Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 January 3

= January 3 =

Wikipedia-related blog aggregators
For the last few years, I've enjoyed keeping up with Wikipedia-related blogs at Open Wiki Blog Planet. I view it daily in my browser. However, for the last six months or so, the site has very irregularly updated - perhaps about once a month. I don't think this is a caching issue on my end. Does anyone know what the problem is with the site, or suggest any change I can try on my end? What alternative compendiums of WP blogs are there? I am already aware of Planet Wikimedia.- gadfium 00:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Pop up blocker for specific site?
I have an Imac and I use the latest version of Firefox with pop-up blocker on but it only works sometimes. Some pop-ups continue to... pop up and especially ones from one site. Is there a way to target popups if you know a part of the URL? Alternatively, is there a Firefox add-on or other program that will be more effective? In the scheme of things, it's a minor annoyance, but enough of one that I'm asking.--108.46.103.88 (talk) 01:03, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd say AdBlock Plus is what you're looking for. -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 09:41, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * AdMuncher (not free) is pretty good, too. I use both at the same time. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK)  17:56, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

What's wrong with the external link check?
Hi, I just added a single line referencing one of our articles to Reference_desk/Computing and upon saving, I'm getting a captcha because I'm introducing external links?! Huh?! -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 09:45, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Well, anti spam I would imagine. To make sure you're not a robot posting spam or advertising material from an external source? Mr  little  irish  10:23, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Please, kindly explain what part of my edit was an external link? -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 10:24, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Good point, I read the question and not the link sorry! Note sure then... Mr  little  irish  10:34, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Someone else inserted the external link, but you received the warning. This is a known bug. Von Restorff (talk) 10:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * But there's no external link at all?! -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 13:04, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * And if you create yourself an account to edit from you shouldn't be bothered by these sort of annoyances. It's easy and free. --jjron (talk) 12:03, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Our name is Legion, for we are IP. Resistance is futile. You will be anonymized. -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 13:04, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Actually you are not a part of Anonymous. Usernames, when chosen correctly, can be more anonymous than IP's. Von Restorff (talk) 13:14, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * So are...-- 78.43.93.174 (talk) 17:21, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * ...sufficiently random IPs. --89.204.155.106 (talk) 17:22, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Don't you think? ;-) -- 91.47.17.11 (talk) 17:31, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * When you provide three IPs that trace to destinations near one another, it actually makes it easier to triangulate your location. A username has no geolocation unless one is given. Even then, the one given can be completely false. -- k a i n a w &trade; 21:08, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Kainaw is right. We know your approximate age, we know your sex, and we can geolocate you to a specific area. Your IP's are not "random" enough to hide your identity; the more info you give me the easier it is to find you. If the IPs would geolocate to places all over the world it would be even easier; certain countries do not respect the rights of their citizens and it would be quite easy to trace you even without computer skills by using social engineering and a bit of bribery. If you want to be anonymous on the internet there is 1 good trick: avoid using it. Von Restorff (talk) 01:30, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Um, no. First of all, I didn't want to run afoul of WP:POINT, so I stopped after four IPs. One of them belongs to a pool of IPs used nationwide for mobile devices (UMTS), geolocation info for that one can't be more specific than "Germany". This is basically a huge NAT array (used due the IP v4 shortage, and most users not needing a public IP on their mobile device).
 * Also, some of the IPs don't "belong" to me, either (though I have permission from their owners to use them) and are not even in the same city, and I could have picked a US or UK IP as well to confuse you, or used Tor. While tracking me may seem easy to you, think about this: Without me admitting the use of all these IPs above, you would have had no proof of them being the same user, only a suspicion, e.g. see the mention of "fist" in Morse code (especially if I had used them to edit elsewhere, not in this thread). Plus, they're all dynamic IPs.
 * With a username, once it has been de-anonymized, your complete edit history becomes known, in a way that it can be proven, not just guessed/assumed. Which is not something you want w/r/t previous/future employers, law enforcement (esp. in the kind of countries you mentioned above), or even your neighbo(u)rs... -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 09:33, 4 January 2012 (UTC) PS: Von Restorff, you're younger than me, but let's keep WP:OUTING in mind and stop here. ;-)
 * Um, no. For law enforcement it is quite easy to geolocate mobile devices. It is possible to change usernames (almost) as quickly as IP's; so there is not much difference in that aspect. Making an account also takes less than a minute. But IP's are geolocatable and some usernames are not. The MediaWiki software's TorBlock extension automatically blocks all editing through Tor. Von Restorff (talk) 09:41, 4 January 2012 (UTC) p.s. In which month was I born?
 * Well essentially, you are just trolling now. If you wanted to hide, like someone said before, don't use the internet. There is always a way to track IP's. It's not that hard for me or you to really. If you want to carry on changing IP's or using someone else's IP, then you carry on. It's no skin off anybodies nose here. Mr  little  irish  10:03, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * @Mr X.: if you want to we can continue this discussion on my talkpage, that is probably a better place.
 * @Mr little irish: I know your intentions are good but relax mate, he is not trolling, he just believes some misconceptions about anonymity on the internet. Von Restorff (talk) 10:08, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not trolling, we're just drifting off-topic from my original question (hence the ). As per Von Restorff's suggestion, we're moving it to his talk page. -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 14:59, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not trolling, we're just drifting off-topic from my original question (hence the ). As per Von Restorff's suggestion, we're moving it to his talk page. -- 88.67.154.4 (talk) 14:59, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

MySQL5 password brute force
I have Extreme GPU Bruteforcer and with 3000 PasswordsInThread and 512 streamprocessors and both min and max length 8 chars I get about 300.00M p/s. How can I improve this without spending money?

Is there better software out there (sorry, I do not own a Macintosh, but I am willing to install a Linux distro) ?

This is just for fun, it is my own site and I know the password. Von Restorff (talk) 10:28, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

Firefox Stopping & Starting
My firefox (v9) has developed an annoying habit (since around v4). It works fine for about 8 seconds, then seems to freeze for 3 seconds. The content of the page doesn't seem to matter, as while I type this, it is freezing on and off (resulting in half a sentence suddenly appearing). I can be scrolling up or down the reference desks, and it will freeze, then suddenly jump to wherever it was I would have been. It's very annoying and for this reason I prefer to use Opera, however, firefox does have some features I like to use once in a while. I believe it might have something to do with constantly checking for updates to addons. Is it possible to get firefox to just check for these addons once a day? I mean, if there was no update 5 seconds ago, I doubt there'd be one now. It only happens with Firefox and nothing else. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:01, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Start Firefox in safe mode. If the problem disappears it is likely that it is caused by an add-on/plugin. Von Restorff (talk) 18:43, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * ... and if it is a plugin, try disabling them one at a time until you find the culprit. You can disable Firefox updates completely by unchecking the boxes in Tools > Options --> Advanced --> Updates.   D b f i r s   20:42, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Do not disable FF updates, browsers need to be up to date. Von Restorff (talk) 04:29, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I have my FF updates disabled (for reasons of poor internet access), but I do update manually. Perhaps I should have written "you can disable Firefox addon updates by unchecking the addon box".    D b f i r s   08:31, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * My guess is that updates are not the problem. Von Restorff (talk) 09:23, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, you're probably right. Firefox doesn't check for updates that often, even if it has dozens of addons.  What else in Firefox could be causing the problem?  I suppose it could be one particular addon, possibly downloaded from an unapproved site.  Perhaps it would be worthwhile trying Help --> Restart with add-ons disabled.  (Sorry, I've just noticed that you suggested exactly that above)   D b f i r s   08:18, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Mercury (element)
Your article on mercury states the following: A heavy, silvery d-block element, mercury is the only metal that is liquid at standard conditions for temperature and pressure; the only other element that is liquid under these conditions is bromine, and metals such as caesium, francium, gallium, and rubidium melt just above room temperature. With a freezing point of −38.83 °C and boiling point of 356.73 °C, mercury has one of the narrowest ranges of its liquid state of any metal.[1][2][3]

My question is, If mercury is a liquid at room temperature; How can the freezing point be -38.83 degees Celcius? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.111.46.103 (talk) 17:19, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Elements are in the liquid state when their temperature is between the freezing and boiling point. Maybe you're unfamiliar with the celsius scale?  Room temperature is usually around 25°C, which is between the freezing- and boiling- points of pure mercury.  Mercury will freeze into a solid metal if you make the temperature very much colder - around  −38 °C, which is much colder than your household refrigerator or freezer (but not as cold as, say, some parts of Antarctica in winter; or some biology-lab freezer equipment; and certainly not as cold as a vacuum freezer apparatus in a low temperature physics lab).  Nimur (talk) 17:24, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * (EC) In the same way that water is a liquid at room temperature, and its freezing point is 0°C. Its freezing point and its state at room temperature are unrelated. In any case, this is a question for the science desk, not the computer desk. Feel free to re-post it over there to get some more detailed answers. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK)  17:25, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

MySQL fuzzy select field name
I have 30 fields named diag1, diag2, diag3, diag4... I want to get a list of rows in which any of those fields have the value '410'. I know this will not work: select * from er where 'diag%'='410'. Is there a way to fuzzy-select all the fields at once? -- k a i n a w &trade; 18:22, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't think there's a way to use wildcards in your field names (with the exception of the * column wildcard). I think you will have to just make a very large query of it ("where diag1='410' OR diag2='410' OR ..."), which is pretty easy to generate, no? --Mr.98 (talk) 19:39, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I can't think of a way to do it with a single query. Possibly in a program/script of some type, using a "SHOW COLUMNS FROM &lt;table name>" statement to start with. -- LarryMac  | Talk  20:20, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I have considered using a show columns subquery, but I don't think it is possible to use the results of that subquery as a field name, only as a value. -- k a i n a w &trade; 20:24, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * This may not be an option for you, but it would be nice to adjust the schema to better fit the data. If you have a large number of things that you want to treat uniformly, it's probably best to represent them as rows rather than columns: create a new 'Diag' table that contains two columns, a key into the original table, and a value representing whatever the diag columns contained, and fill it with 30 (or however many) rows per row in the original table. Then, the number of diags wouldn't be built into the schema, and you can simply query that table to find something with the value '410' and join on whatever other information you need. Paul (Stansifer) 21:13, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Trust me... If I were the one who created this database (which is read only), I wouldn't have had a table structure like this. I also wouldn't have used "ADYEAR" and "ADMONTH" to be the year and month values, but "ADDAY" to be the day of the week (completing omitting the day of the month). -- k a i n a w &trade; 21:16, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Well, for MySQL 5.0 and higher, this should get you the list of the column names:

select * from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS where TABLE_NAME = 'Foo' and COLUMNS like 'diag%'


 * However, I'm not sure how, or if, you can then use this list of column names to do what you want. StuRat (talk) 17:07, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Latin characters in Unicode
What fonts support Latin Extended-C and Latin Extended-D and is there anywhere I can download them? --Theurgist (talk) 22:30, 3 January 2012 (UTC)
 * C & D. Quivira is a font that is free to use for any purpose, including commercial usage, and it has a nice name. Try evermono if you like this. Code2000 is the most complete Unicode font available. Von Restorff (talk) 01:11, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I can now see all Latin characters in Unicode. --Theurgist (talk) 09:40, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
 * YVW. Offtopic: I like your userpage; maybe I am going to steal it. Von Restorff (talk) 18:50, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

User Limit on Software Installation
Hello. How do software developers keep track of the number of PCs on which a program with a specific serial key is installed, especially if your PC crashes and you have to re-install the program? If a license on your PC is 1-user and your PC crashes, how does the software company know that you are not installing the program on a second PC? Thanks in advance. --Mayfare (talk) 23:01, 3 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Digital rights management outlines several of the techniques. Many of these technical solutions have holes; many of them inconvenience users; but some of them work very well.  You might read floating license and software metering as well.  Nimur (talk) 23:04, 3 January 2012 (UTC)