Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 December 19

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December 19

iPhone 5 won't display attachment icon in message bodies

I can download email attachments sent to my iPad but not my i5. In message list there is a paperclip to show the attachment and when I select the message to view a new pane opens and I see the spinning wheel and ...Downloading... but there is no icon in the message body after. I've tried jpgs and docs with the same result. Any ideas? signed... Perplexed — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.120.208.98 (talk) 00:23, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

A faster way to edit an OsCommerce website?

I use OsCommerce to update my works website, but it's painfully slow to add, edit, or delete things off of. We already upload a price file each morning to change prices. Is there a way to edit the site offline and upload it, or use a program that can do it? Thanks ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 09:18, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Cannot watch videos on YouTube

Many videos won't play for me at all. And those that work stop after 5 minutes (stop loading). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Computing/2013_November_26#YouTube_.2B_flash_game_problems.--78.156.109.166 (talk) 09:28, 19 December 2013 (UTC) Could someone send these videos to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6s5WGmCKC4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRrNvmvTAC4

& a

May 21 2011 video with scorpion sign/billboard (with countdown to may 21) they say in it that the end of the world is just 30 days away and "the mayans said december 2012 but these people say the end is much closer"--78.156.109.166 (talk) 09:33, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

The videos will be copyrighted most likely, and so they can't be sent to you. The hyperlink can, but then you already have that anyway. The loading issue may be due to a poor internet speed for streaming video. Have you tried lowering the video quality? Thanks ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 09:49, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks it worked. How come?--78.156.109.166 (talk) 09:53, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Changing the video quality worked? If you're trying to watch a HD video on a poor connection it will buffer slowly and lowering the video quality or upping your internet download speed are the only two options you really have. Glad to be of help ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 10:01, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

What else, young lion? SomE vids still wont play but changing vid quality worked even on some of the vids that wouldnt start.--78.156.109.166 (talk) 19:12, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

it wasnt hd. it wasnt a hd issue. also, on the higher quality (which made the videos unplayable) the videos didnt buffer slowly, they didnt buffer at all--78.156.109.166 (talk) 19:23, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

I used "HD" because i didn't want to say 1080p, 780, 360, etc. If one won't play then restart your router. If it still won't play, then lower the quality to one your connection can manage. Thanks ツ Jenova20 ^(email) 09:28, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

What going on with Google News?

I used to find lots of useful information through google news archive. It used to be an option through "advanced search", but the regular search defaulted to the last 30 days. Now, though, there does not appear to be anything called archive search, and now all searches default to results for "anytime". But somethng's wrong. I had done a bunch of searches over the past week or so, and was surprised to find nothing.

Today, though I did a search of which I expected to find hundreds and hundreds of results going back 200 years, and I found only six recent results, even though I made sure I was searching "anytime". I said to myself, "Huh?". So I then tried something I was absolutely sure should have huge results: "Abraham Lincoln" using a custom search of 1850 to 1920 and got no results at all.

My only conclusion, then, is that search is broken, or the archives that used to be so useful are no longer part of google news, or have somehow been separated out. If this was isolated to today, I would just chalk it up to Google News being broken for a few hours or today, but as I said I had started noticing this over the past weeks or so. Anyone know what's going on?--15:37, 19 December 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.167.166.18 (talk)

You are not the only person to have noticed this problem. It was reported at the Village Pump, where it received a response from a Google employee. It appears that they are in the process of replacing the News Archive search, and have disabled the old version in order to reduce the burden on developers. There is some information on how to get results using the standard Google search here, although I am not sure whether it will provide the results you want. --Kateshortforbob _talk 18:11, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Ah. Thanks much for posting that link. Good to know they are working on it and it will be fixed some months down the road. Meanwhile it is really mindblowing that one of the top website in the world (maybe the top?) would have something like that go down without any prominent advance notice, nor any prominent explicit notice on the service that it is not working while it's not working, with the service purporting to work but just not providing any results. There may be scads of technical genius over at Google, but this is true amateur hour conduct from a customer relations and business management standpoint.--71.167.166.18 (talk) 22:05, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

How to archive this PDF of a journal article?

At http://escholarship.org/uc/item/86r2j122 I'm trying to archive a PDF of a journal article on http://webcitation.org or on http://wayback.archive.org. When I do a webcitation for http://escholarship.org/uc/item/86r2j122.pdf (the supposed download link, URL seen if you hover over the "Download PDF" at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/86r2j122 , you get redirected to http://escholarship.org/uc/item/86r2j122 WhisperToMe (talk) 17:22, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

The trouble you're seeing is because the server is checking the HTTP referer; if there isn't one, or it isn't from their site, they send the HTML page rather than the PDF. So, in essence, the document can't be linked directly from another site. That's behaviour they've intentionally introduced. It's possible to download the PDF directly from the URL only if the user agent does referer spoofing. All may not be lost, however. I don't know specifically how archive.org's crawler works - it may be that if you ask it to store the html page, it will also crawl the PDF. If it does that, when you view the archived HTML, it should have a link to the archived PDF. You could then use the archived PDF's url directly (because, I'm pretty sure, archive.org does not check referer). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:34, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

escholarship.org is blocked by robots.txt so my only hope is to try archiving the HTML page with webcitation.org WhisperToMe (talk) 23:37, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

I made http://www.webcitation.org/6LzeIYoxI - Can someone please check to see if the webcitation server actually got the PDF or is the PDF being read from the escholarship.org server? WhisperToMe (talk) 23:39, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

From Google Scholar:

@article{rogers2005superneighborhood,

title={Superneighborhood 27: A Brief History of Change [Research and Debate]},

author={Rogers, Susan},

journal={Places},

volume={17},

number={2},

year={2005}

}

Is the bibtex entry of any help? --109.189.65.217 (talk) 20:39, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

gps

hi all, can anyone suggest/guide me through to get this server coding in php for gps tracking system that I wish to host . if at all anybody have tried please do guide me through it am not going anywhere in this thanks in advance — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.210.206.27 (talk) 18:42, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Not sure what you're trying to do. What do you mean by "this server coding in php"? Does GPS navigation software help?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 12:02, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

You need to state your setup and objectives a lot more clearly if you expect to receive any helpful answers. In what way are you interfacing to the gps device? Are you processing gpx files or are you planning on doing real-time interfacing to a gps device in php? --109.189.65.217 (talk) 20:52, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

PHP runs on the server - not on the client. It doesn't know where the client is geographically located unless the client tells it. Hence you need to write code in the client to send that data to the server in order for the PHP code to process it. Client-side code pretty much needs to be in JavaScript code. So on the client, you need something like:

 <script>
 function showLatLong(position)
 {
   alert ( "Latitude: " + position.coords.latitude + " Longitude: " + position.coords.longitude; 
 }

 navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(showLatLong);
 </script>

In place of the "alert" command, you'd need to use something like AJAX to send that data to the PHP code running on the server. You can find a bazillion examples of how to do that online.

SteveBaker (talk) 23:08, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Cut, copy, paste, delete, select all not working in ie + back/forward buttons

but undo works, in the same menu (rightclick menu)... the functions work in firefox... i was messing a bit with settings but i just imported data from ie to firefox, nothing else iirc--78.156.109.166 (talk) 19:10, 19 December 2013 (UTC) back/forward buttons in ie dont work.. not clickable or blue or anything--78.156.109.166 (talk) 19:14, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Offline pages in firefox & ie

I cant browse offline in ie. work offline button in file menu doesn't get checked when i click it, nothing happens when clicked.. how do i view which pages are viewable offline in firefox, like a list or something? instead of checking all pages i have ever visited to see if any are cached in firefox for offline-able viewing.--78.156.109.166 (talk) 19:11, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Guessing game

Is there a Wikipedia article for a "guessing game" played on a computer? The idea is that the user thinks of something, and the computer asks a series of yes/no questions about it, finally providing a guess, asking the user if it was right. If it was not, the computer asks for a question to distinguish the right answer from what it was guessing, and adds it to a (presumably) binary tree data structure about how it should ask questions. JIP | Talk 20:20, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

Twenty Questions, Akinator. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:27, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

I was just going to post that! 190.156.122.141 (talk) 20:28, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

The computerised version of Twenty Questions is at 20Q. I've seen Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? adapted for computer use, usually focussing only on animals. An example is at animalgame.com.-gadfium 00:50, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks for the question, and for the answer. Drmies (talk) 01:23, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

"Guess Animals" (which is the game that http://animalgame.com implements) was the first game like this that I ever saw...and that was in 1975 - so it's a very old idea! Basically, it has a database in the form of a binary tree with animal names at the leaves of the tree and a yes/no question at each node. It starts at the top of the tree, asking the question, branching to left or right, asking the next question and so forth until it reaches a leaf node - when it says "Were you thinking of a ...". If it guesses right, then we're done. If it guesses wrong, it asks the user to tell it what animal you were actually thinking of and to provide a question to distinguish between it's incorrect guess and the animal you were really thinking of. This allows it to extend the database. You only have to have half a dozen people play with the software for 20 minutes each and it'll manage to guess correctly almost every time. Obviously, it works with things other than animals - "Guess Cars" (or "Guess fatal diseases"!) also works!

The main problem with it is that it's dependent on the user providing good questions - and it may have to ask a ridiculously large number of them to get the answer correct. On the other hand, it's quite clever in that it will eventually self-recover from badly asked questions or vaguely thought out animals. For example, if you're thinking of a dog, and the computer guesses "cat" - you might input the question "Is it more than 12 inches tall?" - without thinking that some dogs are actually shorter than that. If someone happens to be thinking of a Chihuahua, they'll answer "No" and the computer will guess "Cat" again...but then that user will add some other question like: "Can it retract its claws?" that will fix that for future players. It can also fix vagueness - if one player really does add "Dog" as an animal and subsequent people think of specific kinds of dogs - the system will eventually add all of those breeds and the system will again provide better guesses.

Another common game from those early days guesses a number between 1 and a million by doing a binary search. So the first question is "Is your number greater, less than, or equal to 500,000?"...If you say "Less" then it asks again at 250,000 and if you then say "More" then it'll ask about 375,000...each time halving the interval of numbers that it knows your number lies within. Within 20 questions, it has your number, every time. This impresses a lot of mathematically-naive people.

SteveBaker (talk) 22:52, 21 December 2013 (UTC)