Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 November 4

= November 4 =

Slideshow/DVD
My AppleMacPro laptop is running Mountain Lion, and so far as I can see it is not possible to copy a slideshow onto a CD. Does anyone know of a way to do this please?85.211.131.65 (talk) 07:04, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * As an S/VCD you mean? Might look into tovid. ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:40, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, don't understand the above, and I should have said D.V.D not CD.85.211.131.65 (talk) 22:31, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * This used to be possible with iPhoto '08 and iDVD (see the HT1103 or HT1089 instructions on Apple Knowledge Base), but Apple has discontinued iDVD and is getting rid of a lot of optical drive functions. Unless you have access to an old Mac/version of OS X with iPhoto '08 and iDVD, you might have to use a third-party application. --Canley (talk) 05:17, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Photo browser supporting GPS tags?
Running Ubuntu 12.04. I'm looking for an image browser that will show you on a map where a photo's location is, assuming it has GPS tags in the EXIF data.

I think KDE's old image browser, can't remember the name, used to do this, but there is no currently supported version of it. Nautilus doesn't do it, or at least I can't figure out how.

The problem with digikam is that it won't do anything unless you first put the photos into an "album". I have no interest in making "albums". My albums are called directories, and I manage them with  and.

Anyone know of a program that will do this, or a way to get Nautilus or digikam to do what I want? --Trovatore (talk) 07:48, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Found the old one I was looking for: It was called KuickShow.  Man, that was nice.  Apparently it depended on features in imlib that aren't there anymore.  I can't understand how this functionality can be allowed to degrade like this &mdash; surely someone has filled the niche? --Trovatore (talk) 08:13, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * You can probably find out why by perusing imlib's bug tracker, VCS, or changelog. ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:41, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, maybe, but I'm not that interested. I mostly want a replacement for the functionality.  Any leads?  I found gwenview, and it's similar, but again doesn't do the GPS thing, unless I just haven't figured out how to turn it on. --Trovatore (talk) 19:09, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Encoded message
I am trying to decode the message on http://coord.info/GC39EDV which is in the form of one or two directional arms on a consistent base. Somehow the resulting plaintext needs to be interpretable as numbers.

I have tried the obvious semaphore and semaphore from behind, gibberish. I have also tried a simple alphabet rotation on the gibberish.

(C) and (E) are obviously split into two "words".

(B) and (C1) end in a common 4 symbols. B is 6 symbols long, C1 is 7 long.

(C2) starts and ends with the same symbol. If the symbols spell numbers in English, I know of no 5 character number starting and ending with the same letter.

Note that there is a formula to insert the values A..F into which suggests, in context, that (C) is in the range 8..11.

If anyone knows of other flag messaging systems other than standard semaphore or has any insight into any of this I would be very appreciative.

-- SGBailey (talk) 08:40, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Message F has nine symbols, with 5, 7 and 9 the same. I find 36 such words in an English dictionary, none of which I can see as a number ("goldeneye" = 17 because it is the 17th Bond movie? Unlikely.) After a couple of similar failed dictionary checks, I doubt it is a simple substitution alphabet in English at least. I'm trying to cross my eyes and see the symbols as a 3D puzzle. I'm guessing it's titled "Line of Sight" for a reason. 88.112.36.91 (talk) 15:03, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * BINGO!! Ok, I've spent most of the day on this (on and off), but I've managed to decode it now. It's actually a very clever puzzle, and all the clues are there in the listing. Since it was very satisfying for me to solve on my own, so to speak, I won't post the solution (unless you specifically request it) - instead I'll just say that the thing that put me on the right track was the coordinates that are given by the cache owner. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 19:02, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Well it's a reservoir on the top of Telegraph Hill - which also suggests semaphore like coding. CM - Is there any hint you can give without giving the solution? -- SGBailey (talk) 00:17, 5 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Ok. You were right about the semaphore, but it's not the manual semaphore. There's another type of semaphore that was used - try searching for Pasley Semaphore codes. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 07:29, 5 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Getting closer. I've got the names of the places and I know their significance. Converting them to numbers is eluding me for now - I've tried A being the start being 1 through to D being near the end being a higher number, but the EFF in West doesn't yet make sense.


 * Make sure you're thinking along the right line. Everything you need now is in the article Semaphore line, although a Wiki search on at least one of the place names will be beneficial. Hope you manage to come at it from the right direction now. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 08:14, 6 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Well I know where Bannicle Hill is. and I can do S>N or N>S. I have yet to pass the checker, but I expect to in due course. Your help has been gratefully reecived. -- SGBailey (talk) 09:13, 7 November 2012 (UTC)


 * What got me wondering was that small horizontal bar down from the signal arms that should have some significance and indicate a "non-human semaphore" (or a definitely, um, male human)...

Origin of markup symbols for /italics/, _underline_, and *bold*
Where do these markups come from that you often see in e-mails or elsewhere, where regular font styles are not available? (Though there are some mail clients that actually render the enclosed text the way it is supposed to look) I was wondering how old they are. Thanks! -- megA (talk) 13:06, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * The origin of the underscore symbolism is surely obvious, and for the others practice varies. I myself have always used * to indicate *italics*, and CAPITALIZATION to indicate bold. Looie496 (talk) 15:23, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * *bold* is definitely interpreted as bold by those mail clients I've come across, so there must be some standard somewhere. -- megA (talk) 17:26, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't know when these originated, but it is curious that this sort of informal formatting does not appear much, in my experience, in teletypes. I've gone over many, many reams of teletype communications from the World War II period and never seen this sort of thing — they spell out punctuation if it is necessary. All of which is to say, I don't think this is one of those things that is that old. My suspicion is that this dates back to the early e-mail days, e.g. the late 1960s or early 1970s. But this is just a suspicion. It would be interesting to know, but it's not the easiest thing to quickly research owing to the fact that these characters are generally excluded from automatic search queries. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:04, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I would have expected Usenet as the lastest possibility, and maybe some programming language or encoding standard that features these exact symbols. -- megA (talk) 17:26, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
 * It was already standard on usenet/gopher when I started back in '93. The ALL CAPS things was there at times too, but I think it was on its way out. Even back then, people complained about caps being "shouting", though come to think of it, many applications were presented in all-caps, which might also have contributed to the switch to asterisks. Matt Deres (talk) 18:18, 5 November 2012 (UTC)


 * *Emphasis* (not bold) and _underline_ were used in the Jargon File in version 2.1.1, Jun 1990, and explicitly described in 2.2.1, Dec 1990, which is the first version to have a "Hacker Writing Style" section. There's no information about the origin, though. /This/ style was added in 2.9.6, Aug 1991. -- BenRG (talk) 23:25, 5 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I recall (back in the days of daisywheels, i think) yet another markup, doublestrike, which operated in addition to the bold attribute.Gzuckier (talk) 01:48, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Security question
I tried to sign into my yahoo account now and I can't. I asked to reset my password but it says "For your protection we can't let you reset your password online, please contact the Costumer Center". What does that mean? Was my account hacked? Please help me I'm desperate. Netwwork (talk) 15:05, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Have you tried to contact the Customer Center? Looie496 (talk) 15:25, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes I have, even by phone but don't find the number. Netwwork (talk) 15:51, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Try this 77.166.70.218 (talk) 08:29, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

cURL
I need the equivalent to this in cURL; wget --mirror --include-directories=*/abc http://example.com

The reason is that wget does not support HTTP compression but cURL does. Using compression will save terabytes of bandwidth. 92.233.64.26 (talk) 15:15, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * cURL is not equivalent to wget; cURL does not have anything like mirror. There are a number of other web crawler programs which may suit your application. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 15:40, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I understand. All I really need to do here is extract urls containing "abc/" from index.html and feed them to cURL to download. But I don't know how to do this because my knowledge of grep, awk etc is bad. The html of the links is;
 * page1
 * and they are on a single line in the raw html (I tried for /f delims but because it's all on one line it doesn't work) 92.233.64.26 (talk) 16:01, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * If it's a sequence (page1, page2, etc.), you can just do  ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:51, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

There is no sequence, that was just an example. 92.233.64.26 (talk) 18:37, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * ¦ Reisio (talk) 20:03, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Help with HTML forms
Is it possible to use HTML forms to "modify text" in the middle of a URL? For example, here is the example of a URL I use:

file:///C:/Other/HTML/sx/num44.htm

I want to make a form that will allow me to type in any number in said form to replace "44" in the URL above and take me to the page corresponding with that number. For example, I type in "26" and it takes me to "file:///C:/Other/HTML/sx/num26.htm".

I can easily use forms to "modify the text" if it's at the end of the URL; for example, a specific Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hurricane_Sandy

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=[INSERT TEXT FROM THE FORM HERE]

But I have no idea how to do it in the middle of a URL. Any help? -- Tohler (talk) 20:13, 4 November 2012 (UTC)


 * You need to use a little Javascript to do something like this. Here's a very simple example of a script that will let you take some input and then make the browser go to that page. Depending on your use, this may be sufficient; if you need it to really use HTML form elements (e.g. if you are submitting actual form data), it will require modification. But it's not very hard; just let us know. Here's the code:

Page number:  


 * Let us know if that doesn't quite do it. You can see that all I've really done there is add a bit of Javascript to the "onclick" method of the submit button, and told it to change the "location" property of the "window" (which is how you set a URL with Javascript") to whatever URL I want. --Mr.98 (talk) 21:02, 4 November 2012 (UTC)