Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 July 24

= July 24 =

Speech recognition
I used a speech recognition software to recognize the lyrics of a song and the result was incorrect. Any idea? Testor Ploa (talk) 04:01, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Not particularly surprising. As our speech recognition article indicates, this works best in the context of a narrowly-defined field, where the vocabulary is small, and the semantics clear. Song lyrics are almost the polar opposite of this. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like bananas, and my love is like a red red rose... AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:36, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Time flies like an arrow... but we can decelerate it. Testor Ploa (talk) 04:51, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Even people with good hearing have difficulty figuring out song lyrics. See mondegreen.--Shantavira|feed me 05:38, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid this is just a limit of the technology. Even with no background noise (musical accompaniment counts as 'noise' in this context) speech recognition is far from flawless. APL (talk) 06:17, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * That's a good point. The human auditory system is readily and instinctively able to distinguish language from background noice/musical overlay and process it effortlessly. On the other hand, computers so far struggle immensely with this distinction and processing. Simply, a computer can't do any better making out the lyrics of some recording than your ear can.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 21:53, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Chances of tracking down attempted SQL injection
OK so i did a stupid think i tried "how to hack" youtube video and tried to hack as an Admin onto a website. After an "Admin" username and string [1'or'1'='1], this message in red letters popped up that this security breach attempt was forwarded to their IT department.

I was in firefox, with private browsing enabled (similar to Google incognito, http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Private%20Browsing), and had Tor, which allows me to connect to multiple anonymous servers (bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays). What are the chances I can get tracked down for this?--DSbanker (talk) 04:11, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I suspect this will depend very much on the website you were trying to hack. If it was some random forum, you may very well get away with it (scary warnings don't necessarily mean much), but if it was the CIA, don't make any long-term plans. But why would you think that YouTube was a sensible place to look for help on this in the first place? Anything there is more or less certain to be either wrong, simplistic, or just plain useless. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:22, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * It was actually the website of a midsize business in another state.

i am 15 years old, and yes what i tried was stupid. But i did plan for this scenario to come up and planned to be untraceable, as i am beginning learning python and etc. The only problem, i connected to Tor from a home IP address (stupid) Correction: this should be called "Chances of tracking down attempted SQL injection?"--DSbanker (talk) 04:26, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * It isn't just stupid, it is wrong. Breaking into websites is as bad as breaking into houses.  If you develop criminal habits at the age of 15, you are going to find it hard to unlearn them.  Give it up!  There are better ways to get your kicks. Looie496 (talk) 05:43, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * If you were properly using TOR, I think the chances of them tracking you down would be pretty low. Even without TOR they'd need to contact the FBI who would need to get a warrent to your ISP's records and then confiscate your computers to verify that it was you and not someone controlling your machine remotely.  Tor's biggest known vulnerability requires a number of "bad apple" nodes hidden within the network. I'm sure a number of law enforcement agencies have done this, but I don't think they'd "out" them for such a juvenile and unsuccessful attack.
 * To be honest, the fact that they've got an error message specifically designed to be scary makes me think that they get a lot of people trying it.  So I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it if I were you. APL (talk) 06:07, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm a bit annoyed here. We ought not to be assisting people with criminal activity, or helping people to avoid facing the consequences of criminal activity. Looie496 (talk) 17:31, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm just asking something here. I am not gna be trying it again.--DSbanker (talk) 23:59, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * It's not clear that the OP violated any laws (even if he/she had gotten in, cybercrime is a really problematic area, esp. with mere intrusion into a private server). We're not assisting anything illegal in any case. We're telling them that they aren't going to be tracked down anytime soon for such an amateurish little thing. Which is undoubtedly true.
 * I will point out that one of the first things I did when learning about SQL injection (which I started SQL programming) was to try a rather simple injection on a website I was using, and was shocked to find that it was wide open exposed. I sent the sysadmin an e-mail and they patched it up. Nobody tracked me down to arrest me. It was a good lesson. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:33, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
 * ...and what would the OP have done if their hack had been successful? People have been arrested and convicted to prison terms for hacking.  Like Looie, I don't think we should encourage criminal activity.  Astronaut (talk) 15:01, 25 July 2011 (UTC)


 * I didn't get in, and I don't plan to do anything of the sort again. I was just going to see if what I saw on YouTube worked. I was just fooling around, which was stupid. Il confine my ideas of such activities to theory.--DSbanker (talk) 15:43, 25 July 2011 (UTC)


 * If you want to become an ethical penetration tester, want to become a sysadmin or are just interested in the field, practice on 'intentionally vulnerable' systems like OWASP WebGoat or Metasploitable, which are legal training kits intended for training pentesters, security consultants and security-minded sysadmins, running in an isolated virtual machine on your own computer. Never practice on someone else's live system without permission. CaptainVindaloo t c e 16:21, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Hey thanks for info on that stuff! really appreciate it.--DSbanker (talk) 16:41, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

A command for checking how much memory a program uses during its runtime (in Linux)...
Hi! I'm a bit new to using Linux and the command-line, but I'm already falling in love with it. I have a question though: if I want to find out exactly how much time a program takes to execute, I can simply use the very convenient time utility. Is there a corresponding utility for memory? Like, you type something like "memory something", and it lists the maximum amount of memory "something" needed during runtime? The reason I want this is just as an easy way to check if some optimizations to a program I'm making is actually working. I realize that there are much better ways to do it, but I just want a very quick and dirty way to get some idea about it, much like how the time-command gives you a quick and dirty way to find out if your program becomes faster. 80.216.71.133 (talk) 07:45, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * valgrind, by default, provides a basic summary with the info you're looking for. Moreover valgrind can report all kinds of stuff, to an overwhelming level of detail.  Incidentally, once you feel "time" isn't giving you enough detail of where the time is being spend, gprof is very informative.  Equally strace (which shows system calls and their arguments) and ltrace (which does likewise for library calls) can be very informative. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 10:01, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * To be on the this topic, is there one more detailed (for Windows) than Task Manager in Windows (other than Sysinternals) that is rather cheap on memory resources? General Rommel (talk) 11:05, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Purify is very good. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 11:28, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * How about top? Also, vm_stat on some Linux/Unix platforms, though that doesn't break memory down by process, it does show different types of page allocations, which may help diagnose performance issues.  Nimur (talk) 03:26, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Games that spontaneously alt-tab
I enjoy the game Heroes III. (Yes, even though it's old.) Once in a while, though, it will dump me to the desktop. I can easily alt-tab back to it and continue where I left off, but recently I've been trying to find out why it happens - checking for malware, turning off various services and so on. Does anybody know, is this: I've sometimes observed the same thing in other games, though that might be coincidence. I've never known it happen in any of the various art programs and IDEs I run, only while playing games - and not very often. It might be related to programs that run full-screen, although I've never noticed it affect Blender. Card Zero (talk) 11:40, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * A known bug in Heroes III,
 * A known side-effect of any specific spyware,
 * A known problem with some part of Windows XP?


 * A guess: when you run old games in fullscreen mode, often they have to switch resolutions and video modes and etc. as they segue between different parts of the game (e.g. menus, the main game, whatever). I seem to recall on my old computer that sometimes these transitions would bug out or fail or something. Does it happen while just playing, or is it something that happens when switching between different resolutions? Does it happen while you are actively playing, or when you've not done anything for awhile? --Mr.98 (talk) 12:24, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Good thought, but no - today it happened just before some AI-controlled vampire lords flew over my castle wall to attack something, which doesn't involve any sort of switch between screens. I have a vague feeling that it might always happen just before a sound is played, and so I am suspicious of my sound driver, but I don't find the idea very plausible (lots of sounds are played in the course of a game, and why would the sound driver suddenly dislike one of them, and ... so I'm just being superstitious really). I think it can happen while the game is idling, too. Card Zero  (talk) 12:34, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Could it be a different application (eg messaging) trying to get your attention, which would switch you out of the fullscreen game ? Unilynx (talk) 14:33, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * do you know how to check the event log? There might be a clue there. Vespine (talk) 05:06, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I've noticed this behaviour with Windows Notification complaining about firewall being turned off or something similar. Sometimes the notification does not popup in a window but in the taskbar which is sufficient to move focus away from your game to the desktop. Sandman30s (talk) 08:38, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

laptop booting
my laptop bios wont accept the os which i put...aft pressin enter wen it prompts to press any key for boot it shows a blinking cursor with a black background.....help me out pls.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.161.181.224 (talk) 14:28, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * What OS are you trying to boot? Can you boot any other OS?  This problem generally means that the bios can't locate or read the boot commands, but there are many possible causes, including hardware failures, disk corruption, or an incorrectly set up boot sector. Looie496 (talk) 17:25, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

wget article history
How would you use wget to output all the IP contributors to let's say the Example article to a text file ? Drogonov 19:42, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't think that's a task wget could do on its own. Wget is just a download program, it can download the history page but you'd need to use some other program to process it, extract ip addresses, and output them to a text file. Maybe something like grep 82.43.90.27 (talk) 22:20, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * As long as Drogonov didn't need to do anything more, wget+grep should be enough. But if the real goal is to do more processing (e.g. to retrieve and analyse the contributions of the IP contributors) then scraping the HTML becomes a pain. The Mediawiki API (and the accompanying wrapper libraries for various programming languages) makes doing this kind of thing much, much easier. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 23:44, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Linux distribution system requirements
I have an old Windows 98 second edition PC that is idling and I'm thinking about trying out Linux on it. Is there a list of hardware system requirements for the older Linux distributions? In particular, I'm considering Ubuntu. My PC uses Intel 82443BX Pentium (r) II processor with 128 MB Ram & 19 GB hard disk. Thanks. Axl ¤  [Talk]  20:24, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * That's well below the recommended requirements for Ubuntu Desktop. A lightweight Linux distribution like Puppy Linux should be okay. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 20:30, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * But if you intend to use the machine only as a (slow) server, it's just within the requirements of the Ubuntu Server CLI. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk


 * Finlay, thanks for your answer. Is even the oldest version of Ubuntu too advanced for my machine? What about Windows XP? I think that Windows XP should work, right? Axl  ¤  [Talk]  21:28, 24 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Running an older-than-current version of Ubuntu is a bad idea; only one older version is still supported, and it's not that old.  You're talking about a machine that's at least 13 years old; asking it to run anything other than a very low-end system isn't practical. If you want to eke out a few more years of minimal functionality from this thing, use Puppy Linux. It might just run XP, but XP licences are hard to get and would be wasted on this thing.   Equally any Linux on this thing is going to be a basic experience at best. If you're curious about what a modern mature and feature-rich Linux experience is like, but don't want to commit a nice new-ish machine, you can install Ubuntu on Windows (where it's kinda like an application) using Wubi (which comes on the Ubuntu install disk); this won't damage your existing Windows install.  As to the Pentium II - frankly I'd either put this thing in the bin or I'd get it running Win98 nicely and pack it up carefully and put it in the attic, and in 20 years it'll be worth donating to a museum. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 21:53, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks Finlay. Axl  ¤  [Talk]  22:05, 24 July 2011 (UTC)
 * You could try a LiveCD to try out something like PuppyLinux without installing it. See List_of_live_CDs. 2.101.4.222 (talk) 09:36, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'll try one of the lightweight versions from USB, maybe Lubuntu. Thanks. Axl  ¤  [Talk]  18:24, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
 * See also Lightweight Linux distribution and List of Linux distributions that run from RAM. 2.97.216.222 (talk) 21:03, 25 July 2011 (UTC)