Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2008 September 4

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September 4

As Root

Hey y'all. You may recognize me as the n00b who often asks stuff here. ;) Anyways I have a question for being root in Ubuntu. The Examples that come with Ubuntu are owned by root as such I being a normal user(Though I can log in as root), I only have "read-only" access. How do I log in as root(I usually login from the terminal but I don't how to do anything in the terminal other then installing stuff, and getting updates) or do something else to "unlock" files that are owned by root? If I need to clarify my question, please say so.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:06, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

From the command prompt... If you know root's password, just type "su". I personally type "su -" to load root's profile. If you are in the sudoers file (/etc/sudoers in Ubuntu, I believe), then you can run any command as root by appending "sudo" in front of it, as

in "sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf" (don't run that). You'll be asked for YOUR password, not root's. -- kainaw™ 00:32, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Mmmh now how to open the documents in Examples? Or how to enable read+write by a normal user?--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:39, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Once you are root, you can use chown to make you the owner or chmod to allow everyone read/write ability to the Examples directory. -- kainaw™ 00:41, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

ER can you give me the "specific" command?--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 00:51, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Never mind I did it. I "unlocked" the file. Then relocked it. It's: chown (name of user) (name of file/folder/directory). This changes the owner and thus who can edit the permissions. :D Thanks guys.--Xp54321 ^{(Hello! • Contribs)} 01:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

When I was a noob, I was told, "Learn to use man and check out all the files in /usr/bin." I figured out that you can do something like "man chown" to learn what the chown command can do. I then looked in /usr/bin and used man on them. I found a lot of cool things. I still think the advice was a tad rude, but I'm glad that I followed the advice. -- kainaw™ 01:24, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

You can give "read" access to all users with sudo chmod a+r /path/to/file. And as Kainaw said, use the man pages. -Abhishek (talk) 02:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

D:/ doesn't read discs

Hey guys, I've been having trouble with my laptop (Toshiba, running XP) regarding the CD/DVD drive for a few months now. Ever since I tried to run what I think was a bootleg DVD in it and the software I was using to run it crashed, the drive has been unable to read discs. Well, I think it reads them, but it does a whole load of weird whirring sounds for a few minutes and then does absolutely nothing, and then I can't access the disc via the computer. I have been able to install IL-2 Sturmovik by putting in the disc JUST as the computer boots up, but after this the same thing happens if I put in a disc. I have considered purchasing an external CD/DVD drive so I can play Spore when it comes out, but what exactly is the problem here? I think it's the software, and as far as I know there's no way to remove the drive from the computer. I can't rollback because I never updated the driver. Avnas Ishtaroth _{drop me a line} 01:47, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

A Linux LiveCD/LiveUSB would be useful in here, to test out if it's hardware or software problem. If you don't want to download a Linux iso you can maybe try safe-mode, since it appears that you could access the drive for a brief moment before it goes dead. Laptop optical drives are usually replaceable, sometimes even with different parts, without too much problem. --antilived^{T | C | G} 08:14, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

What brand of laptop is it? Most companies will sell you an internal drive thats easily replacable, but this will cost more than an external drive. However it will look nicer. In the meantime if you wanted to get Spore you could always get it off EA Downloader or Direct2Drive, both of which are legal, easy to use, and don't need a CD drive. Both are fairly good although I consider direct2drive better because it lets you download your games forever whereas EA Downloader has a limit of 6 months unless you pay $5 extra. Also if you order before the game comes out you get the Spore creature creator for free I think (not totally sure) TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:29, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh a thought. Have you tried removing the DVD drive and booting the PC without it, then closing the PC down and putting the drive back in again. I had an issue similar to this with a floppy drive and this fixed it. TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:31, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

As I said, I'm not sure if I can remove the drive. There doesn't seem to be a way to. It appears to be quite a crappy old thing, I think it's about 2-3 years old now. Will have to check the model on it though. Anyway, my granny purchased me both Spore and an external drive today, so we'll see how that goes. Avnas Ishtaroth _{drop me a line} 06:56, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

It could be that the "bootleg DVD" used AutoRun to install some kind of malware which interfered with later use of the drive. Sony got in huge trouble for doing something like this a few years ago. SecuROM, which ships with many games, seems to be notorious for causing drive problems. -- BenRG (talk) 15:38, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Bawww, it appears she bought me an external hard drive, which I already have. I'll look into Direct2Drive, but I already have the game, I just need to install it without a CD drive. Would I be able to install it on the external hard drive via the family computer and transfer it to my laptop? Avnas Ishtaroth _{drop me a line} 08:23, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

That won't work. You could copy the entirety of the DVD to the external drive instead of installing it, and run the setup.exe from the external drive on your own PC however the game MIGHT have copy protection to stop that, but Spore runs without the CD so I think the only bit in place is the internet registration. TheGreatZorko (talk) 22:50, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Google Chrome

Is Google Chrome any good? I have no intention to replace my beloved Firefox 3, but I'd be interested in seeing how it is before giving it a roll myself. bibliomaniac15 03:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Fast -Abhishek (talk) 06:05, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

It looks pretty okey. I have been using opera for a long time and I love it. One thing to notice is for every tab on Chrome there is a separate application/instance of
Chrome. I am looking for some developments in future. Ultimately one day you have to shift to Chrome so get used to it. 61.12.10.34 (talk) 07:22, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Why not try it yourself. It doesn't replace Firefox and if you don't like it you can make it go away. I myself like it, especially the way tabs work, and the way it intergrates with Vista's Aero interface. It's also bloody fast and the download manager and incognito mode are great, but I miss adblock. Since the browser is opensource and supports plugins though I suspect there shall be an adblock extension soon enough. TheGreatZorko (talk) 08:22, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Shockingly, software doesn't have to be open source to make it's pluging work... so because it's open source has no bearing on the development of an adblock extension. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 10:26, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but open source means that even if google specifically trys to stop an adblock extention (and they may do seeing as adverts are their main stream of revenue) someone can just fork the code and remove that part. TheGreatZorko (talk) 11:37, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

So true, and if a TV company decides to remove the parts of the TV that let is show channels, you could take the parts and create a new TV. Of course it's not very helpful to the conversation to bring that up, because there is no chance of Google doing that, and you clearly realise your reasons for being supportive of open source are somewhat unstable or you wouldn't feel you had to try and force it into posts like this where it really has no bearing, and your example was just silly. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 11:42, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

How about this: if a browser supports extensions, you can implement an ad blocker as an extension. If it's open source, you can implement it in a code fork. Being open source and supporting extensions means you have two avenues for introducing an ad blocker, so it's reasonable enough to mention both. (Especially since, per the below, Chrome doesn't actually support extensions.) -- BenRG (talk) 15:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Nope, you're (i know you're a different person, i'm generalising cause i'm lazy) still pushing your views on open source like they're more important than they are. If someone uses Google Chrome code to write an ad-free browser, it is no longer Google Chrome. - Jimmi Hugh (talk) 22:45, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Not necessarily, Sometimes in open source there are patches or alternative, non-official binaries that add additional features or make changes that the official maintainers won't do. This is a lot of effort, because every time the official project is updated, the patches or alternative binaries must also be updated, but it does occasionally happen.

Usualy these patches are absorbed into the main trunk, but if they aren't for whatever reason, they can be maintained indefinitely in parallel to the software project itself. This is a lot of effort, but it's less effort than creating a total fork.

Whether the patched version would still be chrome is a philosophical question that's really just nitpicking. APL (talk) 01:17, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Does chrome really support firefox-style extensions, or is that just a myth? I can't find any evidence of that. As far as I can tell Gears isn't useful for making the kind of plug-in we're talking about, here. APL (talk) 15:12, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Not currently, apparently.  :-( --LarryMac | Talk 15:34, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I downloaded Chrome when it came out, and I've been using it as my browser for the last couple of days (I've been using Firefox since like pre-1.0, I figure that it would be nice trying something new), and it's pretty nice. It's certainly lightning fast, it looks nice, and it's got enough features to be useful. Although stuff is missing (like any way to handle feeds and the omnibar ain't no awesomebar, among many other things), it works decently enough. I like it! 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:43, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that Google's idea of a "way to handle feeds" would be Google Reader. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for built-in functionality. -- Coneslayer (talk) 19:56, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

That's not what I meant. When you go to a page with an associated feed (like a blog, or a wikipedia history page), a little feed icon appears in firefox and internet explorer 7, so you can easily subscribe to it. Google Chrome doesn't have that, so you have to either dig up the link on the site or look at the source (where it is in a <link> tag). And when you go to a page which is a feed, both IE and firefox gives you simple ways to subscribe to it (using the browser or Google Reader, for instance). Chrome doesn't do that either. Compare for instance this feed from the New York Times in Firefox and Chrome. Chrome doesn't even render it nicely. It's rather incredible that a Google Browser offers no way to easily add feeds to Google Reader. It's such an easy feature to implement, and so basic, that it's quite stunning. 83.250.202.36 (talk) 21:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I get it now. I thought you meant something like Firefox's Live Bookmarks. -- Coneslayer (talk) 13:15, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

No Linux version....fail. SteveBaker (talk) 03:55, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Have you guys read this recently? Kushal (talk) 14:43, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

advanced Perl help!

On a Perl forum, someone wrote me a perl script to parse a CSV (comma separated value) file. I've saved the code here: User:Nichalp/code. Now I noticed a major bug in that the last line of a CSV file does not get parsed. I tried to contact the author, but he seems to be offline for the past week, and the code is well over my head for me to understand. Please could someone who can understand the code help me? I think it has to do with the eof check. I have put up a sample CSV file content on the page. =Nichalp «Talk»= 04:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yuck. First of all, you should be using the well-tested Text::CSV module, not some anonymous hack parser. Secondly, yes it is almost always wrong to use eof() in perl (the read operators have eof/error return values which you should be checking for instead). And why are there 2 different read loops? Too much of a mess to fix. Kill it, get Text::CSV from CPAN, and start over. --tcsetattr (talk / contribs) 05:04, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Webpage update monitoring

Is there a program or website that offers the service of monitoring a specific list of other web pages for changes? And then emailing me or something when there is a change? It doesn't have to check all the time, just once an hour or once a day or whenever I tell it to. Kind of like the Wikipedia Watchlist, but for the web. This would save me the trouble of going through the pages regularly to check for changes, which happen infrequently so it is a waste of time. I know that I can monitor updates to RSS feeds; but this is about regular web pages, not RSS feeds. Thanks, --71.141.123.164 (talk) 06:12, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

If you use Linux, it would be trivial to script a sequence of moving a local copy of a page to a backup, wget the current version of the page, run diff on the two versions, send email (or save a local log message) if diff doesn't return null - you can even add the diffs to the email. Add it to Cron. Get creating and have the script read URLs from a file so you don't have to write a script for each page you want to watch. -- kainaw™ 12:16, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Failing that, the page may have an RSS feed for this. Check the website in question for links. — QuantumEleven 12:27, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Not wanting to be picky but, um, they explicitly don't want an RSS feed. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 12:41, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, crumbs - that should teach me to read questions more carefully! Sorry, OP. — QuantumEleven 10:10, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Not that messing around with wget, diff and cron isn't cool and everything, but if you're not into that stuff, there's webservices like Versionista (which I believe was inspired by wikipedia's history and diff functions). I haven't used it personally, but I hear it works great. For instance, if you look at this comparison you see that the McCain campaign removed Tom Ridge from some speaking-thing. Nice, huh! 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:58, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Delete Sarah Palin as non-notable!

Google hasn't heard of her: [1], clearly doesn't exist. :-) So basically, I got this search result about a half an hour ago. I haven't seen that happen before and once I repeated the search, it was back to normal. Do you know what (probably simple) explanation there is? Servers overloaded etc? Fribbler (talk) 16:20, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

That picture is altered. When Google doesn't find ANY results (as the message says), you do not get 10 pages of results below the message. Next time do a better cut and crop. -- kainaw™ 16:40, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Hadn't noticed that. Should have clicked on those before I closed the window. But nay, I have not 'shopped the picture. I swear on my wiki-reputation that that picture is an unaltered screenshot. Curiouser and curiouser..... Fribbler (talk) 16:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

I did notice your sig after replying and wondered if some anon was manually typing it in... but, you could still be an anon manually typing in Fribbler's sig! -- kainaw™ 16:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

But I could not alter the page history showing it to be me.... :-) My guess is that, at the time of the search, I was clicking lots of things quickly and I must have somehow cut the search off half-done. But I can't reproduce the result. Fribbler (talk) 16:53, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

That's a possibility. In Firefox, a pretty solid indication of that would be the message "Stopped" rather than the usual "Done" on the bar at the bottom of the window. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 22:55, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Anyways, not having a Google hit does not mean it is non notable. Kushal (talk) 22:58, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The long list of other pages certainly suggests a poorly faked image...and it's REALLY hard to type anything into Google that sounds remotely like English without getting either some valid hits or a "Did you mean..." suggestion. Just try it! Any combination of believable English names produce hits - and any "almost" real names produce a "Did you mean...". Also, the Wikipedia article on Palin has existed since October 2005 - LONG before you did that search - and at the barest minimum, that would have constituted one ghit. But Sarah Palin is a common enough name - and even if "sarah palin" didn't match for reasons of non-notability, you'd still have gotten some pages that had "Sarah Miles" and "Micheal Palin" that would have matched (there are 2,430 Ghits for "Sarah Miles" and "Michael Palin"). So we KNOW for 100% sure that your search result (as illustrated) is broken.

So can it be a FireFox bug? No! At least not a remotely credible one because the page says "Your search - sarah palin - did not match any documents." - no possible combination of failing to render text could result in that appearing on the screen - look at the search results HTML code - it's a very simple piece of continuous HTML. How would the surrounding text (which Firefox would have to have "dreamed up" somewhere) get wrapped around your search term with all of the boldface tags perfectly in place? For a random rendering bug - that's an awfully tough coincidence. Finally - (albeit perhaps circumstantially) in the Palingoogle image, there are 48 pixels between the bottom of the pale blue bar that says "Web" and the bottom of the "sarah palin" text. When I do it (Firefox 3.01, Google.ie - seemingly the same fonts, etc - but with a genuinely failed search) that is only 36 pixels - and no amount of window resizing makes it come out any different with that font choice.

Hence, I also accuse our OP of faking the image. SteveBaker (talk) 03:51, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

So probably not a Firefox bug. Likely a momentary Google bug. I'm not sure about the pixels. Something to do with my widescreen laptop resolution perhaps. I would like to reiterate that I have not faked the image. Had I have then I would basically be trolling. Not something I would do. Fribbler (talk) 15:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I would like to add that if an article doesn't meet notibility guidelines the non-notable template should be placed on the page to alert other editors, with reasons on the talk page of that article. And if you have questions about this then the Wikipedia:Help Desk is the place for them not the computing reference desk. - Phydaux (talk) 11:55, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

I am aware of that. The title was of course a joke. It's the technical bug that I'm interested in. Fribbler (talk) 15:21, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Most of the top results (except for wikipedia) in google are cloaking sites and google knows about them and just lets them keep on cloaking and getting the top result everytime. William Ortiz (talk) 21:07, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Java

In Java, are classes objects? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 16:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

In Java, a class is the description (the code, the file, the actual stuff the programmer typed into his editor) and an object is the instantiation of the class (the stuff the variable points to). -- kainaw™ 16:49, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

So what's this [2] all about then? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.223.156.1 (talk) 16:57, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

It's about a class named Class, from which the JVM creates Class objects. --LarryMac | Talk 17:00, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Is that a yes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.164.115 (talk) 18:09, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

No. --LarryMac | Talk 18:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

In general, try and stay away from "meta"-elements like java.lang.Class (with the exception for java.lang.Object, which you can't stay away from). Concentrate on learning the language, and worry about the under-the-hood stuff later. 83.250.202.36 (talk) 17:37, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

It boils down to how you define "object", which can mean different things to different people. My own feeling is that classes are not first class objects in Java, since to manipulate them like other objects you really have to reach around the language's back. For example, to create a new kind of class (not a new Class object), you have to call out to a Java compiler and then load the resulting byte code. Compare that to the kinds of class manipulations you can do in Smalltalk or Perl, where you can dynamically assign new methods to a class. --Sean 19:01, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

A class is not an object, no it is not, but this does not mean that you cannot have an object named Class! :) NerdyNSK (talk) 14:34, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

2 YouTube questions

Question 1

1. Can you rename your YouTube account?

Question2

2. Can you transfer videos from one account to another?

No, you can't do either, unfortunately. --jh51681 (talk) 18:36, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

All you can do is download the YouTube video and upload it to the new account, or upload the original, if you still have it.--ChokinBako (talk) 11:28, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

How to develop a WIKI portal

I am trying to post a new article on wikipedia but I am not sure how to do it. Can someone please help me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vishnuteja84 (talk • contribs) 19:28, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Your first article. Xenon54 19:50, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Also, Wikipedia: Help Desk. For any other questions you have about using wikipedia. -Phydaux (talk) 11:40, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

firewall log

I looked at my firewall log out of curiosity and saw a lot of text like:

Sep 4 15:00:28 82 Firewall[38]: Stealth Mode connection attempt to TCP 70.215.252.82:49197 from 209.85.147.104:80

What does this mean and should I be concerned? Thanks for your help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.215.252.82 (talk) 20:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

You shouldn't be. Whatever it was, your firewall blocked it. Old-school internet worms works by scanning the internet for computers with a specific vulnerability that they can use to infiltrate yet another computer (and thus spread the worm further). They fill the tubes with random noise like this. Firewalls block these attempts so that they can't accomplish this.

I would say one thing though: a much better protection against this can't of thing compared to a software firewall is a NAT router, which will drop these packets before they can even reach your computer. I strongly suggest you get one, since they are dynamite for protection against incoming hacking attempts 83.250.202.36 (talk) 21:07, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

The local port (49197) looks like a dynamically assigned port number for an outgoing connection, the remote port (80) is the standard HTTP port, and an RDNS lookup on the remote address reveals that it belongs to Google. So I think what probably happened is that you made a web connection to Google and your machine decided the connection was closed before Google's did. When Google subsequently sent another IP packet, your machine interpreted it as an unrelated "connection attempt" to that now-unused port. Nothing to worry about, in other words. I don't know what "stealth mode" means, but it might mean that the firewall simply ate the packet rather than sending a RST packet back. The RST is supposed to tell the sending machine to close the connection in case the last close request got lost, but it has the side effect of letting the sending machine know of your existence, which some people think is a security risk (since the sender might be scanning for in-use IP addresses). -- BenRG (talk) 21:29, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

"Stealth mode" probably means any packet other than a SYN packet sent to a closed port. The traditional way to see if a port is open is to start opening a connection to it (send a SYN packet), but every firewall and intrusion detection system ever written will spot that. There are other ways of seeing if a port is open (send an ACK packet, send a FIN packet, send a null packet, send a Christmas-tree packet, etc.) that are less likely to be detected. --Carnildo (talk) 23:23, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Firefox 3 Closing Randomly

OK, I never used to have this problem, but all of a sudden Firefox 3 started having issues on my computer. It'll just disappear- close down without any warning or error message. It doesn't seem to matter how many tabs I have open or what sites I'm on, it just happens. Thankfully, if I start it back up, it will let me restore my tabs, but it's really getting annoying. The last time it happened, it eventually started coming up with an error message saying something about how it could not be found (or something, I can't remember it exactly). And then I tried other programs, and they came up with the same message! Even the Task Manager and command prompt wouldn't come up! Finally, I had to completely restart my computer and reinstall Firefox. I really don't want to do that again this time (I've already gotten the "can't find something or other" error message, but haven't seen it since restarting my computer this time around.) so I'm wondering if somebody can give me some insight into what exactly is going on and how I can fix it? --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 23:12, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

1. What kind of computer are you on. (I mean, we're not psychic!) 2. Do you have any special extensions installed. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 23:53, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, sorry. I've got a Windows XP. As for extensions... erm... lemme think. I think there's StumbleUpon on it, and I know Veoh's little bar comes up. Not entirely certain. I have tried to start it in Safe Mode, but it still doesn't work. --Alinnisawest,^{Dalek Empress} (extermination requests here) 00:16, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

If other programs are doing it - then it's probably not a Firefox error - but something more systemic. When you get an error like this - you REALLY need to get into the habit of writing it down. If you had the exact message for us - we'd stand a good chance of being able to diagnose it.

SteveBaker (talk) 03:03, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Uploading files to Google Sites

Google Page creator allows files under 10 MB each and 100 MB in total to be uploaded. Does Sites have this feature? How can I use it and what are the limitations? Thank youKushal (talk) 23:39, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

:( Kushal (talk) 17:00, 7 September 2008 (UTC)