Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 June 14

= June 14 =

Name of 25 pin laptop keyboard connector
Hello! I'd like to know what a keyboard connector that has 25 pins is called. It's the type pictured here.

Thanks!

3vilp4wn (talk at me) 01:05, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * A ribbon cable with a 25-wire ZIF connector? Nimur (talk) 01:41, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * That's it, thanks for the fast reply!   3vilp4wn (talk at me)  02:03, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

itunes and WMP
How can I export a playlist from windows media player to itunes?

Can I just sync an ipod directly whit widows media player? Like I do whit my sansa

thanks

Iskánder Vigoa Pérez (talk) 01:49, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * I was always under the impression that WMP and iPods just don't mix, but this video claims to show you how to do just that (and there are probably others if you do a little searching.) However, the comments seem mixed; be cautious when following tutorials like this - do so at your own risk! Good luck! --Yellow1996 (talk) 01:36, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

thanky ou very much... and what about to import the windows media play list in to itunes??? Iskánder Vigoa Pérez (talk) 03:45, 15 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Check this forum post. Hope this helps! --Yellow1996 (talk) 23:57, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

History wiki
I would like to know about some wiki, other than wikipedia, that works with world history topics. Cambalachero (talk) 12:49, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Wikia.com hosts a variety of wikis. If you search for "world history" there, you get several results: . The wikis are probably less reliably than Wikipedia, but they also have less restrictions. For instance, the Wiki on Wikia titled "AP world history" seems to be about the topic covered in an advanced high school class in the USA. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:05, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * There is also World History, a world history textbook organised by the high school class mentioned above.- gadfium 00:11, 15 June 2013 (UTC)


 * See "HistoAtlas" and Category:History - WikiIndex.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 00:25, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Want to rebuild RAID - not sure whether it was RAID 1 or 0!
I had a problem with my computer and cleared the CMOS. I solved the problem (and clearing the CMOS didn't help at all). Now I have another problem - two of my SATA HDDs were in a RAID configuration but I don't know which (1 or 0). I'd like to put them back together again so I can access my data. How can I proceed if I don't know what type of RAID configuration my drives were in in the first instance? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.19.68.88 (talk) 18:16, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Do you remember how large the storage was, compared to the hard drives? If your total storage was the sum of the size of the two drives, it's RAID0 (if those are the only two choices) - if your total storage was the same as the smallest of the disks, it's RAID1. But I would have expected your hard disk controller to have autodetected by itself how the drives were configured, if the drives themselves are still okay - so I'd proceed with caution and would prefer to have the drives backed up before letting the BIOS touch 'm again... Unilynx (talk) 20:41, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * When disks are set up for RAID, the RAID controller writes some metadata to each disk. This metadata gives some information about the RAID volume. Unfortunately there's a variety of formats used - Intel's ICH format, Adaptec's CPF format and their newer AMF type, and the "standard", DDF. If you have an Adaptec RAID, you should be able to find a utility on Adaptec's website which will allow you to interrogate the metadata blocks to tell you what you want; if its another manufacturer then you might find the same for them.  Failing that (with the BIOS set for no RAID), I'd try booting the machine into Linux, installing the mdadm package, and running mdadm --detail /dev/md0 - if you're lucky, the Linux kernel will have automatically seen the DDF metadata blocks, recognised them, and created a temporary md0 device which mdadm can interrogate. In all these cases I'd repeat Unilynx's caution about backing up. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 22:43, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Why can't search engines find URLs?
If I copy and paste a URL at the top of the screen, but I accidentally included an invalid character, I get sent to a search engine and it tells me there are no documents containing this.

It seems to me they could find a way to give one result, that being the URL I intended to copy. And the URL as displayed is often too hard to convert into the form I need to go back at the top of the screen.— Vchimpanzee  ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 21:23, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * It seems you're finding that a unified search-and-address bar in a web browser has serious usability problems. I agree with your frustration, but recent web-browser interfaces have trended towards unified search and URL bars.  The result is that a malformed URL is treated as an even more malformed search query.  Few modern search engines have a formally-designed syntax, so it's not clear why a URL fragment is "invalid" - but if the query returns no results, it can be assumed that your query is not an input that the search-engine can successfully process.  Nimur (talk) 22:42, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * The complaint is stated as a universal fact, but I suspect that you really only know that one particular browser is sending you to one particular search engine that isn't giving you a useful result. Looie496 (talk) 22:48, 14 June 2013 (UTC)


 * "Too hard to convert into the form I need to go back at the top of the screen" puzzles me, but you might be encountering Percent-encoding, and could benefit from the use of this converter: . Card Zero  (talk) 01:05, 15 June 2013 (UTC)


 * It happened to me last on Firefox. The problem with the search engine happens on Bing, Google, and Yahoo. I think it happens with IE. The most common occurrence of this problem is when the URL was in an email I sent myself, where the ">" character is on the same line because it was a reply.— Vchimpanzee  ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 15:34, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * And as for why I can't just go back and copy and paste again: Perhaps I would have to click on "Back", or it might even be more complicated than that. It's not an easy URL to find again. Another way it happens is if I copied a part of the URL and inserted it into one already in the address bar.— Vchimpanzee  ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 16:11, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Correction: Yahoo doesn't do this. But it doesn't find the URL I wanted.— Vchimpanzee  ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 16:36, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Search engines build indices based on what searches they anticipate users will make. They have vast archives of searches people have performed, and looking at those has evidently persuaded them that searching for documents that contain a given url isn't what sufficient people what - so they don't add that to their index. To make their task tractable, search companies discard a great deal of information about pages; it would be perfectly feasible to build an index allowing you to search for pages where the word "carrot" is in orange text - but they don't think most people will want to do that search, so they don't index that either. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 17:17, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * This shows how to search for sites that link to a URL using Google. 209.131.76.183 (talk) 14:49, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I'll try that last solution. By the way, Google and IE do give me related results when that happens. Maybe Google found out about this and fixed it.— Vchimpanzee  ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 19:11, 19 June 2013 (UTC)