Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2012 September 2

= September 2 =

Inverting the Multimedia and F keys on Asus netbook
My Asus Eee PC 1015PX has a set of multimedia keys (Volume up/down, mute, dim screen, etc...) on the top row on the same buttons as the F keys (F1, F2, F3, etc...). By default, when I press one of the keys, it triggers the F keys, in order to trigger the multimedia functions, I have to hold down the Fn keys on the bottom of the keyboard. Is there anyway to invert this such that when I press the keys without the Fn key it will trigger the multimedia functions, while pressing the keys while holding the Fn key will trigger the F keys?

I believe the programs responsible for this may be called "HotKeyMon.exe" and "HotkeyService.exe." However, I can only find these under the process list of task manager, and not in any program folder. Furthermore, task manager lists the user as SYSTEM, rather than my user name.

Thanks Acceptable (talk) 17:29, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * A family member's laptop has an option to do that in the BIOS. Try looking there. --Bavi H (talk) 21:32, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Also try Windows Key + X. 92.236.250.154 (talk) 20:26, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

weird computer problem featuring //@
Hi all, I have a website that works perfectly well offline with explorer and firefox, but when online, it won't work with explorer. I've tracked the error messages, and explorer is definitely concerned about comments in my code starting with //@. I use //@ in javascript to mark major breaks in my code, so it would be unfortunate to have to change all of them, spread across about 5 or 10 files. Does anyone know what might be going on? I'm using lots of jquery include files from google code. Thanks in advance, IBE (talk) 17:44, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
 * In IE, //@ is used to indicate Javascript comments with conditional compilation; see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6s6fab9k%28v=vs.94%29.aspx. So most likely you're screwed. Looie496 (talk) 18:53, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the link - googling wasn't helping me. People can add to this if they have any more detail, but I've put resolved so people know it's basically sorted. IBE (talk) 22:43, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * It's also discussed in Conditional comment 176.250.67.119 (talk) 01:19, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

You Tube player problems
I normally use Internet Explorer to use YouTube. In the last 24 hours when I click to play a video, the entire screen goes white except for the video itself, which I cannot do anything with other than watch in full, no pausing or downloading. If I do click on the video while it is playing the entire screen will go black, although the sound will continue. At this point, if I right click on the black screen and select pop-out I will get a small viewer showing the video only which works properly, allows me to pause and download. But I have none of the background page allowing me to see related videos or comment, or the like. I have followed the suggestions at youtube's help page,disabled hardware accelerator, and used compatibility view in my browser, to no avail.

I tried using Firefox when this started, but Firefox will not even play the video, it shows me a simulated static screen with the words "An Error Occurred. Try Again Later." Are these problems possibly related?

Should I try reinstalling Flash, or an earlier version?

Can restoring default settings on IE help? I am reluctant to try anything drastic since I have no idea what is going on. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 18:06, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * I had that problem some time ago with Firefox -- not sure about any issue with IE. In my case the problem was actually in RealPlayer.  Here is the fix that Mozilla suggests.  However, the fix that I applied, which actually worked, was this:  (1) Start RealPlayer; (2) Open the Preferences, and select Download & Recording; (3) Uncheck the box that says "Enable Web Download & Recording for these installed browsers:"; (4) Press OK. Looie496 (talk) 18:33, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Well, I definitely don't want not to be able to download with realplayer. I will check if doing so helps, however. μηδείς (talk) 18:41, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * I both disabled and upgraded RealPlayer, neither had any effect. I did upgrade Flash almost a month ago, perhaps I should downgrade? μηδείς (talk) 19:02, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Well, both problems seem to have cleared themselves up, apparently due to the realplayer upgrade, although it seems to have needed something else to have taken effect in the last 10 minutes for it to kick in. Bizarre.  Thanks for the help! μηδείς (talk) 19:20, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

NOT

AGH!!! It's back! I think the problem may be with YouTube. I don't have problems watching or downloading videos from other sites. μηδείς (talk) 19:25, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Whatevert the underlying issue was, I ultimately solved it by resetting to factory defaults wit the option to keep my data, and all is now working fine, although I have to manage add ons and change a few other settings back how I like'm. μηδείς (talk) 04:14, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

GIMP 2.8 takes a lot of memory?
Previously, when I was using Fedora 14, I could open a bit more than 100 image files on GIMP at the same time (the size of each of them was in the order of one megapixel). Now when I have Fedora 17 and GIMP 2.8, I can't open even half that many. Trying to open 40 such files grinds the computer to a complete halt. Opening 30 files is as far as I can get, and even then I experience minor slowdowns. Is GIMP 2.8 really this greedy on resources? J I P &#124; Talk 18:48, 2 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Are you using KDE? When I ran Fedora 14 and KDE 3.5, I could connect my PC to the TV to watch streaming media. Basically this means I am running two monitors.  When I upgraded to Fedora 16 and KDE 4 (on the same hardware), I could no longer do this.  When I attempt to run two monitors, the video stream is unwatchable.  The only solution was for me to disable the actual monitor and just use the TV.  I solved the problem permanently by ditching KDE and moving to IceWM. --TrogWoolley (talk) 14:22, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
 * No, I use GNOME, not KDE. I had to install Cinnamon to get some semblance of the usable Fedora 14 desktop back and not that awful crap the GNOME project is officially heading towards. J I P  &#124; Talk 17:09, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
 * What are you doing that requires you to have 100 images open at once? GIMP was never really designed to be used that way. Looie496 (talk) 17:28, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I regularly download images from DeviantArt. I've found out that since I'm usually only interested in part of the image, I can save time spent viewing the images if I combine the interesting parts of several images into one. I use the GIMP for this purpose. Unfortunately, since I'm too lazy to do this combining work as often as I browse DeviantArt, I have acquired a backlog of more than one thousand images. Therefore it's more efficient to load a hundred or so in the GIMP at once. J I P  &#124; Talk 19:04, 4 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I've done comparable things quite a bit -- my method is to use GIMP in conjunction with gThumb. You can open a directory of images in gThumb and then drag&drop thumbnails one at a time to GIMP.  GIMP was designed with the philosophy of being purely an image editor -- it does not try to be an image manager, and isn't very useful for that purpose.  There are lots of image managers other than gThumb, and I expect that many of them would work, but gThumb does the job just fine for me. Looie496 (talk) 21:55, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

MIS (Managing Information System)
How many contents are present in MIS? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.52.106.189 (talk) 22:36, 2 September 2012 (UTC)


 * I don't understand your question.  Does the article Management information system help?  Otherwise, please clarify what you are asking.  RudolfRed (talk) 22:51, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Python: from list of strings, to list of integers
If you have a list of strings, like ['6', '9', '7', '14', '11', '9', '11'] and want a list of integers, how do you do it? Somehow sum(list) won't convert the elements on the fly. I know that I could convert and sum each element with for i in list: a += int(i) But, isn't an easier, standard way of doing this? Comploose (talk) 23:47, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

sum(int(i) for i in list) or, to get a list of integers out of list: list2 = [int(i) for i in list]. OsmanRF34 (talk) 00:21, 3 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Or, if you are old-fashioned and have a sense of beauty: . Note that all these work because   is not just a type name, but also a function that constructs integers from strings. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 00:33, 3 September 2012 (UTC)


 * Tangentially, while map in python2 returns a list, in python3 it returns an iterable. The two are interchangable in many practical cases, but if someone really needs a list, you'd say  90.211.231.197 (talk) 13:18, 3 September 2012 (UTC)


 * I realise that yours is a simple example, but in general it's a bad idea to call a variable, as list is also a built-in function which takes an interable and produces an actual list. Python is forgiving in that it lets you do this, but if you forget and later (in a larger program) you try to call the builtin you'll get  , which can be hard to understand. 90.211.231.197 (talk) 13:18, 3 September 2012 (UTC)