I saw Jamie's item for questions addressed to the resident genius, so this is the item for the rest of us to offer answers. The title says "Short Questions," but we really mean short answers: Questions that you think can be answered in something less than a page, with fewer than 10 equations and figures, combined.239 responses total.
Why does EU use the abbreviation GB for the United Kingdom, instead of UK?
Great Britain I guess. What is the difference between Great Britain and the United Kingdom anyways?
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Pratt Library.
That turned out to be a really interesting question, jp2. You'll have to look at http://www.nic.us/delegated_managers/delegated_subdomains.txt to see who to contact for the particular name you want. I suspect you won't be able to get "jp2.md.us", for instance, but I can't get the list of reserved names to unzip.
Re 1 and 2:
"GB" seems to be the standard/official international abbreviation for the UK.
Canada Post say that letters addressed to people in England, Scotland, Wales
or Northern Ireland should be marked "GB" or "Great Britain". This *may* have
something to do with the fact that the ownership of Northern Irelandi
sontested.
The official name of the country is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland". Great Britain is the larger of the two main islands
composing the countries of Britain and Ireland. the term "UK", or, informally,
"Britain" (i.e. no "Great") refers to England, Scotland, and Wales (on Great
Britain) and Northern Ireland (the Northeast 6 counties on the island of
Ireland - try saying that in an accent where you don't pronounce "r".)
("Northern Irelandi sontested" above should read "Northern Ireland is
contested".)
I tried to keep this as brief as possible, but as you can see, it's
complicated.
Of course, you could just call the whole country "England", but that annoys the hell out of the Scots and Welsh (and the Northern Irish?), as does the term "The British Isles" for the islands owned, separately, by Britain and Ireland. And then there's "Ulster"...
Ulster?
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What do you mean by "under the third tier"? jp2.md.us or jp2.there.md.us ?
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Ulster is one of the 4 original provinces of Ireland, along with Leinster (where Dublin is), Munster (where Kerry, Killarney, Limerick etc. are), and Connaght (sp) (northwest). Ulster is essentially the 6 counties of the 32 which is now Northern Ireland. Refer to the song "4 Green Fields".
SINCE WHEN HAS 13 BEEN CONSIDERED UNLUCKY?
Thankyou albaugh. I was going to post that these evening, (it's 22:25 here), but you beat me to it. For those wondering about the "essentially" bit in albaugh's post, Ulster the geographical province of the island includes all 6 counties of Northern Ireland, plus three in the Republic, to the east and southeast of Northern Ireland. One small correction - the spelling is "Connaught", or "Connacht", but i believe the former spelling is now the official one. "Leinster" and "Connaught" are pronounced, roughly, "Lennster" and "CONNot", I believe.
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Trojan's better. Or maybe not.
Abstinence brand? What, are those like really uncomfortable or something?
Maybe they're hoping for a little free advertising when people say "the best protection is Abstinence." Sort of like the scam where a guy created a long distance company named "I Don't Care".
How is engine displacement derived? Is it the amount of water displaced by the entire engine, or is it the size of the compression/combustion chambers? I'd always assumed the former. Of course, I've never really thought about it, either.
Engine displacement is the difference in combustion chamber volume between the piston at full out and full in. So, let's say you're looking at a 450cc motorcycle engine with 2 cylinders (which would be a .45 L engine, in the car world's terms). 450cc/2cyl = 225cc (.225L) per cylinder. This means that each cylinder can hold .225L less water at its smallest (piston furthest in) than it can at its largest (piston furthest out).
So my 302 V8 had 37ci/cylinder. Cool. Thanks. :)
You're welcome. Ask me sometime when I can draw on something and I'll explain what the 4 strokes in a 4-stroke engine are and graph the power output for a cycle. I have half a degree in this stuff; I need to get *some* use out of it...
Animated 4-stroke engine at http://www.marinediesels.info/Basics/the_4_stroke_engine_explanation.htm
Nice!
A 4-stroke gasoline engine works the same way, except that a mixture of air and gasoline is pulled into the cylinder during the induction stroke, then as the engine approaches TDC the spark plug is fired to ignite the mixture. (Actually, the timing of the spark can be anywhere from 20 or more degrees before TDC to a few degrees after TDC, depending on the engine speed and the design of the engine. As the engine speeds up, the spark has to occur sooner for best power. This is called "spark advance.")
Now I know why timing is expressed in degrees. :)
the url in #23 si awesome.
You spell "the" correctly, but not "is"? How is that logical.
t h e was a mistake sizat alright?
O, I thought you had trademarked misspellings, when used simultaneously.
Does anyone have a 1 or 2G (or 4G) laptop 2.5" hard drive that they don't want and will sell cheaply? Jim wants to put Win98 onto it. How big a drive do you need for minimal Win98? The CD that came with the laptop insists on putting a bunch of junk on before it puts Windows on, including 15M of a video commercial for the computer that runs in loops.
Minimal Win98 should fit within 200 megs, I think, but without much to spare. A 450 meg drive would probably be comfortable for a Win98 system, if you don't plan on installing a lot of large software packages. A minimal Win95 system will fit in under 100 megs. I've seen it squished down under 64 megs, before.
At one point I had Win95 running on a machine with a 120MB hard drive and 8MB of ram. Had no problems with disk space, but lots of propblems with memory. Subsequent versions of windows seem to have grown exponentially, though...
We got Win95 pared down to 48M by deleting all the ads for various ISPs and other nonsense like that. Jim has a 500M laptop drive that was not large enough for the CD that came with the computer (Win98 and a bunch of other things) but it did not give you a choice of what to install. It was a 'backup' CD, I think. He also wants to put on some scanner software and probably something to edit photos with. He has some old slides to convert to digital format. We will get hold of a regular Win98 CD. Thanks. Does Win98 come with some painting program that can edit photos? I will some day put scanner software onto a linux computer.
Win98 doesn't come with a good photo editing program. I would suggest Paint Shop Pro.
I'd get Irfanview - it's a free download, and will do cropping and scaling and such.
I like Irfanview a lot, but I don't know if I'd call it a photo editor.
It's getting bigger each time I look at the webpage, though. From http://www.irfanview.com (I cut it down to the editing features) Change color depth Scan (batch scan) support Cut/crop IPTC editing Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Filter Factory) Capturing Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs Lossless JPG rotation
I've seen questions about this before, but I'm not sure they were the same problem I'm having. Just in the last week or so, my dishwasher is leaving a thicker and thicker film on the glasses, and now on everything else as well. I bought something that said it was a dishwasher cleaner, a powder to be used with no dishes; it did no good. I've ran some of my glasses through the dishwasher 4-5 times now and they're getting a lot worse. I cannot see through them any more. I'd switched to a tablet-type dishwasher soap, and thought that was the problem, so I bought some of the liquid I've usually used (Cascade Complete). It didn't help; things are still getting worse. The dishwasher worked fine until this week. What's up with that?
try running it with a bunch if white vinegar in it
I'm doing that now; I put a couple of cups of vinegar in a container and am running the dishwasher right now. My non-metal dishes which are film-covered are in there; got that suggestion from some WWW site.
We had a problem with a chalky white glaze which was getting worse with each load. A vinegar wash got everything glaze-free but until I changed to a non-Cascade liquid dishwashing liquid, the problem persisted. We now use Palmolive liquid. Dishes are clean and glassses are sparkling clear. Gotta run, my apron needs ironing.
Do you starch your apron, Mary? (-: The vinegar helped, but I wonder what will happen the next time I wash dishes. If they look like they have soap scum on them again, I think I'll ask for a repairman to look at my dishwasher.
Is your water inlet valve working properly? That is, is the dishwasher actually washing and rinsing the dishes? We lived with strangely filmed dishes for a short while before I realized the inlet valve had failed and letting in only enough water to slightly rinse everything so food scraps were gone - but the detergent stuck around.
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I don't know if the water intake is working correctly. I do know the dishes are wet after they've been washed. I'm calling the repairman tomorrow.
I once had a very dirty drain screen cause the same type of problem.
Re #39: When I had that problem, I eventually figured out it was because the water valve wasn't opening for part of the cycle. To figure this out I had to sit next to the dishwasher and listen to it for an entire wash cycle. It was only one part of the cycle that had the failure, so the dishes were still wet, but they weren't getting clean. I find Tang (or the cheaper store-brand imitation) is a good dishwasher cleaner and deoderizer. Run the dishwasher empty (no soap, either) and after the tub fills the first time, open the door and dump in an entire can.
I don't know what a drain screen is, but I don't see anything easily removable in the dishwasher that should be causing this type of problem. Since I live in an apartment, I have the luxury of getting a repairman to come out for free. I'm going to do that rather than worry much more about the problem.
That's what I was thinking.
Is your "Jet Dry" supply empty?
I can't say I've ever noticed any difference between using Jet-Dry and not using it. I'm starting to suspect it's snake oil.
The apartment complex manager said this problem happens sometimes if the water softener for the building is on the fritz. I guess they fixed that yesterday. I tried my dishwasher last night. It didn't get rid of all the film left on the dishes that I hadn't scrubbed by hand. It did handle the ones I'd washed by hand, though. If I run the rest through another time or two, they'll probably be fine as well.
Oh - you don't live in AA, do you? Many communities don't soften their water and homeowners and businesses have to do it themselves. I was surprised to learn that Kalamazoo doesn't soften its water supply, although they do remove iron. Apparently people complained a loot more about iron in the water than calcium and magnesium.
I don't know who softens the water in Tecumseh. I do know the water in Lenawee County is the hardest water I've ever seen. When I lived outside nearby Clinton and our water softener was low on salt, taking a shower was a horrid experience. That film that was on my glasses would stick to my skin just as well. I'd come out of the shower and feel dirtier than when I'd gotten in it. I fear to know what would have happened if it'd ever run out. Since I didn't notice any broken glasses or other dishes, I presume it didn't get that bad last week.
sabra sabra cadabra janc is going to reach out and grab ya!
Not the most pressing short question, but perhaps someone here can satisfy a point of curiosity for me. I recently rewatched the film "Cold Comfort Farm", a British period comedy which made a joke out of the phrase "something nasty in the woodshed." I've seen and read other British humor which has riffed on that phrase, too. However, although the nature of the "something nasty in the woodshed" is usually pretty apparent from context the origin of the phrase itself remains a complete mystery to me. Does anyone know where it comes from originally?
(I'd do a google search on it but I'm more or less sure that while the results would be memorable they're not highly likely to be enlightening, at least not insofar as concerns the question at hand.)
<reads #58 twice, then laughs>
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It comes from Stella Gibbons' book "Cold Comfort Farm" (1932). There is a review at http://www.catharton.com/stellagibbons/worksfarm.html that remarks upon 'Stella's most profound feat of comic invention centres round the famous phrase: "something nasty in the woodshed."'
But was it the phrase itself that was her invention or was it the appropriation of the phrase for comic use?
That's a good question as there could have been a use of the phrase in Cockney or other English slang and Gibbons picked it up for her spoof of English country life. But apparently it was her use of it that set it free into popular use. However it doesn't seem uncommon for authors to popularize expressions, comic or otherwise. I just finished a crossword puzzle that used as answers now popular expressions that (it claimed) all originated in one work of fiction. The expressions are "thank you for nothing", "the sky's the limit", "mum's the word", "no love lost", "give the devil his due", "stone's throw", and "smell a rat". Can you name that work?
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Re #63: After some painstaking, arduous research (read: spend five
minutes typing stuff into Google) it doth appear that the work in
question is _Don Quixote_ by Cervantes. In fact, I came across a
website that lists many many expressions from Quixote. Among the
more familiar:
o As ill-luck would have it.
o Which I have earned with the sweat of my brows.
o Can we ever have too much of a good thing.
o Plain as the nose on a man's face.
o Out of the frying-pan into the fire.
o Bell, book, and candle.
o Let the worst come to the worst.
o Why do you lead me a wild-goose chase?
o I find my familiarity with thee has bred contempt.
o Sure as a gun.
o Sing away sorrow, cast away care.
o Thank you for nothing.
o Murder will out.
o It is the part of a wise man ... not to venture
all his eggs in one basket.
o Within a stone's throw of it.
o Let us make hay while the sun shines.
o Every man for himself, and God for us all.
o I shall cry my eyes out.
o A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
o Here is the devil-and-all to pay.
o I begin to smell a rat.
o Faint heart never won fair lady.
o Let every man look before he leaps.
o He has an oar in every man's boat, and a finger in every pie.
o The proof of the pudding is the eating.
o It is good to live and learn.
o He is as mad as a March hare.
o I must follow him through thick and thin.
o There is no love lost between us.
o All is not gold that glitters.
o Honesty is the best policy.
o I have other fish to fry.
o All in good time.
o Matters will go swimmingly.
o Good wits jump; a word to the wise is enough.
o You cannot eat your cake and have your cake.
o The pot calls the kettle black.
o When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome.
o Many count their chickens before they are hatched.
o Rome was not built in a day.
If Cervantes truly invented all of the above, this is astounding. See
http://www.literatureclassics.com/browselitquotes.asp?subcategory=SU&author
=Sa
avedra
for a longer list.
Shakespeare was also a great creator of language. When ever I read
some Shakespeare or see it performed, I'm always struck by how many
familiar everyday expressions I hear. The Bard invented 'em.
<remmers makes a note to himself to read Don Quixote some day>
There would be a question of the degree to which the translator of Don Quixote from the (early) Spanish had a hand in putting those expressions into English, at least for those that are not verbatim translations. I find it difficult to image what the Spanish for "Mum's the word" would be such that it would be translated as "Mum's". So, to find out this, we would also have to read it in Spanish. One possibility is that the translator chose in some cases known English expressions that he knew but which by the translation were immortalized. (Consider that the book was first translated into English in 1612. Hmmm....could Shakespeare have done the translation?
(Time to do some more Googling...)
remmers is quite the researcher
I don't think "something nasty in the woodshed" comes from anyplace other than the Stella Gibbons book (which was a favorite of mine long before the movie). The matriarch in that book saw "something nasty in the woodshed" and this event has caused her to brood in her room for decades, casting a dark shadow over Cold Comfort Farm. The heroine manages to dispell the cloud, with the help of travel brochures, as well as slicing through many other knots in the dismal tangle of Cold Comfort Farm. Part of the charm of the book is that the "something nasty in the wood shed" and several other mysteries (including that of the rights due to the heroine) never get resolved. They just get swept out the door without further examination. The knots are cut, not unraveled, and everyone goes free without further ado. Rather disappointing to hear that people use the phrase in contexts where the meaning is obvious. That's really missing the point.
I guess I can see how you might prefer it to remain unexplained in MacGuffin-like fashion.
Many mysteries are best savored in an unsolved state. And the idea that you don't have to deal with the burdens of history, you can just forget them and get on with life is charming and refreshing. Every one in the mideast should read "Cold Comfort Farm" once a week.
I use Windows Explorer quiet a lot at work, to browse directories with lots of files. Each time I start up Windows Explorer, and often (it seems) when I change to a different directory, it switches to using "Large Icon" format for displaying the list of files. I want "Details". Is there some way to universally, permanently, set Windows Explorer to use "Details" format? Thanks!
Browse the "root" of your hard drive, basically the drive letter. Set the viewing properties, and from there somehow you select an option to set it for all subfolders... either from a right-click or in the menus.
Hmm. I can do that at home (Windows XP) by setting the current View setting that I want, then going to Tools > Folder options, selecting the View tab, and activating "Apply to All Folders". I'll have to check whether I have that at work, too (Windows 2000). It seems to me I've looked before... but I'll try it. Thanks, Scott!
Basically the same in win2k as in winXP. Have to do it every time I log in at school, most students like icons so the images are set that way, changes are only in effect until the machine is restarted. We ghost them every night. It is a pain. Also have to set my monitor resolution every time, the image is set at 800x600, I prefer 1152x864, will accept 1024x768 (especially as they are 15" monitors and I use a 19" at home).
All right, I've set my Windows Explorer at work to always use Details. Thanks for all the help!
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That question made my head hurt....;-)
Cygwin is the only decent freeware one I've found. I use it for the application you mentioned, and also for doing SCP transfers.
(In case you change your mind about not using Cygwin, there's a set of setup instructions for a basic install with sshd running as a service here: http://tech.erdelynet.com/cygwin-sshd.html)
Can someone clearly explain meters per second per second? We used it in Calc I, but I'd usually just plug-and chug and write the m/s^2 after the anwser, without understanding it. now i'm seeing it again, this time in referance to the constant acceleration of gravity being 9.81m/sec^2, but being a chemisty book, doesn't actually explain m/s^2.
Acceleration. Meters per second is velocity, acceleration is how fast your velocity changes (as when dropping things from a height).
Right. Assume you're travelling down a city street at 10 meters per
second ( * 3600 seconds per hour = 36,000 m/h or 36 kph, a bit over
20 mph.) You're not speeding up or slowing down, just travelling
the same amount of distance every second -- that's your velocity,
and velocity is distance over time - meters / second. [or if you
prefer other units, miles / hour, furlongs / fortnight, or
{any unit of distance} / {any unit of time}]
You come to a place where the speed limit changes and so you decide to
accelerate. Acceleration involves a change in velocity -- let's say
you want to double your speed to 20 meters / second (or around 45 mph..)
As anyone who's ever tried to stop suddenly before hitting something
can tell you, changing your velocity takes time, whether you wish to
increase or decrease it. Acceleration is the measure of how fast your
velocity changes, or put another way it's the measure of that change
in velocity with respect to the time it takes to effect the change.
So acceleration = (change in velocity) / time
or (m/s) / s
or m/(s^2)
But let's take it a bit further: the slash means divide-by. So:
10 m / s / s = 10 m / s :- s
= 10 m / s x 1 / 1 s
= 10 m / (s x s)
= 10 m / s ** 2
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Can anyone point me to a store, reasonably near Ann Arbor, that sells Lotsa Cola (& other Lotsa flavors)? Never mind why, you really don't want to know.
I need suggestions for a good browser with which to do standards- compliant DHTML/JavaScript development/debugging under Mac OS X. Got any?
Safari?
There appears to be absolutely no facility within Safari for reporting of Javascript errors, which makes it pretty useless for the purposes I specified.
That's why I asked. Thanks.
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VirtualDub?
I use VirtualDub for capturing and trimming video and it works well. If you're looking for something along the lines of a nonlinear editing system it will probably disappoint you, though.
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will cracklock kill taht 30-day bug?
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We are trying to diagnose/fix jep's Epson stylus C60, for which the printer driver would be at least a half hour download. Is there some way to do a self-test on this printer, or on other newer Epson printers?
Turn off the printer, and disconnect the printer cable Hold down the (strange rune button) and keep it held down It has two symbols on it. One looks like a piece of paper with the corner folded Press and release the power button Continue holding down the (strange rune button) until the green power light starts to flash, then release it. It will print a diagnostic page. There's a 64 page PDF manual at the Epson WWW site if you look around a bit, but that will take you a while to download, too.
Thanks. I actually downloaded the printer driver (15 min once we got the 56K winmodem to work -the only one of five we could get to work) and Win98 would not print at all with that driver. Maybe we need a different cable. I followed instructions and the cartridge moved back and forth but it did not load paper or print. How do I load paper into it?
You just slide the paper into the tray where the sliding paper size bar is, as I recall it. As I recall, there are no tricks or difficulties with that printer; it works just as you'd expect. It should load the paper; at least it did the last time I tried to use it.
Short Question: What is the best way to make an executable file into a double-clickable application in Mac OS X? (When I use an applescript "do shell script..." the applescript applet hangs after spawning the shell process instead of closing.)
Is the tray for paper at the back or at bottom front? Jim put it in back.
As I recall, it could be put in either way.
What's with this accursed trend of putting the word "all" in a sentence in places where it makes no sense at all (forgive the pun), as in: "Who all is in this room?" "What all are you doing tonight?" I don't know if anyone has heard the phrase "syntactic sugar" before, but this all strikes me as syntactic excrement.
Who all has been doing that?
all y'all has too mudge time on yore hands.
This all may be true. "Y'all", of course, is excluded because it is the (informal) plural of singular "you", a distinction found so important that just about all european languages retain it.
As in the well-known French saying, "Y'all come back now, s'il vous plait."
They always shorten that to SVP, though.
Y'all haven't been around enough southerners. "Y'all" is not necessarily plural, in common usage. Usually but not always.
Didn't Jeff Foxworthy say that 'yupto' is a southern word? What'cha yupto?
"Y'all" can be singular. "All y'all" is always plural. ;>
<cringes, and wonders what type of "southerner" y'all have been hearing>
Oh, I need to lighten up, don't I? :) In the serendipity department, I discovered this quote from Kinky Friedman while doing some web-based research: "Remember: Y'all is singular. All y'all is plural. All y'all's is plural possessive."
That must be where I was remembering it from. :>
That "You all" and "What all" is usually what I've heard Indians say. I've not heard any Americans use that, but maybe I wasn't paying attention
My brother's wife is from Arkansas. If you took away "y'all" and "you all" from her speech, she would be unable to communicate.
are you sure?
Thank all y'all for correcting me.
Is there such a thing as a VESA 2.0 video driver for Win98? We have a computer with SiS onboard video (COmpaq Presario) for which we cannot find a video driver. Windows decided to call it plain PCI VGA. (We found the driver for the onboard sound for that computer).
"Unfortunately" English has no separate word (pronoun) for second person plural, so people (especially south of the Mason-Dixon line) compensate.
We do use "you". For example, in speaking to a group, I feel no hesitancy is saying "you" to refer to a whole group, but some must feel they have to add "all" to encompass the group. Do people in the south feel it not enough to look at a group and use just "you"? How did that get started? Does it come from a normal declension in another language?
In the north (of England) we use "you's"
We found the Compaq's video driver by looking at the number on the video chip instead of the numbers produced by diagnostic programs. It works. Why does Windows not have VESA drivers????
Will a PC2700 DDR RAM chip work on a motherboard for which is specified
DRAM Access Time: 2.5V Unbuffered DDR 200/266 MHz Type required ?
Will a 27 year old whore work whore way through Hollywood?
I have a confusing problem with Eudora on my laptop. I used to download html mail just fine (daily comics, for instance) using a dialup connection. Recently I took the laptop to a friend's house and connected via an ethernet card to his home network which is connected via cable modem to the internet. When I next downloaded email, all the html graphics were gone. Now I am back on dialup, but I *still* get no html mail. It seems as if Eudora remembers something about that network connection. I have explored the preferences on Eudora, and can't find a way to fix this problem. There is a setting for automatic downloading of html, but I get a weird effect, with some html coming through, and some not. Any ideas?
Good luck with the html. The only html mail I get is spam. Can you reinstall Eudora? My short question. Where can I find a brief introduction on how to compile linux programs from source code? Someone sent me a shell script for choosing options (to compile lynx) and I found the source code (.tar.gz file) but how do I combine the two?
Start by uncompressing and extracting the source code, e.g.:
tar xzvf source.tar.gz
(do this in some directory that's a good place to keep source,
like your home directory or /usr/local/src or something like that,
not in a system directory like /bin or / )
Most archives unpack into their own subdirectory of the current
working directory, so change directory into wherever the source
has unpacked itself, eg: cd lynx-x.yy
Under the top level directory of an unpacked source archive you
will virtually always find a file titled either "README" "INSTALL"
or some other name that marks it as a logical place to start.
Read the document for instructions on how to configure, compile,
and install the package. In most cases this process consists of
editing one or more makefiles and include files (typically in
places indicated by surrounding comments) and then compiling with
"make" and installing (once "make" is successful) with "make install")
Thanks, I may try this first with photopc (which produces a 49K exe file for Debian but I seem to have found the wrong Debian version). Then with Lynx, for which someone sent me a shell script. I may have more questions later. In the past two days we just put our linux computer together but have not installed the compiler files yet. 120MB of them. The rest of linux is half that size including five browsers.w To install a .tar.gz file (generic) in Slackware I presume I follow some of the above procedure to decompress into subdirectories and then move the files to the proper locations in the regular directories, right? I have Opera as a tar.gz file, also ratpoison. Or is there some easier way?
A tar file is a collection of files stuck together into an archive by the "tar" command. (Historical note: the name "tar" comes from "tape archive" but tar proved useful for much more than just putting files on tape..) A .tar.gz file is just a tar file compressed using the gzip utility. You used to also see .tar.z files (made with the "compress" utility) and these days you'll often see .tar.bz (bzip2 utility..) Linux's tar command has an extra flag that tells it to compress/uncompress the file it's working on so that you don't need an extra step in your command line, so the "tar xvzf lynx-x.yy.tar.gz" command above should uncompress (-z) and extract (-x) the file (-f) lynx-x.yy.tar.gz while telling you (-v) what it's doing. Once all the files are extracted from the compressed archive the process will include: a) configuring the package options, b) compiling the source into executables and/or other files, and then c) installing the finished product into Typically once you do (a) according to instructions, the "make" command takes care of step (b). Once you're satisfied that (b) worked right, most packages are set up so that "make install" will put the finished products in the right places. You will usually need to be root for the "make install" step to work properly, unless you have configured the package to avoid installing in a public directory.
I am always root on my little linux. The author of the DOS version of lynx (which I helped find one little bug in with his help) sent me a shell script which he said to use to configure the makefile(s) and he also explained how to make an error log of the compilation process. Your brief explanation combined with his longer one are starting to make sense. To make a Slackware .tgz package I think I would, before the makeinstall step, use something like 'makepkg' to compress the compiled files into an archive that someone else could install. My other question was how to install packages ending in .tar.gz that were not designed for Slackware, such as Opera. After decompressing them, is there some easy way to move the files to their correct places? The file that I extracted from a .deb package worked like a Slackware file but Opera ended up in its own directory not on the path and was looking for some file it could not find (related to unicode) when I tried to use Slackware's installpkg. Someone in the linux mail list that I have subscribed to (for basiclinux, a small SW based linux) will explain this soon if you cannot. I can wait. I was told to compile the latest version (with patches) of ncurses and openssl and make a static version of lynx which will be larger than a shared version.
The instructions never make sense until you execute them correctly.
All kinds of things may come packaged in .tar.gz (aka .tgz) bundles. My comments only apply to source code archives, and not even to all of those.
Thanks. Today I tried to compile photopc. Unfortunately the author decided to bundle the source code together with the dos and win binaries in a .zip file. We used pkunzip on it and it truncated a few file names which I renamed. It changed Makefile to makefile which I renamed. It changed config.h.in to config.h, which already existed, so we have to extract them separately. It compiled something anyway but now it is looking for /dev/photopc as a device and I need to relearn how to set this up in some file that defines devices. Apparently I was supposed to edit Makefile but I did not. Configur(e) checked a few things about the computer. Make made the binary file. Which file do I define /dev/photopc in? Not in my index (SW 3.2 book). I knew this six months ago before I got sick. THere is a Slackware infozip.tgz package with zip and unzip that will work with DOS files, says my book. I wish it would talk to me about defining devices. Might be time to takethis to jelly conf.
I unzipped photopc.zip properly and looked at Makefile and there was nothing to change (unless I wanted to compile for dos or win instead of unix/linux). ./configure gave me a long list of things about my computer and took 30 seconds. Make said 'all' and took 1 sec and produced photopc. Make installput photopc and another binary and some doc and man files where they belonged. I had to type ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/photopc for it to recognize the camera in com1 as a device and it worked!!! Thanks for explaining this. It was simpler than I thought. THe rpm program still won't work - can't find some dependencies that are on my computer - so now I will compile antiword from source code instead ofusing the precompiled rpm version. Then lynx 2.8.5, which might take longer. I compiled links at grex which took several hours. It must help to be the only user.
I just compiled antiword (converts WORD 2-2002 to text or ps). There was no configure file so I could not configure. There were lots of Makefile's for various UNIX platforms including one with no file extension which turned out to be the default, for Linux. I typed make and it made a bunch of .o files from the .c files as well as a couple of executable files. I typed make install and then ran the program. This was incredibly fast, perhaps 2 minutes total. My first compiling experience (on grex - shared SunOS system which kicked me offline every 15 minutes) was luckily atypical. Next I compile lynx and opera!
Re resp:127: Does Internet Explorer work? If you're using Windows, Eudora relies on the Internet Explorer DLLs to render HTML, so if your IE settings are wrong you may have problems. (This also means you need to keep IE up to date. Any security holes in IE also tend to affect Eudora.)
Two quickies. Is there an easy way to tell which conferences on grex are most (or most recently) active? Secondly, way back in the early days of picospan, we used to have a cool little command that would show who was currently in which conferences...a finger command of sorts for picospan. As I recall it was highly specific to the system iii unix we were running on the altos and disappeared due to the difficulty of maintaining it. Was this command ever revived? It was a neat way to seeing "where the action was" on a given evening of heavy conferencing. I remember people sometimes used it to sometimes create "flash crowds" in a conference resulting in some very interesting item discussions (anyone remember tz?)
Try check or checknew . backtalk also has something like that for all conferences.
Re #139: I remember the "who is in" command. As far as I know, it's long long gone.
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I recently stumbled across the "participant" command. Interesting. :)
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I recently discovered "users".
(Yeah, that's what I expected, John. I've hacked up a script that vaguely approximates it but it's too slow for the current hardware. Maybe can try it again once we swap in nextgrex. It's a pity picospan doesn't maintain it's own version of utmp that could hold information like who is in what conferences, what item are they currently reading, responding to, etc. Might make the conferencing system a bit more transparent and draw in folks that currently only hang out in party by giving them a stronger sense there is another place "where the action is")
Might also raise some privacy concerns.
Dave Thaler put info about who logged in to what conference into YAPP, and as a result, the "participants" command for YAPP is speedy enough to be usable.
Re: 146: A program-specific *replacement* for utmp? How bogus; surely you mean "A utmp-like file"? How did a free (for non-members) system pay for System III? Running Linu, 3rd Edition says that AT&T System V costs "around $1500", in 1999 (cue discussion of the greediness of AT&T and the [formerly?] established system vendors).
My wording was poor; I meant "too bad it doesn't have its own utmp-like file that could hold..." Mike Myers was a very generous person and forked out a lot of money for the altos...something on the order of USD30000 in 1984 dollars I believe. I'm not certain what portion of that was hardware costs versus OS licensing fees. Given the era, I would guess the software was largely thrown in and much of the cost was for the hardware.
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1) What's the difference between "Hide" and "Unseen" in Backtalk? 2) In backtalk, is there a way to "ignore" a user? 3) Anybody aware of a bug in Mandrake 9.2 involving creating a bootkisk? I keep getting a "mkbootdisk failed" error during installation. I'm also having trouble putting the bootloader on a floppy. These problems DIDN'T exist in 9.1.
backtalk should have a way to beat up other users.
like naftee, dah/polytwerp, and sabre.
In your personal settings, there is a twit filter option. Go to "Entrance" and I think the link is there.
Thanks.
Re 155> Will this skip all items that have the person in my twit filter as the only new response? Or will it show me these items with their response hidden?
I checked the Help pages and there was no mention of a "Twit" filter. Is this an undocumented option? Speaking of the Help pages, it would be useful if there examples as to how these options are employed.
Re 157 and 158, type ignore for Valerie's program and enter the names of your twits when prompted. I see all items where the twit was the only one to respond recently, with a blank line instead of the response. It does not skip these items, unfortunately.
This won't work for Backtalk.
Re 159> That is unfortunate since it doesn't serve the purpose I'd use it for :(
Unfortunately, filters in Backtalk only hide responses from twits, not the fact that they responded.
Is it feasible to change that? I do understand that staff is pretty busy though ...
You should send mail to janc to request any Backtalk changes. But, as you said, he's pretty busy these days.
K, thanks
janc canht even maintain his test backtalk site.
Last night was the second restaurant I noticed seeing U007 on the cash register display while it was in "idle" mode. Other that saying "You are James Bond" :-) does anyone know why that particular string shows?
Does anyone have an opinion on what it means when your hot water heater has entered a mode where its pilot light goes out about once a month?
Time for maintenance call.
What would the maintenance accomplish? Cleaning of something to prevent, for example, unobstructed flow of gas to burner? Or a range of things the "guy" might check for?
Best case is the gas nozzle to the pilot is a bit clogged and a simple cleaning will take care of it. Worse case is the the furnace in on the way out and needs to be replaced.
Both the furnace (not involved) and the hot water heater are ~2 years old.
Could be a bad thermocouple, too, couldn't it? Usually there's one that connects to the gas valve, to shut off the gas flow if the pilot goes out.
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I second that, tod.
I third it. Speaking as someone who had a carbon monoxide problem and didn't know it.
The local newspaper here in Ketchikan had a story this week about a family who died from CO poisoning due to a furnace defect.
Fortunately, our house is pretty drafty, and it hadn't gotten quite that bad yet. We all just thought we had the flu.
You can buy carbon monoxide detectors.
They are required in Japan. Can't get gas service unless one is installed.
My own experience is that in a furnace the thermocouple is a very likely cause, & is pretty easily replaced in many cases. I've never had one go out on a water heater, though. (My guess on that has always been that they deteriorate with the higher temp in the furnace, but this is just a guess.)
Ditto the comments on the thermocouple. $8-$12 for the part, and 40 minutes max with a little contortionism to replace it, depending on unit placement.
One of my best friends was killed by CO poisoning back in 1997. His mother and her boyfriend also perished. Please get yourself a CO detector if you have gas appliances. In this situation it was a defective water heater, and just like with Joe they thought they had contracted the flu. (best guess by the medical examiner, based on medicines consumed, etc.)
Where is the best place to put these carbon monoxide detectors? Near the appliance, or in the living areas? I have a gas fired furnace and water heater in the garage, and a gas oven in the kitchen. Should I get two detectors?
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zactly...we have one in the bedroom
If all the smoke-detectors are linked together, and a CO detector can be added to the system, it might make more sense to put it near the possible sources of the CO.
Good question. It is my understanding that CO is heavier than 'air', so they should be close to the floor. We have one outside the two first floor bedrooms, plugged into an outlet about 1ft off the floor.
We have CO detectors... now. Including one rigged to our security system, so it gets called in. In our case, our heat exchanger was basically coming apart. The leak was probably pretty slow, because we'd been feeling draggy for days -- also, as I said, we have a drafty house. What saved us was that the gas ewnt out because of a problem up the street. We woke up, way too early, freezing our asses off... and felt GREAT. We didn't put it together until the gas company showed up to turn our furnace back on, took a look at it, and condemned it.
Wow, I'm glad you were OK, Joe. When I last looked for a CO detector, it cost about $45. Is that about what one should expect to pay?
Yeah, that sounds about like what we payed (in the yen-equiv.) It's pretty scarey how quietly that kind of poisoning can sneak up on you. In this regard, the general drafty-ness of homes here may actually be a blessing of sorts.
C (12) + O (16) = 28 for the molecular weight of CO. That of std air is ca. 29.9. Hence CO is *slightly* lighter than air. I would expect, however, that the difference is not significant and the CO would mix with the air without stratification. Other sources of air circulation (drafts, temperature differences, the furnace blower, etc) would be more than sufficient to ensure good mixing.
(Is CO in fact heavier than air? Would a combined CO/smoke/fire detector mounted on the ceiling of the furnace room NOT be a good idea?)
(Rane slipped in with the answer I needed. :)
My apartment had a gas stove. I replaced it with my own electric stove. Gas stoves are the greatest source of carbon monoxide because they put it directly into the living space, not up a chimney. Children in houses with gas stoves get more respiratory illnesses. (Also those in houses with smokers, who effluent also does not go directly up a chimney).
You don't (didn't) have a vent above the gas stove?
No vent, and even if there is a vent not all the carbon monoxide would go up it. Lots would go sideways. Pilot lights produced even more. City code does not require venting gas stoves in apartments. A friend with a large house (3000 square feet) which is old and leaky got a detector, detected gas on the third floor, and continues to use the gas stove. It has a fan in the wall near it and now he leaves the window open too. The oven produced more monoxide than all four burners together, possibly because it does not get as much air.
RE#192 -- thanks for clarifying, Rane.
I have a gas stove and no vent. I dont cook much though. I have a CO detecter on the wall by the basement stairs. I have a very drafty house so hopefully I'll be ok. I should probably get my furnace inspected. IT is old.
Gas stoves do not produce hazardous levels of CO if they are operated properly. See also http://www.epa.gov/iaq/co.html
hai jana annna....
hai
I have a CO detector in my bedroom. I also use a CO detector card in my car. It's not very expensive, and it's a good idea if you have an older car.
Re #190: $40 would be about right. If you're going to use a gas stove, vent it properly (i.e. with a fan) and you'll be fine.
Just bought a battery powered (9v) CO alarm for ~$20. It shows the various places where alarms can go, starting near the water heater & furnance, then the main floor, then near sleeping quarters. Then there are words about recommending them be close to sleeping quarters, and having one on every floor. Obviously they'd like to sell you 3, not just 1. Living in a 2-story ranch, it is my thought to put the detector in the laundry room, close to the source of possible CO leaks. Thoughts?
I want Santa to bring me a ~$100 Casio keyboard that has 100 tones and "MIDI". That's all the bullet point says: "MIDI". I assume that means it has a MIDI interface capable of connection to a computer (PC). I would like to "drive" the keyboard from my PC, to make use of its 100 tones. I'm assuming that's pretty basic MIDI fare. Unfortunately, the people on duty at Best Buy last night didn't know anything. Not only that, they didn't seem to have any MIDI controller cards for a PC. I'm assuming that I should be able to get a MIDI controller for $30-$50, nothing fancy. I assume that I could get such a small beast at CompUSA. Any recommendations? P.S. What do I have in mind, mainly? To assist in my composing / arranging (for concert band) hobby, being able to hear (approximately) the instrumentation etc.
Your sound card probably already has a MIDI interface built in... the usual connector is the 15 pin D connector for the joystick. You'll just need a special cable to get MIDI froum that.
Re resp:205: I put mine in my bedroom, on the theory that it'd be more likely to wake me up that way if it went off in the middle of the night. It's the CO level where I am that I care about, not the CO level next to the furnace.
Re 206> My suggestion - if you're buying anything from CompUSA, be absolutely certain it's what you need, and it will do the job BEFORE you open it. Once opened, CompUSA charges a 15% restocking fee. Extremely annoying
OK, I will check my existing sound card for a DB15 connector. Let's pretend it doesn't have one. Is a MIDM DB15 connector pretty standard for sound cards these days? And is that to say that one doesn't normally get a "standalone" MIDI card, one gets a sound card with a MIDI connector?
I think what's most common these days is either a sound-card MIDI connector or a USB-to-MIDI converter box..
You're probably better off buying it just about anywhere except CompUSA, too. Their prices are ridiculous, especially on cables. They're a last resort when I really need something, no one else has it, and I can't wait to mail order it.
The kind of place that would employ people who say "We don't sell RAM any more because it slows computers down"?
You might want to check out Guitar Center, Ford Road in Canton, MI
They have a good selection of that sort of stuff, and most staff should
be able to help you.
Never thought it would be a geek store of a different flavor
when you start looking at the tech gear.
I'd start closer to A2, at Music-go-Round. They probably help a lot of newbies get MIDI stuff going, and I'm sure they're smarter than the nice folks at Gui-tard Center.
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Best Buy? You mean the idiots who subpoenaed Grex for posting year- old public information?
I can't say I've ever found Best Buy personnel to be experts in any field except cash register button pushing.
Re #217: I don't remember that story. Do tell?
Yes, please do tell.
I don't remember it either.
A Best Buy floor clerk found what I asked for on the second try.
The story, as I recall it, is Best Buy sent a subpoena to Grex demanding we reveal the identity of a user who had posted prices for their Thanksgiving Day sale. (This was before Thanksgiving.) On closer examination, the prices turned out to be from *last* year's sale.
They apparently sent out blanket subpoenas to any sites which came up on a search for "best buy" and "black friday" without doing any further selection narrowing.
Did anyone file a complaint against them for abuse of process?
Re 224> They'd have to have a little more criteria than that, or they'd come up with a whole lot of irrelevant sites
Re resp:225: Would we be likely to benefit from that in any way that would make up for the attorney fees? Re resp:226: Irrelevent sites like Grex? ;>
I meant that they'd have to have criteria that asked for "prices" per se. Or they'd be sub-poenaing people who wrote "I'm going to Best Buy for black friday" in their blogs.
Depends on the ethics of the lawyers who were hired to research the problem and send out the letters, I suppose.
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On the radio, Roto Rooter advertises some kind of "no digging of trench" solution for permanent replacement (?) of sewer line. Does anyone know what it is they do? How effective it is? Etc.?
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I've heard of lines being replaced by running new pipe inside the old. I don't know much about the process, though.
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As I understand it, they use the new 802.11ex standard to transmit your sewage wirelessly to the city system.
<twenex laughs out loud>
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<makes note to be cautous about running Kismet.>
Re resp:235: LOL.
You have several choices: