Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 May 11

= May 11 =

Privacy and email
If I appreciate my privacy can I have a free email (like gmail, yahoo or hotmail)? Or is it absolutely necessary to pay for it?217.168.0.94 (talk) 00:11, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * To be truthful, it does not help even if you pay for it. Unless you send all of your emails to yourself over localhost and noone else, there will be a receiver. If you get an email, there will be a sender. Please stop worrying about things you cannot realistically help. Alternatively, you can come up with an entirely fresh paradigm and get filthy rich (you can give the money to me if you don't want to stay rich. =P) --Kushal (talk) 01:03, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * You might consider carefully reading the privacy policy of any email service you use, free or otherwise. Some of them may be scanning your emails for keywords to base advertisings on. Or they may be filtering for viruses or spam. You may consider this a violation of your privacy. Even if they don't do any of those things, you emails will still be going through at least one (probably more than one) third party who may either illegally monitor your emails, or turn them over to law enforcement agencies on demand. It's also possible that a hacker will gain access to a email server. See E-mail privacy for more.  A possible solution is encryption. Pretty Good Privacy is a reasonably popular solution. APL (talk) 01:49, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * One word: Encryption. GPG. There's no other way. --grawity 13:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

iTunes on new computer
I just got a new computer, but had to give up the old one before the new one arrived. I'm trying to sync my iPod to the blank iTunes on the new computer, but it won't recognize it. I did save all my music files and everything from the old computer, and put it on a portable hard drive, but I can't just put the whole thing on, and am afraid I'll have to add each song individually, which will take forever, plus I'll have to re-enter all the information I spent so many hours diligently researching and filling in on the first computer. How can I make all the songs and playlists and everything from my iPod sync with the blank iTunes on my new computer without losing everything? Cherry Red Toenails (talk) 08:53, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * And to make matters worse, my iPod just froze. It won't play, it won't turn off, it won't go to the menu, it's just stuck on pause. (And no, it's not locked; I did think of that.) Cherry Red Toenails (talk) 09:00, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * You can restart your iPod by holding the MENU and center buttons pressed for a few seconds (until the Apple logo appears).
 * The information is stored in the music files themselves (see ID3), so you should be able to just add the whole folder to iTunes.
 * And next time, use "Backup to disc". (It's in "File" menu on Windows.)
 * --grawity 13:19, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Playlists, however, are not .froth. (talk) 13:33, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the help so far. I did manage to add the entire music folder, and you were right, the artist and album and album art and all that stuff came with, but the things like play counts and playlists didn't (as mentioned by froth) so if I now plug in my iPod and sync it, will it import that info from the iPod to iTunes, or will I lose it all? (If it helps to mention this, I not only backed up the My Music folder onto the portable hard drive (which is the folder I just put onto iTunes), but also the iTunes folder from under Program Files. Would the stuff I'm looking for somehow be accessible from there?) Cherry Red Toenails (talk) 02:21, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
 * And now I see that all my music files imported in double, so I have two of every song. What happened there??? Cherry Red Toenails (talk) 02:26, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't have Google access right now so I can't get you a link, but there are pages that describe moving your iTunes library from one computer to another. Not sure if everything moves over, but some does. You want to click the export iTunes Library menu item (or something close to that), probably in the File menu. That'll give you an XML file. You may have to edit that to point it to the new location for your music (and album art?) (search/replace?), but when you import it on the new computer it should bring over most everything from your old library. 206.126.163.20 (talk) 02:31, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Just ONE file for flash
When I export a project from Swish Max, I end up with one lovely file that will import quite happily into Powerpoint (using a plugin). However, when I make a swf file in ADobe captivate (also to use in powerpoint) I end up with lots of different bits and pieces. Is there any way i can convert these bits and pieces into one file? Sorry for my use of over technical languag, you can tell I am no Flash expert! Thanks - Kirk UK —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.82.79.175 (talk) 11:26, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * What do you mean 'bits and pieces'? What are the file extensions of the files generated?  a s e nine  say what?  07:01, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

C array and structure initialisation
I can't seem to figure out how you can set all the elements of multidimensional arrays or of structures to zero. I'm also having trouble initialising strings in structures at initialisation.Any help would be appreciatedBastard Soap (talk) 13:18, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * If you set the first element of an array to zero, the rest of the elements will be set to zero automatically. So just do something like
 * int array[size][size] = {0};
 * Dismas |(talk) 13:22, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Didn't work, all elements came to a value of -858993460 Bastard Soap (talk) 13:44, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Try memset(array, '\0', sizeof(array) );           APL (talk) 15:12, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * If you used malloc, use calloc to allocate memory set at zero. --h2g2bob (talk) 16:47, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Dismas's suggestion should work. The C standard requires that it work. It's better not to use memset when you can avoid it, because it's easy to get the details wrong and crash your program or fail to initialize the whole array. Also, it's undefined behavior to use memset (or calloc) to initialize pointers or floating-point values to 0. It'll work on most modern implementations, but technically it's a bad idea to rely on it. The = {0} construct works correctly for pointers and floats. -- BenRG (talk) 01:26, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I want to initialise to zero multidimensional array of characters or structures with characters and doubles. Bastard Soap (talk) 13:33, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Your array appears to be neither static nor global, otherwise it would have been initialized for you. As such (being on the stack), you need to use memset. -- Fullstop (talk) 17:42, 13 May 2008 (UTC)


 * You can initialize stack variables to zero in the way Dismas said. MyStruct x[12][34] = {0} will initialize the entirety of x to zero, not just the first subobject. Furthermore it will do this correctly, as though you'd explicitly assigned 0 to everything, whereas memset will set all bytes to zero, which doesn't always have the same effect (though it does on most implementations). What you can't do is assign zeros to a previously declared array this way. For that you can use memset (technically nonportable), or you can do something like this:

static const MyStruct zero[12][34]; memcpy(x, zero, sizeof x);
 * or this (which wastes a bit less memory):

static const MyStruct zero; int i;           for (i = 0; i < sizeof x / sizeof zero; ++i) x[0][i] = zero;
 * both of those are portable (though, again, I don't know how much that matters in this day and age). -- BenRG (talk) 10:46, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Automatically removing all line-breaks
Here is a page with a bunch of letters. I want all the letters on a single line. If it were any other character (even a tab-space), I could use find&replace to remove the separation, but I don't think this can work with line-breaks. Is there a way? Seans Potato Business 14:18, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Are you pasting it into something like Word? In Word you can just do a search and replace for '^p' to replace hard returns. If you're pasting into some other package that won't let you search for returns there's an easy workaround. View the source code of the web page, copy/paste into your package then serach and replace the html code surrounding the text. Mike --87.114.7.177 (talk) 15:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * View source wont work, because it's formated with line-breaks in the source code also. I use OpenOffice so will search for a code for that, but if anyone else posts it here, I'll be grateful since I'll be checking intermittently (and post the answer when I find it for prosperity). Seans Potato Business 16:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * In the Find and Replace dialogue enter a dollar sign in 'Search for'. Click the 'More options' button and check 'Regular Expressions'. Click 'Replace All'. William Avery (talk) 16:55, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * With OOo 2.3.1, I get "search key not found". Have you confirmed that this works? Seans Potato Business 17:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes. It works with 2.4.0 on Ubuntu. Possibly you need \n instead of $. William Avery (talk) 19:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Well it didn't work with either but I updated to 2.4 and now it works fine. Thank you very much! Seans Potato Business 08:13, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


 * The unix tr command will do this job

tr -d '\n'


 * You can download a Windows executable from UnxUtils at Sourceforge William Avery (talk) 16:15, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * How do I tell it which file to apply the effect upon? --Seans Potato Business 17:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

tr -d '\n' file-name


 * Graeme Bartlett (talk) 06:18, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


 * In the end, I didn't use this option but I've retained the UnxUtils, since I've used Linux before and know you can do some nifty things in terms of searching through files. Thanks for the tip! --Seans Potato Business 08:13, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Metadata editor
Hello, I'm trying to find a way of editing the metadata on all my movie files in XP. I have loads, in all shapes and sizes and they appear to inherit random metadata as regards to Genre and suchlike. There are apps for editing MP4 files, of which I have vanishingly few examples, is there not an easier way? With MP3s one can simply right-click and edit the data manually, that fuction seems to be denied me with movie files. Thanks. 80.229.160.127 (talk) 14:37, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Have you tried importing them into either Windows Media Player or iTunes and editing the data like that?  weburiedoursecrets inthegarden  19:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Movie files do not support things like the MP3 Tag which is appended to an MP3 file. Movie files have headers which contain for example FourCC which identifies it so that it is played by the correct codecs. Your best bet would be a third party app to categorize your collection. Sandman30s (talk) 19:50, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Windows Movie Maker
I am using Windows Movie Maker, and I created a movie. I noticed an error, so I fixed it in the project, and went to resave it as a movie. Now, I keep getting the error: Windows Movie Maker cannot save the movie to the specified location. Verify that the original source files used in your movie are still available, that the saving location is still available, and that there is enough free disk space available, and then try again. I have verified all that it said, and it still is not working. I have restarted the computer, changed save locations, tried different names, and it still wont work. What can I do? --Omnipotence407 (talk) 15:23, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Try importing all of your video clips or pictures into WMM again.  weburiedoursecrets  inthegarden  19:17, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Im afraid I have. The error I had to fix was on all the slides, my converter had put green lines along the bottoms of the pictures. I fixed that problem by reinserting properly converted files. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 00:23, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I have had this problem in the past, as well. As far as I know, it is an error with the program, and I haven't been able to find a workaround yet. Leeboyge (talk) 06:36, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd even accept a substitute. Even if I have to redo the whole thing, it isnt that intense. --Omnipotence407 (talk) 22:38, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Translate from Turkish
Does anyone know a good site where I can translate a web page in Turkish to English? Makey melly (talk) 18:02, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I've looked, and entire website translators and few and far between. I have however found some Turkish to English phrase translators:


 * Translation Booth
 * InterTran
 * Both of these are free.  weburiedoursecrets  inthegarden  19:24, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Hidden pic (Internet Explorer only)
How does this work? --grawity 19:20, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * The image appears to have alternating pixels; the ones with the woman on are slightly smaller than the others and can only be seen when highlighted.  weburiedoursecrets  inthegarden  19:27, 11 May 2008 (UTC)


 * IE highlights images by drawing a checkerboard of blue pixels over the image (try highlighting the Google logo and looking closely at the white bits). This checkerboard hides all the pixels that make up the non-hidden image. If you look carefully in the top-left corner with the image not highlighted, you can see her face and the other image in alternating pixels. It doesn't work in other browsers because they highlight images with a semitransparent mask rather than alternating solid and transparent pixels. — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 20:14, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

That's awesome!!!!!! (challenge try and see the outline of boob without highlighting) Xor  24  talk to me  02:07, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Slow laptop
My laptop is 4 years old now, and it has recently begun to randomly slow down for about 5 seconds before resuming it's normal speed (though the fan really kicks in after those 15 seconds). Recently reformatted and plenty of free space. What could be causing this? Mr Beans Backside (talk) 20:45, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Could it be a hardware problem, as you said that you newly reformatted the computer? Perhaps the hard disk drive is malfunctioning? Yetmotega (talk) 21:56, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Could it be a power problem (low battery)? 82.35.162.18 (talk) 22:09, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Overheating problem? Have you cleaned the dust from the fans etc in the past 4 years?  Could explain both the slowdown and the fan. --Wirbelwind ヴィルヴェルヴィント  (talk) 17:41, 15 May 2008 (UTC)