Computing desk
< August 26	<< Jul \| August \| Sep >>	August 28 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 27

Difficulty finding page related to "Order of Operations" in Mathematics.

"Order of Operations" is such a simple process, we all learn it in grade school. I needed to use the term in an email, and it took me over one-half hour to find it!

Everything that was being returbed by your search engine were articles at the college level and beyond.

Maybe you need a "Kidapedia"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drexpert007 (talk • contribs) 00:32, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Have you tried the Simple English Wikipedia? simple:Order of operations -- Dismas|^(talk) 00:42, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The article is Order of operations. Wikipedia normally does not capitalize words other than the first word in article titles, unless the words are proper names or the like. See WP:TITLEFORMAT. 69.228.170.132 (talk) 18:03, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

how long does it take to overwrite hard drive using system recovery disc

Let me clarify a few details:

- I've had the computer for a couple of weeks

- I haven't done much with it other than log in to email and forum accounts via web browsing.

- The hard drive is 1 TB in size (854GB in free space actually available). I plan on returning it Monday, so I just need to know if this will take a long time (as in hours on end) or if it's a brief and reasonable time (as in under an hour) 70.52.79.25 (talk) 08:15, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify: Do you want to overwrite every bit on the disk to blank it out, including the empty portion ? I assume you want to do this for security reasons, before returning it ? Technically, you shouldn't need to blank out any any unallocated sectors, although you would need to blank out the empty portion of allocated partitions, as it may have had data in them which was "deleted", which just means the index entry is removed, and the data is left in place.

To answer, we would need to know the hard disk model number, so we can find it's write speed. StuRat (talk) 09:34, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Don't know the model number, but I know the read and write speed is 5400rpm. --70.52.79.25 (talk) 15:21, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It will take several hours at least to overwrite the whole disk surface. Overwriting only used portions would take less than an hour, but that won't necessarily overwrite all personal information, and I doubt the recovery disk has it as an option anyway. If it's a Windows machine and you want to minimize downtime, you can install TrueCrypt and set it to encrypt the system drive. This takes hours but the system is usable during that time. Then erasing the drive is instantaneous: just forget the passphrase. -- BenRG (talk) 16:45, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If it's a recent SATA drive it likely supports a "secure erase" operation (we could use an article about that). You should use that in preference to a software program if you can do so conveniently, but either way, yes, wiping a 1TB disk is likely to take a few hours. A rough guess for an internal SATA might be 100MB/sec which is 10000 seconds or around 3 hours. If it's a USB2 disk it will be more like 20MB/sec, or about 15 hours. In principle maybe you could get away with wiping just part of the drive, but if you had anything sensitive on the drive it's safer to wipe everything. 69.228.170.132 (talk) 18:08, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Django simple button + field + saving

I know python and a little bit about django (at least, enough about urls.py and views.py to copy and paste a working example.) I'd like to have a simple function:

Button, when pressed, it processed the text obtained from a text field and does two thing: shows it on screen and saves it to a file (append to text file or SQLite, whatever is easier). How can I do that? Comploose (talk) 17:27, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know enough Django to do it justice, but I can give a trivial example in Bottle, which should at least give you the conceptual idea of what to do.

#!/usr/bin/python
import os.path
from bottle import get, post, request, run, Bottle 

NAMEFILE = 'names.txt'
app = Bottle()

def generate_page(msg=None):
    if msg:
        html = '<div style="color:red;">'+msg+'</div>'
    else:
        html = ""

    if os.path.exists(NAMEFILE):
        f = open(NAMEFILE,'r')
        for name in f.readlines():
            html += name.strip() + '<br>'
            f.close()

    return html + '''<form method="POST" action="/">
                       <input name="name" type="text">
                       <input type="submit" value="add name">
                     </form>'''

@app.route('/')
def page():
    return generate_page()

@app.post('/') 
def page_submit():
    name = request.forms.get('name')
    if len(name)>0:
        if os.path.exists(NAMEFILE):
            f = open(NAMEFILE,'a')
        else:
            f = open(NAMEFILE,'w')
        f.write(name+'\n')
        f.close()
        return generate_page('added:'+name)
    else:
        return generate_page()

run(app, host='localhost', port=8080)

That's pretty minimal, and not an example of good practice, but hopefully it's instructive nevertheless. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 19:43, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ooooh. Thanks for the answer. I thought that could be done in kind of three lines of code, but no, I'll have to invest more time to get it. Comploose (talk) 22:23, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Has anyone got The Ur-Quan Masters to work?

Has anyone ever got The Ur-Quan Masters to actually work on a Linux system? I installed the game on my fresh Fedora 17 system, eager to play it, because I played the original Star Control intensively on my old Amiga 500, but the sequel never appeared on the Amiga. uqm --version reports I have version 0.7.0. When I start it, I get as far as the main menu, and when I select "New game", I get a screen saying "IGL - Interstellar Frungy League presents", after which the program crashes. Is there a working version available anywhere? JIP | Talk 18:54, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Start it from a terminal and observe the output when it crashes. ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:42, 28 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I tried that. It just says "Segmentation fault (core dumped)". JIP | Talk 18:49, 28 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Facebook question

What is the max size of a file you can attach to a personal message on facebook? — Preceding unsigned comment added by KobiNew (talk • contribs) 19:37, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]