Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 September 29

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September 29

.CGF

How do I open .cgf files? - 81.158.75.136 16:36, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I suggest you read this page to try to figure out if any of these match. All of the looks pretty obscure to me, and it is very possible that it is some other obscure file format they don't know of. Jeltz talk 19:10, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Hacking modems/routers

How can i hack my router for greater speeds ? i am using vsnl broadband 128kbps unlimited package .I have a adsl2+ router and its model number is TAD100.the maximum download rate it is giving me now is 12kb/sec.I just want to know any tips,tricks or hacks to increase download rate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.246.7.17 (talk) 01:37, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Your router? That would do nothing AFAIK. You mean your dsl modem? IANAL but I wouldn't be surprised if it were actually criminally illegal, and I'd be even more afraid if the ISP actually owns the modem and you just lease it (likely). Don't even try; I'm sure you'd have to keep up with the latest developments regularly in order not to get caught, and it's not worth it --froth^t 02:10, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I doubt it's possible at all; I'm on normal ADSL but when I had 128kbps upload my ADSL sync speed was only at 160kbps, so no matter what you do you can't go beyond that; Once reached their servers, they will throttle you according to your login so there's very little you can do there, unless you go out and phish for someone's unlimited account, which is definitely illegal. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:13, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I did read something about this about a month ago, but I'd say the risks aren't worth the reward. 128kbps is not a lot, I hope you're not paying anything over $30 or so a month. That's not much better than dial-up and real broadband is cheaper these days than before. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 11:01, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

For cable modems at least, often the bandwidth limit will be artificially imposed by the modem (downloaded through special channels from the ISP when you pay for a plan); presumably this makes the connection more stable because packets dont have to travel for milliseconds before you find out that they're not going to get there because they're being dropped by the ISP. So there are ways to open your modem and modify it. I've never actually done it but it seems pretty involved- most require soldering IIRC. And risky. Don't do it --froth^t 17:43, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Translating machine code

It has occured to me that translating machine code from one system configuration (ie. i386 windows xp) to another (ie. sparc linux) would be an alternative to emulation. Is there any work being done on this? Resources? 70.72.13.55 03:00, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Binary translation or possibly just-in-time compilation. Pretty nasty performance on the first one, OK for the 2nd. --froth^t 05:30, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Transmeta processors perform something slightly analogous, translating x86 machine code into native instructions; in theory they might also do the same for other architectures. --LarryMac | Talk 15:37, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

linux

i have a pc with intel 965 motherboard,processor-core2duo... i was not able to install any version of the linux.. unable to boot from cd is the error message... i have tried it with different cd rom... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.212.244.66 (talk) 04:41, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

What Linux distribution did you try? What's the error message? Did you burn the CD yourself? What speed did you burn it at? It, like Windows CD's if you have ever used nLite and make custom Windows install CD's, needs to be burnt at 4x speed to decrease the chance of errors on the disc. There's probably a check for errors command on the LiveCD before you get into the system, try doing that and see if there's any error. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:10, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

If your booting from HDD or floppy to access the CD-ROM, your drive may not be compatible with CD-RW - especially if its an old computer. But, as its a "core2duo", antiliveds answer is probably right. Did you burn the Linux distribution from ISO or just copy the actual files to the disk? Think outside the box 14:46, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I may sound dumb but if you can boot from you optical drive, my next question is how much RAM do you have? Can you try using one of the LiveCDs? Try Xubuntu (if regular Ubuntu and Fedora core fail). Let us know the results. --Kushal^{Click me!} --Kushal^{Click me!} write to me 22:17, 1 October 2007 (UTC)write to me 22:16, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

copying DVDs to CDs.

To whoever it may concern. How will I transfer movies from a DVD to a CD?

S.G. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116.193.137.113 (talk) 05:43, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

You don't! Or, you can, but it's difficult, won't play in a DVD player, and will have to be compressed so much as to be virtually unwatchable! If you are simply looking to back up the DVD (not make it playable in a drive but available to burn later from a computer as standard data), you could probably rip the DVD, and then either spread the chapters over multiple CDs, or you could convert the .vob files to .avi, optionally edit them with a video editor like Windows Movie Maker, and then burn them. Keep in mind a DVD usually stores upwards of 4.31 GB, compared to a CD's 700MB, a clearly substantial difference. -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 10:59, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

You could try AutoGK to rip the DVD; config it right and it'll give you a good quality 700MB avi file per DVD movie. You could burn that to a CD or even encode it to a Super Video CD with will play on a DVD player. Think outside the box 14:51, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Yahoo! photos

They say we can store limitless number of photos in "my photos" in our Yahoo! account.But my number of photos is only 16 and the 17'th photo is not getting loaded into it.06:19, 29 September 2007 (UTC)Hedonister|^(talk)

Well, I'm not sure how to solve your problem, but Yahoo photos closes on October 18th. You might want to think about downloading all your photos by then, not uploading more. Think outside the box 14:16, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Enlarging digital images - removing zigzaging from pixels

When you enlarge small digital photos, you often get a blurred zig-zag line on the diagonal boundry between one region and another. If you were for example painting an enlarged copy of the image then it would be straigtforward to straighten the zig-zag by re-drawing it as a straight line seperating the two regions. Is there any computer software anywhere that can do this automatically please? This is different from just a sharpening algorithmn. Thanks 80.0.106.37 09:40, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Depends on what type of image you are tracing, and how good you want it to be. If you're talking about photographs, no there aren't any programme that will convert it to vector image in any appreciable quality (or even if one exist, it will be gigantic and way too slow), and and upsampling will not bring back lost information; If you're talking about drawings and diagrams, you can use Inkscape and its built in tracer to trace it to vector, but it's much neater to do it by hand. --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:07, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

The issue is that it isn't exactly what the user thinks it is. From a human perspective, we see the badly pixelized image and think that it would be so easy to draw a line between two differently colored sections. However, those colors are not as distinct to the computer. Each one is a combination of red, green, and blue. How do you get the computer to recognize exactly where the line is? It is subjective. You have to know the subject of the photo and then which colors are similar and which are different. All in all, it is not anywhere close to a simple program. It is a similar task to that of trying to program a human brain. -- kainaw™ 13:33, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

There are programs that can scale up photographic images with less artifacts than the simple bicubic interpolation used by most raster graphics editors. A couple I know of include PhotoZoom Pro (formerly known as Shortcut S-Spline) and Genuine Fractals, but I'm sure there are others —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 13:55, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Another approach is to just blur the pic, so the zig-zags are less visible. That isn't as good as other methods, but just about any photo editing program can do this. StuRat 16:06, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

You might be interested in Potrace or Scale2x. -- BenRG 17:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you BenRG, from the samples Scale2x looks good, but like the others lacks a simple non-programmer's interface. Thanks 80.0.120.38 20:11, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

email password

can i change the password of my email196.203.125.247 09:54, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

You can change your password on essentially every web-based email provider in existence. If you said how you access your e-mail, we might be able to help (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and so forth). -Wooty [Woot?] [Spam! Spam! Wonderful spam!] 10:52, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Mozilla Firefox

Where can I download Mozilla Firefox version 3.0a8 ? Because I found only Firefox 2.0.0.7 .--125.24.55.130 10:46, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Here you go, first link from googling "firefox gran paradiso download". --antilived^{T | C | G} 10:55, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

I still can't find it because my English isn't very good and I do not well at downloading,thank you. --125.24.55.130 11:21, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

That is the wrong link, it's for an older alpha release. Here is the correct link. Depending on whether you use BillOS, MacOS or Linux, click on one of the links at the top, and it should start to download. JIP | Talk 13:29, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Since the questioner already said that his/her English was not good, maybe you should leave your OS fanboy-ism at the door and just say "Windows" instead of "BillOS". --LarryMac | Talk 15:32, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that. JIP | Talk 16:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

>.> --froth^t 17:40, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Binary to ASCII

Are there any programs that allow a user to encode binary data (ie photos, windows programs, etc) into ASCII text files? Hyper Girl 13:44, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

You don't quite say why you want to do that. Assuming you want to store or transmit binary data over a medium that either only supports ASCII or that sometimes does weird stuff to non-ascii data, then Uuencoding and Base64 will help - both articles describe the algorithm and also provide links to programs that do the job. 217.42.190.82 15:07, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll check them out. Any specific programs for the job? Hyper Girl 15:14, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

hehe --froth^t 17:39, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Microsoft Word and Excel “*” characters

I have downloaded some tabular material, and there are a number of asterisks scattered throughout it. I'd like to change them into in-line notations, but whenever I try to do a “find-and-replace” in Microsoft Word, it interprets the “*” I enter as a wild-card character. Same thing in Excel. Is there any way in these programs to get these programs to change every “*” to other text? — Michael J 15:32, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

You can turn off wildcards, at least in my version of Word (Word 2004 for Mac). Find > Click the little "show more options" button > Uncheck "use wildcards". --24.147.86.187 16:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Aha! It works. I didn't see that check-box there. Thank you. — Michael J 16:16, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

In MessyWord, various special search codes begin with '^', so I'd try '^*' as an alternative to turning off wildcards. —Tamfang 05:59, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Java screensaver for Mac OS X

Is there any way to start a java-program (a jar, that is) as a screensaver in Mac OS X? That is, let it start after a period of inactivity? --Oskar 16:32, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Multiple MediaWiki installations using the same source

I would like to install 2 MediaWiki installations using the same source files, one wiki at article.example.org which points to example.org/article, the other at development.example.org, which points to example.org/development. The source files are located at example.org/wiki. This is on a shared webhost. Is there any way using Apache mod_rewrite and .htaccess files, that I can get article.example.org/wiki and development.example.org/wiki to rewrite to example.org/wiki? Thanks,  Shardsofmetal  20:42, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

It's a DNS issue methinks but I have no idea how to resolve it as I've never owned a domain name. Ask WP:VP/T about the mediawiki installation. I doubt it'll be easy at all --froth^t —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 23:00, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Sorting Columns in Wiki Tables

Can anyone explain this to me? When you create a Table in Wikipedia, you can have its columns become sortable. See this for an example: List of Best Actor winners by age at win. So, here are my questions. When you sort the date columns, for example, entries like "April 13" will appear before "April 1" ... or "April 23" will appear before "April 2". When you sort the annual column, for example, entries like "12th Annual" will appear before "1st Annual" ... or "29th Annual" will appear before "2nd Annual". When you sort the age column, for example, entries like "50 years, 299 days" will appear before "50 years, 3 days". It seems that, in computer programming language, a character like "111" (for example) is considered to be alphabetically in order before a character like "3" (for example). So, it appears that the correct "alphabetical order" in computer programming language is something like this: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 1, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 2, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 3 ... etc. So, as a result, essentially the columns do not get sorted in the intended (i.e., correct numerical) order. My questions:

1. Why is this happening?
2. Is there a way to fix this ... or to compensate for the incorrect sorting?
3. Why does this not happen when you sort the very first column (Rank)?
4. Is there some mistake or error in the sorting program or is it working correctly?
5. If there is an error in the sorting program, how does that get fixed?
6. If there is not an error in the sorting program, is there a way to change the sorting program so that it actually sorts "correctly" (I guess, numerically instead of "alphabetically")?
7. Is there a way to make the program sort a name like "Henry Fonda" as "Fonda, Henry" (the way it normally would be alphabetized, under "F" and not under "H")?

Thanks a lot. (Joseph A. Spadaro 21:08, 29 September 2007 (UTC))

The sorting Javascript appears to be contained here. From a quick glance at it:

1 and 3: it seems to detect whether or not the information to be sorted is a number or is text. It is thinking that "12th Annual" is text because it contains textual as well as numerical data. It does not seem smart enough to detect whether or not the first part is a number and should be sorted in such a way.

2 and 5 and 6: one could hypothetically write javascript that was able to better detect these things. Not the sort of thing I'm good at (haw haw), but I'm sure one of our budding CS majors could figure out an optimal way to do it.

4: Well, it is working "correctly", it just isn't programmed to handle data of that sort

7: Only if it could detect it was a name. At the moment there is no way to "signal" anything to the sorting algorithm. If you could, though, it would be trivial to have it sort the other way. But you wouldn't want it to assume that every two or three word phrase was a name.

Hope that is reasonably reassuring... --24.147.86.187 22:14, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Fixed your formatting --froth^t 23:09, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

The reason "111" sorts before "3" is that "111" isn't a character, it's three characters, the first of which (1) sorts before 3. There's a simple solution to this: treat "111" as a character. More precisely, split the line into tokens matching [1-9][0-9]*|[^1-9] (with maximal munch), and do a lexicographical sort of those tokens, ordering all the numeric ones in their numeric order. Note that it's important that a leading 0 not be allowed in these multi-character tokens, since otherwise you can get distinct strings that compare equal. Some further refinement would be necessary to handle decimal fractions; anything beyond that is probably hopeless. One hassle of this sorting scheme is that it doesn't deal sensibly with hexadecimal, but I suppose this wouldn't bother most non-programmers. Whether this can be implemented efficiently in Javascript I have no idea. -- BenRG —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 01:25, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Javascript has its own sort() function which can handle different types of sorting of arrays. I guess if it were up to me I'd create two arrays: one for sorting, one for displaying. The sort array would be the same as the display array unless certain conditions were met; for example, if it were something that started with numeric characters and then had textual characters, the sort array would be only the numeric characters, and then it would sort them as if they were numeric (not textual). That would be a relatively easy fix and would be quick to implement. --24.147.86.187 03:08, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Itunes

Ok - so after being a creative zen man for a long time, I've got an ipod shuffle to use in the gym - great little player, so far so good - the problem seems to be itunes. I only use the shuffle for podcasts and when I'm checking what podcasts I have in itunes I'd like to arrange them in date released or maybe by name etc.. except none of the tabs do anything, you click on them but nothing happens, they don't re-order. Am I missing something obvious or is this a known bug? --Fredrick day 23:13, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

iTunes doesn't really work like that in default, it only sorts the most recent episodes for each feed (which I don't mind, it's by far the most logical way to do it). To do what you are asking, you should add a smart playlist (from the File menu, I believe). I have iTunes in swedish so I can't give you exact instructions, but add one and set it to only contain podacasts (you choose "Podcast" from the first drop-down and then "Is true" from the second, again, I don't know the exact words since I have it in a different language, they might be different). You can limit the list to only the most recently added or whatever, or you could just have them all. From there you can sort it any way you want, and you can even browse it and cover-flow like for the main library. --Oskar 06:25, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

em.. so what are the purpose of the tabs if they are non-functional? --Fredrick day 13:56, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

To show you additional information, like how long a song is and how big it is and stuff. This is just how the podcasting section works, it's done like a tree with the shows in order from each feed. It's by far the most logical way of doing it, and I've personally never been bothered by it, I think it works way, way better than any other podcast reader I've ever seen. --Oskar 18:43, 30 September 2007 (UTC)