Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 April 5

= April 5 =

Lock out bad area on HD?
I ran HDTune's error check on an old external HD and it showed a damaged spot. I ran chkdsk /f and then I ran a full format. I ran HDTune again, and it did not show the damaged area. The bad area has been locked out, right? Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 01:53, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * One comment: When one area goes bad, others often follow soon, so you might want to back up your critical data elsewhere. StuRat (talk) 15:32, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * This is my oldest external drive. But it is used for backups from the main drive, so if it dies, nothing will be lost. But it might be about time to retire it.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 16:18, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

how to set "plugin container to firefox" to start only upon my permission
overwhelmingly, the problems with my PC's behavior are due to "plugin container to firefox" related to "Adobe Flash Player" (as shown in task manager) -- almost every site has some god damn ad in a small screen, ready to slow down my computer for things I don't want -- THANKS TO FREAKIN "plugin container to firefox" related to "Adobe Flash Player" -- WHICH, EFF YOU

what do I do? I open task manager and end "plugin container to firefox"

I want to be able to have an alert letting me choose whether or not I allow "plugin container to firefox" to activate

how? how can I make "plugin container to firefox" be something that EACH TIME IT WANTS TO ACTIVATE I can choose whether or not to allow?

[and to those of you who work for browser firms -- OH MY GOD DO I HATE THIS]76.218.9.50 (talk) 08:44, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Flashblock -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 09:23, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * NoScript is pretty cool, too. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:58, 8 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Ghostery will cut a load of other junk from loadin (and from tracking you). All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 17:19, 10 April 2014 (UTC).

Broadband speed
I've recently changed ISP to BT (in the uk). I've just run two broadband speed tests. BT.com reckon download is 38.4 Mb/s, upload 1.82 Mb/s. Whilst http://www.broadbandspeedtest.co.uk/ reckon download is 8.663 Mb/s, upload 1.532 Mb/s. The uploads I can believe, but how can the downloads be so different? What are they measuring? -- SGBailey (talk) 09:16, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It's possible that BT is telling you the ATM synch speed between your property and the DSLAM. This is the maximum theoretical speed that you would see if nobody else was using the internet.  The speed test is showing you the speed you're achieving between your home and their server, and this will be restricted by other user's traffic at busy times.  It's rather like the M25: the upper legal limit is 70 mph, but when there's a lot of other traffic, you can never achieve that.--Phil Holmes (talk) 09:55, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Speed test sites work by downloading a large file to your computer and measuring the rate at which it is transferred. It would make sense that you could download things faster from your own ISP because you are directly connected to their network. Still, it's possible broadbandspeedtest.co.uk's connection is overloaded. I'm seeing a slow speed reported on that site, as well. So I would try downloading a large file from another site and observing the download speed in your browser's downloads window. For example, this file.&mdash;Best Dog Ever (talk) 10:06, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * You could try a broadband meter such as tbbMeter. It will record a graph of how your speed changes over time.--Aspro (talk) 14:44, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * You could try files from somewhere else (maybe ftp://sun.ic.ac.uk if that still exists) to see what speed you get, but basically the speedtest sites have a real problem now that multi Mb/s connections are commonplace. You could try a quiet time of day (night) or day of the week.  See also contention ratio. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 17:26, 10 April 2014 (UTC).

Is there a way to do this?
I'm not looking for specific lines of code here -- I'm eager and excited to do that myself. But before I start writing code, I wanted to check if this would actually be possible.

What I want to have is a table for movies listing what films I have. There will be various columns for things such as "title" "director" "genre" etc. My question is,

Is it possible to make a sortable table (like, "click the column header to sort by that column") where one entry has more than one value in a given column.

Example: A movie like Alien I'd want to have two genre entries -- one for Science-Fiction and one for Horror. When sorting by title, I'd like it to appear once as: Alien   Ridley Scott   Dan O'Bannon    Science-Fiction    Horror

BUT

when sorting by genre, I'd want Alien to appear twice. Once under Horror, and once under Science-Fiction.

Thoughts?

My initial plan is to write all of this in XML and use XSLTs to do the viewing (I have no access to a database/server) Thanks! 199.94.70.36 (talk) 15:59, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * It certainly is possible, yes. Depending on the language, etc., it might be easier to put in two (or more) entries for each and filter out the duplicates where you don't want to see it repeated.  Also, you might want to not list all the movies by all genres like that, as it will make for a rather long list.  Instead you could select a theme, and list only movies that match that.  StuRat (talk) 16:17, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * yeah I was planning to have each element have two child elements if I want to assign the movie to two genres, but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to still have that "clickable column" thingie under the conditions I set. This is actually intended to be viewed by OTHER people and I know many people want to be able to view by genre199.94.70.36 (talk) 16:25, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * We should also talk about the data structure. If you only have one field type with a variable number of entries, then you can put that last and not specify the number, just read until you hit the end of the line:

Alien, Sci-Fi, Horror
 * But, if you have more than one field type like that, (let's use main character's names) then we run into a problem:

Alien       , Ripley    , Sci-Fi, Horror The Terminator, Terminator, Connor, Reese, Sci-Fi, Action
 * Here we can't tell where the character names end and the genre's begin. We'd need to add the number of character names to clarify things.

Alien        ,1, Ripley   , Sci-Fi, Horror The Terminator,3, Terminator, Connor, Reese, Sci-Fi, Action
 * Of course, we can add in the number of genres, too, if we want:

Alien        ,1,2, Ripley   , Sci-Fi, Horror The Terminator,3,2, Terminator, Connor, Reese, Sci-Fi, Action
 * Or we could skip the numbers and use a delimiter instead (let's say a vertical bar):

Alien       , Ripley                   ,|, Sci-Fi, Horror The Terminator, Terminator, Connor, Reese,|, Sci-Fi, Action
 * (XML files may have their own way to handle this problem.) StuRat (talk) 16:34, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Presumably the plan is to view this using a browser. Since browsers are generally not capable of handling arbitrary XML code, you'd have to use an XSLT to convert it to html.  If you've figured out how to handle that, then you might find this page useful for an idea on how to make your table sortable.  One way or another, it will require either writing or digging up some code in Javascript or some other language to do the sorting. Looie496 (talk) 19:15, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * You could do this really easily in Excel, if the XML stuff isn't all that important. Shadowjams (talk) 07:58, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There is the aditional problem that a comma can appear within a movie title.
 * One could encode the offending characters somehow; I'd guess that for a comma within a field, you could invent some HTML-like tag, say, &comma; to handle it in comma-separated lists.
 * (...or you could use URL encoding on non-URL data, as Rich Farmbrough suggests below) - ¡Ouch! (hurt me / more pain) 07:23, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Another idea, you could prefix every field with a field identifier, or a wiki-style namespace prefix. Say Ti for title (why? see below), Di for director, Ac for actor, Ch for character and Gn for genre.

Ti:Alien, Di:Ridley Scott, Ac:Sigourney Weaver, Ch:Ripley, Gn:Sci-Fi, Gn:Horror Ti:The Terminator, Di:James Cameron, Ac:Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ac: Linda Hamilton, Ch:Terminator, Ch:Connor, Ch:Reese, Gn:Sci-Fi, Gn:Action
 * (Note that only the first colon of a field can be a namespace separator; it's fine and unambiguous to write, say,

Ti:Jaws 34: Revenge of the Alien Killer Sharks From Uranus: The Sequel of Jaws 33: Attack of the Alien Killer Sharks From Uranus
 * without risk of "colon cancer." Not sure if that's still relevant or if I'm going off a tangent again... ) - ¡Ouch! (hurt me / more pain) 08:14, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Percent-encoding (ak URL encoding) might be the way to go: standards are good, mkay? All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 17:31, 10 April 2014 (UTC).

Wireless USB access, simplicity
I have a 2TB external USB drive I use for backup and storage of big files I need once in a while. What's the simplest standard for making access to it wireless, so my laptop backs up every hour plugged in or not? I have a wireless network, however I don't want others on the network to have access to its contents. I know Wireless USB does exist, but it didn't really take off and doesn't have the same recognition as Bluetooth, USB and so on. --89.243.7.60 (talk) 17:46, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * If you have another computer on your network (that would be on all the time), you could hook up the drive to it and share it on your network. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Palmtree5551 (talk • contribs) 18:15, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Strange flash problem
All of a sudden, all flash games are running at hyper-speed. This happened when playing a game when I was attempting to reset screen-size, and (presumably) unintentionally pressed some F-key that changed game speed, and I can't figure any way to restore this. The strange thing is, this hyper-fast speed applies to all games from any source. In addition, even videos on the flash player are fast. I've already tried deleting cookies, and clearing the caches for Firefox, Adobe player and Java. However, the problem persists. Is there some way to reset key-bindings to defaults? This is the only thing that I can think of to hopefully fix this. Other suggestions are also welcome. I'm using Firefox on Win7. ~Thanks in advance; this is quite annoying and puzzling. ~|71.20.250.51 (talk) 18:54, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Sounds like it's using a higher frames per second rate. Can you try another browser to see if Flash games are affected there, too ? StuRat (talk) 02:29, 6 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Try restoring your computer to a date before the problem started.&mdash;Best Dog Ever (talk)


 * ► I forgot the Windows' golden rule: "When in doubt, reboot."  The problem went away, but I wish I understood what exactly the problems was.  —71.20.250.51 (talk) 14:50, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes if we knew what the F key was I could speed up my Dogecoin miner... All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 17:40, 10 April 2014 (UTC).

Searching Craigslist
When searching Craigslist, is there any option to have a "wild card" character in your search term? For example, in another program, if I use the search term "People Mag*" (with an asterisk at the end after the "g" as a "wild card") that will deliver in the search results any items that start with those letters (and end with anything else). So, that search would yield "People Magazine", "People Magazines", "People Mags", even "People Magic", and so forth. Is there a similar character (such as the asterisk) that works as a "wild card" for Craigslist searches? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:40, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * The asterisk works for me. --  Gadget850talk 20:58, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Really? Does it work in this search ... Searchcraigslist.org ...?  That is the search in which I am trying to employ a wild card.  Thanks.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 21:07, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * You left that out. Odd. 'farscap*' gets hits for Farscape but 'farsca*' does not. Its a Google Search so it should conform to that standard. --  Gadget850talk 19:13, 6 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's odd. Any idea why that might be?  I am trying to search for both People Magazine (singular) and People Magazines (plural "s" at the end).  When I do a search for "People Magazine", it will not pick up the plural "People Magazines".  And I also cannot get it to do the wild card asterisk, "People Mag * ".  Any ideas?   Thanks.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 22:29, 6 April 2014 (UTC)