Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 September 9

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September 9

Microsoft Excel question, probably a dumb one

I have a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, it's not for math or formulas, just to keep notes on something. Many of the cells have a lot of text in them (up to a paragraph) but I don't want all the text to be visible in the spreadsheet, as long as I can see it when I click on that cell. Does that make sense? This usually works fine, but occasionally Excel will automatically resize the cell for me, making the entire row taller so that I can see all the text in that row at once. I don't want this; it is annoying and frustrating that I don't know why it sometimes does it or how to fix it. I know that I can change it back by going to the Format menu and selecting Row and manually adjusting the height, but is there an easier way? Instead of fixing it like that each time, I'd rather just know why it's doing that so I can avoid the problem. Thanks in advance for any help you can give. --Grace 01:24, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

It's really hard to tell since we have no idea what you're doing with the spreadsheet. But there are several easier ways: Try selecting the cell, the column the whole sheet, or whatever you want to be displayed in this way and hit Ctrl+1 (the number one). This will give you the Format Cells dialog. In the Alignment tab, either unselect Wrap text or select Shrink to fit, whichever you like better. — Sebastian 09:17, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Hey, that seems to have worked, thank you. --Grace 23:24, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

OS X Address Book and Default Email Address

Hello,

Is there anyway in OS X address book to set a default email address? I have many contacts with multiple email address and I would like to be able to specify one as the one to always send mail to.

Thank you,

--Grey1618 11:02, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Running a game in windowed mode

Hi, I have a game that I would like to run in windowed mode. None of the configuration files I have come upon so far seem to allow such an option to be turned on. The target is "C:\...\RomeTW-BI.exe", do I need to add anything to this to force it to run windowed? Thanks in advance. :)) 81.93.102.185 11:43, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Some programs allow it, some don't. First see if the game has the option to run windowed mode through any of its in-game options. If not, go to the shortcut of the game (or create one) and try changing the target to have a " -window" (with a space) or " -w" and running the game - the two most common switches for windowed mode. Otherwise, you'd have to run an emulator or a sandboxing software that runs in a window to force it to be in a window - but that is often more trouble than it's worth. x42bn6 Talk Mess 12:40, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Also, try ALT-ENTER while in-game. This is a common Windows shortcut for toggling between fullscreen and windowed modes. 68.183.218.134 15:13, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Googling "Total War Windowed Mode" comes up with some options. Try running the application with the switch -ne; apparently that works for some versions. --24.147.86.187 21:35, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

No Emacs in Fedora 7?

I recently updated my Fedora system from version 5 to version 7. The new system boots up nicely, and even remembers my complete profile, but for some reason it doesn't seem to have Emacs installed. What the heck? How can there even be a Unix system without Emacs? JIP | Talk 17:08, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

It may not have been part of the default basic install. Just install it then. Go to Add/Remove Programs and it's listed in there somewhere. --Spoon! 17:34, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I tried, but pirut said that pup was already accessing the update database. Pup has been doing that for half an hour now, clogging up my Internet connection, without showing any signs of actually installing anything. Well, it did say there were 165 updates available, so I guess downloading all of them is going to take a while. I'll have to see tomorrow morning at the latest. JIP | Talk 17:47, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't use any gui package managers. I install it from the command line: yum install emacs. -- kainaw™ 22:08, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, if pirut is updating packages in the background, it's possible that the RPM database will be locked, or that there will be a yum lock. Annoying for the first boot, until you can disable it. -- JSBillings 13:43, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Emacs is not a standard Unix program, so you can't just expect it to be there by default. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.78.64.102 (talk) 22:29, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Now why would you expect Fedora to include a competing OS in its default install? :) --froth^t 22:08, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

cost of cell phone plans

Is the cost of cell phone plans expected by analysts to decrease in a year? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.217.199.246 (talk) 20:34, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

I know my comment is grossly off course but this thread reminds me o0f my rebellion when our english professor shunned the use of passive voice. --Do not click me! 20:23, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

Difference between Mirroring, Failover, Clustering and Load balancing?

What is the difference between Disk mirroring, Failover, High-availability clusters (a.k.a. Clustering?) and Load balancing?

It would seem that Load balancing is different in that it involves a server that redirects traffic to an array of servers which then handle the traffic from there, and each of the servers in the array may be slightly different.

Mirroring / Failover / HA Clusters seems to be multiple servers that [may or may not?] have identical disk images that each act as a backup ready-to-go in case the primary server failed.

Perhaps Mirroring / Failover / HA Clusters may not actually have identical drive contents? Maybe they are all server data in unison, just without another server acting as a Load Balancer?

Help?

--Eptin 22:09, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

That's a lot of questions. Did you check into each of the articles you linked? Keep in mind that many of these look and act the same. Or, you may use multiples of them at the same time. That is, if you have a number of web servers fronted by a load balancer, you could call that a high-availability cluster of load-balanced servers, exhibiting failover. If a web server fails, the load balancer fails over to the remaining ones. There is a cluster of them, and when they are not in a failure state, you can balance the load across them.

Mirroring, in my mind, just means that you've got two identical drives, and you always write the same thing to each. If one drive fails, you still have the other drive -- you can fail over to it. --Mdwyer 04:06, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Smells like homework; however; disk mirroring is generally on a single machine (setting aside remote mirroring provided by SAN clusters.) failover is when you have a hot standby machine, with the master writing data to a shared drive (NAS or SAN) and is brought up after the master fails, load balancing is where two or more machines run at the same time and requests to them are split between machines (with the machines synchronising between themselves if the requests actually change things), high-availability clustering is a combination of load-balancing and failover (where, because two or more machines are running at the same time there is no delay in failover as would happen with non-clustered failover, and data is synced between the machines if they don't share storage). However a lot of the time they're used interchangeably in marketing materials. --Blowdart 05:51, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Bots

Hi, I know about four programming languages, and I know how to put a bot up for approval etc, but what I was wondering was, what do most people find as the most user friendly interface for building a bot, like PASCAL or Python. Thanks! Yamakiri 22:45, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

First, you have to define "bot". There are many definitions of that term in Computer Science alone. -- kainaw™ 00:55, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like the question is in reference to bots on Wikipedia. It doesn't really matter what you develop the bot in; so long as it is compliant with the standards (i.e. it can be deactivated by an admin if it malfunctions, etc). You might consider a technology that allows for easy standard data interchange, such as XML. What are you trying to do? That will help narrow down the "preferred" technology choices. See Wikipedia:Creating a bot for details and tools! Nimur 01:34, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I think the reason most people use Python, anyway, is because there are already classes written in Python to help you interact with the Wiki. That is, you can skip pretty much to the "what should the bot do?" phase rather than worrying about the "how does the bot connect to the internet? how does it log in? how does it differentiate the content? how does it search?" etc. sorts of things. I could be wrong on this, though. --24.147.86.187 01:49, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Since MediaWiki is written in PHP, I'd be rather surprised if there aren't already premade libraries for PHP as well. -- kainaw™ 01:53, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

It wouldn't help things that MediaWiki is written in PHP, since you wouldn't be interacting with its code directly—just its HTTP outputs/inputs. While I find PHP a pleasant scripting language, it is not generally used for things like bots because it does not lend itself to being run endlessly (most PHP scripts have very quick execute times are normally set up to automatically exit if they take more than a few seconds to execute). While you can make PHP iterate over a set of instructions again and again (or run it from command line interface), this is not really what it is good at and not really what it is designed for, and there is no real advantage to using it for such a thing in any case. --24.147.86.187 07:38, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Oh, that's good then thanks! Didn't think about the PHP part though. Yamakiri 10:54, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

• Most people use Python, so I would probably use that. The library will be better, the number of people who can help you will be better, the chances for someone joining in on your project will be better, etc. --Sean 12:49, 10 September 2007 (UTC)