Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 July 12

= July 12 =

backup firefox address bar search
I'm currently preparing for a re-install and am wondering if there is anyway to backup the database used in the firefox address bar search?

Cheers, --124.180.216.146 (talk) 11:32, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * All your settings are stored in a profile folder. The location of this varies depending on your OS, but you should be able to save this folder and copy its contents back.  See here for more info.  It probably helps if you re-install the same version of Firefox as you had before, but I don't know how essential that is.
 * There are also various tools/plug-ins that claim they can back up all kinds of settings including your history and bookmarks (which are what the address bar search uses). I can't recommend any, but two are FEBE and MozBackup.  But copying the profile folder is probably sufficient. --Colapeninsula (talk) 13:23, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * This page on the Mozilla website explains how to back up your info. --Colapeninsula (talk) 13:24, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * At minimum, you could try saving your places.sqlite database and using it with your fresh install. TheGrimme (talk) 16:41, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Text Converter
Hello, a long time ago on the internet you used to get all sorts of sites that would convert a website / some text into certain dialects or styles, for example you used to get one that turned it into the A-Team, so if you wrote "Me and Bobby went to the shops to get some ham", it would make it say "Me and Murdoch modified the crazy damn shops to not get on no plane, fool!", and you also got them so it would turn ordinary language into porno talk so it would be "Me and ****ing Bobby went throbbing hard to the fisting shops, ****ed some ham in the ***", or similar. What were these things called and do they still exist and where can I find them? Jeremy Wordsworth (talk) 13:59, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * There's such a translator here. I think there may also have been some proxy servers that did it more transparently, but I can't find any now. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:34, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Organizing music
Hi, I was just wondering in what ways and how you organize your music. Do you organize them by artist/album/song (and what do you do with soundtracks from films/plays)? Do you go by genre/artist/song? Or do you just plop everything in one (or maybe many) places on your hard drive and let software such as MediaMonkey or foobar2000 do the rest? Thanks, 141.150.23.93 (talk) 16:06, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I have my music organized in folders by genre, then by artist, and finally by album. If I have a single song by an artist, I have a 'Misc' folder inside of each genre.  I also use mp3tag in order to rename my files to [track #] - [artist] - [album] - [title].mp3.  It's all a matter of preference, but that is mine. TheGrimme (talk) 16:48, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * One difficulty is that the concept of "Artist / Album / Song" as a top-to-bottom hierarchy is really not well-suited to many types of music and audio. For example, much of my audio collection consists of files from independently produced creators who never released anything in the form of an "album."  And as a personal preference, I have never liked the idea of "genre" to describe music or audio: are the Beatles rock or pop?  There is never a good answer; "genre" seems like a poorly contrived effort by music marketing corporations who sought to segment the purchasers into demographics, rather than a sincere effort to categorize the audio according to any aesthetic or meaningful, technical metric.  So, it's unsuitable to try to fit these tracks into a folder or database structure that expects a well-ordered, unique tree-structure ("genre > album > artist > ...").  Similarly, there is not a one-to-one mapping between artist and song: consider the case of remixes, cover-songs, group collaborations, and so forth.  Consider, Tree (data structure) vs. Graph (data structure); it is my opinion that a collection of audio-tracks with associated metadata describing their style, creator, and so on, are much better described as a graph than as a tree.
 * After years of trying to make a sensible hierarchical ordering that could account for these various permutations, I have finally succumbed to the "giant directory full of unsorted tracks," and a directory database that intelligently scans audio tracks for metadata (usually, an ID3 tag) to allow rapid search. I have used WinAmp and iTunes, which are both available for free; I have also used Rhythmbox, which is free software.  These software can all assist you in organizing your music and data files.  Nimur (talk) 17:00, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Trees are also graphs, I think, but only of a more restrictive kind. So, that would be graphs in general vs. a particular form of graphs. Wikiweek (talk) 22:57, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

I group them into my own roughly aligned Genres then it's just every song in that genre sorted by artist name (my key thing being that I personally would look for, say, Aimee Mann under 'M' not 'A' so I have to have them set as Mann, Aimee in my naming (well probably not but I do). ny156uk (talk) 17:44, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Math for hardware vs. math for software
Is there math for hardware and math for software in a degree program of computer science? I suppose some things, like Calculus, might be common in both cases, but I also suppose some topics and subfields are specific for hardware or software. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikiweek (talk • contribs) 22:18, 12 July 2011 (UTC)


 * In computer science, you study both (mainly in graduate school). Software mathematics will be covered in algorithms class. You want to write your programs in such a way that they run efficiently and (very important) they complete. Hardware mathematics will be covered in architecture class - specifically when you discuss the math coprocessor that most CPUs have. You will also cover the many algorithms for performing simple calculations like floating point division. You will learn how to make your software even more efficient. For example, integer mathematics is much faster than floating point mathematics in all common household computers. So, assume you are writing a program that deals with numbers with 2 decimal places and you do a lot of addition and multiplication with them. Instead of using a float type, you can use an int type (multiplying every number by 100) and just cram a period into the numbers when you display them on the screen. -- k a i n a w &trade; 13:07, 14 July 2011 (UTC)


 * For software, I'd say algebra, Boolean logic (the simple form), and matrices are useful, and geometry for graphics. (I've only used calculus on one occasion, which, incidentally, was what first brought me to the Ref Desk, to find the formula for the center of mass of a bent pipe.)  More advanced math topics are likely only needed for applications in those specific areas.  For example, you don't need much knowledge of statistics, unless writing a program to solve statistics problems.  And, even then, the specs would likely include any formulae to be used. StuRat (talk) 19:07, 15 July 2011 (UTC)