Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 May 15

= May 15 =

Repair IE by uninstalling
I read that a good way to repair IE is to uninstall it, then reboot, and the computer will prompt you to download it. Will the computer be able to download it without IE installed? (I also have Firefox installed.) Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 04:21, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * The first question would be how are you going to uninstall IE? AFAIK, Microsoft has made that unpossible. -- LarryMac | Talk  11:38, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * It is possible to uninstall it. Go to control panel, Windows componants, and untick Internet explorer. You can download IE via Firefox after a restart. Mr Little Irish  (talk) 申 12:35, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Which version of IE? On Windows 7, you can definitely uninstall IE9 and get IE8 back.  I just did it last week. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 17:42, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I have IE9. I'll take whatever it installs, then I can update.  So it is safe to delete IE, reboot, and it can access the Internet (without IE) to download it? (I do have Firfox.) (When I tried to download IE, it would n't install because I have a newer version installed.)   Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 20:13, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Yes, it should be safe. I've had to do it a couple times at work recently to test IE8 compatibility issues for the website I'm working on.  A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:05, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 01:23, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

I just now got around to doing that and it didn't work. I turned off IE9 as described and rebooted. Then I tried to run the IE9 install program. It would not run because it said that a newer version was installed. So I went back and turned IE9 back on in the control panel, but it won't come back at all. IE.exe doesn't even show up in the search. What now to get IE and Windows Update back? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 01:34, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Quiting Spotify
On Windows, when you click on the red X in the upper right hand corner, this normally shuts down a program. However, Spotify minimizes itself to the task bar. Is there a way to get red X to exit the program? I just find this annoying and I don't see anything in the settings that lets me change this behavior. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 17:22, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Effectively no, there isn't. However, there are a number of ideas here for exiting Spotify, or at least making it appear as if you've done so. Some of them involve a bit of hax0r skillz, so approach at your own risk. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 17:32, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * OK, thanks. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 19:20, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Just a few weeks ago, we had an unrelated discussion and I linked to the WM_CLOSE documentation, which explains what's going on here. This case is an example of software that intentionally overrides the user's expected behavior in response to a system event.  When you click an "X" in Windows, you are sending a message "asking pleasantly" for the software to "please exit."  The programmer who wrote code to handle that message can do any other action they want... and in this case, the programmed action is not to quit, but to minimize, hide, or otherwise do something else.  If you want to directly kill a process, instead of politely messaging it to please shut down, you can force-quit the task using Windows' task manager.  Nimur (talk) 19:25, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I'll just use Task Manager. I could write an app that closes it for me, but I'm not that annoyed.  On a side note...years ago when I had an dial up connection with AOL, AOL would pop up a dialog every X minutes and ask you whether you wanted to stay online, so I wrote an app that ran in the background and 'clicked' the Yes button for me. :)  A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 19:30, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * On Win7, you can choose File/Exit, or right-click the taskbar icon and select Quit Spotify. But then that leaves a process called "SpotifyWebHelper.exe" in the task list.  No wonder I don't use this app.  -- LarryMac  | Talk  19:49, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * That's evil! Good catch.  I work on a very memory constrained system so every little bit of memory counts. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 23:31, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I just want to point out that the "X" button never means "exit this program". It always means "close this window". The usual rule is that programs exit when they no longer have any UI. For a program that only ever puts up one window, that happens when you close that window, but that's a special case. (Even those programs will usually have occasional pop-up dialog boxes with an X button.) Programs with a persistent tray icon usually don't exit when you close their last top-level window, because they still have the tray icon. On Macintosh, programs usually don't exit when you close the last window because they still have the menu bar. -- BenRG (talk) 19:46, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Window size in Windows XP
I've noticed that with some applications in Windows XP (MS Access 2007, for one), an originally maximized window would at some point shrink a little. The window is still technically maximized (the function of the middle button in the minimize-restore-close set of buttons in the top right corner is still "restore down"), but there is a one- or two-pixel area on each side of the window clicking on which brings to the foreground whatever window is in the background. If "restore down" is clicked, the window shrinks as expected, and maximizing it back maximizes it properly (without the one-pixel strips on the sides). I can't figure out what may be causing this behavior, and it is pretty annoying as these few pixels are occasionally all that it takes for scroll bars to appear within Access. Any ideas?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 15, 2012; 18:53 (UTC)

Is AJAX refresh the right tool for this?
I have been doing simple AJAX refreshs of things like a number that changes its value over time or of some text field. I was wondering if I can use AJAX to refresh a page in the following way and if so, how to do it (in principle)? The site is an internet auction and the page I want to refresh is the list of a user's winning auctions, i.e. the list of all active auctions that a user has been bidding in and in which the user is currently the highest bidder. Each item in the list consists of various types of data (image, text description, current bid price, etc.). For simplicity, let's say it is arranged in an array/table where each row corresponds to an item and there are columns for image, description, bid price, etc. If the user is overbid for an item or if an auction ends (i.e. the user wins the auction) this item should disappear from the table, i.e. the row should disappear. Can I do this with AJAX? bamse (talk) 21:45, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Sure, that's something AJAX could do. AJAX can do pretty much whatever you want it to, it just requires you to figure out exactly what elements should update and how it should work. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:43, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Server side webapps and client side update scripts generally pass information like this in a simple data-centric format like JSON. It's very straightforward to have your client periodically poll the server for a foo.json file, parse it with an API like jQuery.parseJSON, and use that to render HTML into the document using the DOM. There are server-side libraries to generate JSON for every reasonable webapp language (e.g. Python's). Other serialised-data formats like XML and Protocol Buffers are also pretty well supported client and server side. You certainly could have the server just generate an HTML subtree and the client would paste that into a node of its DOM (but that's only safe over a secure connection), but using a display-agnostic format like XML or JSON allows you (or others) to write different apps that consume the same data and use or present it in new and interesting ways.  For example, you could code an iPhone app that consumed the JSON feed and showed the same info in an iPhone-friendly format (which may be preferable, in some circumstances, to viewing your webpage and getting the info that way). -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:46, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Whether it's the right tool depends on your application and your users. Periodic refresh may be enough (assuming there's no client-side UI state like user typing that would be destroyed by an auto refresh). Updates like this work nicely with things with lots of little frequent updates (BBC News has an excellent full-screen news ticker which they use to cover major events as they unfold; I think it pulls a new JSON dump every 30 seconds). But if updates are infrequent and/or uninteresting, this may be overkill. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:53, 15 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the replies. Basically I want it to work like this, if an item disappears all the subsequent rows should move up. So if I have 5 items/rows initially and item/row 3 disappears then item 4 should be moved to row 3 and item 5 should be moved to row 4. Could something like the following work?
 * 1. I put the whole   into a   and give the div an id based on the item id.
 * 2. The JSON then contains the whole   stuff bamse (talk) 23:03, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I've added some   tags above as it was screwing up with the RD formatting, and made the followup make no sense if you didn't see the source. Nil Einne (talk) 07:13, 16 May 2012 (UTC)


 * You could do that, sure. Again, you can do pretty much whatever you want, but it may not be an optimal arrangement or it may limit your flexibility. --Mr.98 (talk) 22:28, 16 May 2012 (UTC)