Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 March 27

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March 27

Using Twitter for business

Hi, I am a manager for a company and have been given an "official" twitter account. I was wondering if it was possible--through some third party or whoever--if I can set it up to post tweets to the one account from my employees' personal cell phones as they are scattered about. It would have to be something I can control from my end, so I can deauthorize any one employee from twittering if I need to, and also without giving them access to the account itself through the username and password. Thanks! 68.63.212.186 (talk) 01:53, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

http://cotweet.com/ F (talk) 06:05, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I think this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.63.212.186 (talk) 21:46, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

16-bit Icons

Anybody know of any software for extracting icons from 16-bit software...in Vista?Smallman12q (talk) 12:05, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

• Seems that ResScope and eXeScope do the trick.Smallman12q (talk) 12:41, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

LocalSettings.php

I have just set up my own wiki but can't seem to access the LocalSettings.php file. Could someone tell me how you access this file so I can set some settings. Thanks. Paul2387 10:47, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

You must have shell access (e.g., permission to SSH to your server). The LocalSettings.php in MediaWiki is not accessible through a web interface. Have you seen the MediaWiki manual entry for LocalSettings.php? Nimur (talk) 16:16, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Cannot Page Down the reference desk pages

I am using Firefox 3.6.2, WinXP Sp3. Page Down only works till the end of the large grey box at the top. If I try to go further, the page just shudders without moving down. However if I click on the slider at the side to get past the grey box, then Page Down works again. It did not used to do that. I also see that "Entertainment Desk" has moved to the second position. If this is by design then I prefer the pages the way they were before - anyone else agree with me? Thanks 89.243.43.75 (talk) 15:38, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I have an identical operating system and browser and don't have the same Page Down problem. You are probably having an issue related to caret browsing - try changing your settings in the Firefox options (or press F7 to enable/disable it). As far as the desk positions, they were re-ordered to be alphabetical earlier this week. Nimur (talk) 16:19, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Except for Misc. StuRat (talk) 16:37, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

And Archives. 89.243.43.75 (talk) 18:55, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, pressing F7 solved the Page Down problem. 89.243.43.75 (talk) 19:17, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

What artilcles to begin?

I'm a student at a IT education center, but little do I know about computer hardware. All we are taught is software programming. Recently, I concern much about hardware concepts, such as x86, x64, SSE4.1, 32-bit, 64-bit... I tried to study them myself on these articles, but they are full of computer hardware related terms that I cannot understand, since I know nothing about this aspect (it sounds like I'm find out what a C function does while I even don't know any statement in C programming language). Follow the links to these terms' artiles, hoping to know the basic first, I end up with more and more. What articles should I read first of all? I need to know the basis first, then study these after.

Besides, I want to study about television aspect ratio too. I don't know why the TV resolution is called 480i, 720p and 1080p instead of the monitor's 640x480, 1280x720 and 1920x1080 respectively. Visit these articles to find out the answer, but I encounter the same problem. Again, what articles should I read first to study this? -- Livy the pixie (talk) 17:07, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Your first question is about the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit computers. This is not a very difficult concept - there are different types of CPUs that are designed to work with digital data of different sizes. The details about how this works are somewhat complicated; especially since 64-bit computers usually include backward compatibility with 32-bit computers. "x86" is the general name for a series of CPUs designed by Intel Corporation. SSE4.1 is just a modern feature - a new set of specialized instructions - to speed up processing, especially for multimedia and video decoding. If you aren't familiar with computer architecture, the Computer article, specifically the Computer Function section, will bring you up to speed on what happens inside your computer.

Your questions about television might be answered at HD video; then you can read about progressive scan (e.g., 1080p) vs. interlaced video (e.g., 1080i). The TV resolution is annotated this way for historical and business reasons; technically, a modern HD TV could be described by a (width)x(height); but this isn't common. Nimur (talk) 19:56, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Yea, the TV resolutions being specified differently than PC monitors is a pain; that's what happens when two fields develop independently. But, hopefully, monitors and TVs are merging into one, and thus will end up with a common standard for this type of thing. I hope we end up with something like 1080x1920p60, which fully specifies the vertical and horizontal resolution, the scan method, and the maximum refresh rate. But God help us if we end up calling it something like WTFVGA. StuRat (talk) 21:16, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

The 386-descended processors in almost every desktop machine are really complicated and ugly, especially in instruction set. The Motorola 68000 has a much simpler machine code, so if you want to learn assembly language, or learn about microarchitecture, it's a good place to start.

In theory, a microprocessor can be super simple and tiny; the only thing that makes it complicated is the desire to take advantage of the super-smallness of transistors and do lots and lots of stuff at once. The most important concept in improving performance this way is probably the instruction pipeline. (I seem to recall that even an old 100 Mhz Pentium would be executing maybe a dozen pipelined instructions at once. Our article says that it even had two pipelines. Not sure how that works.) It's a really cool design problem. Paul Stansifer 03:38, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

How do I fix "LUpdate MFC Application" and stop it from crashing?

I have a Dell XPS m1330 with Vista, spybot search and destroy, and AVG anti-virus. Almost everytime I boot my laptop up a warning box pops up that says LUpdate MFC Application has stopped working. I ran a scan with spybot, AVG, and surfright Hitman Pro, all find no problems. I have tried to find some information on this issue, but haven't found anything helpful. What exactly does this error mean, is it a virus, and how do I fix this problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm pretty good with computers, but this is like another language to me. Below is a copy of one of the Problem reports.

Product LUpdate MFC Application

Problem Stopped working

Date 2/8/2010 11:24 AM

Status Report Sent

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: LUpdate.exe
Application Version: 1.0.0.7
Application Timestamp: 4a976cf7
Fault Module Name: StackHash_e51a
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 00000000
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00000000
OS Version: 6.0.6002.2.2.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: e51a
Additional Information 2: 4c0d4d78887f76d971d5d00f1f20a433
Additional Information 3: e51a
Additional Information 4: 4c0d4d78887f76d971d5d00f1f20a433

Extra information about the problem
Bucket ID: 1546924715 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.7.5.23 (talk) 17:14, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

this Google search suggests LUpdate.exe might be malware. Astronaut (talk) 01:52, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Caret navigation in Firefox

What's the point of that? What's it suppossed to do? What's the difference from non-caret navigation? The Caret navigation article does not tell you. 89.243.43.75 (talk) 19:21, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Scroll up a few pages... --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 19:35, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

The point is simply that it changes the keyboard interface. Some people prefer a different way to navigate pages. It has some advantages, and some disadvantages. The trouble you mentioned earlier is a disadvantage, in one view, because the Firefox caret browser flow-graph follows the HTML source code's document object model instead of the final rendered HTML output. This means that it behaves unintuitively if the page is poorly designed (or just the result of rendering from many complicated scripts) - unless you think about webpages in terms of their DOM, in which case it behaves perfectly intuitively. On the other hand, that function allows a web designer to diagnose the gap between their source-code and the final rendered result. See, for example, tab order, for a similar concept. Nowadays, most end-users are so familiar with web browsing that they rarely stop to think about the internals of hypertext - caret-browsing is designed for people who want that internal view. Nimur (talk) 19:44, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Highlighting text with the mouse prior to copying

I have tremendous problems with doing this. I highlight some text by pressing the left mouse betton while moving the mouse, and then as soon as I move the mouse the highlighting disapears. I have found out that if I wait while counting between 10 and 20, then the highlighting stays there, but its a long time to wait. This varies according to the page involved. I also find that sometimes it is impossible to get the piece of text I want highlighted - the highlighting dances around and has a life of its own. Are there any guides or advice available about how to do this please? I use Firefox and WinXP. Thanks 89.243.43.75 (talk) 19:29, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

I can think of a few reasons that this could be happening. You might be on websites that use a JavaScript or other technique to actively detect text-highlighting and de-select (as a limited form of content protection, when the author wants to dissuade you from copy/pasting their content). You can disable JavaScript in most browsers, (instructions for Firefox). Alternatively, you might be running a program in the background that is stealing focus - meaning that the background program aggressively steals the "mouse-pointer" away from what you were doing. This is common among some video- or music-player software, many programs which normally run at full screen, many poorly-written programs, and many malware programs which are intentionally disrupting or spying on your activities. To help diagnose, try disabling Javascript first and see if the text highlighting issue goes away. Next, try on a website without any fancy features - like a simple HTML or text document. Let us know if this solves the problem. Nimur (talk) 19:39, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

The Focus stealing said that TweakUI could disallow focus stealing, and I have just made that change. I will see if things improve for a while before disabling Java etc. Thanks Update - all of a sudden, highlighting things is much easier. What could have been stealing focus before? I do regular malware scans, so probably not malware. 89.243.43.75 (talk) 19:55, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Your highlighting trouble could possibly have been related to your caret-browsing trouble, which we fixed earlier. Nimur (talk) 20:18, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Also, for future reference, you can highlight everything with Control A. Obviously not good if you only want a small portion of a huge section, but it has it's uses. StuRat (talk) 21:00, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone else see a giant grey, opaque box over the top of this question ? Or do I just need to reboot ? StuRat (talk) 21:06, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

It seems to have gone away now. Strange though. StuRat (talk) 17:56, 28 March 2010 (UTC)