Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 February 11

= February 11 =

Manipulating photos with fractal generating software
Hi,

I've been using various fractal generating programs to create art, and one which I've used a lot is an old form of Spangfract (v1.98beta6). this allowed the importation of non-mathematical images (such as photographs), which could then be manipulated mathematically. Unfortunately, this version was only for classic Mac, and later versions for OSX (such as Spangfract X) - though they claim to be able to do the same process - are very crashy whenever I try to import any photos.

Are there any freeware fractal generating packages other than Spangfract - either for OSX or for Windows (preferably XP) which allow users to import and manipulate photos?

TIA, Steego (talk) 02:28, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

TomTom and GLONASS
Hey everyone, I was just wondering if anyone knows whether or not my TomTom satnav (bought in January) can make use of the Russian GLONASS system as well as the US GPS system, or if I need a software change or something to make it do so? Ditto for the future European Galileo and Chinese Compass systems? Thanks, Colds7ream (talk) 09:06, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


 * You need more than a software change - those other systems operate on different radio frequencies (among other technical details). You would need a separate piece of hardware to handle that, unless your handheld unit specifically says it already contains electronics to decode those systems.  Such multi-system satellite navigation devices are pretty uncommon and expensive.  Nimur (talk) 15:29, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, thanks. Colds7ream (talk) 17:36, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

HP 5940 printer info
I have an HP printer (5940) an would like to know the cartridge number for the color black for my printer. Can you help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.207.249.23 (talk) 09:26, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Compatible HP 96 Ink Cartridge (C8767WN) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.27 (talk) 14:20, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Double-clicking with Firefox
Does firefox require or expect any double clicking? How can I turn it off - I've looked through the variouis firefox menus, and searched on the web, and I cannot find any mention of this. I'm wondering if Firefox's eexpectation of double clicking is responsible for some of the problems listed above. I loath double clicking, it is horrible. 89.240.198.212 (talk) 11:54, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Could you give more detail? What operating system? Double clicking to start Firefox or double clicking when navigating the web with firefox? Most OS use the double click system for starting programs. I'm not aware of any options in Firefox that you could change to enable double clicking of hyperlinks, perhaps this is an OS issue also. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.43.89.27 (talk) 14:15, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

WinXP. As I said, I do not like double-clicking. I have re-checked that I already have double-clicking turned off in Windows (by looking at where it is hidden, in start/settings/folder options). So if Firefox expects double-clicking, and my computer is set up not to do double-clicking, might that be the cause of the problems? Thanks 89.243.182.24 (talk) 14:30, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I apologize for sounding like a Dell customer service person on this one, but have you tried a Firefox uninstall and then a re-download-and-install? Actually, a Dell customer service person would end up asking you to format your hard disk and reinstall everything from scratch.  Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:34, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I can't think of any action in Firefox that would require double-clicking. APL (talk) 22:52, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Some of the problems previously listed may have been due to turning on ClickLock in Windows Mouse Properties, which does more than described. I have now turned it off again. Update: I am still getting the same problems, so perhaps it was not that. 92.29.82.48 (talk) 20:26, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Killer graphics card drivers & Ubuntu recovery
My graphics card:
 * NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT

When I install the drivers from the CD that comes with the card, it's all fine - there are no problems. However, any time I download drivers from online, my computer can't reach the desktop; it crashes shortly after the screen with all the "press F to..." information. This has happened every time I tried updating it since I bought the card in late 2008. I recover Windows (Vista) by using System Restore and carry on as before. For the most part, I've lived fine with my ancient card drivers, but now that I'm trying to switch to Ubuntu, it's a bit more of a problem.

I thought it might be a Windows problem, so I rushed straight in and installed the newest drivers for the card from online...and it crashed Ubuntu same as it crashes Windows. Luckily, I had an older version of Ubuntu in my GRUB menu (due to a mistake I'd made a few weeks ago) so I tried using that to get a working version of Ubuntu just without the drivers. Long story short, I rendered all three versions of Ubuntu on my GRUB menu unstartable.

So...


 * 1) Any idea why my Graphics Card of Death won't let me update its drivers, or anything I could do to solve that problem?
 * 2) How might I go about recovering Ubuntu to make it useable again?
 * 3) ...This one should be easier. Once all of this is sorted, how might I go about deleting the other two Ubuntus from my GRUB menu?

In case it wasn't obvious, I'm not hugely technically minded (I struggled to use Ubuntu, having been a Windows user for ten years). Please bear that in mind :) Vimescarrot (talk) 12:25, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * If it doesn't make sense, the following comment is something of a continuation of a discussion KageTora and I had about this very issue before I came here. Vimescarrot (talk) 12:36, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, something I didn't mention to you before. I'll write it here in case it is relevant, but my Vista laptop never updates the drivers for my 'came-with-the-machine-and-stays-with-the-machine' graphics card. I went to the Intel site to do it myself and this made my system unstable so I had to fall back on System Restore to fix it. There may be a reason why graphics cards are not updating their drivers automatically. --  KageTora - (影虎)  ( A word...? )  12:31, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Getting this working again: rename /etc/X11/xorg.conf to some backup name, and if there's a backup or failsafe or whatever file then rename that to xorg.conf (if necessary you can boot from a livecd and change the file that way; you can also copy the xorg.conf from the livecd to the hard disk. Your new xorg.conf shouldn't have special nvidia lines in it. If things still fail, then you may be running into problems with the nVidia kernel module (but I don't think so, as you're getting pretty far into the boot); if that's the case, boot into single user mode, discover the nvidia module(s) with modprobe -l | grep nvid and then remove them with modprobe -r -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 14:30, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Incidentally I've had no problems, on several machines, with the closed-source Ubuntu nvidia driver (which is now at v185 (185.18.36)) installed using Ubuntu's "Hardware Drivers" application (from the Canonical repositories). I've never found the need to install the driver binaries from nVidia's own website. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 14:35, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I'll be trying this out later tonight if I've got time, or tomorrow if not. I did use the Hardware Drivers application to get my drivers. =\ Vimescarrot (talk) 18:02, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree with Finlay's assertion - the closed-source binary that is distributed by Canonical (through Synaptic) has been more stable for my system than the newer versions available at nvidia.com. However, if you need particular features of the newest drivers (or CUDA support), the default Canonical binary is not sufficient.  Nimur (talk) 22:54, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

Photo gallery plugin for Wordpress
Hi guys. I'm looking for a decent gallery/photo album type plugin for Wordpress for our non-profit's website. We've searched Google and several Wordpress plugin pages to no avail. It seems like the free ones are extreme crippleware and the good ones are quite expensive. It's also been a frustrating 2 months installing and testing one plugin after the other. The best we've come up with is the current gallery on one of our articles here, using the SimpleViewer plugin. It is about 50% of what we need, however once the gallery is created it cannot be edited, so we cannot add/remove/re-order pictures, nor does it do captions. You can't even bulk upload or bulk link pictures to a gallery (it only does it one by one).

Long story short, we need something as follows:
 * 1) Free (beer) or very very cheap
 * 2) Photos uploaded and linked in bulk
 * 3) Image captions
 * 4) Auto thumbnails
 * 5) Gallery can be freely edited after creation
 * 6) Gallery can be embedded anywhere in a post. Multiple galleries per post must be possible.

Basically something like the current SimpleViewer but less crippled. All good recommendations appreciated, particularly if you have personal experience using one. Zunaid 13:07, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


 * The only one I've ever used for wordpress is gallery(2), though I've never really used it for embedding (I guess you want a flash applet or some sort of animation script for that?) I haven't looked at gallery3 yet (probably won't bother) and there seems to be another plugin (wpg2) for embedding gallery in wp posts, but I'm not sure if it does everything that you want it to do. 219.102.221.49 (talk) 00:31, 13 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Now that I think about it... can't google wave do all of that? 219.102.221.49 (talk) 00:35, 13 February 2010 (UTC)


 * We want to host the images on our own site rather than hotlink them from elsewhere. But nevermind, I found NextGEN Gallery which does everything I want, it's quite brilliant actually. Zunaid 11:05, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

multiple files with awk
Hi, if i have multiple awk scripts attempting to write to the same file at the same time, is there anything in the awk/bash/linux specification that would guarantee that each script completes its write before the next script starts, i dont care about the order that each script writes in, just that each can print its line of text without messing up the previous/next line? ie is there any kind of file locking mechanism in place either implicitly or could be passed as a parameter? Thanks--86.27.192.94 (talk) 23:38, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


 * *nix has (at least) two file-locking mechanisms, detailed at File locking. But I don't believe awk has access to them, nor that there's a (standard) command-line access to them. So your options include:
 * use a regular file as lock; your script checks to see if the "lock" file exists, and if it does it sleep-waits and polls again; if it doesn't then create one. But that has a nasty race condition; you can (mostly) avoid that by creating a symlink named lock that "points" to a (non-existent) "file" named for the PID of your script (that way a script can check if it created the common lock). Doing this properly, particularly on NFS, is rather tricky.
 * wrap your awk scripts in little C programs (or whatever language you like that does support file locking) as suggested here
 * convert your awk script to a more featureful language - a2p will turn it into a perl script and pyawk does some awk-y things in python. Both languages can use fcntl and flock.
 * hack: prepend each line of the output of each script with a prefix (e.g. script1 puts "0001", script2 puts "0002", etc.) and then postprocess with sort --key to order 'em.
 * Hope this helps. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 23:56, 11 February 2010 (UTC)


 * If the files are open with  (which includes the ">>" in the shell), and the file isn't on NFS, and the amount written per call to  isn't too large (my guess is a few kB), then you are guaranteed to get the lines out intact in some order without loss or duplication.  However, awk will probably not call   for each line separately, but will buffer them until they reach some size (4 KiB is common) and then write that much at once (which will not be an integral number of lines, so you lose).  But if each process writes out very few lines, then all of them will get written in one   when the process exits and you win (except that it may look odd that the output has blocks of lines from one process each even though they ran concurrently).  --Tardis (talk) 00:04, 12 February 2010 (UTC)


 * Essentially the same assumptions predicate my hack, above, so if Tardis' case doesn't work, my hack won't either. Forget my hack. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 00:07, 12 February 2010 (UTC)


 * If you can avoid the problem altogether, you're less likely to run into trouble mucking with file locking. Consider, for example, having all the  s write to different files, and having   come along afterwards and concatenate them into the same file.  (This, of course, requires making sure   runs only after everything is done, but that might be easier to arrange.) Paul Stansifer 02:45, 12 February 2010 (UTC)


 * One way to avoid the locking would be to use a program that does the locking, like a logger. If all the awk scripts are just writing text, have them log it instead of write it.  The logger will lock the file as necessary. --  k a i n a w &trade; 03:10, 12 February 2010 (UTC)