Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

Okay, well I'm pleased that's settled.

And posted to ILX for posterity.

Okay, now I have a novel to get back to. Good night.

Enjoy "Less Than Zero"!

My start menu (win98se) is wreaking havoc! Whenever I access it for programs, documents or bookmarks, it freezes explorer+taskbar, though whatever other apps I have running are not interrupted. Even if I avoid using the start menu in a session, when I shut down, I'm given the "Program not yet shut down -- End/Wait" prompt. I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary on the program manager, and I've run a virus scan twice: nothing up.

But the most troubling thing is that Zonealarm has alerted me that Explorer and WMPlayer is trying to access the internet, and once, some program called abetterinternet.com or somesuch tried to connect to the internet, too. I'll have to run adaware/spyware blaster, but what in heck is going on??

It was "The Black Dahlia", Chris.

For OS X general maintenance, I highly recommend this article:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/11/21/maintenance.html

ooohhh a better internet!

Bah on you Macists, answer my question!

I give you Bellucci pubic hair and this is my thanks?

I'm on a computer whose resolution is poopy so I couldn't make it out.

Well, you know, you're not on a Mac, so...

Spyware. Here's more info:
http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/library/abetterinternet/index.phtml

I just did a fairly thorough search for that particular spyware. Nothing turned up in AdAware, and I only found one key in the registry that matched the string, though it was in a different place specified. Didn't turn up at all in the Add/Remove Programs, searched for the dll and exe files, nothing.

However, I noticed that Windows Media Player is running in the background, which seems to be in middle of things. Is it usually supposed to do that?

I want to save myself some boring data entry. I want to find a way of automating entries of share prices from the yahoo finance website into an Excel spreadsheet.

For each example, I would like to enter the Last Trade value into a certain cell in Excel. This has to be done once a week at the end of the week. There is an example here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ate.

The html code for each Last Trade value seems to be the same i.e. for this example:

<td class="yfnc_tablehead1" width="48%">Last Trade:</td><td class="yfnc_tabledata1"><big><b>17.43</b></big></td>

all of the yahoo finance web pages I need to input data from also have the same kind of format i.e. the URL mentioned above with just the code at the end (after the equals sign) changing. Also, the spreadsheet entry will involve entering the Last trade value into columns B through to BE each week, and for each of these columns the contents of row 2 corresponds to the value after the equals sign in the URL.

Please help!

perl

um, that's not too helpful but then you are using excel 8)

i'd write a script that used wget or curl to get the html pages, sucked out and chopped up the relevant line using perl or sed or grep, wrote the output as comma separated file which i could then import into excel. how you'd do this using windows is left as an exercise for the reader. (cygwin? activestate perl?)

koogs, otm!

mark

wrote a little something in php (because it's portable and easy enough to install) and sent it to your hotmail account. don't know how useful it'll be as i've no idea what formats excel will import but it should make it a little easier.

andy

hi andy,
thanks for that - will look out for it.

cheers.

How to simulate rolls of a die using the windows calculator?

just search roll playing on versiontracker, you should turn up any number of dice simulators.

I'm asking because maybe I have an idea for an ilx game. It would be too much trouble to ask everyone to download and install a program so I'm looking for a way most users could do this easily, like, to generate random numbers between 0 - 9: 3,1,4,1,5,9,2,6,5,4...
Or between 10 and 99: 31, 41, 59,...
Or between 100 and 999: 314, 159, 265 etc
I figure windows is the most popular os around here, so I'm searching for a way to do this with it's scientific calculator, or I guess it could be doable via the command prompt.

how about using javascript? everybody has a browser available to them and it gets around the tricky platform specific stuff...

Yes, Sebastien - don't do anything you need to install. Many people are on office compute setups that block any installations.

well i think that's seb's point

Ah right, sorry. I was kind of bigging up the javascript idea I think, without really reading properly.

I'm trying to render a wav file from a mix I made in Acid Pro 3. I do this all the time but this time it's saying "Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low" and crashing out. This never used to happen, so why now? I tried doing it with a much smaller Acid file and it happened again. WTF?

this seems to coincide with having downloaded a recnet windows update i think

mr latin, is that a disk space problem?

mark, i had another thought about your thing last night. instead of lots of individual pages can't you set up a yahoo portfolio that contains all the prices for the companies you're interested in? this would just mean downloading one page (let their database do the collating of info) but would mean the parsing of the file to extract the price you wanted is a bit more complicated. or maybe there are too many companies.

well, I was running low on disk space and I think that's when the initial problem occured. However since then I have freed up a good two gig of space on both of my hard drives so it shouldn't be so bad should it?

have you rebooted? the virtual memory is actually disk space and if the disk space was full it may have impinged on your swap space (although theat depends on the sytem you're running). so reboot and / or kill off some processes and see if it improves (there should be a tool - top on linux f'rinstance, task manager on windows - that'll tell you what's using what space)

(ah, windows update probably means you're running windows.
My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Performance -> Virtual Memory is where you change it on win2k systems. typically this should be about twice your RAM. we have a 3G partition here at work that we use for nothing but the page file)

yes i rebooted. I'm totally unsure how much RAM I have but when I went to that screen the initial was "2" and the max was "2". This sounds wrong non?

yup that sounds wrong, should be three times your RAM at least.

without wanting to sound like a total spaz, but how do i know for sure what my RAM is. When my computer boots up, it says a really low number but I have been assured that it is a lot more than this and that there is a reason why it gives out this low number on the login readout.

right click on my computer click properties. It will tell you there.

Everytime I startup my computer, my wireless connection (which I admit I leach off of a neighbor) doesn't work until I go into Properties>Support>Repair. Meanwhile, I can connect to other wireless networks around (at a coffee shop or from the school across the street) without issue. Any thoughts?

uh, is 128mb of ram normal?

it is less than average, but ram size isn't everything.

Can I ask:
I have a 5 year old iMac running OS9.2.1. Flashing ? indicates problem finding startup disk. Do the double startup, no success. Zap the Pram, no success.
Startup iMac from system install CD-Rom. (and even try system - restore, which is hopeless). It appears to boot, BUT, then when the CD icon comes up, the cursor icon disappears, so that I can't click on the intall disk to start.
All the USB cables etc are fine. Any ideas?

I think my hardware is fucked somehow. I've got another computer (that I'm writing this on) but would love to get back into it to retrieve info etc. (300 rare Wu-tang songs!)

Thanks to anyone kind and clever.

Sounds like a dodgy disk or disk controller. Open it up check the connections inside. See if you can borrow a copy of disk warrior from somewhere. Boot up with the disk warrior disk with all periferals unplugged bar keyboard and mouse. Try repairing the disk with diskwarrior. It may be completelyfucked though.

paulh if it is the hardware and not the disc, you could theoretically save your data by removing the hard drive and placing it in an OK machine. Some tech stores should be able to do this for you as well.

This may sound a little bit odd, but without my doing anything that I know of, the font size in IE just keeps getting bigger and bigger (and bigger) every few days, to the point of becoming a considerable irritation. Anyone any suggestions?

Oh dearie me, forget I ever said that...

this is driving me nuts. I have a dell machine with a firewire card installed. I just bought a lacie 160GB firewire drive. It works fine, except when I plug in my ipod to the other firewire port, at which time, the drive ummounts. Sometimes it unmounts completely and disappears, sometimes it appears to remain there, and I can click through the directories, but not see any files; sometimes it comes back if I turn it on and off, but most of the time I have to reboot, and windows does a disk check, and all is well. Lacie support have been no help. I suspect this has something to do with windows' driver and assigning drive numbers to the ipod and the drive. Has anyone else experience this? (I'm using WindowsXP. All drivers appear to be up to date). Everytime I want to add anything to my ipod now requires at least one reboot which kind of kills the convenience.

One thought; does the LaCie drive have another firewire port on the back, and if so, what happens when you chain the iPod through it instead of plugging it into the Dell?

I tried that thinking that would solve the problem, but it kept happening. well, it reassigned different drive letters to things at that point (the drive had been I, the Ipod J; then when I chained them, the iPod became I, the drive J, and the drive dismounted itself).

The drive works fine on my Mac at work, so I don't think it's a problem with the drive itself. It must be a windows problem. It's just odd that I can't seem to find anyone else who has had this issue.

Have you tried doing a hard assign on the drive so that it's like N: or P: drive or something like that? Just to get it away from all of the other drives. Windows can be a real pain with assignment of drive letters, especially if a device keeps trying to reclaim the same letter every time you plug it in. Moving the hard drive up the alphabet will at least keep it safe if the iPod's being pushy. (or vice versa)

If you don't know how to do that, it's in Disk Management; I think with both Win2K and WinXP you go to the control panel, select Administrative Tools, double-click "computer management" icon, then look for the "disk management" option on the left-hand-side. When you click on it, all of the attached disks should pop up. If you have your external drive attached, it should appear there, and you can right-click the drive and reassign the drive letter using the "change drive letter and paths" option.

cool, I will try that out when I get home. thanks!