Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 August 10

= August 10 =

Occasional surround sound support via laptop HDMI out
I have an Asus M50Sv laptop with HDMI out. I'll play some movies from media player with surround sound just fine, but for some reason I only get stereo while playing Half-Life 2. I checked the HL2 settings and it's set to 5.1 on the audio tab.

I checked the Vista (Home Ultimate) sound settings and they show only LR channels for the HDMI output (and the same for what I assume is the SPDIF output) in the sound settings, but I figured this was more of an audio encoding thing (a la Dolby Pro Logic), but got confused when I could only get stereo in HL2. Then I played a movie in WMP11 and got all the channels just fine.

Is the game too old? (2004) Is there something I can change to get full surround? I'd hate to have to connect another cable, because it's just so painfully convenient to have a single HDMI cable hooked up to my TV to get a glorified gaming console for 4x the price :).

Thanks! --156.34.78.224 (talk) 02:10, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Line breaks on gmail
Is there any way to change the number of characters for the line break on gmail? My lines are insanely short, and I can't figure out for the life of me how to change it. Magog the Ogre (talk) 05:26, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Could just expanding your window work? Are these line breaks being sent as well, or are they only display issues when composing mail? --omnipotence407 (talk) 11:38, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Do you mean the point where plain text mails are wrapped with a > sign? Kushal (talk) 14:16, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I had a similar problem a while back where for a short time suddenly all the emails I sent were arriving with each paragraph put on one single line going right off the page. People had to scroll along to read each paragraph then scroll back for the next one. I kept getting emails back from friends saying reading my emails was a pain in the arse and I couldn't figure out for the life of me why. It fixed itself, somehow. I have no idea what happened. Your problem might just be a temporary thing, too.--ChokinBako (talk) 00:23, 12 August 2008 (UTC)


 * This problem almost certainly stems from ambiguity about who/what is putting the line-break characters in (i.e. are you hitting enter at the end of each line, or do you just let the input-text-box do the wrapping automatically?). Some text display systems use line wrapping even when there is no actual line-break character in the text stream.  If text was written or displayed on such a system, and then transferred to some other program which does not intelligently interpret the presence or lack of newline characters, formatting nightmare will ensue.  Nimur (talk) 16:57, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Ye, the problem is that the text is line wrapping too early when I send it. It's a pain to read, and I don't like it. I want to change it. Magog the Ogre (talk) 02:41, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Only Part of My Page Appears
I am creating a new page at Uer"Oneroomschool. The last time I saved my changed, only the first part of my page appears, and only part of the TOC.  However, when I click on "edit this page," everything is still there.  Why doesn't all of it appear?

Thank you,

Oneroomschool (talk) 05:42, 10 August 2008 (UTC)Oneroomschool

Never mind--I figuered it out. I had an error in a reference.

Oneroomschool (talk) 05:48, 10 August 2008 (UTC)Oneroomschool

Library softwares.
Name some prominent library related softwareSameershakti (talk) 06:03, 10 August 2008 (UTC).


 * Assuming you mean a library that stores books, ILIS or Iliswave (by Fujitsu). -- Hoary (talk) 10:17, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Millennium, published by Innovative Interfaces, Inc., also look at Integrated library system.--droptone (talk) 12:10, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

bash for
I need to do a lot of things (using sed, mostly) to quite a a lot of files. But when I check that I understand for in bash, I'm embarrassed to find that I don't.

As a minimalized example, let's suppose that I want to automate the renaming of two files: from a.txt to a2.txt, and from b.txt to b2.txt. I'd have thought that bash would do this via something along the lines of

for firstpart in [a b]

do

mv $firstpart.txt $firstpart2.txt

done

However, this doesn't work, and no variation on it that I've yet thought of does it. I've found various guides to flow control within bash (or Bourne), but curiously none seems to deal either with lists that one has just made up or with the manipulation of filenames. What am I missing? -- Hoary (talk) 07:11, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Your 2 bugs are: the brackets around a and b, not helping. Get rid of them. Second, "$firstpart2" is the value of the variable named "firstpart2". You need to use ${firstpart}2 to get what you wanted: the value of the variable named "firstpart", then a "2". Braces around the variable name are needed whenever it is immediately followed by some text that might be part of the variable to be expanded. (Imagine you also had f=this and firstp=that then what would you expect $firstpart to expand to? It wouldn't be "thisirstpart" or "thatart".) --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 08:42, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Excellent! Thank you very much. But stick around, please, because I have an even stupider question. Though I have successfully written and used very elementary shell scripts under GNU/Linux/bash, today I'm using Mac OSX. This claims to have the bash shell, so I hadn't thought Mac OSX would be an issue; however, it seems that I can't get any shell script to run. The simplest: a text file consisting of the single line/command:
 * ls
 * I save it with the name "sillyscript" and type
 * chmod +x sillyscript
 * I check with
 * ls -l
 * and sure enough, yes, it's executable (so at least I didn't manage to screw up chmod). I then type
 * ./sillyscript
 * and get the helpful message from bash: Cannot execute binary file. Actually I don't even understand what this "binary file" is, as sillyscript isn't binary (except in the sense that anything in a computer is binary), and as far as I know ls isn't a file. As we hopeless beginners say, WtF? -- Hoary (talk) 09:13, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

OK. for I in *.txt ; do mv $I `basename $I .txt`2.txt ; done You need to make the file begin with shabang. shebang. ls --Kjoonlee 09:41, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) !/bin/bash


 * How odd. But many thanks! -- Hoary (talk) 10:10, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Except that it doesn't work. I even checked that yes, bash really was in /bin, and of course it is. I added the shebang line exactly above, and saved, yet I am still told:
 * -bash: ./sillyshell: cannot execute binary file
 * Er. . . . -- Hoary (talk) 11:07, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

What does

file sillyscript

say about it? Does bash ./sillyscript work? What editor / thing are you using to edit the file? --78.86.164.115 (talk) 13:31, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * file sillyscript
 * tells me
 * sillyscript: UTF-8 Unicode text
 * while
 * bash ./sillyscript work
 * tells me
 * ./sillyscript: ./sillyscript: cannot execute binary file
 * The little script was made with TextWrangler.


 * I'm going to sleep on this. If I can't do it easily tomorrow (my time), I'll give up with it and do it on my Linux machine (an hour's trainride away). Still, I'm fascinated as well as irritated by my inability to do something (run a script) with an all-singing, all-dancing Mac that I used to do on a CP/M-80 machine with 64kB (yes!) of RAM. Something's gone off (maybe just my brain). -- Hoary (talk) 15:19, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Hm, what happens if you do this? cat > sillyscript2 ls [press ctrl-d] chmod u+x ./sillyscript2 ./sillyscript2 --Kjoonlee 15:32, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * 1) !/bin/bash


 * That worked perfectly! Well, it's one way to write text files, I suppose.


 * I'm afraid I've forgotten if there's a GNU/Unix utility that reads two files and announces if they have the same checksum; therefore I don't know for sure that these two minuscule scripts are identical. But for what it's worth (I'm sleepy), the two files do look identical. The obvious difference is that sillyscript and sillyscript2 are -rwxr-xr-x and -rwx--r-- respectively. I've no idea why this difference should matter. (Unless the shell for Mac OS X is somehow tweaked to render non-executable any script that's supposed to be executable for everyone, maybe because such ease of use makes it smell Trojan. No, that's too silly.) -- Hoary (talk) 16:01, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * My guess is that TextWrangler is putting a Unicode byte-order mark at the beginning of the file. Look for an option that turns this off, or save as ASCII. -- BenRG (talk) 17:25, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The utility that you want is cmp, although diff might also work (depending on what it makes of things like the putative BOM). I would expect either system you named to have both utilities. --Tardis (talk) 14:28, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

How to merge MP4 files together for free
Hello. I have got a couple of MP4 videos I would like to merge together. How can I do that for free? Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.79.34.109 (talk) 08:35, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Googling "MP4 Joiner" returned many results, you just have to find one that fits your needs--omnipotence407 (talk) 11:36, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Audacity?78.144.189.229 (talk) 16:40, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but Audacity is for audio. Kushal (talk) 13:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Can Windows Video Editor do it? Maybe not, but check out WP's article List_of_video_editing_software—which includes free software options—and one of them must be able to do it.--El aprendelenguas (talk) 21:45, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Download a program called Super which can be found by looking up on Google "Download Super Converter" from there make them what ever video type you want and then use whatever video editor you want to combine them.  Rgoodermote Not an admin  00:51, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Switching keyboards
I have a laptop (running Windows Vista) with a UK format keyboard, but I often use an external US format keyboard. Consequently, I have the language toolbar set up to allow me to switch from one to the other. However, something that has bugged me for a long time is that the keyboard setting seems to switch spontaneously. Anyhow, today I found out that I can switch keyboards by pressing left-shift and left-ctrl together and that would explain the "spontaneous" switching - I'm not a good typist and I'm obviously hitting shift and ctrl. Is there a way to turn off this key combination, or change it to something that's less easy to hit by mistake? Astronaut (talk) 16:09, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Windows (XP anyway) is really brilliant at switching layouts, because it lets you use as many different keyboards on different programs all at the same time. For example, you can put Microsoft Word on UK and Firefox on US - all at the same time! Have you tried setting a different shortcut, which you can't press by accident? Maybe "Control Shift Alt Zero".78.144.189.229 (talk) 16:34, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * How do I set a different shortcut? Astronaut (talk) 16:36, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I won't bash you for using Windows :-) But neither Mac OSX, or Unix systems in general, seem to do that. The other possibility is that it switches automatically according to whether you use the built in, or external keyboard.  Now that, I can at least see the logic in - even if it is annoying.  As for keyboard shortcuts, I only have XP, but I will go and check.78.144.189.229 (talk) 16:38, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I get Control Panel>Regional and Language (in classic view)>Languages>Details>[Select the keyboard layout you want]>Key Settings>Change Key settings.78.144.189.229 (talk) 16:49, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I would expect it to switch to US format whenever the external keyboard is plugged in (my old work laptop on XP did just that), but it doesn't. Anyway, I found the setting and I can now type as bad as I like without it spontaneously switching on me.
 * However, it's slightly different in Vista from your instructions. It goes like this: Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Keyboard and languages tab, and click on the Change Keyboards button; then on the Advanced Key Settings tab, make sure the "Between input languages" is selected and click the Change Key Sequence button.  There, you will find the settings for the Alt-Shift sequence to change language and the hidden ctrl-shift sequence to change the keyboard layout.
 * Thanks for your help 78.144.
 * Astronaut (talk) 17:40, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Finding flickr account from a farm.static address
How can I find the account for this great portrait? Fanx. 190.244.186.234 (talk) 16:49, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The Flickr photo owner finder show it's part of greyisthecolor's work. Nanonic (talk) 17:02, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Small Games
How Small Games are prepared using Microsoft Office Excel?, Plz guide me.thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.220.215.13 (talk) 19:16, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I am not sure if you wanted this (as it seems to apply only for Office 2000), but here is the second Google hit for which describes an Easter egg (media). Kushal (talk) 21:31, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

What happened - Acer / BenQ
Copied from Misc desk Franamax (talk) 23:55, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Acer became BenQ and all of the sudden even though its site is still online none of the CD drivers, warranties, data sheets, applications, driver, or firmware updates will download. Plus you can not reach them by phone or by fax. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.162.249 (talk) 15:45, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I thought I could disprove this easily by downloading a driver for my Acer monitor, but it does indeed seem the Acer site has gone to sleep. Can anyone shed some light on this? When did Acer become BenQ for one thing? And what's the deal with the downloads? Thanks! Franamax (talk) 23:55, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Err, works fine for me and so does the ftp (the European one at ftp://ftp.work.acer-euro.com ). It may depend on your location. Acer and BenQ have always been the same company. Nanonic (talk) 00:22, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
 * (correction) actually BenQ split off from Acer in 2001 before having the final strings cut in 2006 . Nanonic (talk) 00:37, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Problems with Audacity
I've just downloaded Audacity digital audio editor, and it won't seem to let me edit anything. I'm new at audio editing, so it may just be me. I can import audio files and play them, but it won't let me cut or edit anything I select. Thanks for any help, False Tournament (talk) 23:56, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * How about reading Audacity's Manual first?-Abhishek (talk) 04:00, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * After importing a file, try highlighting part of the sound waves and then using some of the editing features. I had a similar problem when I started using Audacity.--El aprendelenguas (talk) 21:37, 11 August 2008 (UTC)