Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 January 9

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January 9

Partition madness

I made a partition of my hard drive on my mac for boot camp. I've gotten into some unrelated problems with windows (darn registration) and wiped that partition's data. Can you merge a partition back into an existing HD partition —Preceding unsigned comment added by Crossaxel 412 (talk • contribs) 02:19, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Kind of. If you have all sectors partitioned right now, then you blow away a partition and resize a partition to include the sectors that were previously included in the old partition. The problem is that some file systems may have issues with this, i.e. NTFS. I don't know what file system Mac OS uses, but if shouldn't have a problem with it. But since I don't know for sure, you might want to get a second opinion just in case. EvilCouch (talk) 05:59, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

The Boot Camp Assistant in Mac OS X should have an option to "Restore the startup disk to a single volume", which should wipe the Windows partition and merge it with the Mac partition. --Canley (talk) 04:29, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm not seeing an option for "Restore the startup disk to a single volume". Where is it? Help? --Crossaxel 412 (talk) 18:26, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

ISO framerate

I have an ISO file on my computer that I was trying to convert to MP4. I used Handbrake, but the automatic framerate made the video choppy. Is there any way I can determine the proper framerate from the ISO? Thanks in advance. QWERTY | Dvorak 03:29, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

In my experience, you get terrible video if the buffer empties due to lag on the video side. I get this if I try to rip a DVD while running too many other programs. You appear to be trying to fake a DVD or Video CD with an ISO and then rip it to an MP4. That is a lot of work for the computer to do - which I feel can easily cause the buffer to empty. Have you tried first burning the ISO and then ripping from the CD/DVD? -- kainaw™ 03:43, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

The video quality is not the problem, it's the framerate. Unless I tell Handbrake what framerate to use in the conversion, it will have to duplicate frames and end up looking choppy. The problem is, I don't know how to find out the proper framerate. QWERTY | Dvorak 23:13, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Fedora video cropping tool

I have no trouble using DVD-Rip to easily rip the DVDs I make to videos for YouTube. However, I haven't found a simple tool for cropping out a section of the video. I have to rip the whole DVD and then upload the whole thing. Does Fedora have anything in it's repository (or even on Livna) for cropping videos? -- kainaw™ 04:05, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what's in those repositories, and I'm not sure I have the best answer anyway, but since nobody else is touching this question, I'll try: MEncoder --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:21, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

widescreen or full? why?

If you buy a PC (laptop or desktop), do you prefer a widescreen or a 3:4 screen? And why? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.104.123 (talk) 05:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Depends on what you do with it. If you mainly use it to watch movies or edit photos, widescreen is better; If you use it for browsing the interweb or gaming (on a laptop?), normal 4:3 is better. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:27, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Doesn't matter as long as the screen is huge :) no, seriously, having worked with 16:9 and 4:3, I think I perfer standard 4:3 displays because they feel bigger (but that's a thing of subjective perception). --Ouro (blah blah) 12:15, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I use three 4:3 displays on my work computer and two 4:3 displays at home. I do not understand the benefit of widescreen for "computer" use. Playing movies is, in my opinion, not "computer" use. The way I work, every window is maximized on one of the monitors. I don't have little windows all over the desktop. With a widescreen it would be difficult to click one "maximize" button and have your window take up half the screen on the left or right - allowing you to easily have two maximized windows side-by-side. With multiple displays, it is easy. -- kainaw™ 12:59, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I ,like my widescreen for screen for : 1) Ganes 2) More than one code file side-by-side. But I also have a 3:4 monitor next to it. And that's the real answer. Multi-monitor is the best way to go. APL (talk) 14:02, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Apparently you're not familiar with the "Tile Windows Vertically" command. It is kind of new, I guess. Anyway, it lets you optimize two or more windows on a screen. As a user of 16:10 displays, I can vouch for this feature's usefulness. Two screens are nice, but when you only have room for one on your desk you might as well pick a widescreen.--Jmeden2000 (talk) 17:47, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Wide screen always. Consider a 8.5x11 paper with margins that's 8x10 printable area that's 8:10 ratio. Putting 2 sheets side by side makes it 16:10 ratio. A big widescreen is much more useful then big 4:3 display. NYCDA (talk) 20:30, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

A 4:3 display is larger than a 16:9 display of the same diagonal (by about 12%). The computer display article currently contains the following amusing paragraph: "A widescreen display always has less screen area for a given quoted inch size than a standard 4:3 display, due to basic geometry. Some regard the resulting greater potential profit margin as a prime reason for their promotion." I have no idea whether the second sentence is true, and it should probably be deleted in any case. -- BenRG (talk) 22:48, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Unless referenced, it is merely opinion. -- kainaw™ 23:05, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

When working with very large images in Photoshop or doing Portrait-style work, there is occasionally, depending on your specific monitor resolution, not enough vertical and too much horizontal space on a widescreen monitor. Acceptable (talk) 00:36, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Definitely 4:3 all the way. Widescreen laptops are clunky and ugly from all the wasted space- have you seen those mammoth HP laptops with 6 inches of unused horizontal space on the keyboard and a full numpad?! When I got a second monitor I got widescreen though, since it came down to a choice between 1400x1050 (same as my primary display) and 1680x1050. The extra horizontal pixels won out, and those 280 pixels are perfect for snuggling a google talk window on the far side of the monitor :D The best is undoubtedly multi-monitor.. SO much space it's glorious, but if you're stuck with 1 display use 4:3 --f f r o t h 03:05, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Widescreen all the way. The aformentioned ability to have two pages on one screen coupled with the ability to watch movies with less letterboxing is fantastic. Running games in Widescreen is best too because it best deals with peripheral vision allowing you to be better immersed. I myself use a 16:10 19" monitor as my primary and a 5:4 19" monitor as my secondary, and can say that this is probably the best setup. TheGreatZorko (talk) 09:07, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Few games support widescreen resolution, and no serious multiplayer games do- that's cheating. Anyway it's not all that helpful for the extra pixels you're rendering- you and your teammates can keep your angles covered without seeing everything at once.. that's a lot of the gameplay in first person shooters --f f r o t h 16:57, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Is it really true that few games support it? The last.. well, every game I've tried, has supported widescreen resolutions like 1440x900. Granted, I don't do multiuser stuff. Friday (talk) 17:03, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Pretty much every game released last year supported widescreen, and a lot of older ones that don't directly support widescreen can be forced to work with it. Check out [1]'s wiki. And calling widescreen in MP cheating is like calling 5.1 surround sound cheating, or having a better PC so you get more FPS cheating82.31.5.202 (talk) 20:03, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

You might want to wait a while before buying any new computers, because USB 3.0 and FireWire S3200 have just been revealed! And you can't use them on computers you have now. So i would suggest that you just wait a while until newer computers come out until you start worrying about widescreen or fullscreen. And btw fullscreen is better. well, thats my opinion--Dlo2012 (talk) 01:47, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I would pivot my 4x3 monitor into 3x4 (portrait) orientation --Masatran (talk) 18:54, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Windows scripting

As a Linux convert I have no idea how to do basic things in Windows with command line, but as I have to use Windows at work, I have to learn. I'm trying to automate a back up process which involves copying files from one location to another, and delete the older version, and the gives a notification on the users that it's done and they can continue doing their work. The only thing I have trouble with is the notification: what can I use? I tried using net send (it has messenger service running) but I can't figure out how to send a message to myself. Is there something like zenity in Windows? --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:25, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

This is just a guess, but can you net send to "localhost" or 127.0.0.1? --LarryMac | Talk 19:37, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes you can net send localhost, but "there must be a better way" --f f r o t h 02:59, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Maybe because it's on a domain but even net send localhost doesn't work, net send * sends one to everybody except myself. In the end I have to use vbs to create little pop-ups. --antilived^{T | C | G} 09:30, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Sending EOF to QSHELL on System i

Hello, I'm using QSHELL on a System i where there is apparently no support for sending an eof (cf doing a Ctrl-D in bash). Does anyone know anyway of doing this? It's happy to let me do a

cat

But then just lets me type... forever. Any ideas? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.193.189.41 (talk) 11:27, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry just found it, I can go, if anyone's interested, for example:

cat << stop

and it will look out for 'stop'. --194.193.189.41 (talk) 11:41, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

You may have a different eof character than ctrl-d. Try the stty command to find out your eof char. 195.35.160.133 (talk) 16:09, 15 January 2008 (UTC) Martin.

Print screen

I'm using Windows Vista and I cannot get the print screen function to work. CRTL+Print Screen does nothing, ALT+Print Screen does nothing, can't paste anything into MS Paint.--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 13:29, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Surely print screen is the primary function of the key and you don't need to depress anything else? Lanfear's Bane | t 14:11, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

No, it's not, it's the insert key that also has print screen on it, but I can't work out how to use it.--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 14:23, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Is this a laptop and the letters "Print Screen" are in blue, purple, organge - or anything other than the white used on all the other keys? Is there another button with something like "Fn" on it in the same color? -- kainaw™ 14:50, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

It's a laptop and it has "prt sc" in a box below "insert" both on the key. Black key, white text, no colours.--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 15:27, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

If you have a Compaq Presario , this forum thread might be useful; to summarize, the person asking the original question did have to use the Fn key next the the space bar. Thus, press and hold Fn and then hit your multi-function insert/prtsc key for the whole screen, Fn-Alt-PrtSc for just the selected window. --LarryMac | Talk 15:39, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

What I was trying to get at was that the key is an insert key. It is not a print screen key. By pressing the Fn key (apparently), you change the function of certain keys. That turns it into a print screen key. So, by pressing Ctrl+Print Screen (without the Fn), you were really pressing Ctrl+Insert which will not do a screen capture. -- kainaw™ 18:47, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, you've just solved my problem. I never noticed the Fn key before.--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 06:36, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Website Frames Question

Alright, I know frames are "old news" and arent really used anymore but I decided to start playing with them just for fun. I was wondering if there is a way to have a link in the links pane change the Main frame AND another frame at the same time. So, for example I have a main frame and a header frame... could the link change both?

Thanks :)

--Zach (talk) 14:30, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

To do this without javascript, you use frames in frames. Your page will be a links frame and a "content" frame. The content frame is a title frame and a main frame. The link target is the content frame. The page loaded there contains a title frame and a content frame. Obviously, this limits your layout design since the title and main frames must either be the same width and set top/bottom or the same height and set left/right. If you instead use javascript, you can easily set the src for one, two, or more frames on your page with a single click. -- kainaw™ 14:46, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Linux/WinXP combo

Hi, I enjoy learning from reading on this desk and have two three questions. I am considering setting up an old laptop as a server in the closet, primarily for serving files (backups of my digital images, server for my music collection and "synchronisation folders" for keeping "My Documents" on both laptops the same. I run Windows XP on both "regular" laptops in use and do not intend to change this. I intend to use Ubuntu Linux on the server (because I already downloaded the ISOs and tried this before, it seems user friendly) and manage it using PuTTY or something similar (command-line; I was once familiar with DOS 6.22 and find the transition not-too-bad). My questions are:

1) When I consider using mostly command-line, would it be easier to just install Ubuntu Server? Or should I go for the full desktop, what will be the cost in terms of startup time etc? I could probably go for some stripped down distribution instead (DSL? FreeNAS?); however, I fear I then will end up missing something that I need (for example considering the next question)

2) I believe SAMBA is the easiest way to connect to files on the Linux box from the XP computers. However, I have had bad experiences with the Norwegian letters æøå with SAMBA before, even though I configured it with the "correct" codepages etc (I believe it was SAMBA v2, not v3, however). Does this now work fully? I tried browsing samba.org for this but found nothing decisive. Have anyone tried? I need this to work because a lot of my pictures have ÆØÅ in the file names and I do not want the backup to change the file names. (If I cannot resolve this I might resort to running an OEM Windows XP on the system instead.)

3) I don't think my old laptop supports wake-on-lan. Is there any other way so I don't have to keep the machine running and generating heat etc all the time? I considered wiring the "on" button (or the wires, anyway) to the USB or LPT port on my wl500g router (which already runs a kind of Linux system) which is always on, and try to get some software/package that could enable power here when I request that. Anyone know if such a system exists, possibly as sort of USB dongle that is cheap to get?

Thank you very much! --Jørgen (talk) 18:34, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I did this exact same thing at home. A laptop is a nice fileserver. It doesn't take up a lot of room. It has built-in battery backup. In case of a fire, it is easy to snatch it up on your way out the door. To answer your questions, don't waste disk space on a GUI. You shouldn't need to work directly at the server once it is set up and all of your setup needs can be done in the shell. Samba is the best way I know to share files between Windows and Linux. There is an alternative of trying to get your XP machines to NFS mount the server. Some programs do that, but I've never used them. You can use SWAT to set up Samba and maintain it from your XP machines using a web browser. I don't have wake-on-lan either. I have it stop the drives and shut off the screen after an hour of non-use. At that point, it uses very little electricity. I should note that I disabled practically all services on the laptop - so it doesn't waste time doing something stupid such as monitor for bluetooth activity. -- kainaw™ 18:45, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, Kainaw. I'll look into NFS in particular. And I guess I should think about the power saving option once again, checking the temperature after some hours of sleep mode. If anyone have any other opinions on the questions I'll of course still be happy for tips! In particular regarding Samba and Norwegian characters. Jørgen (talk) 20:58, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Computer animated films

Today's computer animated films look incredibly lifelike, and continue to improve with time. Characters are shown with realistic facial expressions, waterfalls are portrayed with mist. Why, then, are actors still hired to voice the various characters in a film? Hasn't technology evolved to the point that voices can be computer generated as well? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.120.95.52 (talk) 20:58, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Voices can be computer generated, yes -- see our speech synthesis article for more detail. The challenge is in adding emotion and inflection etc (called prosody) to those voices. Take a simple phrase like "Where are you going?" You can put the emphasis on any of the four words and get slightly different meanings. Using a markup language (like SSML) might help with this somewhat, but I'd guess that at this time it is just not cost-effective to replace human actors. On the other hand, within the speech synthesis article is a link to a page mentioning the release of software meant to be used for anime and manga; note however that the linked article mentions some doubts and perhaps limited usage for such a system. --LarryMac | Talk 21:22, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I'd say the major reason is that there's no pressing need for synthesized sound. Voices and sound effects are cheap and easy; fantastic visual effects done in the real world are not. As for why they hire expensive actors, it's because their celebrity helps in marketing the film. Generally speaking, professional voice actors are much better than regular actors doing voice-overs (compare Dan Castellaneta to Kevin Bacon, say). --Sean 01:50, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Making pages live

I have just created a new page, and I need to know how to make it Live on the www. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kimberlynd (talk • contribs) 22:38, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Can you clarify? What kind of page have you created, and how? What do you want to do with it? -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 22:52, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Assuming you meant that you created some HTML page and you want it to be accessible via the www, you basically need to register a domain name with a registrar, open an account with a hosting provider, configure the DNS servers and upload your file via an ftp client. There are other possibilities, but this is probably the simplest. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 23:00, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

In most cases, getting a domain is strictly optional. With most hosts you can access your web page by www.[isp's name].com/~[your name]/ or something similar. (Check your host's FAQ.) APL (talk) 05:19, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

This wouldn't look very proffesional, though. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 09:23, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Google allows you to edit HTML in its Google pages. Kushal^t 12:28, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

If you are talking about Cynergy Data, you have created the page and it is live. (Note that it may take search engines, including Wikipedia's search facility, a few days to find it.)--Shantavira|^{feed me} 19:50, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Disposable short URLs

Is there any URL shortening service (like doiop etc.) that allows users to either set an expiration date or timespan after which the short URL will no longer work, or register before creating a short URL so they can identify themselves as the short URL's “owner” and delete it once they no longer want it to function? The first of the two possibilities should be easy to implement. Wikipeditor (talk) 23:09, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

The main feature of all them that I've seen (tinyurl, dwarfurl...) is that they never expire. They even say that on the main page in big bold letters: never expires! So, I believe it would be difficult to find one that does expire. You know - it wouldn't be difficult to write one for yourself. All you need is a hash table for the shortened url string, the main url, and the expiration date. Once the expiration date is over, remove it from the hash table. -- kainaw™ 23:15, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick reply, but I wouldn't know how to do that. I can't believe nobody has this killer feature yet, I'd even use GiganticURL if it did the job! Wikipeditor (talk) 23:36, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I do not see this as any sort of "killer" feature. If you do not remove the actual page, it will always be active regardless of any shortened URLs redirecting to it. Also, when a person uses a shortened URL, they can bookmark the page. The bookmark will be to the page, not the shortened URL. So, they will have a link to it until the actual page is removed. In short, expiring shortened URLs is nothing more than a nuisance. It provides no form of restriction to keep people from accessing the page. -- kainaw™ 23:58, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks again for your reply. Situations where it may be useful are of course limited. For my purpose, I don't need perfect restriction, and in fact I have just deemed an eternal short URL acceptable and made one. Wikipeditor (talk) 01:40, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I had an idea for a workaround - which may actually omit the need for short urls. You can create symbolic links (shortcut in Windows-world) to your web pages on your web server. For example, you may have the page http://yoursite.com/some_page_that_you_want_to_link_to.html. You can create a symlink to it called http://yoursite.com/123qwe. When you don't want that active anymore, just delete the symlink. In essence, you are creating your own short urls. -- kainaw™ 02:07, 10 January 2008 (UTC)