Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2007 May 23

= May 23 =

Recovering video file from cell
Hello, I accidentally deleted a video file on my cell phone. I had saved it on the removable memory card. Since I deleted it, I have not used the memory card in any way.
 * 1. What program is the best to use to recover my file if I put the card in a media card reader?
 * 2. Is there any way to recover my video with out the use of a media card reader?
 * Thanks, --( Aytakin ) | Talk 02:07, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Try PhotoRec. --cesarb 09:45, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I got a USB flash card adapter on ebay. It is pretty cool.  It has a second little converted plugged into the SD slot, so it can take miniSD too.  It wasn't too expensive.  A search for "SB flash card" on eBay should get you what you need.  Make sure it'll take either SD, miniSD, or the Sony one, depending on what your phone uses.  I hope you're able to get your dirty movie back!!  - NByz 01:01, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

name of a PC RTS game that I saw
On most of RTS games when you choose a character and then click on another he just get closer and then stay there shooting on the enemy (without moving). I saw on a games magazine a article about a PC RTS game that was released (or a being done), that when you choose a character and click on a enemy, he not just stay there shooting the enemy he plays like if he was a FPS player, so he avoid shoots and others things, and the enemy do the same too. I not remember the name of this game, can anyone say the name of this game to me?? (I saw this article on 2006 or 2005, and the game was a new game, so the article was not a retro gaming article)

PS: This game may be a RTT too.


 * Company of Heroes, maybe? -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 08:24, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I think that is this game thanks 201.78.246.222 13:45, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

non english programming languages?
Just a curiousity, but are there any non english based programming languages, or ports of english programming languages into other languages? -- Phoeba WrightOBJECTION! 09:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, I can't remember its name, but I read somewhere in Wikipedia about one that was in Spanish. However, it didn't seem to be of any popularity at all. --Taraborn 10:01, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Looking at conlangs, there's var'aq. Any others? -- Phoeba WrightOBJECTION! 10:10, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

As someone else observed recently, many programming languages aren't really english anyway. ;-) And using macros, you can overmap the keywords with your own language.

Atlant 11:52, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I guess Reverse Polish isn't what you want, but I always liked the name. --jpgordon&#8711;&#8710;&#8711;&#8710; 14:43, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * See ... Non-English-based programming languages. --TotoBaggins 16:19, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Ares p2p program
Hi. The program works perfectly in my brother's XP account (where it was installed), but can't connect in mine. Why can that be? --Taraborn 09:59, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Perhaps you need admin privileges to run, go into control panel and see if you have admin privileges. --Lwarf 10:10, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I do have admin privileges. Some programs made for Windows 9x apparently don't work well in XP in different accounts, but this doesn't seem to be the case. --Taraborn 17:53, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Old versions of the software can't connect to new versions; ensure that yours is up-to-date. That said, I would investigate alternatives to Ares - the top Google hits are mostly ad related, and a sole CNET.au review on the page recommends LimeWire instead. I personally would recommend uTorrent (which is completely ad-free at this time) and use other specialized tools for chat and any other functions Ares offers. --Edwin Herdman 23:21, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks. --Taraborn 06:34, 24 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Try the compatiblity wizard, that sometimes works for me with apps made for win 95. --Lwarf Talk to Me! 04:12, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

MOV to DVD or DivX
A friend wants a - possibly freeware - solution to port his *.mov digital compact camera short movies so he can watch them via his DVD player. Any quick suggestions by experienced people? JH-man 10:50, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * If he has access to a new Mac, iDVD can do that easily. --24.147.86.187 12:20, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry, should have mentioned he only has a PC (Windows XP). Any easy-to-use equivalents for PC? Thanks anyway! JH-man 12:35, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * There was a similar question recently. VLC media player is probably a good tool to start with, at least for the conversion from MOV.  What program(s) does your friend have for writing to DVD?  -- LarryMac  | Talk  13:04, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I'm not sure which DVD software he has, but we will figure it out from here.  :)  JH-man 13:12, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Reverse MP3 Playback
I have a couple of Mp3s which I would like to play back in reverse. Sounds weird, I know, but apparently there is a hidden message in the track if one listens to it in reverse. How do I play my Mp3s in reverse? I've got Audacity, but can't find a way to do what I want. Any pointers?

Thanks in advance.

Hasanclk 13:30, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It should be in the "effect" menu on Audacity. -- LarryMac  | Talk  13:46, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * The effects menu is blank. Meaning, after I opened the MP3 through Audacity, I can't select any of the options of the effects menu. Both the effects and analyze menus are un-clickable.


 * Hasanclk 14:33, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * do this in two steps:
 * transcode it back to a .wav file.
 * play the .wav in reverse.
 * you need two steps becasue mp3 is "stateful." By contrast, .wav is simply a series of independent samples. (Please note: I've never done this, but the theory is correct.) -Arch dude 16:49, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Windows Sound Recorder, with wavs, can do Effects -> Reverse. Will be perfect :)Josh Holloway  17:31, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * No idea what an MP3 being unstateful means. But I did exactly what you said. Exported the original MP3 to WAV format using Audacity. Then loaded the WAV file(which nearly quadrupled in size btw) on Audacity. But the same problem still exists. Effects And Analyze are unclickable. And believe it or not, I did actually think of doing the Sound Recorder thing, but I don't have a microphone. :)


 * Anything else I can try?
 * Thanks
 * Hasanclk 18:00, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * You don't need a microphone to use Sound Recorder. Start it up and click File/Open and navigate to your new WAV file.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  18:03, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Excellent! That worked! Thanks guys!

Hasanclk 18:13, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

You need to mark the part of the track that you want to reverse in audacity. Like when you mark a part of a text that you want to turn to bold face in a text editor. Didn't you ask that question some weeks ago? I remember suggesting audacity to you.

Excel macros
I have a spreadsheet and I want a macro to delete all rows where the entry in column D is zero. I tired the following but it didn't work. I had to run it about 5 times to get most of the relevant rows deleted and even then about 3 or 4 (seemingly) random zero-rows remained.

Sub test For Counter = 2 To 371 Set curCell = Cells(Counter, 4) If curCell = 0 Then Rows(Counter).Select Selection.Delete Shift:=xlUp End If      Next Counter End Sub

What am I doing wrong? Zain Ebrahim 13:55, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I added additional spaces to the above to prevent the indents from confusing the wiki-rendering. Unfortunately, I can't answer your question though.  Davidprior 14:17, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Bit of a wild guess, this one - should it be "If curCell.Value = 0", rather than "If curCell = 0"? — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 14:30, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Any time you have two consecutive rows with value 0, you will end up skipping the second one, because of the shift up. e.g. if rows three and four contain 0.  when Counter=3, you will perform the select/delete/shift up.  Now row four is where row 3 was.  Then you increment Counter, so it equals 4, and the "new" row 3 gets ignored.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  14:35, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I found a way to make it work. It's pretty ugly code, but then again I've never touched Excel macros before today:

Sub test For Counter = 2 To 57 Set curCell = Cells(Counter, 4) Do While curCell.Value = 0 Rows(Counter).Select Selection.Delete Shift:=xlUp Set curCell = Cells(Counter, 4) If curCell.Value = "" Then Exit Do         Loop Next Counter End Sub
 * I've replaced the If/Then with a Do While loop. This will process all consecutive zeros before incrementing Counter.  The line just before the Loop statement is crucial, or else this macro will run endlessly (causing one's CPU utilization to hit 100% and also requiring the use of the task manager to kill Excel).  Also note that I changed the end value of the For statement to 57 because I was just testing with a small data set.  Also important - as you step through this macro, the index of the last row will continually be getting smaller, since you will have been deleting rows all along.  Thus the final several executions of the For loop will be checking on empty cells.  Actually, this is what makes the check for an empty string ("") critical, since apparently when curCell.Value=Empty, Excel will treat it as equal to zero.  I also implemented Matt's idea to check the specific property of curCell.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  15:14, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Why not just loop downwards (which is of course upwards in the sheet)?  should do what you want. --Tardis 22:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Just a few follow up questions. I'm quite new to programming in excel so bear with me. 1. After I saw LarryMac's first answer I decided to include "Counter = Counter - 1" in the IF..THEN statement. Would that have worked? 2. Whats the difference between curCell.Value and curCell? 3. Why would looping downwards have helped? Zain Ebrahim 08:46, 24 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I really should let somebody with greater expertise handle this, but I'm enjoying learning about this stuff. (And I do have a programming background, so I'm not just making stuff up).
 * 1) I just tried putting in the Counter decrement, and it works until you get to the point where you're checking on empty rows. Then you run into that "Empty = 0" problem again.  Luckily, I was smart enough to run my test by single stepping through using the debugger (use F8 from the macro editing screen), so I didn't lock up my PC again :-)  Anyway, a test for curCell.Value="" would need to go in there somewhere.  Now, philosophically, it's really really bad to monkey around with the value of a for loop variable within the loop.  It can be done (and legions of BASIC programmers have done so), but it can cause confusion, subtle bugs, and other headaches.
 * 2) There really is no difference; curCell and curCell.Value are the same. From what I can tell from my speedy introduction to Excel macros and VBA, this is because you have defined curCell as an instance of Cells, which is a property of the Range object, and the Range object has a default property of Value.  So when you say Range=XYZ, it's the same as saying Range.Value=XYZ.  However, it's good practice to be explicit.  The curCell variable that you've created has dozens of other properties, such as font, width, alignment, shading, etc.
 * 3) Ultimately, the "looping downward" concept Tardis mentions is ideal. Each time you execute the delete/shift up, you are only moving rows below your current pointer (as viewed on the screen), so the problem of skipping rows doesn't even come into play.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  14:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. That really helped. Zain Ebrahim 07:43, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia Bot: CSV
How do you use CSV files In VB.NET? Lmc  169   15:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * You parse through it; I don't think there is a special class for handling it. Here is a pretty easy code snippet, pretty straightforward. --140.247.248.120 16:08, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks peeps 89.241.225.141 14:36, 24 May 2007 (UTC)(logged in = Lmc   169  14:40, 24 May 2007 (UTC))

3GP (or 3g2) Video Format
Hey All!

I've been looking for a freeware or open source (free) converter from the 3gp cell phone video format to any of the MPEG formats... or frankly any other format.

The Nokia PC Suite comes with a player for them, but no way to convert. There are a few software suites that cost around $40. Any ideas?NByz 17:22, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Look on this website http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html this has a converter for almost anything i've ever tried to use, i use it for the .3g2 format on my cellphone im sure it can convert to and from even though ive only mostly used it to convert to .3g2  200.12.231.42 18:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)   Ag for MemTech


 * Ffmpeg (windows binaries), or it's derivatives mencoder and vlc, can help. --h2g2bob (talk) 21:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * w00t. Thanks, the Super (C) program is HORRIBLY marketed, but feature rich and free.  It does the job. - NByz 04:47, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

µTorrent problem - file system limitation error
I'm trying to download a simple .mdf package. BitTorrent downloaded the first 94% of the file, but then everything started freezing, so I switched to uTorrent. It works fine at first, picks up the file where BitTorrent left off, but then after downloading for a minute or so, it stops and gives me "Error: file system limitation"

What does this mean, and what do I do about it? I'm running Vista 32-bit on a wireless 3Mb/s cable connection. Also, I'm getting this message in the Logger: "Unable to map UPnP port", which is odd considering I have UPnP enabled both in my router settings and in uTorrent. Is this just an occasional error like hash fails, or could it be related to this file system problem? Thanks, &mdash;Akrabbimtalk 20:34, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * The "file system" thing might be that you're trying to create a file greater than the maximum file size allowed by the file system. The max file size for NTFS is vast, but if your disk is formatted FAT32 then you might be running into its 4GiB limit. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:40, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * No, my hard drive is NTFS. Besides, the .mdf file is only 3.46 GB, the .mds is only 33 kB, and another 720 B .txt file. &mdash;Akrabbimtalk 20:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Filename too long? Pathname too long? File/pathname contains illegal character?  NTFS is pretty plural about these too,but you never know. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:11, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Would you post a link to the torrent in question so we could try for ourselves? —Bromskloss 21:10, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Providing it's legal? Don't want Wikipedia getting screwed over for linking to illegal content. Josh Holloway  21:32, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmm... I'll try a simpler pathname. That could be it. &mdash;Akrabbimtalk 23:07, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, a simpler filename works, only the problem is I can't figure out how to get uTorrent to save files as a certain filename. The torrent has the .mdf file saved as "Sample [FULLDVD][Multi-Spanish-EN-IT].mdf", and I can get the error to go away if I bring it to something short like "S.mdf", but I can't get uTorrent to change the filename. Can you do this, or is this hopeless to download such a large file with such a long filename? &mdash;Akrabbimtalk 00:45, 24 May 2007 (UTC)


 * DMCA safe harbor clause... --⁪frotht 18:33, 25 May 2007 (UTC)