Computing desk
< October 2	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	October 4 >

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.

October 3

How do I make Windows MediaPlayer12 the default player again

Resolved

How do I reclaim all the file types, that MSMediaPlayer can handle, to play in MediaPlayer as default again?
(I use Windows Media Player 12 under Windows7Home).
--89.9.63.203 (talk) 06:05, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Start -> Control Panel -> Programs / Default Programs -> Set your default programs -> Windows Media Player -> Set this program as default AvrillirvA (talk) 21:50, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Perfect! Thank you! :-)
-- (OP) 46.212.181.97 (talk) 13:43, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How to link two combo boxes (access 2007)?

I have a table with some fields and one of them is a combo box. I have created a form for this .

I add another field with combo box. How can i make , that when i select a combo box (example state) the other

combo only lets me choose cities from that state ?-- first question

Related to the first --- I also did some testing , like creating 2 tables (one state the other city) , and i have linked them with ID - state ID (one to many).

In the state table , it shows me with a plus + , the cities that i want. But i want to see them in a form , wich is not related to the two tables.

So i use combo box form control in the form , to select the field for state , and another combo for the city. I see the states with the first

combo box , but when i choose the other (city combo) it shows me all cities...... PLEASE HELP...

Thank u in advance .79.106.5.224 (talk) 06:57, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a way to do it with only one extra table:

1. Create a table called tblCities with text fields name and state (and add a primary key column if you want one). Populate it with some data (e.g. San Francisco/CA, Boston/MA, whatever).

2. In your form, create your two combo boxes. I will refer to them a cboState and cboCity. For cboState, set its Rowsource to SELECT tblCities.state FROM tblCities GROUP BY tblCities.state ORDER BY tblCities.state;. This will make it list all of the states in alphabetical order, but only list one of each state.

3. For cboCity, set the Rowsource to SELECT tblCities.name FROM tblCities WHERE ((tblCities.state)=[cboState]) ORDER BY tblCities.name;. This just means, select all the names (in alphabetical order) from the cities table where the state value is the same as whatever is selected in cboState.

4. Now, one last thing. By default cboCity will not update when you change the state. So we have to tell it to do this manually. Click on cboState, go into the Properties window, and then click on Events, then click in the space for on change and click the button with the three dots that appears, then choose "code builder." This will open the VBA editor.

4. Your screen should have your cursor just after a place that says Private Sub cboState_Change(). Add the following one line of code below this line: cboCity.Requery. Then save and close the VBA editor. This just means, every time cboState is changed, it should cause cboCity to refresh its options.

Let me know if that works for you. Now if you wanted to link back to the cities table for your data, it is slightly more tricky — you need to add a primary key field to that table, and have that primary key be linked to the cboCity combo box (you don't need to link the state combo box to anything because it is implied by whatever city it is, in this scheme). If you need the above modified for that purpose, just let me know. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:59, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In-browser PDF display

A lot of my workflow relies on various PHP/Javascript programs I have made that display alongside PDFs in a browser window. I had made these programs to be compatible with Adobe Reader.

I run a Mac with OS X 10.6.8, using Safari 5.1 as my primary browser.

So I was somewhat surprised recently when Safari stopped using Adobe's plugin to display PDFs. At first I thought I had done something wrong, but now I see that this is a major compatibility problem with Adobe Reader and Safari 5.1.

Instead of opening a PDF in the Adobe plugin, it now sometimes displays a PDF with a minimal of editing features (it doesn't even display page numbers, which I need for my work), and the default Safari PDF reader does not recognize any hashtags like #page=, which used to make the Adobe Reader PDFs jump to whatever page I told it to.

So I'm looking for a PDF reader that can do four things, in descending importance:

1. Display in browser in OS X 10.6, either in Safari 5.1, or Firefox, or Chrome.

2. When viewing the PDF, it needs to have some easy, straightforward sort of way to see the page numbers, adjust the zoom, things like that. Adobe Reader's default tool bar at the top worked fine for this.

3. Ideally, extra bonus, it would be great if there was some way to programmatically (e.g. with a hashtag or Javascript) be able to tell the reader to jump to a given page (e.g. #page=5). I don't care how it does this — I'm happy to make small adjustments in my code to whatever the method is — but it needs some way of doing this. (This is because I deal with big databases that are indexed to various pages within these giant PDFs, and I need to be able to quickly see page 135 or whatever without too much hassle or tabbing back and forth.)

4. Can handle very large PDFs relatively fast — most of the PDFs I am using are between 20 and 150 MB in size, and some PDF readers (like the Preview application for the Mac) take forever to try and cache all thumbnails or other things, and are thus super slow. (The PDFs are composed of lots of grayscale photographs, primarily.)

Any suggestions? --Mr.98 (talk) 12:14, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You could load it via swishpaper or flashpaper, of course then you're relying on Adobe Flash. The only fullproof thing I can think of is fully converting away from any binary format, to ordinary HTML. I feel your pain, man. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:12, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

HTML would really not work. I don't mind relying on Adobe if it works, but I don't think SwishPaper or FlashPaper are fast enough to serve as an on-the-fly PDF reader, are they? --Mr.98 (talk) 20:01, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to take a look at pdf.js. It's very primitive in a lot of ways, but (a) it does do the page-number-as-anchor thing that you want, and (b) being written in JavaScript, you don't have to muck around with browser plug-ins. The demo seems to be very slow, but it's under active development (the main repo seems to be getting commits every day, even on weekends). Paul (Stansifer) 19:29, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That's an interesting idea. I'm a little skeptical it will be able to handle my files without blowing up my browser, but it might be worth a shot... --Mr.98 (talk) 21:48, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Although the default Chrome PDF reader does recognize #page tags, it inexplicably doesn't show page numbers. I swear I read somewhere that it was based on FoxIt, the only Windows PDF reader that doesn't suck monkey nuts, but unfortunately the full version of FoxIt doesn't seem to be available for the Mac OS. Have you tried skim? Maybe worth a go. Other than that.. why not downgrade? It's not like every new revision of the Mac OS gets worse as in Windows, but there have been inadvisable upgrades before (7.6 to 8.0, for example). Nevard (talk) 23:45, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Odd Problem with Cell in Excel 2007

I copypasted the contents of a comment in the margin of an .rtf file from Word 2007 directly into a cell in Excel 2007. Now I want to remove the comment, as it has since become irrelevant. However, I can't. I can't even select the cell anymore. Is there anything I should do here? KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:10, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Have you tried deleting the entire row or entire column in which the cell lies? One thing I have learned to do in Excel is that when pasting and weird stuff happens, I first "Undo" ... then I select the destination cell, click up in the text area as though I wanted to type something into the cell, and then choose Paste. This tends to paste just text and does not attempt to paste text formatting. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:06, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have tried to delete the row, but it won't let me. Clicking on the row, just highlights the first cell, unlike normally were it highlights the entire line. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 17:16, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

1: Try Shift+Space to select the entire row. 2: If you can't select the cell, maybe the protection settings got turned on? --Bavi H (talk) 23:58, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You could also try including the rows above and below in your selection to be deleted (having copied necessary data elsewhere first of course). Dbfirs 08:49, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I can't select the cell, or delete the row/coloumn (it just deletes the first cell in each row/column). I suspect this may be due to some pre-formatting that my agent has done. But they can't get rid of the comment, and nor can I. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:51, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As a last resort, if this is is possible for your sheet, you could try exporting to CSV (comma separated variables) which you could edit in a text editor (such as notepad) if necessary, then re-import to a new sheet. Dbfirs 15:51, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

RSS for Reference desk?

How can I subscribe to Wikipedia:Reference_desk questions? I love to read it.

Yes, I can add this it to my watchlist, but its not comfortable enough. - Ewigekrieg (talk) 15:51, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There is an ATOM feed for the changes to any page - go to the history of that page and there's a link to the ATOM syndication on the bar on the left - for this page it's this. I think if you substitute feed=rss for feed=atom in that URL that should give you RSS (but most syndication clients will take ATOM too now). 2.122.75.122 (talk) 16:25, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Windows script

I need to rename a number (ca. 1000) of files in windows (XP). Is there a way to automate this? All files are of the form "x_y.jpeg" with "x" and "y" numbers. I want them to be renamed to "y_x.jpeg". So for instance, "1_2.jpeg" should be renamed to "2_1.jpeg", or "12_34.jpeg" should be renamed to "34_12.jpeg". Can I do this automatically in windows only or do I need to install an addition program? If so, how do I go about it? bamse (talk) 15:55, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Here is how to do it in PowerShell

   Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\Users\Santa\Pictures\" -Filter "*.jpeg" | % {
       $file = $_
       $parts = $file.Name.Split("_")
       $new = $parts[1] + "_" + $parts[0] + $file.Extension
       $file.FullName
       Rename-Item -Path $file.FullName -NewName $new
   }

TheGrimme (talk) 17:49, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hugging my rename 's/(.*?)_(.*?).jpeg/\2_\1.jpeg/g' *.jpeg right about now. ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:22, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, TheGrimme. The script returns "y.jpeg_x.jpeg" instead of "y_x.jpeg", which is irrelevant for my purpose, so no need to fix it. bamse (talk) 22:02, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

XP TO ME

Is there a program to makes Windows Xp recolonize Windows ME? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.71.63.46 (talk) 16:13, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I sure hope there isn't — what do you even want it for? ¦ Reisio (talk) 18:23, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean install over? If so, see the following page: [1].--Best Dog Ever (talk) 19:17, 3 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No I mean like how Vista can recolonize XP's language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.71.63.46 (talk) 01:03, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Query, what do you mean by "recolonize"? Do you mean run a program written for one operating system run under another? ie. recognize not "recolonize"? 220.101.24.249 (talk) 01:54, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Operating systems cannot colonize or recolonize. You are obviously using a word that you don't know the definition of or you are trying to spell a word you cannot spell and typing an entirely different word. Unless you can define what you intend "recolonize" to mean, no answer can be given. If you insist on using "recolonize", it is apparent that this question is intended to be nonsense and will not be answered. -- kainaw ™ 13:44, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you're talking about programming languages, you should know that operating systems do not have associated programming languages. (Individual compilers and libraries must support specific programming languages, but XP and ME are similar enough that pretty much anything that supports one will support the other.) Paul (Stansifer) 15:45, 4 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

First of all shut up Kainaw,second of all yeah Paul I mean that.