Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2009 March 7

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.

March 7

SSD comparable to Intel X25-M

Are there any SSDs with capacity (80GB) and performance (0.1ms access and better than HDs read/write) similar to the Intel X25-M that cost less (its $350 on Amazon now)? I know there are some cheaper ones that don't perform. 66.91.255.120 (talk) 00:23, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

counting blocks in aurocad

can anybody tell me how to count blocks in an autocad drawing? are there any commands? thank you.124.43.43.22 (talk) 07:13, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Count blocks? I use AUTOCAD to do stuff at work, but I've never come across a way to do that. But AUTOCAD is a huge program, so there might be a way I don't know about (I'm not an expert). Have you searched the help section? Press F1 when you have the program loaded and it'll pop open the help files. Killiondude (talk) 04:15, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Music in PC

Is there any freeware that can generate stream of musical notes from the recorded sound file and vice versa. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 120.89.118.53 (talk) 12:09, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean you want it to generate sheet music from an audio file and vice-versa ? If so, generating audio from the sheet music seems far simpler. To go the other way you'd probably need very simple music, like just a piano, playing single whole notes. Trying to decipher all the sheet music for an orchestra would be far more complex. StuRat (talk) 14:45, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I think I remember either freeware or more likely commercial that can a) convert an audio file to .midi and b) other program(s) that can convert a midi file to a textual representation, possibly even to sheet music. See Music sequencer, List of scorewriters, List of MIDI editors and sequencers. You do not have to have any extra hardware for midi - most midi files can be played through the computers speakers. 89.240.206.60 (talk) 23:44, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Step 2 is much, much, easier than step 1... --Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 00:36, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I know Gama, but I guess you were referring to a much newer program than that. --grawity 19:32, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Program refuses to completely uninstall

About a month ago I tried to remove and reinstall a BETA version of Windows Live Messenger (I can't remember the exact version number) and did so through the usual route of Add/Remove Programs. However, it soon became apparent that this hadn't completely removed the program and despite me removing all components of the program, eventually resulting in deleting the Program Files/Windows Live Messenger folder, it refuses to accept it's fully uninstalled. Since this didn't work, I tried to use a program that tries to delete every aspect of a program from your system, including the registry entries. However, this hasn't worked either. Until it's uninstalled, I can't reinstall as it insists I have "a newer version installed on my computer". Anyone have any ideas, short of reformatting my hard drive? —Cyclonenim (talk · contribs · email) 16:59, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Hey cyclo, i suggest you download a registry cleaner and run it once as a reference of few files does not get deleted manually. Let me know if that works ,i believ it should.Vikk

ccleaner might work, if you've not already tried it. I had a similar problem to op and eventually had to delete the registry entries manually, but be careful if you do that as you can potentially cause massive errors in Windows if you delete the wrong thing.

Thanks, EasyCleaner seems to have done the trick. Thanks to you both. —Cyclonenim (talk · contribs · email) 20:04, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Resolved

StuRat (talk) 20:27, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Using Clonezilla

I have been recommended here on the Comp RefDesk to check out Clonezilla as a means for backing up my entire computer. Just to clarify, on my external hard drive, I can create a folder named, for example, "Upstairs Computer" then then back up my entire C: drive on my Upstairs Computer into this folder? Will I be able to boot from the external hard drive should my internal hard drive crash? Acceptable (talk) 18:26, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

You'll have your entire C-drive on there, but you can't "boot" from it. Booting requires operating system files. I'm no computer guru, but I don't think backing up a C-drive will put your operating system on it. I've actually backed up C-drives before, not on my own accord, but because others have asked me to do it for their systems. You'd save much more room on your hard drive if you just backed up what you need. Killiondude (talk) 04:13, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

If your hard drive actually physically fails and you have to replace it, you'll probably want to buy a new hard drive, then restore the Upstairs Computer folder back onto the new hard drive. Indeterminate (talk) 07:36, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Clonezilla comes as a CD image. (It's actually a special version of the Debian Live CD.) You burn the CD and then boot off it. It asks you whether you want to copy from an image or a disk or a partition or logical drive, and whether you want to copy to an image or a disk. You say from a disk to an image, and the image goes into some directory of your external disk.

Some time later, disaster! Your regular hard drive gets scrambled. You replace it. Now you boot off the same Clonezilla CD. This time, you copy from the image to the drive. You then remove the CD and boot off the restored hard drive.

So no, you won't be able to boot from your external hard drive. However, you'll be able to boot thanks to what you put in your external hard drive.

Killiondude is right in that all of this takes a lot of space. (It's definitely not something you'll want to do at the end of every working day.) However, Clonezilla won't copy unused parts of the hard drive (unless you perversely insist that it does so), it normally compresses what it copies (unless you perversely insist that it doesn't), you can cycle backups (make a new one, delete the oldest one, make a new one, delete the oldest one, etc) and giant external hard drives are cheap.

Clonezilla asks many questions. For most, it suggests an answer. I found that for most of the time I could hit Enter to take the suggestion. But be careful: it does -- it has to -- throw in the occasional question that needs human thought, notably the one about what you want to copy from and what you want to copy to. So do pay attention.

Clonezilla also has prompts that are in slightly wobbly English and that have a few "!" too many. One or both of these may offend some people's sensibilities. Me, I can happily live with them. Hoary (talk) 10:15, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Reload a web page every x seconds

Resolved

I've probably asked this question before but I really can't be bothered to trawl through the archives so I'll ask again. I'm looking for a simply bit of html that will reload a set url every two mins. I'd edit the html file in notepad to set the url and then open the file in the web browser and it'll do it. Many thanks.

This should work as long as the page doesn't break out of frames:

<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Reloader</TITLE> <META http-equiv="refresh" content="5" /> </HEAD> <FRAMESET cols="100%"> <FRAME src="http://wikipedia.org"> </FRAMESET> </HTML>

Change the "content" for the # of seconds, the "src" is the page to reload. --98.217.14.211 (talk) 19:23, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks a lot :D

Both Firefox (perhaps requiring a plugin) and Opera support reloading webpages automatically at a set interval. – 74  21:17, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Computer programming for chatterbots.

Can someone advise me on a learning path to creating my own own chatterbot/ artificial conversational entity? I glanced briefly over pages about natural language processing, but I'm left wondering so can one use Java or C++ etc computer languages to create these? Can someone outline briefly the steps to take? Thank you in advance.

The programming language doesn't matter much (Java or C++ will be fine), although you'll find a lot of the material you'll find on the subject expresses itself either in Lisp or Prolog, these traditionally being the languages AI and NLP have been done (Prolog much more so in Europe than North America). Simply put, you read in a line from the user, parse it into syntactic units. Then you perform some kind of semantic analysis (to try and figure out what the sentence actually might mean); simple bots just dig out a noun or verb or two and parrot them back ("tell me more about <insert item here>"), smarter ones do a more thorough job. If you want the bot to behave in anything more than a toy way, it'll need state - that is, it remembers a bunch of things that have been said, and uses this as a frame by which to "understand" the conversation as a whole (so if we were talking about trains a few questions ago, and you now started talking about the engine, I'd probably infer that you meant an engine that is somehow related to you, or to trains). To really make something worthwhile, a bot would need "domain knowledge", that is it's been programmed beforehand with some knowledge of the "real world", or some department of it. So you might tell it that cars and bikes and trains are vehicles, that cars and bikes have engines, that horses and bikes can be ridden, and that people and horses eat food. This is where everything gets very difficult, as writing useful information about even a trivial domain takes a lot of effort, and can produce relatively little result. Anyway, back to your bot. After it has "understood" the sentence (I write "understood" in quotes, because it mostly hasn't really done anything of the sort, just formed a very primitive model of the sentence and the knowledge it might possibly contain) the bot must compose a reply; naively it just parrots words or ideas found in the submitted sentence (or based on the knowledge frame it has built up). To make it behave a bit more like a person you might build it with a set of conversation patterns (e.g. the beginnings and ends of conversations, asking directions, discussing something we like or don't). Now writing a general-purpose artificial conversationalist is doomed to failure (if you follow the above prescriptions) because the thing's understanding is so primitive that it quickly becomes like talking to a drunk idiot. Writing a conversation-type and knowledge-domain specific bot will be a lot more likely to succeed, and will probably be a lot more fun. For example, write a bot that the human (pretending to be a police detective) must interrogate about a crime. 87.115.143.223 (talk) 21:06, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Urgh, I forgot about ambiguity. Consider the sentences "John said he and Peter had gone to the pub. Then he went home". Who went with Peter to the pub (was it John, or someone else)? And who when home (John? Peter? the unnamed other male?)? While your bot's internals will function with some kind of rather formal system like first-order logic, vexingly people rarely write in unambiguous logical statements. Figuring out who went to the pub with Peter is hard enough for people, with better equipment and lots of real-world experience. Your bot will make a lot of (probably rather amusing) errors in this regard. 87.115.143.223 (talk) 21:14, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I tried some of this stuff for an old-school text adventure. It's really tough:

• Use the sword in the chest to hit the wizard. You remove the sword from the treasure chest and use it to hit the wizard
• Use the sword to hit the wizard in the next room. You walk into the next room and hit the wizard using the sword
• Use the sword to hit the wizard in the leg. You hit the wizards' leg using the sword
• Use the sword to hit the wizard in the chest. There is no wizard in the treasure chest

It goes beyond parsing the sentence. The amount of specialised knowledge you need in order to make sense of these things is enormous. Worse still, you need the knowledge in order to parse the sentence - but without parsing the sentence, you don't know what knowledge to consult. SteveBaker (talk) 02:23, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Using an existing sim card in a new iPhone?

I have just received a new, though rather cheap, phone from a family member. It is an AT&T phone with a 3G sim card, and the family member is paying for the service. I also just received my tax return, and would like to get an iPhone. I have not found a consistent answer online, so my question is this: If I got an iPhone 3G, would I be able to just put in the AT&T 3G sim card I already have, thus bypassing having to sign up (and pay) for new AT&T service? I know the sim cards are removable, but, as noted, I have yet to find a consistent answer on whether or not I would be able to activate the device without purchasing a new plan. Thanks. --Abin Sur (talk) 23:37, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

You might want to read the iPhone article, particularly the part about the SIM lock. -- JSBillings 14:42, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

That mostly talks about doing something to the phone to take non-AT&T sim cards. He is talking about using an existing AT&T sim card and just popping it in, no hacking or cracking or anything like that. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 15:21, 8 March 2009 (UTC)