Root Access

slhck

13:00

@IvoFlipse None at all, I've used Macs for the last 5 years so I'm dumbed down when it comes to buying hardware

Ivo Flipse

@slhck Crap :P

HaydnWVN

@IvoFlipse i've got an (older) ATI 4870 that still gets performance boosts from each driver release

only 1 or 2 FPS, but over 5-6 driver releases it makes a difference lol

Tom Wijsman

59

Life Improvement

Proposed Q&A site for experts and enthusiasts that want to solve problems that hold people back from improving themselves (personality, confidence, communication, language, productivity, organisation and so on) such that they can achieve more in their daily life.

Currently in definition.

Just one more follower, the annoying thing is that nobody is asking questions. :(

The amount of +10 questions needed is a bit of an overkill... :D

slhck

13:16

Any Excel pro here?

jokerdino

Depends. :D

slhck

I want the count of each exp for each group_id

jokerdino

VLOOKUP? :S

slhck

Ah, that rings a bell

But how does that give me a count?

jokerdino

Used to play with excel long time ago.

vlookup wouldn't help you with this though.

it is for looking up from a database or something

allquixotic

13:19

hii

jokerdino

Here comes the excel pro.

HackToHell

hi

allquixotic

lol

for most things, it's harder for me to think of a formula way to do it than it is to write a VBA macro to do it

slhck

Hm. But it can't be too hard.

HackToHell

Excel sucks :/

Paul

13:20

@slhck I think you want a =sumif()

slhck

C'mon.. do I have to do this in Ruby again?

Paul

Or =countif()

allquixotic

@slhck pivot table

jokerdino

ah, those beautiful if <3

allquixotic

a pivot table could definitely do it

slhck

13:22

I've never used a pivot table

jokerdino

What better time?

slhck

Alright, @allquixotic, how do I set it up?

allquixotic

it's easy, which version of Excel

slhck

allquixotic

o_O what version is that?

FFS. of course.

slhck

13:25

2011

:P

allquixotic

anyway, create a pivot table for your entire dataset, and put the exp into a row label, group_id into a column label, and Count of exp into Values

from your screenshot of the first 17 rows I have this result from that:

slhck

Okay, how do I create a new … thing to put into the values?

allquixotic

slhck

I can drag group_id and exp around, but it's only those two

HackToHell

0_o I do not get at what you guys are trying to do ...

allquixotic

13:27

drag the exp field into the "Row labels" box

slhck

yup

allquixotic

drag the group_id field into the "Column Labels" box and remove it from "Row labels"

then drag exp again from fields into Values

jokerdino

if (a1==1),(b1=="Whatever"), count=+1

allquixotic

it'll automatically be "Count of exp"

because exp is non-numeric so it'll default to count not sum

HaydnWVN

@slhck use COUNTIF

slhck

13:29

@allquixotic Ah you can drag the … thing

Nice

allquixotic

what thing are you talking about?

you just have to drag and drop from the "Field name" box into the other boxes

experiment until you get the flow you want

I've taught dozens of people how to use pivot tables dating back to Excel 97... a lot of stuff can be accomplished with them that's hard or annoying with formulas or VBA

slhck

yeah, I wasn't aware of the fact that you can drag the field names into the boxes on the bottom

allquixotic

pretty sure this does what you want

slhck

I got it now, thanks @allquixotic!

allquixotic

yup... too bad I don't get rep for it, but I get street cred in Root Access, which is just as good

jokerdino

13:31

Excel pro, i have a side project coming up. ;)

allquixotic

no please...

(j/k, whatever, hit me, I'm a masochist)

HackToHell

Why do you guys use it for ??!!

jokerdino

haven't thought of anything yet. :P

@HackToHell use excel you mean?

Journeyman Geek

lol

cause other people do!

allquixotic

the spreadsheet paradigm (whether it's LibreOffice Calc or Excel is pretty much irrelevant these days) is generally useful for a lot of problems involving medium amounts of data... more than a dozen or so items but less than hundreds of thousands

that happens to be the range of data that most financial and even many scientific data processing tasks work within

HackToHell

13:34

@jokerdino yeah, what else ?

jokerdino

any Firefox guru who knows of an extension for finding a meaning for a word when you double click it?

HaydnWVN

@HackToHell Well just think like this... Excel is 2 dimensional... A pivot table is a way of making it 3 dimensional

jokerdino

@HackToHell i thought you were referring to pivot table

Tom Wijsman

@HackToHell: They're trying to turn Excel into Excellent.

HaydnWVN

@TomWijsman Excellent at crashing more like.

allquixotic

13:35

@jokerdino I call that thing the left side of my brain

works fairly well... low latency, never needs system updates, no security vulnerabilities

jokerdino

blah

mine regularly runs out of space or low memory

HackToHell

fine, you guys just confused the hell out of me

Tom Wijsman

@jokerdino /me selects "extension for finding a meaning for a word when you double click it", right clicks, clicks "Search google for ...", gets Google Chrome results! :P

HackToHell

yeah, chromium rocks

Tom Wijsman

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/…

jokerdino

13:37

@TomWijsman Well, why do you think i am prodding for a pro here :D

i like the Google dictionary one for Chrome. Need the same for FF

Tom Wijsman

Above extensions works for me. :D

Dunno about FF.

allquixotic

I use FF at work by necessity but I've never seen an extension like that for FF, sorry... I guess that makes me not a "Firefox guru"

even though I do have like 12 application security testing extensions installed

HackToHell

TIL Ctrl+F4 kills Chrome instead of closing a tab in Linux

Tom Wijsman

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-dictionary-and-google-t/
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/_/help/help4.htm

allquixotic

@HackToHell nice :D

jokerdino

13:38

@HackToHell Try Ctrl-W and Ctrl-q

Tom Wijsman

@HackToHell Been using CTRL+W for ages.

HackToHell

Ctrl+W works

jokerdino

@TomWijsman Nice.

Tom Wijsman

@jokerdino: Alright, see which one fits you. But honestly, for the same search terms Google is clearly giving Chrome an advantage... >_<

HackToHell

But I am used to Ctrl+F4, hitting that too often

And I am typing bad

needs to see moar cat videos

makes the room silent by blabbering

jokerdino

13:40

Hm I need a double click extension actually :(

wait. whoa.

HackToHell

Create one :)

Tom Wijsman

@HackToHell Yeah, Chromium rocks, because my Google Chrome doesn't close its processes upon ending and Google doesn't want to compile the right ./configure option to fix that into their binary.

jokerdino

it works

Tom Wijsman

@HackToHell Well, isn't it sufficient to disable that shortcut on your window manager?

HaydnWVN

Pivot table

In data processing, a pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets or business intelligence software. Among other functions, a pivot-table can automatically sort, count, total or give the average of the data stored in one table or spreadsheet. It displays the results in a second table (called a "pivot table") showing the summarized data. Pivot tables are also useful for quickly creating unweighted cross tabulations. The user sets up and changes the summary's structure by dragging and dropping fields graphically. This "rotation" or p...

Tom Wijsman

13:41

@jokerdino Both of them mentioned double click.

allquixotic

@TomWijsman is it because they're hanging and it doesn't use SIGKILL, or what?

I haven't seen that behavior on Linux but I'm only running 21 stable on Fedora

jokerdino

@TomWijsman yeah, it works fine. thanks much!

HackToHell

Must do that as soon as spotify stabilizes

It's driving me mad

jokerdino

In chrome, you can choose to run background processes for apps or something

allquixotic

/me listens to Spotify on his Nexus 7 tablet

Tom Wijsman

13:42

@allquixotic No, they're using the wrong memory allocation memory, and I believe that somehow keeps the processes open due to leaked memory or so. No clue what's it exactly, but the processes just stay there after I completely close Google Chrome.

allquixotic

@TomWijsman that sounds like a completely different problem than memory allocation. memory allocation doesn't cause that kind of problem.

Tom Wijsman

@HackToHell Just don't try to meet the black cat, he makes your YouTube white & ugly.

allquixotic

things that could cause that problem: (1) the process opened a file descriptor whose kernel module has hung (e.g. /dev/drm/* or /dev/snd/*); (2) the process ignores SIGHUP or SIGTERM which the controlling process probably sends when it dies; (3) the controlling process crash-exits rather than exiting gracefully and doesn't have a chance to send SIGTERM/SIGHUP

HackToHell

It's still showing up :P

allquixotic

they need to call prtctl() system call on the child processes when they're started to instruct the operating system to send SIGHUP to the children when the parent dies... then they need to make sure that nothing in the children handles SIGHUP so that it terminates the processes

or they can just SIGKILL them to be 100% sure, but that prevents the children from doing any kind of cleanup, so it'd have to be: SIGHUP/SIGTERM; wait a bit; SIGKILL

Tom Wijsman

13:45

@allquixotic bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413637

> ... was random - sometimes it shut down nicely, sometimes it left those processes consuming ~1% CPU. Gdb showed that it is a problem related to Chrome's custom malloc (tcmalloc) in combination with the Nvidia drivers (in particular, the driver calling tcmalloc's malloc(), and the malloc waiting for something that never happened).

> To state the obvious: Disabling tcmalloc is not an option for google-chrome, unless there is some way to do it at run time.

allquixotic

ah, so that's why I've never seen it; it's a conflict with the Nvidia binaries.

Tom Wijsman

groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-dev/…

Yeah.

allquixotic

so the processes hang...

that could still be worked around by cooking up a patch to SIGKILL the children if they don't terminate within a certain time or respond to a heartbeat ping on a file descriptor or socket or something.

but certainly since chrome is closed-source there's not a whole lot you can do about that until Google patches their sources

Tom Wijsman

True, but well, using different memory allocation on chromium fixes it as well and makes the children exit clean.

allquixotic

there's a good reason that they use tcmalloc rather than the standard glibc heap allocator

tcmalloc is basically used for performance on workloads where you have a highly variable heap size and frequent small allocations... glibc malloc() just doesn't optimize well for that, and ends up calling sbrk() or brk() system calls (sloooow, kernel context switch) very often

glibc malloc will still work, but I'm pretty sure they will want to continue using tcmalloc into the future.

it would be nice at least if the chrome devs would talk to the nvidia devs and come up with a mutually agreeable solution

Tom Wijsman

13:52

Yeah, it's faster and so on. Although I don't notice anything slow at glibc.

But yeah, probably might try tcmalloc again in the future, some driver updates has passed by and it might be fixed or magically no longer occur...

allquixotic

I remember when Adobe Flash's mp3 decoder had some kind of glibc function call interleaving bug with certain versions of glibc (Flash was actually in the wrong and was doing something unsupported) because glibc fixed a bug that allowed it to work correctly... heh... it was memcpy() I think.

Ulrich Drepper acted like an arse (as usual) and Linus Torvalds even got involved and made a political issue over it

some Russian guy hacked the flash binary and fixed it before Adobe patched it lol

HackToHell

@jokerdino Are you going to study in India after your exams ?

Who wants a laptop ?

dragonblogger.com/lenovo-laptop-giveaway

allquixotic

:O

oh... it's not a ThinkPad.

jokerdino

@HackToHell doubt so

HackToHell

@jokerdino Don't !

jokerdino

14:00

why? O_o

allquixotic

my immediate response to that is "No" since I don't want an IdeaPad :P those things are terrid

I already have a T530, anyway

HackToHell

@jokerdino Just do not study anywhere in the extreme south

jokerdino

why what?

allquixotic

/me looks at the specs sorry, that is just not a gaming laptop at all...

HackToHell

Dino does not get it, dino needs to grow

@allquixotic you forgot the word budget

allquixotic

14:03

what's that? O_o

jokerdino

OK brb

allquixotic

oh, right. some people have limited money. :P

HackToHell

makes a mental note not to post any giveaway's here

r.tanner.f

@HackToHell Right? :P

HackToHell

??

allquixotic

14:06

@HackToHell sorry ;P do post giveaways for the rest :)

HackToHell

Right, got that

allquixotic

in fact if someone here has already registered for that giveaway and wants to do the 5 points for having someone else register with your code (not sure exactly how that works), feel free to post the link and I will help out

so that whoever shares it with me will get 5 entries due to my entry

cool concept, that

HackToHell

i leave stuff like that to reddit

allquixotic

it's weird that you only get 1 entry for entering yourself, but if someone else enters using your referral link, you get 5 entries per person... that's very heavily skewing the results in favor of people who get a lot of people clicking their link... fascinating concept

almost like trying to see who can get the most page impressions of their link

the co-founders of Google could totally win that by posting their link on the google.com homepage ;P

HackToHell

lol

Oliver Salzburg

14:16

@allquixotic The idea is to reward those that push the link the most, isn't it?

allquixotic

yes, obv.

HaydnWVN

@HackToHell Fail, that wasn't a referral URL :P

HackToHell

yeah, i was posting it simply

allquixotic

@HaydnWVN I was wondering that too, Hack could've gotten a ton of +5s from us

Oliver Salzburg

But to get 5 more entries, you're potentially inviting unknown amounts of people into the raffle, because you don't know how often the link is re-shared

HackToHell

14:17

I though you liked free stuff

Oliver Salzburg

Nice way of "improving your odds" :D

allquixotic

@OliverSalzburg You get 5 more entries per person, right? So if 1000 people use your referral link you get 5000 entries, while each of those people only get one

HackToHell

I am not improving my odds at all, fyi I cannot win it

HaydnWVN

Just pay a little for a google ad-word to link to your referral URL, put it under free+laptop or something xD

Oliver Salzburg

@allquixotic Oh, I see

HackToHell

14:18

I am a writer there so I cannot win it !!

I really do not understand you people >_>

allquixotic

@OliverSalzburg which is why having the Search button on google.com redirect to that site would be uber

quick, figure out how to do XSS on google.com !

HaydnWVN

lol

allquixotic

inject your referral link into the search button :D

HaydnWVN

the heat you'd get for a ~$350 laptop? ;)

allquixotic

IKR... but some people will do anything to "win" something (yay!)

Oliver Salzburg

14:20

The problem I have with give-aways like that is that I used to be on the other end of those and know how much of a scam they are :P

HackToHell

Oh and btw someone figure out how to scrap SU, it blocks me out if I request too much stuff

@allquixotic You seem like the right kinda guy

Oliver Salzburg

Yeah, you can't enter yourself and none of your employees and their families, but your highly valued customers are very much welcome to enter and, oh surprise, they win!

allquixotic

@OliverSalzburg it depends on how much personal info the giveaway asks of you

Oliver Salzburg

Because there is zero regulation with these things (at least over here)

Blog bot

Blog - Stack Exchange: AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents

Joel Spolsky on September 20, 2012

We’ve all heard the stories of seemingly trivial patents being used to mug technology companies. There was the patent on the “Interactive Web” which a troll named Eolas used to extract $521 million from Microsoft–until a jury in East Texas threw out the patents. There are the four patents Lodsys is using to send threatening letters to software developers everywhere–trivial patents that Google says never should have been granted, in fact, Google and Oracle have submitted mountains of prior art to show that the patents should be invalid. …

allquixotic

14:22

@HackToHell what do you mean "scrap SU" and what do you mean it blocks you?

Oliver Salzburg

Everyone makes up their own game and if the winner was actually randomly drawn is up to the companies themselves

HaydnWVN

Guys how did we miss it... Yesterday was 'talk like a pirate day' :(

avirk

No one ping me aye :(

HaydnWVN

> PING avirk -t

Oliver Salzburg

@HaydnWVN It wasn't missed, it was ignored.

HackToHell

14:24

@allquixotic run nikto on SU and you will see what I mean ...

@HaydnWVN It's a Hollywood thing

avirk

@HaydnWVN you forget to use @, it will through error otherwise :D

@HackToHell you are much angree on that fat bit** :P

HaydnWVN

Yar be true

avirk

@HaydnWVN yar?

Tom Wijsman

Check that about page...

allquixotic

wow, askpatents sounds awesome

i read the blog... they're working with the Director of the USPTO... win

time for us to pwn some lawyers who think their invention of a rectangle-shaped phone with a graphical display is unique

6

might end up spending more time finding prior art on AskPatents than I have been spending helping ppl on SuperUser. this is important.

Sathya

14:45

evening all

jokerdino

:must post on reddit:

allquixotic

@Sathya AskPatents! Time to go to war! And they should really put this question in the FAQ or sticky it or something: patents.stackexchange.com/questions/122/…

Sathya

@allquixotic ah that's gone public now eh

good, good

jokerdino

darn, mmyers beat me to Reddit.

@allquixotic lol I have been part of it since it came online

still have not thought of a question to ask.

avirk

@Sathya evening

Sathya

14:50

@jokerdino link?

@jokerdino lol, no I didn't

avirk

@Sathya last day has you watch out the match?

Sathya

I don't watch cricket

avirk

@Sathya Oo

which game you like?

Sathya

I don't follow most sports. Used to follow EPL & F1 religiously few years ago, but not catch F1 once a while

jokerdino

@Sathya one sec.

@Sathya no you are!

avirk

14:54

@Sathya hmm interesting bro

Sathya

@jokerdino #okay.

jokerdino

redd.it/106yvr

@Sathya lol i'll be there :P

avirk

ah can anyone tell me a good adventures/magical/sci-fi movie to watch I'm very bored today :(

Sathya

@jokerdino :P

jokerdino

Bah, here's the comment link - reddit.com/r/technology/comments/106yvr/…

@avirk Twilight :D

You'll thank me later :D

avirk

14:58

@jokerdino argh!

@jokerdino I'll thank you now.

jokerdino

lol

avirk

@jokerdino I've already seen all its part :P

jokerdino

@avirk nice knowing you ~_~

avirk

@Sathya your twitter avatar is really cool should be use on SE site :)

@jokerdino :)

jokerdino

@avirk creepy stalker.

avirk

15:03

@jokerdino Oo

its night over here and you are asking me to watch horror :P

allquixotic

@avirk if you haven't watched the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series yet, do it. Do it now.

jokerdino

Twilight is a romantic comedy :)

avirk

@allquixotic imdb link first :P

@allquixotic however TV series will take a lot of time to download on my bandwidth

:(

Sathya

@allquixotic +1 for Battlestar Galactica

avirk

I've watched Dexter 5 seasons :D

allquixotic

15:06

@avirk it will take a long time to download, but it's a mix and match of "miniseries" (more movie-like) and TV series (more episodic). It's all pretty much a serial though, it's not individual isolated episodes with no lasting consequences... almost every episode adds depth and has lasting consequences.

I've been a lifelong huge fan of Star Trek and Star Wars, but watching the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series totally changed my perspective on sci-fi, and it's now my favorite by far.

it's hard to describe. you have to watch it.

avirk

@allquixotic I'll, sure, I will request to my friend for download

@Sathya Are you on your laptop?

answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-desktop/…

jokerdino

yay more rep on SO

Sathya

@avirk on my laptop what?

avirk

Can you check out this registry exist in the Win 8

Sathya

not now

I need to finish this

Web Applications Town Hall Chat

meta.webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1174/…

jokerdino

15:11

Imma coming for you.

Wait, it's over.

avirk

@Sathya finsh it and let me know if that works still in Win 8 please.

jokerdino

i feel tempted to ramble in that town hall chat ::

unNaturhal

It's reeeeally sloooooooow!

HackToHell

15:34

@jokerdino did you just say that ! Imaginary punch !!

jokerdino

@HackToHell it was a sarcasm.

HackToHell

was it ? :P

avirk

0

Q: Google Chrome displays boxes at the beginning of all words in unicode text

I have this issue with chrome on windows 7, and it seems to be happening only with unicode text within facebook. Screenshot: The boxes disappear when I increase the zoom level by one step. But they come back when I switch to 100% zoom. Is there any permanent solution for this? Chrome 100%: ...

who can tell me which language in pics?

HackToHell

tamil

shit from fb

jokerdino

:>

HackToHell

15:41

My fb feed is full of cats <3

And this facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience?ref=stream

jokerdino

O_o

Ivo Flipse

@Sathya As long as they don't accept Evan

jokerdino

I can't even imagine such a thing.

allquixotic

meow

HackToHell

meow <3

blog.soluto.com/2012/09/…

every damn time

Ivo Flipse

15:47

Good questions, ask them on SU :P

jokerdino

haha

Ivo Flipse

I had the printing problem, some spooler service mixup thanks to itunes I believe or me turning it off :P

jokerdino

i think too tiny for prominence though.

Ivo Flipse

If you download crap, you will eventually get a virus

HackToHell

define crap

Ivo Flipse

15:49

Its not always easy to know what type of memory you need, nor if your motherboard will support it

Gareth

@JourneymanGeek In Seattle now :-)

Ivo Flipse

I had to figure out my parents passwords 2 days ago to help them reinstall Dropbox, the solution was to use Keepass, which was kept in their Dropbox...

As for making it faster, buy a new one :P

jokerdino

Who pang Gareth now?

avirk

@jokerdino why you want to pang him :P

jokerdino

@avirk STOP. Hammer time.

avirk

15:55

@jokerdino i haven't a shield to protect myself :D

Sathya

someone mention a hammer?

HackToHell

@avirk pang ?

jokerdino

@Sathya No one. looks around

avirk

@Sathya yup by @jokerdino

6 mins ago, by jokerdino

Who pang Gareth now?

HackToHell

There comes thor

avirk

15:57

@HackToHell he is crushed and on earth now a days :P

HackToHell

0_o does he live in the clouds ?

avirk

0

Q: Disable Win+1-9 Hotkeys

Just downloaded Dexpot (virtual desktop application), and would like to assign the desktop switch hotkeys to Win-#, but these are already being used the by the system. Is there an easy way to disable only these particular hotkeys in order to free them up?

windows desktop hotkeys disable virtual

@HackToHell he dinner with me yesterday :D

I typed this answer for that question. Is that what he is looking for?

You should take a look on AutoHotKey. It can remap the keys according to your choice. If you want to assign the Win+# key combination to switch to desktop then you can use this script

#3::Send #d
Now when you press the Win+# key combination it will show up to your desktop.

# stands for Win key
^ stands for Ctrl key
! stands for Alt key

Web Applications Town Hall Chat

Transcript for