Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 December 2

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December 2

Borland Pascal and Free Pascal

Hi! Can someone explain the main diffrences between Borland Pascal and Free Pascal in normal English (i'm a dummy in these things, so i won't understand if you start to explain in programmers language)? And does "Turbo Pascal" is the same term as "Borland Pascal"? --84.245.229.37 (talk) 08:08, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

The Turbo Pascal article explains the difference between it (the cheaper product) and Borland Pascal (the more expensive one): "Borland Pascal had more libraries and standard library source code." -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:12, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Borland, and Turbo, Pascal was a closed source commercial solution for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows (both only on x86), which hasn't been developed or sold for a long long time. Free Pascal is an open source pascal solution for a range of architectures and operating systems, and is still developed and used. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:17, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Multi language ability of facebook, twitter, linkedin

For a company based in Poland which has international customers, I was wondering whether facebook, twitter, linkedin and similar sites support multi-language (English/Polish) features. For instance, ideally I would have a single twitter account and create each tweet in either language. Followers could then decide in which language to follow and would only see the tweet in their chosen language. bamse (talk) 09:02, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Are you expecting the site to do a machine translation for you ? StuRat (talk) 09:14, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

No, definitely not. I would prepare the text in both languages. I just want to avoid having two twitter accounts, one for Polish and one for English. Having only one account would also make it easier to make sure that all the tweets are send out in both languages. Similarly for facebook. If I decided to change the design or add some information it would be good if it applied immediately to both, the English and the Polish facebook page. bamse (talk) 09:31, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

WP:OR here but I don't think you're going to get what you want with Facebook. A user can change the language of the site (menus, options, etc) to their own language or a few miscellaneous ones (Pirate, Pig Latin, Klingon, etc) but the posts will still show up in the language that they were posted in. My brother will sometimes post in German but all that is offered to me is a translation link, provided by Facebook, to a machine translation. Additionally, I admin a business page on FB and cannot target posts to a specific language based on user preferences. Or at least not that I've seen in the preferences available to me. Dismas|^(talk) 12:00, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Blender scaling

attempting to rescale a complex object in blender, but rather than wanting it just made bigger, I want something like this: http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u437/Kitutal/private/scaling.png such that effectively the negative spaces around it are proportionally smaller. is this possible, and how would I go about doing it?

thank you

86.15.83.223 (talk) 13:04, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

I do not believe this is a standard feature in Blender - at least, it isn't straightforward. It is possible, though; you need to set up constraint and relations to define the radius of the round, relative to the characteristic length of the limbs of the object. Blender doesn't support that kind of parameterized geometry as well as other some other 3D modeling software. For example, this would be easy to do in SolidWorks by specifying constraint equations. But, Blender's model geometry is accessible via its scripting interface, so if you are fairly adept at python programming (and a relative expert at Blender), you could write a script to define such constraint equations and scale your object in that way. Nimur (talk) 14:49, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Unless I'm misreading your request, you want to scale uniformly away from the surface (along normals)? You can do that in Blender with the Shrink/Fatten tool. « Aaron Rotenberg « Talk « 20:22, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

scale away from the surface along the normals, that's the jargon I was looking for, and a fatten tool sounds about what I would want. I'll give it a go, thanks 86.15.83.223 (talk) 09:53, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Email notifications after WLM shuts down

So, Windows Live Messenger is being shut down in February. When it's running, it produces a little popup when an email is received; you can also check the WLM window to know how many unread emails you have. Are there any other programs out there that have this same functionality? 90.193.232.108 (talk) 14:26, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Most email clients can do this in some form. See Comparison_of_email_clients#Database.2C_folders_and_customization and look for the column headed "New email notification".--Shantavira|^{feed me} 15:26, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

That should do the trick. Thanks very much. 90.193.232.108 (talk) 00:34, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Finding a temporary Word document

I just opened a Word document from Yahoo Mail and made numerous changes to it, with track changes on. I selected "Save" but did not Save As, and then I closed Word. Normally I would save as to My Documents, but I apparently forgot to do this. Now I can't find the document anywhere, although I assume it must be somewhere on my hard drive; a search for a distinctive part of the document name does no good. Any suggestions? John M Baker (talk) 19:56, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Look in Temporary Internet Files. But, unfortunately, it's all too common in this circumstance for people to close the doc, realise they've closed it, and then re-open it from the browser or mail client. Depending on the temp file naming scheme, that can mean the new copy gets the same name as the old, so you've overwritten the document you changed with a fresh version from your email. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:08, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

It should also be in Word's history (perhaps with an unhelpfully mangled name). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:09, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I was eventually able to find it in Temporary Internet Files For some reason, accessing Temporary Internet Files through Windows Explorer didn't seem to work (or maybe I just overlooked the document in question), but I was able to find this file by accessing Temporary Internet Files through Internet Properties. I had indeed re-opened the document from Yahoo Mail, but the second time was a new document. I couldn't open the document directly from Temporary Internet Files, but I copied it to My Documents and was able to open it from there.

Incidentally, our article on Temporary Internet Files needs updating to reflect Windows 7 and, I assume, Windows 8. John M Baker (talk) 01:25, 3 December 2012 (UTC)