Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 September 7

= September 7 =

Ubuntu problems
I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on one of my old computers i had lying around. Unfortunately, it cant do a very basic thing. Open applications. Given, this is a old Celeron computer from 2002, so it's really stretching Ubuntu's requirements, but i still don't see why things won't open! Any solution? I don't care if i have to reinstall Ubuntu, it's not like i have anything on that thing. --69.127.64.22 (talk) 00:20, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * 'It can't open applications' is a very imprecise bug report. What, exactly, do you do in attempting to open apps, and what, exactly, happens when you do it? Algebraist 00:23, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Are you running Ubuntu off LiveCD? How much ram do you have? When you have very little ram (256MB and below) it will take a while for the system to load the application from the CD into the memory. In that case you should use the alternate CD (or maybe a Xubuntu alternate CD, for a smaller ram requirement) to install and your Ubuntu desktop should be quite a bit faster when it's installed. I have a 2002-era Pentium 1Ghz with 512MB ram running the latest Ubuntu without any problem, so there shouldn't be too much problem with hardware requirements. --antilivedT 00:27, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

forgotten phone unlocking code
how can i unlock or flash my cell phone, sony ericsson w890i —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.9.154.189 (talk) 01:01, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I've found the guys over at http://forums.se-nse.net/ helpful when it comes to Sony Ericsson phones. I must say though, some of them can at times be a little unfriendly to the n00bs.  Astronaut (talk) 08:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

cell phone calls
so when I make a call, the tower that I'm connected to is transmitting the voice on the other end in a huge radius, right? It can't just pinpoint my location and beam the call there, b/c radio waves broadcast, no? just curious, thanks, 12.214.21.197 (talk) 01:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Well a directional antenna will need focusing and repositioning whenever you move. For a mobile phone it's far too complex (imagine having a couple of servos controlling an antenna mounted on a gimbal), and mobile standards such as GSM are designed with the low power in mind anyway, so a directional antenna won't bring too much benefit unless you're normally out of coverage. --antilivedT 07:41, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * If you're asking about how you can pinpoint someone's location when you only have their cellphone, the answer is that you use several cell towers to narrow down your location until you get it as accurate as you want. 83.250.202.36 (talk) 07:59, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Mozilla 3.0: Switch off search for keywords?
I've upgraded to Mozilla 3.0 and don't like their "improvements" (distracting, slowing down URL completion etc.). Is there a way to switch them off? Thanks so much!!!!... --71.232.76.89 (talk) 01:49, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * There is no Mozilla 3.0. You mean Firefox 3.0? --Spoon! (talk) 01:55, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * No. just use firefox 2, or use this extension although it only makes cosmetic changes https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.106.15.180 (talk) 02:09, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

PocketPC Unzip Program
I have a Sprint PPC 6700 phone. It runs Windows Mobile 5. I am trying to find an application that will unzip .zip files and every program I try keeps saying this is not a valid PocketPC application. I don't have the USB cable, so I will need to download the program from the web and install it right on the phone.

Also, my phone is not SprintTV capable, are there any other (preferably free) TV programs that will work with my phone? Thanks! 96.228.97.149 (talk) 02:34, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Google Earth and Ubuntu
How's everybody doing? It's me again, :P. Well, anyways I got Google Earth for Ubuntu ans installed it and all etc. Problem is, it flickers like mad'! It's annoying as hell and doesn't help at all when you're trying to see 3D buildings or see snapshots! I'm not really sure how to fix the problem. My screen resolution is 1680 X 1050 and my refresh rate is 60 Hz. Any ideas?--Xp54321 (Hello! • Contribs ) 02:48, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Same thing with Celestia, about 20 min ago I tried to fix it by disabling a ATI accelerated graphics driver. Usually it just takes away some cool animations when windows appear and close etc and it deos improve speed a bit but messes up slide shows stuff like that... Problem is...this time it caused low-screen resolution mode on Ubuntu. I couldn't go above 800 X 600. It was annoying but I used the Ubuntu documentation and restored the normal resolution through a series of BASH commands. --Xp54321 (Hello! • Contribs ) 03:10, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * No the trick is not to disable restrictive drivers, but to disable visual effects in appearances. (although Google Earth works fine with visual effects on for me) --antilivedT 07:37, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * And how do I do that?--Xp54321 (Hello! • Contribs ) 15:35, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Never mind. I fixed it. Thanks.--Xp54321 (Hello! • Contribs ) 17:25, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Microsoft Word 2003 formatting problem
I imported a document from another program (a cheap thing called GSP Write Your Own Novel) into MS Word, and it's generally okay, but there's some kind of invisible border on the pages that limits the amount of text on the page - the available area seems to change so that on some of the later pages I can barely get a paragraph onto the page before I'm onto the next page.

NB - I'm a perennial noob - please keep your answers simple: assume I'm stupid.

Thanks all Adambrowne666 (talk) 03:33, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm working from memory here (I switched to Office 2007 last year) so apologies in advance for any minor errors. Here are some simple steps you can try:
 * Take a look at the page margins. Choose "Page setup..." from the File menu. There you can set the page margins and apply them to the whole document.
 * Make sure the document is correctly split into paragraphs. Ctrl+* will show paragraph breaks and other formatting marks.  Ideally, you will want each word separated with a single space ("·" in this display mode) and each paragraph separated with one or two paragraph marks ("¶" in this display mode).  If instead every line ends in something else like paragraphs marks, or little backwards pointing arrows, they will have to be removed.
 * Take a look at the paragraph settings; Highlight a paragraph (or many paragraphs), right-click and choose "Paragraph...".  Make sure there are small or zero spacings before and after.
 * If none of those actions are effective and the document is not too big, it might be best to re-style the whole document. The easiest way to do that, is:
 * Print the document so you can see where section headers, bold, italic, indents, etc are in the document.
 * Cut & past the whole text into a text editor like Notepad, then exit Word.
 * Restart Word with an empty document, then cut & paste the whole document from Notepad into your new empty Word document. This destroys all the formatting, page margins, section breaks, etc.
 * Using your printed original as a guide, go through the new document imposing bold, italic, headers, indents, etc. in a consistant and pleasing way.
 * Astronaut (talk) 09:26, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks so much for taking the time to set all that out, Astronaut; as it happened, step 1 worked a treat - thanks! Adambrowne666 (talk) 02:10, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Head delay and Firefox bookmarks.
Due to a recent quasi HDD crash, I decided to re-install XP onto a new drive in my Presario SR1520NX. So far, it's kinda working, with two minor problems. I'm combining them into one posting. Hope that OK.

1) When turning on the computer, I usually get a "DISK BOOT FAILURE" message.  Hitting ctrl-alt-reset fixes the problem immediately.

My assumption is that the new HDD needs a bit more time to come up to speed than the old one did. Several people have told me that I can adjust the spin-up time in the BIOS, but on trying it, I can't find anything in the BIOS choices that even come close to mentioning "HDD delay" or anything like that. Any ideas?

2) I re-installed Firefox, and would love to port over my old bookmarks. However, I never got a chance to export my old bookmarks, and assumed that they would be somewhere on the old disk drive.  I happen to have it available, and can read all the files, but have no idea which file(s) to copy over.  The one called Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/defaults/profile/bookmarks.html doesn't seem to be the file, much to my surprise.  Now what?

Thanks for any help. Bunthorne (talk) 04:17, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * 1: Usually there's an option in BIOS that goes along the line of "Wait for HDD at boot up", but not all BIOS have it. But either way this is not a good sign: back in the days you can get that if you're experiencing some cold weather and the lubricating grease solidified and take some time for the drive to spin up to its correct speed, but nowadays they use ball bearings so it probably isn't caused by that. You should start backing up your data to another hard drive just in case your current hard drive fails. Didn't see you say you've installed a new hard drive, and I have no idea why it takes longer to spin up.
 * 2: In Firefox 3 you can use the bookmark manager to import the bookmarks.html file from your previous profile. Otherwise you can try copying over the whole profile directory, start Firefox with profile manager (by adding the switch "-ProfileManager" at the end of the link) and choose your old profile to be default. --antilivedT 07:35, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * In future use the Foxmarks extension which syncs all your bookmarks to a web server. You can then always sync it back to your local copy of Firefox. It's useful for restoring your bookmarks in the case of re-installing, as well as keeping bookmarks synced across multiple copies of Firefox on different PCs. Or use Firefox portable which keeps your entire installation self-contained (useful for running off a USB stick). Zunaid 08:39, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Programming for beginers
I have never programmed before, other than a bit of QBasic when I was about 14, but I would like to now learn. I am looking to program an application that employs screen scraping technology to read data from another application, and on that basis compute various formulae. As I have no idea where to begin with this I thought I would ask for some pointers, particularly what language would be most appropriate for this task, and moreover where the best place to start would be. Thanks  Flaming Ferrari  ( talk ) 09:31, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not 100% sure about what you are trying to do, but if you have some experience with BASIC, then you might find AutoHotkey or AutoIt useful. --Russoc4 (talk) 13:44, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * It depends a bit on what you want to do - if you are looking for something fairly simple (as in no OCR), I'd go with something that plays well with a webcam, which is what I presume you'll use for your input. In which case I've had success with both Java and C, although learning OO might be a challenge. I'd probably lean towards C# for a beginner, all else being equal, simply because Visual Studio is rather nice as an editor, but Java is better if you need cross-platform. Other languages will work, too - especially if OO causes issues. Just check what libraries they have to support video recognition and you should be ok. - Bilby (talk) 13:58, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * If you're talking about screen scraping an application that you have textual access to, such as a command-line application, something you can telnet to, or a web application, this would be straightforward with a Perl module like WWW::Mechanize. If you're talking about screen-scraping a GUI application that you'll have to do OCR on, then that might be too tall an order for a first programming project.  I personally would approach it by inspecting the memory of the other app, but again, that's a lot for a beginner. --Sean 16:22, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Or, putting all of the above another way: describe what you want to do in a little more detail. It'll help us figure out what's right for you. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:16, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, I completely agree. Making a program that makes sense out of images is a seriously difficult thing for any programmer, no matter how experienced. If you just need some data from another program, it's very possible that there is another way to do that 83.250.202.36 (talk) 19:34, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Please help
Using Babel Fish and Windows Live Translator, there is often a problem when translating into French. This is the problem: Words with "'s" do not translate properly. The word remains the same and the "'s" also stays. Why is it like this? Is there a way to fix it? February 15, 2009 (talk) 13:38, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, you get what you pay for with a free translation, maybe. I tried this text:
 * Here's an example of English text. It's got lots of apostrophes.  Dave's put some in, and the paragraph's going to end up with half a dozen.  It's a way to check translation.  There's no telling what's going to happen.
 * And got this in "French":
 * Here' ; s un exemple de texte anglais. It' ; s a obtenu un bon nombre d'apostrophes. Dave' ; s en a mis dedans, et le paragraph' ; s allant finir vers le haut avec une demi-douzaine. It' ; manière de SA de vérifier la traduction. There' ; s aucun what' indiquant ; s allant se produire.
 * Looks to me like it just plain can't handle contractions well. Compare with these versions:
 * Here is an example of English text. It has lots of apostrophes.  Dave has put some in, and the paragraph is going to end up with half a dozen.  This is a way to check translation.  There is no telling what will happen.
 * Voici un exemple de texte anglais. Il a un bon nombre d'apostrophes. Dave en a mis dedans, et le paragraphe va finir vers le haut avec une demi-douzaine. C'est une manière de vérifier la traduction. Nul ne peut dire ce qui se produira.
 * Not much help if you have some text from elsewhere with apostrophes, but that seems to explain the poor translation. --- OtherDave (talk) 19:40, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth, Google Translate doesn't seem to have this problem. I can't vouch for its accuracy, but this is what I got when I put in OtherDave's first example:
 * Voici un exemple de texte anglais. Il ya beaucoup d'apostrophes. Dave a mis certains, et le paragraphe qui va se retrouver avec une demi-douzaine. C'est une façon de vérifier la traduction. Il ne sait pas ce qui va se passer.
 * — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 22:29, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Matt, that's piqued my curiosity. Any thoughts about the difference?  I use Windows XP, and the browser was Firefox 3.0.  --- OtherDave (talk) 10:41, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I got the same result as you when I put it through Babel Fish - the one I posted was from Google Translate, which is smart enough to handle apostrophes properly. It seems like Babel Fish can't even handle possessive apostrophes - I put in "Matt's car is black" and got "Matt' ; la voiture de s est noire" — Matt Eason (Talk &#149; Contribs) 16:27, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Babel Fish works if you use curly apostrophes (’) instead of straight apostrophes ('). Don't ask me why. -- BenRG (talk) 23:05, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Kerberos on Windows XP
Is it possible to use Kerberos authentication when connecting from Windows XP?


 * Server: Debian, with Heimdal Kerberos.
 * Client: Windows XP Pro, with SSPI, my home computer, not in a domain.
 * Client app: WinSCP.

I have installed the ksetup.exe tool from WinXP CD, and added the KDC. What next?

--grawity 14:45, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

IP addresses in DNS servers
In DNS servers, in what form are IP addresses stored (for A records)? Are they in plain text (1.2.3.4), or binary (0x01020304)? (I'm asking because I managed to set up a record for 23.75.345.200) --grawity 18:17, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It depends on the DNS server. DNS servers are defined by the input/output, not by how they store information. -- k <font color='#cc0033'>a <font color='#990066'>i <font color='#660099'>n <font color='#3300cc'>a <font color='#0000ff'>w &trade; 19:56, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * However, the format on the wire is fixed. It has to be for the clients and servers to understand each other. And the wire format for A records is a raw 32-bit integer, not text (definition is in RFC1035 section 3.4.1). It's not possible for a server to send an A record with "23.75.345.200" as the address because there's just no combination of bits that means "23.75.345.200" in an A record. Your server may allow that as an address in a zone file, but when sent to a client it'll either be a malformed packet or it'll be interpreted as meaning something else. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 21:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Uninstalling Windows XP
Okay, im switching to Ubuntu, but having both OS on the computer has made it too slow to run the full installer (i used the one that you can install from windows, making it a seperate OS without partitioning the hardrive). So uninstalling XP should make it work a little faster, in theory. But i dont know how. Its not in Add/Remove Programs because it wasnt an upgrade from 95/98/nt/me, and using %systemroot%\system32\osuninst.exe doesnt work, it says its missing registry information. any other methods? <font color='#ff0000'>the juggresurection (>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ) 18:36, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Maybe try formatting you drive and starting over. Just make sure you get any data you need off before you format. Paragon  12321  18:42, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Well i already have all the data i need off of it. Ive been planning this for a while. now, how would i format the harddrive?<font color='#ff0000'>the juggresurection (>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ) 18:47, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * When you say "having both OS on the computer has made it too slow to run the full installer", what exactly do you mean? Having multiple OS:s on a computer shouldn't slow down the LiveCD that you download from ubuntu.com. Try putting in the installation CD, and see if you can boot from that. Then just run the installer that's on the desktop.
 * If your computer is to slow to run the LiveCD (which sometimes happens), you can download the Alternate CD (go to the download page, check the checkbox that says "Check here if you need the alternate desktop CD. This CD does not include the Live CD, instead it uses a text-based installer"). As the nice little checkbox-text says, this is not a LiveCD, so it will not boot up ubuntu from the CD itself, rather it will boot up an installer. This is slightly tricker, but it's not terribly hard. When it comes to the partitioning stage, tell it to erase the entire harddrive and install ubuntu on it, and there you go :) 83.250.202.36 (talk) 19:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

What i mean is when i try to run the installer from the Live CD, it gets to a screen with some kind of backround on it, and then...nothing. it just sits there. So Im assuming its because there are 2 OS on it, but im not the most knowledgeable when it comes to this kind of stuff. im gonna go try the alternate cd.<font color='#ff0000'>the juggresurection (>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ) 19:14, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually, since its gonna take 8 hours to download, ill just come back if i have any more problems. <font color='#ff0000'>the juggresurection (>-.-(Vಠ_ಠ) 19:54, 7 September 2008 (UTC)


 * You do that :) Way back, I had some sort of similar error with the Ubuntu LiveCD, that the install-program didn't work. I installed from the alternate CD and everything was fine and dandy. Good Luck, and cheers on you for choosing Linux :) We're here in case you need more help 83.250.202.36 (talk) 01:48, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Are you using Wubi to install Ubuntu? If you are you're not going to be able to uninstall Windows XP as Wubi uses the windows boot loader, and you're going to have to burn a LiveCD and boot from that when you start the PC. Then while you're in the live CD when you run the installer just let it format the entire drive and you should have replaced XP with Ubuntu. TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:12, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Out of curiosity, why don't you just create a separate partition for Ubuntu? That way you can use both and you won't have to learn an entirely-new operating system at once.--Birdsusing nnn (talk) 08:25, 8 September 2008 (UTC)