Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 November 25

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November 25

Why does setResizable for Java FX Stage class not work on Linux?

I've found that the Java FX Stage class's setResizable method when given a false parameter results in a non-resizable window when run on a Windows machine, but have found the same source code, when compiled on two different Linux platforms (the latest Ubuntu and the latest CentOS) to result in a window that is still resizable. Another person with the same problem. What is/are the technical reason(s) that setting resizable to false doesn't result in a non-resizable window when running on either Ubuntu or CentOS (if not more Linux platforms)? I know the method spec says it's a hint, so why don't these two (if not more) take the hint?20.137.2.50 (talk) 14:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Have you considered filing a bug report? If you are using OpenJFX (OpenJDK), send a bug report to openjfx-dev. Be sure to specify your OS, JVM/JDK, and your window manager or desktop environment, (e.g. GNOME). Nimur (talk) 15:17, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't have javafx installed on my Ubuntu machine to test this, but for me setResizable works for an ordinary Swing toplevel (with the default unity/compiz window manager). I'd be interested to know if that code works on the machine(s) where you're seeing the problem in JavaFX:

import javax.swing.JFrame;

public class top {
    public static void main(String[] args){
        JFrame f = new JFrame("frame");
        f.setBounds(100,100,200,200);
        f.setResizable(false);
        f.setVisible(true);
    }
}

If that doesn't work either, that would suggest that your window manager is ignoring the hint, rather than it being a JavaFX problem. If it does work, you've narrowed the responsible party down some. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 16:17, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, If I use Swing and a JFrame, setting resizable to false works correctly for me too. It's just the FX Stage that doesn't not-resize correctly. 20.137.2.50 (talk) 16:45, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Then it sounds like something isn't passing the resizable property to the underlying AWT X11 toolkit peer. If you do decide to submit a bug report, the person responding will want to be sure that the relevant hints aren't being passed to the window manager. The way "non resizable" is implemented in X11 is to set ICCCM hints which set the maximum and minimum sizes of the window to the same value. For a running window, you can externally check by running xwininfo -size which will display the hints. So my example Swing program, with setResizable(false) will report:

 Normal window size hints:
     User supplied location: 100, 100
     Program supplied location: 100, 100
     Program supplied size: 198 by 171
     Program supplied minimum size: 198 by 171
     Program supplied maximum size: 198 by 171
     Program supplied window gravity: NorthWestGravity

Those two bold lines (minimum size and maximum size) don't show if the window is setResizable(true). If you check your JavaFX program with that, you can confirm that Java isn't sending the appropriate ICCCM hints, rather than the WM ignoring them. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 18:15, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for telling me about xwininfo, Finlay McWalter. It helped me analyze the problem. I think I found out more about what's going on, and even found a working solution. I neglected to mention that I was using SceneBuilder to design my window's size and appearance. This application automatically updates the application's .fxml file, which is where information about the window's appearance, such as minimum and maximum size go. But the checkbox "resizable" for the AnchorPane properties is grayed out in the checked status, which is why I went to hard code it with primaryStage.setResizable(false). But I did set min and max dimensions in SceneBuilder and my .fxml file had that information. But when I ran xwininfo -size, that min and max information was not hinted to the window manager. So it looks like the problem is that (on the Linux platforms I've used), Java FX does not read the min and max sizes from the .fxml file and interpret that as hints to the window manager. When I added the lines primaryStage.setMinWidth(200); primaryStage.setMaxWidth(200); primaryStage.setMinHeight(200); primaryStage.setMaxHeight(200); primaryStage.setResizable(false);, it worked. So the problem is with the fxml file getting its size info parsed out. 20.137.2.50 (talk) 19:32, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the cause. I've since installed sun-java8ea in an ubuntuVM and manually compiled the Oracle HellowWorld JavaFX app. It honours primaryStage.setResizable(false); as one would expect. So that confirms your settings-file theory. For things like this, especially where there's a difference between Unix and Windows platforms, there's the usual list of file-related things to be suspicious of:

• Paths: it's not picking up your .fxml file at all (the test for that is to put some outrageous values, which should elicit outrageous behaviour in the app)
• Permissions: does the process reading the file have permission to do so (shouldn't be an issue for your dev environment, but it never hurts to check)
• File parsing error: unix/dos line terminations (rolls eyes at this still being an issue), character encoding and related stuff like invisible unicode byte-order-marks (the eye roller of the 21st century)

-- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:44, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Blacking out subtitles

My fiancé is learning British Sign Language. She regularly watches See Hear which is signed, but also subtitled. She wants to watch it without the subtitles being on-screen and is currently doing this by covering up some of our TV with a row of books — does anyone know of any free video-editing software which has filters to detect subtitles on-screen and automatically cover them up? Thanks, davidprior ^t/_c 19:00, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm not clear about whether you're watching See Hear on broadcast TV, or through a media player (or both). Subtitles on digital video are often provided as separate files - see Category:Subtitle file formats. I assume that's not the case with See Hear (if it is, all you need to do is turn subtitles off in the media player), but it might serve your purpose to create your own subtitles file which just displays a single blank subtitle for the entire length of the video, obscuring what's underneath.  Card Zero  (talk) 21:44, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Either from broadcast TV (I use the PlayTV as my PVR which can save recordings as M2TS to transfer to the computer) or from iPlayer (using get_iplayer). But as far as I can see, the subtitles are within the actual video itself whichever of these I use. I guess that creating a dummy subtitle file mean the black box on-screen wouldn't follow the area the real subtitles fill? Thanks, davidprior ^t/_c 21:51, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

You're right, it would be a terrible kludge. It would make more sense to overlay something else - VLC media player for instance has options to overlay text or an image (a "logo", but I assume it could be a large black rectangle) at a specified position. (You could alternatively just crop the bottom of the video off completely.) I guess the subtitles you're trying to cover up move around a lot, so the overlay would have to take up a lot of the screen; but I haven't found any subtitle-detecting software yet except the kind that reads the subtitles and saves them as text.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:09, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

But wait! This VirtualDub MSU Subtitle Remover looks good.

However, the person asking here [1] about how to remove subtitles specifies "don't say MSU Subtitle Remover", and I'm not sure why. Possibly they didn't like the resulting quality - and you have the advantage there, because you only want to achieve illegibility, not clean removal.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:24, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Unix utilities in windows, filesystem may be corrupt

I was messing with tar unix utility with arguments "-czvf" on windows 7, something very weird happened, the output file didn't appear in windows file explorer, I made sure I was on the same path as the console, I also used dir /a to see if it was a hidden or something, it wasn't, however when I used 7z to browse on that directory, the files were there, I tried to type the path but windows insisted they didn't exist, what is weird, is that when I used "ls" unix utilty on windows, ls knew they existed.
Using dir /a

(With and without administrator privileges)
C:\Program Files\Java>dir /a
 Datenträger in Laufwerk C: ist EXTERNO
 Volumeseriennummer: 605B-21A7

 Verzeichnis von C:\Program Files\Java

10/30/2012  09:39 PM    <DIR>          .
10/30/2012  09:39 PM    <DIR>          ..
09/22/2012  02:05 AM    <DIR>          jdk1.7.0_07
10/30/2012  09:39 PM    <DIR>          jre7
               0 Datei(en),              0 Bytes
               4 Verzeichnis(se), 28,093,161,472 Bytes frei

Using ls -l

(No administrator privileges)
C:\Program Files\Java>ls -l
total 152362
-rw-r--r-- 1 User Administrators 78005148 Nov 25 12:30 jdk.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 User Administrators 78005148 Nov 25 12:33 jdk.tgz
drwxr-xr-x 7 User Administrators     4096 Sep 22  2012 jdk1.7.0_07
drwxr-xr-x 4 User Administrators     4096 Oct 30  2012 jre7

Using ls -l with administrator privileges

(With administrator privileges)
C:\Program Files\Java>ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 7 User Administrators 4096 Sep 22  2012 jdk1.7.0_07
drwxr-xr-x 4 User Administrators 4096 Oct 30  2012 jre7

I can't remove them either, so, I'm not sure what's going on. 190.60.93.218 (talk) 19:03, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

OOOhhh, after a long file search it seems windows 7 redirects read/write operations of applications with something called "VirtualStore", I've found the files, interesting.. seems it's all right now. 190.60.93.218 (talk) 19:13, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

This isn't exactly related to your question, but this caught my eye. Does the ls Unix command really work in Windows? I know that modern Windows versions (from Windows NT and beyond, as I recall) support POSIX-compatible file system access at the core level, but the command line still only works with the old MS-DOS way. Is this utility natively supported on Windows 7, or does it need some additional software? JIP | Talk 20:13, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Probably the best answer is to install "Cygwin" - which is a complete unix-like environment with all of the usual command line tools. Everything works cleanly. Windows sees the "unix" system as the c:\Cygwin directory. The unix environment sees the windows system as /cygdrive/c, /cygdrive/d, etc. This is vastly easier than trying to run unix tools directly under Windows. SteveBaker (talk) 20:45, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I used MinGW shell, and just appended to PATH the binaries location. 190.60.93.218 (talk) 12:29, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Reading Amiga disks on a modern PC

So the Uridium 2 game I bought from eBay finally arrived, after one month of waiting. When I powered up my old Amiga 4000, it turned out that its circuitry has long since broken. It can't even find its own CPU any more. So I decided to scrap the physical Amiga altogether and instead just use E-UAE on Fedora Linux from now on. But how can I transfer the game disks to a modern PC? PCs can't read Amiga floppy disks without special hardware (unlike the other way around). Vesalia.de appears to sell the Catweasel controller, but is this, and a real Amiga floppy drive, all I need to read Amiga floppy disks on a modern Linux PC? JIP | Talk 20:09, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

That is the ISA Slot version of the card, which won't fit any vaguely modern PC. They seem to be sold out of the PCI version of the card[2].

Is the game readable by in a format that any of the Amiga disk imagers whose formats UAE can use [3]? If so, that's probably going to be the cheapest option even if it means buying an actual Amiga. davidprior ^t/_c 20:38, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

The PCI version of the Catweasel card seems not to be for sale anywhere, even though it's the newest version. I have contacted Vesalia about it, let's see if they reply. Google gets very many hits about it, but not a single one about one actually being for sale. You would except such a popular product to be actually available. The copy of the game I have only exists on Amiga floppy disks, which PCs (legacy or modern) cannot read without special hardware. If I had bought the game on PC floppy disks (which it was never available on in the first place) or on a CD-ROM, I wouldn't have needed to ask this question. JIP | Talk 21:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Here in the UK, working A500/A600s start about £50 on eBay. This, along with a null-modem cable (and USB-Serial adaptor if your PC doesn't have one) may be the cheapest option. An A600 has the benefit of being able to use cheap IDE-SD adaptors so you can image to SD card then transfer over the serial link. davidprior ^t/_c 21:56, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Given that you now own a copy of the game, would you consider it morally permissible to just download Uridium 2? Searching for the game brings up download links on the first page. I admit it would be neat to be able to read Amiga disks in general, but that's not necessary to reach this particular goal of playing the game.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:51, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I was able to easily find a WHDLoad version of Uridium 2 on-line, free for download. Because I bought the registered version of WHDLoad fully legally way back when my Amiga still worked, I was able to play the downloaded Uridium 2 installation straight after I had copied the files to a directory accessible from within E-UAE. Yes, I think that because I own a fully legal, paid-for copy of the game, I am entitled to download the game from the Internet, provided I don't redistribute it. But still, I would want to be able to read my old Amiga floppy disks. I found this site: http://www.kryoflux.com/, which claims to sell a USB floppy disk controller capable of reading Amiga disks. I only need a real Amiga floppy drive, because Kryoflux doesn't sell them, but then I only have to extract one from my old Amiga 4000 before I send the machine itself to be recycled, because there's no way I can be bothered to get it working again. It's been about two decades since the computer was introduced, after all. In the meantime, I have started the Uridium 2 Wikipedia article. It's still a very short stub, so it needs attention and expansion. JIP | Talk 19:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I placed an order for this KryoFlux controller. It's fairly expensive (over 100 €), but it looks like all I need to read Amiga disks with it is a normal PC floppy drive, which I actually happen to already own. The controller even has a USB interface instead of an ISA or PCI one, which makes it even easier to plug into my PC. I'll have to see how it works when I receive it. JIP | Talk 19:20, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Camera not working since upgrading Ubuntu.

Grrr...my Canon Powershot S3 has been working great for years with my Ubuntu (strictly "Kubuntu") PC - you just plug it in, open the File Manager from the popup that shows up - then grab the files and drag them where you need them.

Last week, I upgraded to the lastest Kubuntu - and while memory sticks and external USB hard drives still work just fine, my camera is detected - but seems to have no files, no folders, nothing on it!

I plug it in, the device notifier shows it's there, I can open a File Manager (Dolphin) from that dialog, the window opens OK with "camera:/" as the location...but no folders, no files, nothing?!? I also tried opening it with Gwenview - same deal.

The camera works fine on our Windows 7 laptop - and the Kubuntu machine works OK with other USB mass-storage systems after the upgrade.

WTF?

SteveBaker (talk) 20:40, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

How much pain is it worth, just to be able to download directly from the cam? You could go read manuals about the Picture Transfer Protocol and fiddle with it for, I would guess, hours, which might or might not work, or you could get a USB SD card reader for less than $20, and pop out the memory card every time you want to download your pics. Personally, I prefer the second option, also because PTP doesn't show you all the files on the card as far as I can tell (I've never been able to download DNG files that way). --Trovatore (talk) 22:02, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, it used to work - easy - just plug the camera in and grab the pictures. I know I can fritz around with SD cards - that's not the question. It just stopped working when I upgraded and I need to know why. SteveBaker (talk) 23:29, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I am confused... is dolphin using PTP or USB Mass Storage Class to grab images? (Sounds like PTP, based on the phony file path "camera://"). What does F-Spot do? (or, what does kamera do, if you're really really using just KDE and don't have any GNOME pieces). Nimur (talk) 03:10, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

That's a good question - I assumed it was USB mass storage - but they might have changed that at some point. Maybe I should try some other file managers - there are several to choose from. But the fact that Gwenview (which is specifically designed to be an image browser) also can't see them suggests a deeper problem. SteveBaker (talk) 14:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

And what about your system log, anything in there related to kio or kamera? Nimur (talk) 03:26, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

This doesn’t answer the OP's question but what I do is install upgrades 'first' to a virtual machine (with Ubuntu a use VirtualBox). Only when I have had time to make sure everything continues as I want it to, do I move over. I still have some old versions running on VirtualBox because I can't be bothered to sort out the right dependancies for the apps I'm running. Makes a nice change though, from Microsoft were regedit problems and drivers takes all weekend to sort out.--Aspro (talk) 02:28, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, I do something like that too - I use a spare hard-drive, install to one while retaining the other as a backup. I could go back to the older install if I needed to - but I upgraded for a reason (other bugs that were getting in my way) and the camera problem isn't sufficiently serious to warrant a downgrade. SteveBaker (talk) 14:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

My theory: Ubuntu recognized the Windows format files your camera creates, while Kubuntu does not. StuRat (talk) 04:13, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

My previous setup was also Kubuntu - just an older version. I don't know about "windows format files" - the files on the camera are just regular JPEG's...and when I grab them from the camera from my wife's laptop and copy them onto our file server - my Kubuntu machine sees them without problems. Plus, it's not just the files that aren't showing up - it's the entire directory structure of the camera that's not there. SteveBaker (talk) 14:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I mean the file system is a Windows one, which some Linux implementations can also read, but not all. StuRat (talk) 22:23, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Steve, we need to know a little more to debug this. When you connect the camera: What do you see in the system log? What do you see in dmesg? What do you see if you run lsusb? This could be an automount problem, or a PTP problem, or a USB driver problem, or something else, but we can't narrow it down from what you've given so far. Nimur (talk) 15:20, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

• Given that it used to work, it would be reasonable to report this at Ubuntu's bug handling facility, https://bugs.launchpad.net/. Looie496 (talk) 16:31, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

With VirtualBox you don't need to do a down grade. I can, and often have had, have several versions of Ubuntu running all at once. I find it quicker in the long run than debugging every time a new version is released. Just keep an old image of Ubuntu or what ever 'worked' on VirtualBox. Then upload and copy the photos from there, over onto your current hosting and latest OS. I do it all the time when using GIMP & Hugin (software). --Aspro (talk) 00:54, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, Steve rejected the workaround of using a card reader on the grounds, I think, that he doesn't want a workaround; he actually wants to know what's going on. Surely keeping around a copy of an outdated distro, to run virtually, is an even clunkier workaround? --Trovatore (talk) 22:41, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

The trade off, is that by using 'virtual' it only take some forty seconds to go into virtual and do the job. Divide that, in to the 90 or more minutes to sort out the dependencies and you have a hundred or so opportunities to upload photos. How many time a week does one upload photos? By the time you have done it a hundred times, the Ubuntu community will have sorted the incompatibilities out. Moving a file from a virtual Guest OS to the Host OS takes no more time than transferring a photo from one file on the host to another file on the host. I'm all for being pedantic (just for the hell of it) but when I just want to get something done, I take the most practical and time efficient route. Is that clunky or smart? --Aspro (talk) 19:18, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Do you really think it takes forty seconds to pop out the memory card and put it in the card reader? Or even twenty, given that you have to reverse the operation at the end? --Trovatore (talk) 20:54, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Memory card? If you don't know about VM's and their employment, then DON”T COMMENT--Aspro (talk) 22:54, 29 November 2013 (UTC).

DUDE. If you can't be bothered to follow what I'm saying, then don't respond to it. Steve rejected taking out the memory card and using a card reader, because he wanted to know what was going on rather than just using a workaround. I said that the VM solution is even clunkier than that. THAT was the tradeoff being considered. --Trovatore (talk) 23:44, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Just download it. [4] No Memory card required... When you finish there is no “reverse the operation at the end?” One just clicks the little X thing in the top off the right-hand corner. Job done! Just tried it! Took 55 seconds (whoops) to run Meerkat (sad I know). And 10 seconds to shut down. So that is 65 sec ON A VERY OLD DELL COMMPUTER!!!. (Dell ? OK, even sadder but in mitigation I only use it for surfing and email. I didn't want to appear be a smart-ass and do it on my Apple Mac)--Aspro (talk) 23:31, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

The "reverse operation at the end" is putting the memory card back in the camera. --Trovatore (talk) 23:46, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Quote from SteveBaker :“just plug the camera in and grab the pictures.” SteveBaker didn't say any thing about plugging in the 'card' did he?. Why~? Oh Why~?! Do you want to take the take the card out?!!Leave-the-card-in-the-camera and use the USB cable that come with the camera. That's why the the camera has a USB socket, and a USB cord is included with the camera in the box. Keep popping your card in and out of the camera an you risk damaging the contacts. Stop interjecting with nonsenses in the hope of scoring points.--Aspro (talk) 17:43, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Let me spell this out for you: If Steve just wants a way to get the pictures, taking out the memory card and putting it in a card reader is, in my opinion, easier than your solution. (In my opinion, it's the better solution anyway, because I just flat don't like PTP and don't see any need to go through any camera firmware just to get files, but that's a side note.) What Steve said was, "[i]t just stopped working when I upgraded and I need to know why". How will it help him know "why", to install a VM of an outdated distro? --Trovatore (talk) 19:53, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

And as to the contacts — that's a theoretical risk, I suppose. It's never happened to me, and I routinely pop out the card. By the same token, you could theoretically damage the contacts in the USB port, by repeatedly attaching and removing the cable. --Trovatore (talk) 19:58, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

You're sounding more and more like a wind-up merchant. One does not even be aware of the existence of PTP when plugging in a camera to Ubuntu. It simply asks you what images you want to up-load and whether to delete those on the camera afterwards etc. Steve rejected 'your' proposal for a card reader (which he probably already has) – because his system worked OK before - without resorting to one. Your right in one thing though. Steve does want a hassle free way of uploading photos of his wonderful family (and maybe the pet do doing a woopsy on the kitchen floor etc). In the early seventies, I gave up trying to debug problems running on Honeywell and PDP 11's, my subordinates could do that if I couldn't find anything more productive for them to do. I had deadlines to to meet. My job depended on utilising time effectively. Other people may be looking at these post on Wikipedia for guidance. Whilst I'm sure that both you an' Steve can pop cards in and out time after time, my friend that repairs this stuff has a constant stream of customers that can't. Also, some peoples time (not yours maybe), may be so precious, as to not want to waste time on dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's when it comes to getting a new release up and running as smoothly as the old one. VirtualBox may not be Steve's cup of tea but it has saved me a hell of a lot of time ( in the domestic setting)and I feel happy to pass the suggestion on. βίος βραχύς. Does that spell it out for you?--Aspro (talk) 21:37, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

As for precious time, I'm convinced my solution is faster than yours.

On PTP — right, you don't have to be "aware" of it, but nevertheless it gets in the way. On my old Canon, it would not show the DNG files, so I simply could not download them that way even if I wanted to. What's it for, anyway? The only purpose I can see for putting an extra abstraction layer there is to enable camera manufacturers to play weird games in the memory card's filesystem without exposing them to the user. Why do we want them to do that? They might even decide to put a proprietary (or just undocumented) filesystem there. And that, frankly, would suck. --Trovatore (talk) 21:54, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

“As for precious time, I'm convinced my solution is faster than yours.” I don't think we can settle that unless both of us fly thousands of mile to meet up for a dual of banjos. If you don't find yours work properly after the trip, you can always try switching it off and turning it back on again.--Aspro (talk) 23:07, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you that propriety (closed) file systems just muddy the waters. Yet, look at these posts of ours, from the point of view of a disinterest reader. - you're going off at a tangent again - that has little to do with the OP's question and are so you are muddying the waters. Younger people than I might call it trolling but that's OK. I've come across post-graduates that just like to hammer and hammer away, rather than find out for themselves (which is no bad thing, after all, why and try to reinvent the wheel when someone else knows the solution)--Aspro (talk) 23:07, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Trolling — whatever. I prefer to use an external card reader rather than the camera interface. That would have solved Steve's (immediate) problem, and I suggested that option. He rejected it on the grounds that he actually wanted to fix the issue rather than work around it. You suggested a different workaround, in my opinion inferior to mine for the single issue (I agree that yours becomes competitive if you want other features of the old distro). I pointed this out to you. Then you got upset for some reason. --Trovatore (talk) 23:26, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

I put it to to you, that Steve rejected your idea because he did not to wast time on on your fix. Steve can not comment on my fix (yet) because he either hasn’t had time to, or it is not his cup of tea. Why do you keep going on about the 'wonder' of the external card reader? I have already given you the link the link to VirtualBox . Try it and experiment... then come back. NOT with theoretical pontification but practical experience.--Aspro (talk) 01:26, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I might try it, sometime, if I have need of a feature that was dropped in a recent distro. Actually, there are a couple — for example, I would very much like to have kuickshow, which depended on an outdated imlib and was never ported to more recent versions. But that means going back to a distro more than five years old, which is probably extreme even in a VM.

But I don't see any reason to try it in this case, because I use an external card reader and see no need to change. Whether my current camera works in my current Ubuntu through the PTP interface, I don't even know; I don't see any real point in trying it, because I know it's inferior to being able to mount the card as USB mass storage, which I can do with my card reader. --Trovatore (talk) 01:37, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Card reader yet again ! Holy moly. That reply going adrift even further from the OP's original query. If you haven't got the hang of this yet: Reference desk is about abut addressing the OP's query. It is not about recording a broken record For that, see (or listen) here:[5]--Aspro (talk) 02:16, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

My original response was quite responsive, and was about a card reader. You didn't seem to get that. So I explained it to you. --Trovatore (talk) 02:19, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Mr Spock. We have a force off Klingons on our port bow. What do you suggest. Spock: I suggest captain, that after looking through the history of the 21st century, you show them you are armed with a card reader. Kirk: A card reader.... But if I employ that, won't I'll be summonsed up before the court of the federation for deploying the the ultimate weapon. Spock: I can assure you captain, that in the 21st Century this term was banded about as a cure all for all ills- a panacea. Kirk: Well, if it persuades CBS and Paramount to grant us another series I'll do it! Uhura … Establish communications with this alien Aspro... Then tell him - for me- that I am armed with a card reader. _{Bye the way – you are about to roll off the top of the page! So make you next point quick, clear and to the point; without any hyperbolas flannel.}--Aspro (talk) 03:09, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

There are thousands of potential work-arounds. Steve's a pretty sharp guy and can probably figure out a work-around on his own. I thought we were trying to help root-cause a specific driver regression in a specific distribution of linux, here. Steve, if you're still experiencing the problem and care to continue diagnostics, I'd be happy to spend some time deep-diving into the syslog and the source-code... as long as that happens before Monday. Nimur (talk) 16:05, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

Yikes! What happened here? This thread got seriously derailed! Work-arounds are not the issue. I've been using computers since before most people here were born (I wrote my first computer program in 1972)...so, yeah - I can happily download images by connecting my camera up to the USB port of my Windows laptop, not more than 18" away from the Kubuntu machine and using "synergy", use the very same mouse and keyboard that's connected to my Kubuntu system to drop the file into the shared file partition I have on my home office fileserver taking precisely zero seconds longer than downloading the images on my Kubuntu system. Hence I neither want nor need a work-around.

What I asked (and what I care about) is why upgrading to a new rev. of Kubuntu would be likely to cause this strange behavior. Is it a new bug that I should report? A known bug? A misguided "feature"? Did I somehow screw up the configuration of USB ports in the new OS rev? Is there something new I need to do to mount cameras? Did they change the default setting of some obscure part of the system in the new release and I just have to set it how I want?

Since I'm working on a project that makes extensive use of USB, I actually *DO* need to understand what might cause the system to happily mount USB memory sticks - but not my USB-interfaced camera because that's something that may concern me over the coming weeks.

SteveBaker (talk) 16:04, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah... probably a good place to start is to figure out who or what is running automount. On older versions of Ubuntu, automountfs was built into Gnome (the desktop manager, running as the gvfsd daemon or something like that)... and the few times I've run a KDE-esque Linux, I assumed an equivalent KDE utility was in place.

Sometimes, the solution is as simple as editing fstab, and making sure there's nothing borked in the configuration file. But we still have not isolated where the failure occurred: is it in a USB layer? A file-system layer? A PTP camera driver layer? In the user-interface for dolphin?

You can evade some of these messy details by avoiding the KDE UI layers and working in Konsole (on the command line). Do you see activity in the usb stack (i.e. lsusb) ? Do you see a device in your /dev directory? Do you see an auto-mounted file system in your /media/ or /mount/ directories? Can you manually mount the filesystem using the /dev/ device? There are many things we need to attempt to root-cause the problem. We can probably attack the problem in a more targeted way if you see any specific error-messages in your system logs that indicate what actually failed.

I'd be happy to help - it's been many years, but I used to get up to my elbows in KDE and Gnome's code; and I worked pretty hard to make gphoto2 work on Kubuntu 9.04 (so that would be ... at least four-years old code). But we really need to get some log details. Nimur (talk) 16:34, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Sorting NEWID() in SQL

SELECT Name, NEWID() AS ID
FROM MyTable
ORDER BY ID

The sorting doesn't seem to work. It sorts randomly, but not in the order of the ID shown. Why? Ypnypn (talk) 22:37, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Try this:

 SELECT Name, NEWID() AS ID
 FROM MyTable
 ORDER BY NEWID

(I'm not sure if that should be "NEWID()" on the last line.) As for why your version didn't work, probably it does the sort before it has assigned the name ID to anything. StuRat (talk) 04:16, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorting of a uniqueidentifier type (a.k.a., GUID) is well defined in MS SQL, but is just not what you might expect, and not necessarily as might be used on other platforms. See this article, which shows which bytes and byte groups are considered first. Our GUID article also has some discussion on encoding and ordering. To get the order that you might be expecting, try:

    SELECT Name, NEWID() AS ID
    FROM MyTable
    ORDER BY CONVERT(VARCHAR(50),ID)

--- Tom N talk/contrib 05:28, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

That's just what I was looking for. Thanks! Ypnypn (talk) 13:49, 26 November 2013 (UTC)