Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 November 15

= November 15 =

What ever happened to German Murder Case against Wikipedia?
What ever happened to German Murder Case against Wikipedia? Wired. Did the lawsuit ever happen? The Resident Anthropologist (talk) 00:19, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Not really a Computing question and probably better asked on the Miscellaneous desk. However, we have articles on Walter Sedlmayr (the victim) and Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber (his murderers).  The latter article contains a section about the cases against Wikipedia.  Astronaut (talk) 01:42, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

List of College/University IP Allocations
In thinking about this year's fundraiser I thought it would be an interesting exercise to attempt to target colleges and university students by the IP blocks assigned to colleges and universities. For example, The University of Tulsa has 129.244.0.0/16 and MIT has 18.0.0.0/8. However, I was unable to find such a list online or through any of the registries. Does anyone know if such a list exists? Thanks, In2thats12
 * Block/blacklists used by P2P users tend to include educational institutions in their ranges you may block. E.g. I just checked and it does have. Bear in mind you're talking massive lists, the list for educational institutions I just downloaded is 600k 7zip compressed or nearly 3mb uncompressed (this includes the ranges in range format i.e. 4.0.32.62-4.0.33.4 and the name of who they think is using that range). Note that educational institutions will usually include schools and kindergartens Nil Einne (talk) 12:33, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the response. That's certainly a place to start and see if such a list is easily compilable and verifiable.  Yeah, the campaigns I had in mind wouldn't go over too well at an elementary school. In2thats12 (talk) 17:05, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Might it be easier just to run a DNS resolver on the IP and see if .EDU is at the end? I guess that probably would be slower than a big look-up table. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:02, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Airlines fare search; full URL
When I search an airline's website for fares, with places and dates selected, is it possible to get the full URL of the search result? I mean the unique URL that will reproduce this search result. Usually I see only the URL of the airlines in the address bar even when the search results are displayed. 180.149.48.245 (talk) 06:44, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That depends entirely on how they've got their site set up. Which airline? APL (talk) 07:35, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Batavia Air, TransNusa, Sriwijaya Air or Merpati.180.149.48.245 (talk) 10:16, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * There are two standard, basic ways to send a request for a response to a website: GET and POST. GET requests you can see in the URL. POST requests, you cannot. If you can't see the information in the URL header, they are usually using POST. There is not usually any way to easily view that information. You could, in theory, have a Firefox add-on, I'm sure, that would save the POST data to a file and later let you re-POST it, though that might not work depending on how they have it set up on the site. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:26, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply. If there is a unique URL, I can import that data into a spreadsheet application.  Is there any way to retrieve data ( fares for various dates) into a spreadsheet by sending multiple POST requests. 180.149.48.245 (talk) 15:58, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Not that I know of. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:23, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * One thing that often works but is not guaranteed to work: Even on websites that use POST you can usually do exactly the same things with GET instead. So you can figure out the parameters of a POST request and then put them into a GET request, or vice versa. Figuring out the parameters of the POST request is the hardest part. There should be a Firefox extension that allows you to look at that, and then you have to reformat it slightly for GET. However, there is an upper limit on the length of a URL, so if there is too much information in a POST request it may not fit into a GET request even if the server would otherwise support that. Hans Adler 16:48, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure "usually" is correct here. It's either caused by (somewhat dangerous) loose assignment of system variables (which used to be common in PHP about 5 years ago, but has long since been switched off) or requires the programmer to deliberately have the script recognize them as interchangeable. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:20, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * If you are (or have access to) a programmer you can code POSTs in (for example) Visual Basic for Applications, using the Microsoft XMLHTTP object. However, even this may not work in some cases: some web sites try to prevent this sort of automated access by various tricks (e.g. use of cookies). These tricks may be surmountable but in practice it can be hard to know how. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 17:19, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * But airline websites are a classic example of a session-based website. The server stores state about your actions (often, even if you have not logged in), so this violates the conventional wisdom that the same URL will point to the same specific content.  This is a design choice by the website architects, who may want to discourage deep linking, bot indexing, and search-engines.  Depending on the website, it may be entirely impossible to deep-link to a specific result set.  Nimur (talk) 17:21, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * (ec) Even if you get the GET/POST queries set up correctly, it may not work. Many apps use server-side sessions. Instead of storing data in a cookie on your computer (or even temporarily in a query string), the data is stored on the server in a session. After a while, the session expires and the data is lost. By rebuilding the URL, you attempt to get back to the old session. Since it expired, there is nothing there and you may get nothing more than a "Session Expired" page. -- k a i n a w &trade; 17:22, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * How do websites like tiket2.com manage to search within these sites. They give only the fare for a single day; but if they are able to get it, they will be able to get the fares for multiple days.  180.149.48.245 (talk) 03:21, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Subject
Which is better; organizing files by date or by category? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.90.180.252 (talk) 15:36, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry, neither is clearly better than the other; it depends on what sorts of files you're talking about, and your personal taste. For me, I keep business files sorted by category, but I sort my personal photos by date.  Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:10, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * "Better" here is relevant to the task at hand. Photos, for example, might be better by category ("Fun times with Jim," "The Lost Pants Incident"), or might be better by date ("July 2010 photos", "September 2010 photos") depending on what you are trying to do with them (finding photos of a person, or finding photos of a day). This is why photo organizing programs that allow you to sort by both thrive, and why there are file organizing programs that let you sort by arbitrary factors as well. --Mr.98 (talk) 17:30, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

IPv6
My isp (virgin media) claims they don't offer any ipv6 support at all, "have no plans scheduled in to use ipv6", and "will be sticking with IPv4 as we have more than enough IP addresses in reserve". However, when I visit http://[2620::860:2:21d:9ff:fe33:f235]/ it works. Is the isp clueless about their own service, or is what I'm seeing not actually true ipv6 and some sort of alternative? 82.44.55.25 (talk) 20:19, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Your OS may have set up a IPv6 tunnel. Unilynx (talk) 22:31, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Would that be on by default in Windows 7? I've never manually set anything to do with ipv6 82.44.55.25 (talk) 22:43, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I can't recall for certain but I think Windows 7 enables teredo tunneling by default and this is used when IPv6 is not provided by the connection. I know various programs like uTorrent try to enable it in any case. Nil Einne (talk) 08:02, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks 82.44.55.25 (talk) 09:53, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually on further consideration and looking at a Windows XP config when answering your other question my answer may be incomplete. I believe Windows 7 also provides 6to4 tunneling and this is probably tried first (if IPv6 is not provided by the connection). That won't usually work behind a NAT router though so Windows will probably next try teredo. Given your config, 6to4 would probably work so you may be using that. ipconfig /all should tell you how you're getting the IPv6 I think. (Your IPv6 address would help too.) Oh and from searching I now remember there's also ISATAP which I think will fit in somewhere, probably either before or after 6to4. (This answer is probably still incomplete, my IPv6 knowledge is primarily around setting it up for myself plus some extra.)
 * BTW if I'm right about your config your config, if you want to have a static (but considering it's free with no guarantees) IPv6 address you could likely set up a tunnel from a tunnel broker relatively easily (setting up behind a NAT is often possible but more difficult and likely to limit your POPs). This may or may not provide better IPv6 performance. Both Hurricane Electric and SixXS  have POPs in the UK. see also List of IPv6 tunnel brokers.
 * Nil Einne (talk) 17:53, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

List of all the "about: " that are recognized by FireFox and MS InternetExplorer
In the web-browsers Firefox and IE one may type in certain combinations of "about: " in the address field, to get to special pages. (For instance: "About:Blank").Is there one "about: " that gives you a list of all the other "about: "s?If not: are they listed on a web page somewhere? --178.232.169.222 (talk) 21:38, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
 * about: URI scheme has a pretty comprehensive list. Regarding IE, only about:blank and about:home still work (the other about: pages just allow access to error pages). Xenon54 (talk) 21:53, 15 November 2010 (UTC)


 * http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries ¦ Reisio (talk) 08:15, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you! :-)--(OP) Seren-dipper 17:50, 20 November 2010 (UTC)