoft.2FaQuantive_deal.2C_Google.2FDoubleClick_deal. Thanks. - 204.104.55.242 15:58, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Questions about virtual storage space

This is Wiki related, but not HD stuff. Is there a limit on storage space for WP? Is it a concern that edits and such be limited so as to "reduce overhead"? Is Wikipedia "damaged" by arguably unnecessary edits? Lara❤Love 16:23, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

The only limit is in our fundraising. There is an explicit guideline somewhere that you should edit to improve the content and leave the performance to the technical people. Unless you're writing an editing robot, you needn't worry about it. --Sean 17:44, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. That's what I thought. BTW, it's not for a bot. I'm getting my facts straight for a response to an editor who claims a project is a waste of edits and creates overhead because of redundancies. He argues that the project should be merged into another, totally different project, because it damages Wikipedia with unnecessary edits. Lara❤Love 17:48, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Hah, no he's wrong. The cost of a single project's edits in terms of storage space is so vanishingly small that it only has any significance whatsoever when added to a million other pages. Massive projects like WP:AFD or even our own WP:RD might consume a significant amount of money on their own just in terms of storage space, but mediawiki pays for these things, not you and not your deletionist friend, so tell him not to worry about it per WP:DWAP. I'd love to quote you exact figures at how much space the average page's full edit history uses, but we don't have any successful pages-meta-history dumps online right now. Just the stubs is 5GB though! (expands to ~100GB) --froth^t 20:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

The explicit guideline is Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance — Matt Eason ^{(Talk • Contribs)} 18:52, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You can buy a 300Gb hard drive for $100. Even allowing for multiple, redundant copies, backups and the computers to connect them up to, storage costs are down to below $1 per Gigabyte. The text of even the longest and most frequently edited 'normal' article is unlikely to hit a megabyte (even including the edit history) - which is a tenth of a cent worth of disk space! Photos are a much bigger concern and most articles with even one photo in them use more space for that one picture than for all of the text. Donate $20 to the foundation and you've probably bought the Foundation more disk storage than you'll ever consume. Then you can tell this bozo where to go! SteveBaker 14:12, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

SQL questions

In SQL, is it possible to combine several SELECT queries with different ORDER BY clauses into one? For example:

SELECT id, name, opening_date, closing_date, type 
  FROM publication 
 WHERE type = 1 
 ORDER BY opening_date DESC;

SELECT id, name, opening_date, closing_date, type 
  FROM publication 
 WHERE type = 2 
 ORDER BY closing_date DESC;

Can I combine both queries into one that would return me every publication with type 1 or 2 ordered by the respective fields?

Is it possible to dynamically leave out a WHERE condition? For example:

SELECT id, name, opening_date, closing_date, type 
  FROM publication 
 WHERE opening_date >= '01.01.2007';

If I were to pass null instead of '01.01.2007' into the opening_date condition, I would like the query to ignore the condition altogether and just give me every publication. Is this possible? JIP | Talk 18:13, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

When both queries have the same number of columns, you can use UNION ALL between the queries to get all the results from each one. As for your second question, I suggest casting "null" to something like "01.01.1001" to get all publications. -- kainaw™ 18:39, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Will UNION ALL preserve the ordering in both SELECT queries? JIP | Talk 19:06, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

UNION ALL will do nothing to the data. It dumps the results of the first query (usually using the headers for the columns as the headers for the entire "union"), then it dumps the results of each remaining query. So, whatever order the queries are in is the order that they come out. -- kainaw™ 19:11, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You can only have one ORDER BY clause, so you can't just put UNION ALL between your two queries. I think the best you can do is to save the results into temporary tables and then do a UNION ALL on those. AndrewWTaylor 10:26, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

What system are you using, I just successfully did: (select id, name from patients order by name limit 4) union all (select sbp, reason from vitals order by sbp desc limit 10) -- kainaw™ 13:01, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm using Oracle 8.1, and it doesn't work. It gives me an error:

SQL > SELECT id, name, opening_date, closing_date, type FROM publication WHERE type = 1 ORDER BY opening_date DESC
2 > UNION ALL SELECT id, name, opening_date, closing_date, type FROM publication WHERE type = 2 ORDER BY closing_date DESC;
LINE 1: SELECT id, name, opening_date, closing_date, type FROM publication WHERE type = 1 ORDER BY opening_date DESC
                                                                                          *
SQL query terminated abnormally

There's no logical reason why it shouldn't work, but it just doesn't. JIP | Talk 15:14, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

In PostGres and MySQL, I have to put parenthesis around each subquery that I'm joining (as in the example above). I don't have Oracle to test it on that. -- kainaw™ 16:21, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

In Oracle, if I place parenthesis around the subqueries, it fails already at the WHERE clause. JIP | Talk 16:28, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Best Java IDE

A simple question.

What is the best Java IDE for programming by your opinion? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.239.172.228 (talk) 20:17, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You might want to look at Comparison of integrated development environments#Java --Spoon! 20:30, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Maya, 3Ds Max or SoftImage XSI

I am an animator and used the program Blender alot, but now I need a better program. And I have 3 questions for that.

1. What movies, videogames was made by using Maya and SoftImage XSI?

2. What animator program, of the three above, is best for 3D animation?

3. What animator program, in general, is the most powerful? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.239.172.228 (talk) 19:50, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Maya (software)#The History of Maya has some information on 1. Algebraist 20:27, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I can't really answer your questions, (and frankly, the ref desk shouldn't be doing opinions or ratings) but this article was linked from Slashdot today, perhaps it will be useful. --LarryMac | Talk 20:29, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

All these programs are pretty much equivalent when it comes to features and high end animation. 3ds Max is more widely used in the gaming industry, Maya in the special effects, post-prod and add production houses. Maybe target the ideal companies you would want to work for and send them a mail to ask what software they use, this will give you a good idea of which you should tackle first. 80.200.237.26 20:36, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I would also suggest checking out Cinema 4D. It's far the most intuitive and elegant high-end 3D app I've ever used. --24.249.108.133 18:53, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Overall, Maya is by far the most widely used - some computer game companies (like the one I work for) still use 3D Studio MAX - but increasingly we find we need Maya for all sorts of specialised tasks so you'd want to have at least a passing familiarity with both. Other programs may or may not be better - but the differences are marginal in most cases and if you are switching from blender (which is a perfectly good 3D modeller) because you want to get a job - then Maya opens the most doors. If you are just looking for a better animation tool than blender so you can work more efficiently, forget it - they are all pretty similar and none of them add enough value to be worth the thousands of dollars they cost (by the time you get all the add-ons and plugins that is). SteveBaker 14:05, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Google earth elevation map

Hello In google maps earth anywhere the pointer goes it displays the coordinates and elevation but I can't find how to show the elevation map. Is there such a feature in google earth that allows you to see the elevation map? 80.200.229.187 20:26, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

If you mean displaying 3D mountains and such, there is a checkbox called "Terrain" in the Layers palette, which will toggle elevation on and off. - Canley 03:43, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry no, I mean displaying the elevation information as a colored map.Keria 13:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Text To Speech Software Hunt

Can anyone reccomend some simple to use, text to speech software that uses AT&T natural voices. I have downloaded many evaluation versions though not found anything that will read out text with a clear, naturally sounding voice. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.152.179.160 (talk) 20:51, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I know some blind people who swear by JAWS (screen reader). Keep in mind they use this 24x7. wilymage 23:46, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

JAWS is meant for the blind, so the visual interface is rather pathetic. ZoomText (offered by AIsquared) offers a decent voice and visual interface (be sure to get the version with the speech synthesizer). Both JAWS and ZoomText are quite expensive (hundreds of dollars). NVDA is free, has almost no visual interface (just a help panel), and the voice is so-so. iZoom is less expensive and has a free web version (iZoom web beta), but also sounds a bit mechanical.

Many of those products have different voices and speed and pitch settings, so you can customize them to make it sound better. If you just want to cut and paste text into a window and have it spoken, OddCast offers a free trial web version with excellent voices. If you need more info on any of these or need their web sites, let me know. If you find a better product than any mentioned here, please let me know, as this is my field and I'm always looking for better options. StuRat 00:30, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Also, some of the products I mentioned are not available for every O/S. What O/S are you using ? StuRat 00:40, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. I'm running Windows Vista though I have an XP machine aswell. I continues teh hunt last night and 'Text Aloud' is looking like a pretty good option. It has the facility to add on the AT&T Natural Voices which are the best I have heard so far. The reason of this hunt is to provide a digital narration for an educational mathematics video. Saving the speech synthesis (from the AT&T Natural Voices development site) as a .wav file then using Adobe Audition to slightly reduce the higher frequencies and add a small amount of reverb produces a fantastic sounding voice, at times almost identical to human speech. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.152.178.70 (talk) 06:59, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

OK, so you're all set then ? StuRat 13:51, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Yep I think So. Thanks very much for teh help. I love the Oddcast mini app - hours of fun! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.152.178.70 (talk) 14:43, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Macromedia Shockwave player 10.1 in Mozilla Firefox Windows XP

Wile opening this site http://www.calcchat.com/, I was prompted to install missing plugins. I tried it but failed. It then wanted me to do a manual install which I cannot do on a library computer. Is there a solution to it? --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 22:06, 1 October 2007 (UTC) Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.7 Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 2 Needed plug-in: Macromedia Shockwave Player 10.1

Does anyone want to answer this question? Any more information needed? Please let me know. Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 03:27, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

No one interested? --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 12:18, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

u need shockwave

Windows Vista explorer error

This is an error in the Windows Vista Windows Explorer (shell?). It brings up the error message that the windows explorer has crashed in every eleven (yes we have counted it) seconds. Is there an easy way to just disable the error reporting? What is the correct solution in this case? The computer is a Compaq Presario ^{(please forgive spelling)} laptop with AMD 64 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and Windows Vista Home Premium. Thanks. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 22:25, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like there's corruption afoot: re-install your operating system. If this issue persists, and if we were talking about any other operating system, I would be inclined to suggest a hardware fault. Vista is still far from a polished product, if a re-install doesn't fix your issue, you may need to wait for Service Pack 1, or consider an alternative operating system. Such as Linux. wilymage 23:49, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You can run can run the bloated, non-interactive "repair" tool by booting from the vista disk; it'll overwrite essential windows files and may solve your problem --froth^t 00:15, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

So, this is not a spy ware problem at all? What is the first step I should take?

Do you know of any problems with loss of data when reinstalling Vista? I have been using MS Windows for years but I am entirely new to Vista. This error is very annoying to my friend. I would appreciate any constructive comments. Regards, Kushal --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 01:28, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

"Repair" shouldn't break anything --froth^t 02:51, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt reply. I think I will go ahead then. Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 03:26, 2 October 2007 (UTC)§

In XP, right click My Computer, click Properties, Advanced, Error Reporting, and disable it. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 07:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I think this is exactly what I want. How do I accomplish this feat in Windows Vista, though? --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 12:29, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Control Panel, Problem Reports and Solutions, Change Settings, Advanced Settings, Off. --froth^t 18:18, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, will try it today. --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 01:17, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

MS Word lists

I went to Formatting, selected "Bullets and Numbering", selected "Outline Numbered", and then selected the dash-circle-square style, but I still can't get a multi-level list when I press TAB. What am I doing wrong? --Lazar Taxon 23:24, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You should be able to press return, then tab. I only have Word 2003 to test on.

You could try playing with "Tools" > "Auto Correct Options" > "Auto format as you type" > "Set left- and first-indent with tabs and backspace." wilymage 23:43, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

You could also just use the "Increase Indent" command/button (it is usually just to the right of the bullets button). --24.147.86.187 01:11, 2 October 2007 (UTC)