Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 July 28

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July 28

2D or 3D Animation software for AVCHD high definition partially simulated rock video?

I have three questions regarding Sony's AVCHD software that comes with their HDD based high definition video camera,recording in the AVCHD format. The first one is that the Sony PMB software plays O.K. on my dual core computer, a few years old now and with a very average graphics card for the time-maybe a bit of motion blur occasionally-but perfect on a stand alone Blu-Ray player, which I do not own yet, (and won't until an HD television comes out with the dynamic range and colour gamut of CRT) but the only player that works independently of PMB, which will not recognise Blu-Ray (apparently windows XP knows nothing about Blu-ray drives) is AVS4YOU but this is jerky even when played on the main internal hard drive of my computer, from the old DVD drive (before it was replaced) or anything else. The PMB software has a "convert to AVCHD" option, but seems to only allow a write to disk-and I can only write to the Blu-Ray using Cyberlink. Cyberlink recommends an upgrade to my graphics card. I suppose I could write to a AVCHD to DVD and then copy back to Blu-Ray, but the whole point of a Blu-Ray drive was not to have to break up HD files to fit on the limited space on DVD. So why can PMB (even with an average graphics card) do what stand-alone players can't? My second question is are there any programs that would let me electronically paint in fine detail individual frames lifted from original footage from my camera for 2D animation/alteration and then create a full HD animation in AVCHD format, also are there any reasonably priced photo-realistic 3D animation programs that could do the same, and by photo-realistic I mean good enough to render human faces convincingly given multi-angle photographs or possibly even laser scans? Also, if I bought an array of cheap web-cams and plugged them into my computer, or a cluster of computers, lets say a ten by ten 2D matrix, effectively creating a synthetic aperture with vertical and horizontal parallax, would future technology allow these images to be turned into moving HD holographic films? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.1.80.1 (talk) 05:33, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Banner

I am using AppleMac Snow Leopard and want to send a photo by e-mail but need a banner across the photo with "Copyright" Can anyone tell me how to do this please; many thanks in anticipation.--Artjo (talk) 09:52, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

What you need is some kind of image editor. GIMP is one free one, though it can sometimes take a little work to install if you don't already have X11 installed. (X11 is on your OS X DVD under the "optional installers," I believe, or you can get it from here, apparently.) With GIMP, you can add text to an image pretty easily, or put it on a semi-transparent layer over the original image, etc. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:24, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

If you have ImageMagick installed, you can do this from the command line (which is particularly handy if you need to automate this process, such as tagging a bunch of images). You'd just say convert in.jpg -pointsize 30 -draw "text 40,40 'COPYRIGHT'" out.jpg or whatever. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 12:47, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

ImageMagick is a pain and a half to install and get working on a Mac, unfortunately, even for someone who is tech savvy. It requires all sorts of installing of a ports handler and compiling from binary and setting system variables and other nasty Unix things. It's not like on a PC where you can just download the precompiled "convert" binary and drop it in and have it work. (I find this exceptionally lame, as you might have picked up.) It took me about three tries to get it working, and maybe about 15 hours of dorking around with it, because I'm not very Unix-savvy (even though I am very Mac and PC savvy). A very frustrating experience! --Mr.98 (talk) 14:06, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Oh dear, That's very disappointing. I'll certainly bear that in mind before recommending IM to another Mac user. Tell me, is GraphicsMagick any easier (a quick check of its download page suggests it's much the same)? -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 14:19, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't think installing ImageMagic is much harder than typing "sudo fink install ImageMagic" (which is how I got it). You need to set up Fink, of course, but you want that (or MacPorts), anyways - for (proper) Emacs, LaTeX, gawk, and all the other indispensable UNIX tools. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 16:50, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, well...thanks for this, but it all seems too complicated for this ageing non-techie,( I'm still trying to understand FM radio!). Any more simpler solutions out there please?--Artjo (talk) 13:00, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe this program? It seems like a pretty straightforward, easy image editor. Download it, install it, open the image, click the "text" tool (the "T"), click where you want it to say "copyright," type out "copyright." --Mr.98 (talk) 14:06, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for all these ideas, but I have decided on the idiot proof idea of taking the photo, printing out the banner, sticking it across the photo, re-photoing it and mailing that, real 'Blue Peter' approach!--Artjo (talk) 07

57, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

(e/c)If it's just the one (or a few) photo(s), I would consider using an online photo editor such a Picnik which allows to to upload photos, make alterations to them, and save the altered photo to your computer, from whence you could send it by email the normal way. There are a number of online photo editors, but Picnik was the one off the top of my head, and it's fairly intuitive. However, there are some instructions which do what I think you want under the cut.

Extended content

Start at http://www.picnik.com/app#/home/welcome Click Upload a photo When the photo is displayed, click the Create tab, then choose Text Type the text you require in the box on the left hand side, choose a font. Click the Add button. The text should be displayed over the image in a box with circles at the corners (it may not be in right position/right size) On the right hand side, choose a text colour, text size and alter any other settings you require. The change the size of the text box (if all the text is not visible), click and drag the circles at the corners of the box. Click and drag the centre of the box to move it to a different position in the image. When you're happy with the image, click the Save and Share tab at the top. Change the file name so you don't overwrite your original image (eg. picture_edited). Click Save Photo. In the boxe that appears, choose where you want to save the photo. You can now attach the photo to an email.

If the image is very large, you would probably be better using a downloadable program as Mr. 98 suggests. I'm not sure what the limit on file size is at Picnik, and it could take a long time to upload a large photo. The techniques to edit the photo will be much the same as described above. I tested this on a Windows PC - this shouldn't make a difference to the website, but the process of saving the image might be slightly different than described; it's been ages since I used a Mac. Apologies if I have simplified too much (it's my day job!) --Kateshortforbob _talk 14:22, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks Kateshortforbob, that works a treat and even this idiot managed to do exactly what I wanted. Thanks again.--Artjo (talk) 14:45, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Wget with cookies

I'm trying (under Windows XP) to download a document from an Intranet site with Wget. When I type the URL into the Internet Explorer address bar, I get the page I want, but with wget I only get a small file which says "the application has been idle for too much time". I assume this is because this application could not read the cookie it expected, so I exported cookies from IE (this gave me a file containing an entry with the relevant domain name) and then I called wget with --load-cookies as explained here. However, I still get the same error message. Any idea? Perhaps the exported cookies file from IE doesn't contain the session cookies the above-mentioned wget man page mentions? If so, how can I get the relevant cookie in the exported cookies file? Apokrif (talk) 10:53, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

You might just need one cookie name and value. In Internet Explorer you can enter javascript:alert(document.cookie); into the address box to display an alert box with the current page's cookie values. When the alert box is on the screen, you can press Ctrl+C to copy the text of the alert box. You can then paste the text into Notepad to look at it further. Once you find a cookie name and value that looks like what you need, here are two ways you might be able to use it with wget.

• As suggested on the wget manual page, you can try using --no-cookies --header "Cookie: name=value" to manually send a specific cookie on every request.

• Alternatively, the cookie.txt file is plain text, so you may be able to manually insert a cookie into the cookie.txt file and use the --load-cookies option. Per the wget manual page, wget uses the non-standard expiration value of 0 for session cookies.

--Bavi H (talk) 00:58, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Hiding a Windows taskbar button

In Windows XP, I'd like to be able to hide individual taskbar buttons that appear in the Windows Taskbar as I launch applications or open folders. (I'll switch back to those apps by alt-tabbing with the Task Manager.) Is there a way to do this? Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:23, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

From memory, in WXP you can "auto-hide" the Taskbar, so that it disappears until you hover over its location with the mouse pointer. To do this, place the pointer on the Taskbar, right click and look for the auto-hide option. This might suit your purposes. Dolphin (t) 06:33, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Actually I am looking to hide the individual taskbar buttons, not the entire taskbar. Googling yielded a few downloads that claimed to do what I want, but I don't want to install random people's software for this application. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:42, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

How easy to program? Geotagged images overlayed on OpenStreetMap

How easy (in relative terms) would it be to program software that would place images on a map like with the Flickr Map feature or Google's Panoramio layer?

This is for a kiosk concept. The photos would be stored on the display computer, and the system could be fully connected to the Internet to access the most current OpenStreetMap information, or the geostuff could be on the system as well.

Ultimately, I'm hoping for something that could be added upon, when more pictures are available to be geotagged and included. -- Zanimum (talk) 16:41, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

That is a feature of the combination of using Google's Google Earth and Picasa programs. If you have both running, geotagging a photo in Picasa makes it show up on Google Earth as a thumbnail that you can enlarge. -- kainaw™ 16:47, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I suppose that would work. But would I be able to lock it down, being a public access terminal, so people couldn't delete and rotate stuff? -- Zanimum (talk) 17:10, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I am not sure I fully understand what you are trying to do, but I would encourage you to look into using the Javascript Google Maps API. It is very powerful and quite easy to use, as far as geotagging goes, overlaying images, syncing with a database, etc. If it were me (assuming I kind of understand what you are doing), I would program some kind of AJAX-y machine that would be locally hosted (but have internet access), and then make the kiosk computer lock to that particular locally-hosted page. It would take a bit of work, but it is well-within the abilities of your average scripter (that is, it doesn't require knowing how to do things with maps very specifically or with images very specifically — just a little nosing around with the Google Maps API, your server-side scripting language of choice, and a database). --Mr.98 (talk) 18:53, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Wget batch files

On Windows, if I run a .bat file with:

wget -mk http://example.com
wget -mk http://elpmaxe.com 

only the first job (http://example.com) is done, and once its finished the second job is ignored. Why is this, and what do I need to do to make it do both jobs? 82.43.88.151 (talk) 16:44, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Would the wget you're calling happen to be a batch file too? What happens if you put 'start' (or maybe even 'start /wait', but can't check right now if that's a valid option) in fron of the wget command ? Unilynx (talk) 22:49, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

You want the call command for that trick. --Tardis (talk) 15:29, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Wireless routers

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good one? Thanks. 24.189.87.160 (talk) 17:55, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

It depends on what you plan to do with it. How many computers will you use (including wifi devices and consoles)? What is the distance between the devices and the router? What kind of security do you want? Do you have a favorite color for the case? Do you plan on calling tech support for the router? -- kainaw™ 17:59, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Two laptops, one printer/scanner (that I plan on buying in the future), my router would be in my room, which is where I mostly use it, although I do move around my apartment a bit, but it's very small. A dual-band router would be nice. 24.189.87.160 (talk) 18:10, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

There is nothing special about those requirements. Any router will work fine. -- kainaw™ 13:44, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Any new router should work, assuming the laptops aren't really old. All of the new routers use either 802.11g or 802.11n. Both standards are compliant with the older 802.11b standard -- but not 802.11a. 802.11n offers greater range and speed than 802.11g, but the range and speed won't matter since you'll be connecting everything in an apartment and to a home Internet connection.

I don't like Belkin routers very much because they are unreliable and Belkin support isn't very good. Belkin is one of the cheapest brands. I've had better experiences with Linksys and Netgear routers. This is the router I use at home.--Best Dog Ever (talk) 22:07, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

ASbot ?

I just got an email saying ASbot on the Ukranian wikipedia has created a user page for me... see http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8F_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B0:Sf5xeplus and http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8F_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B0:ASbot

I don't speak ukranian, what's going on? Am I a spy now? Sf5xeplus (talk) 19:43, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

This is a phishing message and you should permanently delete the message and move on. Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:02, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

ASbot appears to be a bot that welcomes new users. If you've got the unified login thing enabled when you visited the Ukranian wikipedia it would have automatically made you an account. You can safely ignore it, although personally I think you should complain to Wikimedia because it's rather dumb to have accounts being automatically made just because you visited a page there when you have no intention of ever editing that wiki 82.43.88.151 (talk) 20:05, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

This has happened to me on several of the foreign-language Wikipedias. They detect your account via Wikipedia's Unified Login system - one user-account is valid on all language wikipedias. Some of the foreign-language bots do not realize that your primary usage is English Wikipedia and will send you welcome-messages in the robot's native language. It is probably not a phishing-message (unless the email directs you to a non-Wikipedia.org website); it's just an overly-friendly robot that doesn't speak very good English. Nimur (talk) 20:09, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Check the actual targets of the links in the email; they probably don't point to wikipedia urls (something any half-decent email client should have noticed and warned you about). If so, see Wikipedia:Phishing e-mails. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:27, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I think I copied the links above - they appear to link to http://uk.wikipedia.org - is there something hidden I should be looking for?87.102.76.166 (talk) 21:04, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Take a look at how the links in Wikipedia:Phishing e-mails appear when you mouse-over them - the plain text of the link is to wikipedia.org (that's what you'll get if you cut-and-paste) but the real link goes (in that case) to www.fbi.gov (in most web-browsers, and the mini-web browsers inside modern email clients) that destination URL will appear in the status bar at the bottom, or in a little popup. The phishing emails likewise appear to go to wikipedia.org, but mouseing over them shows they really go to some site like en.wikipedia.org.abcedfh.d0000000000000.evil.cn -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:42, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

ok . In this case it looks like they are from uk:wikipedia - the status bar text matches the display text.Sf5xeplus (talk) 22:03, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Resolved

GUIdebook

One of my favourite websites is GUIdebook. Unfortunately, however, it seems no longer to be active; the last update appears to be from 2006. Is there any other site of this kind, that is actively maintained? --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:48, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Desktop environment#Gallery? Nimur (talk) 20:18, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Not quite comparable, I'm afraid. --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 21:02, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Maybe ToastyTech GUIs will do (even if the author has a few strange misconceptions about things). --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 00:38, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Cyrillic

Actually I've got another question relating to Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing#ASbot ? - obviously (?) the long bit of the URLs are hex codes for 8bit values

eg http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B1%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8F_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B0:Sf5xeplus

.. They don't display as cyrillic on wikipedia, or in the email, yet in the browser status bar they do appear as cyrillic - I guess it's one of the 8 bit types described at Cyrillic_alphabet#Computer_encoding

Which encoding is used, and how does the browser know (sometimes) that it's cyrillic, (or is the text editors that are failing) - I'm not seeing cyrillic in the main window - but when I hover on the link I do ? Sf5xeplus (talk) 22:03, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

It's utf-8. To verify, consider the Ukranian Wikipedia's page for Ukraine, http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Україна (which will show as http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%97%D0%BD%D0%B0). We can encode and decode unicode to UTF8 using Python ('cos I'm too lazy to do it by hand), with a line like

   u'Україна'.encode('utf-8')

which returns

   '\xd0\xa3\xd0\xba\xd1\x80\xd0\xb0\xd1\x97\xd0\xbd\xd0\xb0'

(the same hex chars, just escaped using Python's way rather than the web way). See this page for Cyrillic chars, showing their UTF-8 codes. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:31, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

percent encoding says "The generic URI syntax mandates that new URI schemes that provide for the representation of character data in a URI must, in effect, represent characters from the unreserved set without translation, and should convert all other characters to bytes according to UTF-8" -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:34, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

ok thanks I think I understand now - it's percent encoded UTF8, and from the 'percent encoding' article I gather the reason plain UTF8 is not used is to give a method to distinguish between "/" as a separator, and a "/" that doesn't have any special meaning ie just 'text'. (as well as preventing crazy newlines etc when sending raw binary).

Somebody tell me if I got that wrong..Sf5xeplus (talk) 23:08, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Plain utf-8 isn't used because it's still a binary code, and URLs have to be rendered finally in ASCII (well, strictly don't have to, but you run into compatibility hell, as there isn't a standard means to state what encoding non-ASCII chars in a URL have). That 'У' character, which has unicode codepoint 0x0423, is utf-8 encoded as 0xD0A3. Neither 0xD0 nor 0xA3 are valid ASCII (they're > 0x7F), so they need to be percentage encoded. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:17, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

If you're thinking that all of this is rather elaborate and inefficient, you're right. The percentage encoding explodes the size of non-ascii chars and obviates much of the good the clever variable-length encoding of utf8. If you were designing urls now, from scratch, you'd probably just specify utf8 and nothing else. But they had to bolt this on years after the fact, when percentage encoding was already used for reserved ascii characters, when those reserved characters already had meaning, and when the use of non ascii chars was a variable, badly-specified minefield. Tim Berners-Lee once said the only thing he regrets is the 2nd slash in http:// but I rather think he'd regret this stuff too. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:29, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

To compound the complexity, in addition to the URI's suffix, the actual DNS names can also be non-ASCII-fied now. Internationalized domain names are already permitted; it used to be just a special markup "xn--(character encoding)", but now any valid Unicode character can be used in a DNS name. This of course represents a very serious phishing hazard, and I'm a little woried that there are not good solutions to prevent such attacks in the future. Maybe browsers can color-code Unicode symbols if they are out of the locale's normal character set? Nimur (talk) 04:23, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

In addition to the punycode solution, which the article you linked mentions (and which itself seems very flawed), I've seen proposals for browsers to colour-code chars based on their alphabet, to illustrate when (perhaps malicious) changes - so a fake Ebay url (where the e and a have been substituted for Cyrillic homoglyphs) might look like: http://www.еbаy.com   . I guess jokers will deliberately register multi-coloured domains just for the heck of it, but serious sites won't. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 09:52, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Testing for non-standard characters mixed into the alphabet seems like something a email filter could do fairly easily, and perhaps a browser could at least perform a similar test, and give a warning screen to the user before proceeding. No comment on the utility of punycode - but it does sound dreadful: why not base64 at the very least instead of base 36 . Awful. (opinion)

Thanks for the responses.Sf5xeplus (talk) 12:31, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't mean to defend the gobbledygook punycode, but it does seem to be a bit more compact than utf8+base64. Again in python:

                                  u'Україна'.encode('punycode') →  'v0a0aa2bqq6n'
                                  base64.b64encode(u'Україна'.encode('utf-8')) → '0KPQutGA0LDRl9C90LA='

Both are, of course, entirely unintelligible to humans. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 16:05, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Speak for yourself, N00B! ;-) I still know that C9=201=ret in Z80 assembler, and I bet there are people who read Hex-encoded UTF-8 as well as I read Shakespeare. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 17:09, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately you have failed a routine scheduled Turing test. Please report to the factory at which you were constructed for remanufacturing. You will find GPS coordinates for that facility printed on the lower rear of your casing. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:47, 29 July 2010 (UTC)