Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 September 13

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September 13

Wireless in Linux

Hello everyone at WP:RD/C. I am having trouble with my wireless internet connection in Kubuntu/Ubuntu (installed the Ubuntu desktop on Kubuntu KDE4). I am dual-booting Win XP pro SP3 and the afore mentioned. I have encryption on the network so I have a security key. In Win, it asks for the key, I type it in, and everything is good: I'm connected. In linux, however, when it says I need to enter a security key, I enter it and it acts like it's connecting and then pops up and asks again. This is the same key I gave Windows and it connected. Any ideas on what I should do to connect? TIA, Ζρς ι'β' ^¡hábleme! 00:49, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Did you put in the correct encryption standard (WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.)? Is it asking for your wireless key or password for your keyring? Does your wireless work with an unsecured network? --antilived^{T | C | G} 02:41, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I tried all of the encyption standards so yes. It seems to be asking for my key. I don't know if it works with an unsecured network. I haven't had the chance to try that yet. Ζρς ι'β' ^¡hábleme! 02:49, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Also, just on an off-chance - which encryption algorithm are you choosing? Some of the protocols (WPA in particular, I think) let you choose between (again, I think) DES, 3DES and AES. Most cards will auto-negotiate the encryption - so there again, where do you see "auto-negotiate" in your settings? And what other options are there in the click-box? Franamax (talk) 06:51, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Testing Question

Hai Every one, This is Ganesh, i faced one interview question on Testing.Tell me one bug u found which is high severity,low priority and low severity,high priority?please send me solution —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anjaneyaprasad (talk • contribs) 06:46, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Even if we would help you with what is essentially a homework question (and we wouldn't), we couldn't -- we haven't tested the software in question. (Or, if this is in fact a hypothetical homework question that you're just calling an interview, see "we wouldn't".) -- Captain Disdain (talk) 10:07, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Why the heck are your applying for a job you obviously can not do?--mboverload@ 18:27, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

What could that question possibly be measuring, other than "familiarity with the quirky definitions of severity and priority used in our bug-tracking system"? That's not a skill, that's a trivial factoid you could learn in a few seconds the first time you need to use it. Sign of a narcissistic interviewer who's not really interested in the interviewee's abilities. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 20:33, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

These terms are widely used and understood in a standard fashion across the software QA industry (largely following a simplifcation of MIL-STD-882), and are adopted as a general schema used in most bug and issue tracking software. It's a basic way of communicating defect information that anyone in SQA should understand; it's no "factoid". -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:36, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Ganesh, your question is a bit hard to understand. If you're confused about what "priority" and "severity" mean in the context of bug reports, and you're understandably confused about how a very severe bug could still be a low priority, I'll try to explain that.

It depends on a given company's bug-reporting policy, but generally "severity" simply means how bad a bug is - data-loss is the most severe, crashes are severe, whereas stuff like spelling mistakes or minor screen-formatting problems are generally of low severity. "priority" is a measure of how urgently a fix is needed; priority is often changed by product-marketing or engineering people (in some companies priority is left blank by QA staff and is set by PM or engineering-management).

So how can a serious bug be low priority? Surely fixing crashes and stopping customer data being lost or damaged is the highest priority? Usually that's true (and usually bug severity and priority end up being set to much the same value). But occasionally you get weird ones where that's not true - imagine you're testing a database program, and you get it to crash - but the crash only happens when you enter an impossibly long sequence of keystrokes and will only happen on a specific date in the distant past. You'd probably create the bug with a high priority, but (after examining the exact details under which the crash can happen) engineering might set its priority to low, figuring that it will never actually happen in the field.

Now, conversely, how can a very un-serious bug nevertheless have high priority? Imagine the splash screen of your database program somehow manages to misspell the name of the company that makes it. A simple typo rightly has very low seriousness (it doesn't really cause any harm at all - users can do whatever they want as if the bug wasn't there). But this bug gives the product marketing guys apoplexy - "we'll be laughingstocks", they wail (like they're not already...). So they set the priority to super-high, higher than the dataloss bugs and the crashbugs. So they stamp their dainty marketing-guy feet and furrow their low marketing-guy brows and insist that this bug, however trivial its actual consequences to the user really are, must be the first one fixed.

In most organisations, as a tester, you'd generally just either not set priority or set it equal to severity, as deciding which bugs to fix first is rarely a decision QA makes. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:02, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Excellent, Finlay McWalter! Kushal (talk) 10:53, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

If you followed the explanation of priorities, then the other thing you need to know is that this is not a question about knowledge, it is a question about your own experience. You're supposed to tell them about bugs you found in code that you were writing or testing. So no-one here can answer this question, except for you. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 03:32, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

pluggin

Is there a pluggin like NoScript for IE7? If so where can I get it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.128.190.49 (talk) 06:53, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a script for IE7Pro that does this. Nanonic (talk) 15:04, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Firefox/Minefield browser version

When I go to some sites, I see a message saying something like, "upgrade your browser to ie7 or firefox," then it has a like to where I can download them. I use Minefield, the pre-beta version of Firefox, so I am actually ahead of them in technology. I am assuming that they are reading my browser version using some html script/code/thingy. I found where to change the version name in about:config, but what should I change it to (so I can get sites to thing I am using "firefox")? flaminglawyer^c 12:55, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Open about:config. Add a new string entry:

name = general.useragent.override

content = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

This will make your browser identify itself as Firefox 3.0.1.

--grawity 15:25, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Foreign languages in office

I bought Microsoft office 2003 bundled with my computer, and as far as I can remember I did not receive any office disks with it, however I would like to use the foreign language spell checker, which is apparently not installed, and when I try to install the programme just requests the original disks to be inserted. Is there another way to get the foreign language data, or should I have been provided with the disks? 92.10.180.245 (talk) 14:39, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

You would usually get the disks with your computer, even if you have an OEM copy of the software. It's possible that your copy of Office might have been pirated or installed illegally. Try http://office.microsoft.com where you may be able to download what you are looking for. Stifle (talk) 22:31, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

If all else fails - you could download and install OpenOffice - it's free and so are all of the spell-correction dictionaries in a bazillion languages. SteveBaker (talk) 02:47, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Chrome source code size - why so huge?

The recently released Google Chrome (Chromium) source code was recently released and i was shocked at how much space it took up - 1.5GB, that's enormous! I can understand things like webkit are extremely complex but how can a web browser source code take up so much space? It must be mostly text with very little in the way of images, so why so massive? Thanks - a confused amateur programmer -Benbread (talk) 16:47, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

A lot of it is because it doesn't just include the source code for a given package that you need to build chrome, but the entire distribution for something, often including substantive test suites. Included in there is cygwin, a Python (programming language) dist, lighttpd, webkit, ICU (which has a massive distribution), libxml (which has a very substantial test suite). There's 32M of network-cache test data. There's all of Google Gears (which is distributed two large binary files totalling 15M). There's 6M just in unit test data for the V8 virtual machine. There's 330M in webkit layout tests and expected results (including some 4563 test-result PNG files). So you didn't really download the sourcecode for a browser, you downloaded a browser, a couple of dozen major open-source projects, and a huge automated test suite for all kinds of things. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:05, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

PHP from the command line (CLI)

Hi y'all. I'm trying to use PHP to create a command line program to run in Terminal on my OSX MacBook. I need it to batch process a bunch of images, and when I've run the code in a browser it works perfectly. But trying to adapt it to run in PHP CLI (command line) has driven me bonkers. In particular, it doesn't seem like any of the GD (Image) functions are supported! I tried looking at the PHP CLI phpinfo information and it doesn't include any image functions there, and even simple things like var_dump(gd_info()); fail ("Call to undefined function: gd_info() in .../crop.php on line 4"). The GD library is not included the "PHP modules" listed when I run php -m from the command line.

So yeah. What do I need to do so that PHP CLI can use the GD library? I haven't really used it as a command line program before. And I really need those image functions (they're the heart of this piece of code). I could re-write it so that it all runs from a browser but this seems like a defeatist approach to it. Anybody have any advice? I haven't been able to find a Google search that enlightened me, and looking over the PHP manual pages relating to both GD and CLI haven't really helped... thanks! --98.217.8.46 (talk) 17:00, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Some more poking around seems to imply that PHP CLI doesn't compile with GD automatically and to get it to work I'd have to recompile all of PHP... which I'm not interested in doing. So a web version of it, it is... ---98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:48, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I think the CLI and CGI versions of PHP use different config files (php.ini) - one is in Apache's folder, the CLI one is in PHP's folder. You probably need to edit the CLI config to load GD's module. (Just a guess.) --grawity 09:37, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

OS equivalent of mathematica

What free OS alternative do I have to a package like Mathematica?--Mr.K. (talk) 17:47, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Look here: Comparison of computer algebra systems --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 20:18, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

A personal favorite is Maxima. It's not entirely as powerful as Mathematica, but it's a fine product nonetheless. 90.235.16.176 (talk) 09:57, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

The comparison link above doesn´t give further information about which one is equivalent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mr.K. (talk • contribs) 12:10, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

What do you mean by equivalent? Are you looking for an open-source implementation of the Mathematica language? I'm not aware of any. Wolfram does sell Mathematica for Linux. -- BenRG (talk) 19:23, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I meant one with so much function, graphical display and with a scripting language (could be Python). Mr.K. (talk) 08:42, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm telling you, Maxima! It's exactly what you're looking for! 90.235.12.16 (talk) 11:18, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

How Can I FAX?

I have a hp psc 1315 all-in-one little printer attached to my home desktop. It can print, scan and copy. It can also FAX, but I understand that pages to be FAXed have to be in a certain format. On my "printers and FAXs" page I have a picture of a FAX machine which is ready, and the properties device name is evidently my modem. I believe it has a driver that works, but I can't send or receive. The device tab page says "send yes, receive auto". Upon trying to learn about this I saw something that said the format of a FAXed page has to be something like *.CO??? but when I try to "save as" a page I only get the options *.htm, *.html, *.mht or *.txt, no *.CO something. I can get a page of a letter I've written to go to the FAX on "printers and FAXs" but I can't get it to go to another FAX machine which I know to be available. My connection to the internet is fast cable DSL which includes my telephone, so phone and desktop computer can both be used at the same time. Please help.Wiki asker (talk) 18:18, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about your specific printer, but in general windows views fax machines as printers. It sounds like this has been correctly installed, as you're seeing a "printer" named fax in the printers-and-faxes screen. To send a fax you send a normal print job to that "fax" device, as if it was a regular physical printer. At that point a special dialog pops up, which gets you to enter the fax # you want to send to (I forget, and it varies, but I believe it also asks you a bunch of other stuff, and optionally generates a simple fax cover page). Give that a try. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:53, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for replying so quickly Finlay. I can generate a cover page with the special dialog, I had made my FAX "printer" the default, and hit send. I know the FAX machine I am sending to is OK but I get the error message "Phone in use or not connected". It keeps trying every 5 minutes until I delete the message in the FAX console outgoing folder.Wiki asker (talk) 12:22, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

That sounds simply as if it's not plugged into the phone line. The fax port on the fax machine has to be plugged into the voice port on your DSL microfilter (not the broadband port). Try getting it to dial your mobile phone; if it can't make your mobile ring, it's not connected to the analog phone line properly. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 12:27, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

HI Finlay I'm back. I think you are right. I created a cover letter and sent it. I got a small pop up window labeled FAX Monitor which said "Ready to send FAXes" I clicked "send now". It says "Keep this dialog visable at all times check box, Hide, Answer, More/Less; I got: 8:37 Dialing (number) 8:37 No dial tone The phone is in use or not connected. My cell phone is sitting on my desk right next to me and turned on and working and not in use.It's not ringing. Since it gave me the option to answer an incomming FAX I tried "Answer now" just to see what would happen. I got: 8:37 The call was answered 8:37 An error occurred while receiving the FAX I know nobody was sending me a FAX. Since I only have one line from my computer to the modem now and that must be going to the broadband port, how can I make a new line and have only FAXes go to that line? I have a landline phone connected to the modem and I could pull that plug out and plug something else into that receiving hole in the modem but where would the other end of that line go? and what's a DSL microfilter? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wiki asker (talk • contribs) 13:01, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

A microfilter is a little box that plugs into your phone socket and that splits off the signal for the DSL from the ordinary analog phone line. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 14:33, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Make sure you really have that analog line connected to the appropriate port on the HP, not on your PC or broadband modem. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:09, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I found the DSL filter little white box. It has two holes on end A and one on end B. On end A, one line goes to the phone outlet on the wall and the other goes to the phone. On end B the only wire goes to the modem. There is another line from the modem to the PC and another line which goes from the PC to the hp printer. It appears that having the "FAX printer", which has as it's device name the modem, and also having a "printer" which has as it's device name the hp 1315 means that FAXing doesn't actually use the hp at all, so how can it be a FAX machine? I think if the FAXing were working I would hear a dial tone and the other phone ringing, which I don't, so maybe it has something to do with the driver? I think I read somewhere that the incoming and outgoing "letters" are stored in a regular folder, but the FAX console looks just like Outlook Express format. So far I'm just trying to send a cover letter, sending a message and receiving comes next.

The hp printer only has two openings, one goes to and from the PC and the other suplies power from the wall. Also, people who have FAXes have a seperate phone number just for their FAX. I use the same line for both the landline telephone and the PC? If I bought another machine just to do FAXing how would it get messages to and from the PC? I think I could us my PC to send and receive FAX messages just like e-mail.Wiki asker (talk) 19:07, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Your printer doesn't support fax at all, at least not mentioned on the specifications. It seems that you have a modem installed on your computer, so you should plug the phone line into the back of your computer instead. --antilived^{T | C | G} 22:28, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Dear Antilived - THAT DID IT!!! I pluged the regular landline telephone line into the back of the computer and sent a cover letter and it said that it was sent. Unfortunately the recepient was not in his office at the time so he couldn't confirm, but, using a different phone on the same line I was able to call him and he said he would be back in his office in about an hour and would both confirm receipt of first FAX and also try to send me a FAX so I can test receipt on this end. WOW!! THANK YOU!! This is fun! There's nothing like getting information from someone who actually knows what they are talking about.Wiki asker (talk) 16:14, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm back. Both sending and receiving worked but I can't see the incomming letter in the fax console because I get the error message: "The fax document cannot be displayed because your operating system does not have a default viewer for fax documents (.tif files)" I do have 'Windows Picture and Fax Viewer', and I can view the incomming letter in the archived file. So why can't I use my 'Fax Viewer' to view incomming or sent faxed files? Also, up above Finlay McWalter said "Optionally lets you send a cover page." When I send, with the fax "printer" as the default, the dialog pops up and lets me enter the phone number of the fax machine to send to and then I have to create a cover page. I can't find any way to just send the letter without a cover page.Wiki asker (talk) 20:16, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Storage

Question was dual-posted at Science desk. Redundancy removed, existing answers teleported. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 19:52, 13 September 2008 (UTC)