Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 March 24

= March 24 =

Network Adaptor
I am trying to add a computer to a wireless network that has been set up, when when it looks for a list of wireless networks, it says that 'No network card' has been detected. Yet when i look in device manager under network devices it says there is a realtek network adaptor that is working properly. I have tried to uninstall the network device and restart the computer, but that hasnt made any difference. I really cant figure why it cant detect it, but i reckon it is something extremely obvious that i have completely overlooked! It is on windows Vista.

Thanks in advance. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.168.87.199 (talk) 01:15, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Are you sure the realtek network adaptor is not a wired LAN device? --Wirbelwind ヴィルヴェルヴィント  (talk) 05:50, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Check Start/Setting/Network Connections. Is the device listed under "Device Name" & what does it say? What is its Status column (if disabled, click Name column, right click, select Enable). Also in the device manager, can you find a dialog that says "Device status: This device is working properly" and "Device usage: Use this device (enable)". 88.112.62.225 (talk) 06:21, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * It is a Realtek RTL8169/8118 Family PCI GBE NIC, which i am sure is a wireless network adaptor. Under the Network Devices it says it is enabled, but the 'Network Cable is unplugged', and when i try to diagnose it says please plug in a network cable. 86.129.215.180 (talk) 17:13, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Umm... everywhere on the Internet says that that is not a wireless network card. So I don't know where you are getting this idea from. --76.167.241.45 (talk) 19:25, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh, it isn't —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.129.215.180 (talk) 21:43, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Is it a laptop? I spent a good hour trying to get my sister's laptop to connect to a wireless network only to finally find there was a teeeny-tiny switch on the front of the laptop (where no other buttons/ports are) which turned the wireless-card on/off. I would have happily thrown the thing out of the window at that point - what kind of insane company puts an on/off switch on the outside of a computer for wireless?! Grrr makes me mad just thinking about it! (p.s. I know it's pretty common but up until then all laptops i'd used were Macs which have the on/off capability in an icon on the menu-bar...in the OS). 194.221.133.226 (talk) 10:42, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

It is a desktop computer 86.129.215.180 (talk) 17:13, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Freeware software alerts
How can i get freeware software alerts —Preceding unsigned comment added by RevathiCh (talk • contribs) 11:02, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't understand your question (what is a "freeware software alert"?), but I added a heading for it so it'll stand out properly. I bet you're going to get better answers if you explain what you mean. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 13:05, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * It sounds to me like they want to be notified whenever any new free software becomes available. I suspect that they'd need to limit the search to a few specific areas, or else they'd get notices of hundreds of free games each day. StuRat (talk) 14:55, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, something like that you're better just signing up with download.com or majorgeeks.com or whoever your favorite d/l site is: Sign up for the email newsletter on a couple, that should keep you busy with the new stuff fairly well. — Ched ~  (yes?)/© 16:51, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Hourly check for updates on Ubuntu
Does anyone know if it is possible to change some configuration file, to allow Ubuntu to check for updates every hour? I know you might think it is a bit overkill, but I really like a secure system... SF007 (talk) 16:02, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * This wee script would update your system

#!/bin/sh apt-get update apt-get update
 * and you could then schedule it using cron or some front-end to it (e.g. gnome-schedule). Hope this helps, 80.192.24.24 (talk) 22:30, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not 100% sure, but it seems that /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,whatever}/apt does the actual update fetching and the graphical update notifier is only reading the results. So you should be checking for updates hourly if you arrange the /etc/cron.foo/apt to run hourly. (apt-get update should be enough but probably the cron script deals better with some special cases) --194.197.235.58 (talk) 22:28, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Personally I'd just save the script 80.192 mentioned (i.e. /usr/bin/updsys.sh), type chmod +x /usr/bin/updsys.sh, and then type crontab -e to access the cron settings. Add this line to the bottom:

0 * * * * /usr/bin/updsys.sh
 * ← Spidern  →  13:02, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

How could I be so dumb? Of course, I can simply use "sudo apt-get update" in a scheduled way. Thanks, I might try it some day. Thanks to all SF007 (talk) 01:31, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
 * UPDATE: Found an easier way! just install packagekit-gnome and it has an option for that in a nice GUI (system--->preferences--->software updates)

Oprea tabs
When I open a local html or mht film in Opera web browser, it opens the file in a new tab. How can I set Opera to always open new files in the current tab, or even better turn tab browsing off temporally? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.87 (talk) 18:26, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * You can disable tabs by checking "Tools → Preferences… → Tabs → Additional tab options… → Open windows instead of tabs", but I don't know if that will do what you want. Opera doesn't appear to have any options for handling externally-opened files, doesn't support advanced Dynamic Data Exchange options, and doesn't appear to have any command-line options that would help here (except possibly kiosk mode, which most likely isn't what you want). I'd say Opera probably isn't the right tool for this particular job. –  7 4   02:37, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm that just means I have a load of windows open now instead of tabs lol. Thanks anyway, I'll figure something out —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.88.87 (talk) 21:52, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

MS Word tables
I have a dozen or so MS Word documents, which heavily rely on tables. Unfortunately, the creator of those documents did not know about the tables feature being available in Word, so he created bunches upon bunches upon bunches of pseudo-tables, utilizing fixed fonts and extended ASCII characters 179-218 (such as ├─). Does anybody know of an easy way to convert these into proper tables?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 20:03, March 24, 2009 (UTC)
 * Copy/paste into Excel may work, with a bit of stripping out of duff characters. If you're lucky they've used a consistent character for every 'column separator' - if that's the case maybe a find/replace with a comma would help - then you can copy/paste all the rows into excel and do a data-conversion from CSV (comma separated values). Those are your best bets i'd say - it depends on how complex the tables are though. ny156uk (talk) 20:21, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh wow, what a pain! I was hoping for maybe a macro or whatnot&mdash;surely this problem was pretty common in the 1990s, with all those documents converted into Word from various other text formats which did not support any tables other than ASCII?
 * The solution above works when one just needs to produce a Word table (I've just tried it), but my needs, unfortunately, go beyond that. See, I have this exact same set of documents from years later, and those use proper Word tables.  What I need to do is to document the differences between the old documents and the newer ones, and the "compare document" feature in Word would not properly compare ASCII-based tables and normal tables (I need to see the changes line-by-line, and I very much want to avoid doing it manually!).  Converting an ASCII table via Excel is too time-consuming for that (there are just too many little extra tweaks that need to be done in the process).  If anyone knows a better solution, please, please, please, let me know; it will be greatly appreciated!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 20:49, March 24, 2009 (UTC)
 * I feel your pain. It depends on the level of messiness. I would first use search/replace to strip all ASCII funnies, then output the entire mess into an editor like UltraEdit which has column editing and a macro feature that actually works (it also has a nice compare utility). If then I achieve anything readable, I would write a little Delphi app to output that into a comma-delimited file that can be imported into Excel and then pasted into Word tables. Sandman30s (talk) 21:50, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Hire an intern? –  7 4   02:39, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually there are a lot of ways to handle this situation, depending on the level of inanity the person used when making the tables. The first question is, how consistent is everything? Is there a consistent delimiting character for all the columns, and then a different delimiting character (perhaps even a carriage return) for the different rows? If that's the case then text to table feature in excel should handle them pretty easily. If not, then maybe something more complex like sed in *nix would work well. Even without getting into linux, complicated "replace all" approaches in word can handle a lot of scenarios. Provide more information and maybe I'd have some sed ideas about how to handle it. Shadowjams (talk) 04:13, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * So long as the tables are pretty normal with just one line of text in each cell and without too many merged cells, I think this could all be done in Word with a series of find & replace operations like this:
 * Replace all line junctions with "+"
 * Replace all horizontal line segments with "-"
 * Replace all vertical line segments with "\t" (the search & replace special character for )
 * Then use Word's "convert text to table" function with as the column separator. You can then delete any rows with only "+" and "-" in them and eliminate any empty columns.  It might be helpful to print out the document first to use as a guide to see when you have it about right.
 * Astronaut (talk) 11:39, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you all, folks, who pitched with recommendations. Unfortunately, every single one proved to be too time-consuming, so I went the other way. Instead of converting ASCII tables to Word tables I simply converted the Word tables from the newer documents to plain text (Table&rarr;Convert&rarr;Table to Text...). After that it becomes possible to compare the old and the new versions using the "compare and merge documents" feature. Granted, it still shows a lot of cruft (extra spaces, ASCII pseudo-border symbols, etc.), but the changes to the actual content are still easy to spot...—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 19:08, March 26, 2009 (UTC)