i will send you screenshot

i use ethernet cable

not USB for ADSL ....

@nhinkle I'm not a "Windows Guy" (I am a Linux guy), but I find this whole Windows 8 thing and the surrounding contest and community to be extremely exciting and attractive. I really want to understand all operating systems, even the ones that I consider a philosophical enemy of my goals for world domination. :P

I'm very eager to participate once I buy a copy of Win8 on October 26.

"Keep your allies close. Keep your enemies closer."

Glad to hear you'll want to participate!

> I find this whole Windows 8 thing and the surrounding contest and community to be extremely exciting and attractive

I guess we can unban him from the chatroom then, eh? :P @nhinkle

@slhck never :P

I think that's one of the things you have to do for the contest actually. "Level 5: get banned from chat. Prize: Stack Exchange branded handcuffs"

LOL

I'd take the handcuffs if @Aarthi were into that

>.<

oh look, it's showing progress on user profiles now

Actually, that's pretty ridiculous. I can't think of @Aarthi without immediately associating her with that My Little Pony character she has as a gravatar. So, handcuffs + My Little Pony = .... umm, no.

@aarthi now look what you've done :P

@EinsteinsGrandson What seems to be the problem? What are you trying to achieve?

That was in bad taste. xD

@r.tanner.f My message, or yours? :P

@r.tanner.f indeed

to see the icon for cable connection even after i unplug it

Mine lol

@nhinkle huh what what'd i do

@EinsteinsGrandson Are you not seeing the icon even after you unplug it....?

I think I've been lurking in the Comms Room too long

yes

i dont see it

@EinsteinsGrandson By "cable", what exactly do you mean? Cable modem? And is it an ethernet cable or a USB cable?

oh huh. it only shows contest progress for yourself

ethernet cable

@nhinkle I see contest progress for you!

what is even happening.

it's a PCIe NIC

So I must be you! ;-)

@allquixotic wait really? o_O

i looked at my own user page not logged in and nothing showed up

Maybe it only works for logged-in users.

oh there we go. it's just slow to load.

@nhinkle I see it too

Yes, it's very slow to load. Seems to be AJAX which occurs after the page is loaded.

@r.tanner.f I see the PCIe NIC, and it's definitely appearing like @Einstein wants it to, but... uh... that doesn't explain why he thinks it isn't appearing.

@Aarthi do you know if there's going to be an official blog post about the contest, or should we be drafting one up?

@Aarthi Nothing. Nothing at all. Please go about your business. Nothing to see here. These are not the users you are looking for. I'm fine. How are you?

@allquixotic Yeah that's freaking me out. I keep clicking between the tabs trying not to believe it. Shouldn't be doing that.

@nhinkle write one write one

just incase

umm OK

Speculative execution of CPU instructions is good. It's quick, easy, and has minimal losses if it turns out to be a discarded branch. Speculative blog writing; well now, that's a new frontier. I'd hate to do that and then have the post not be used. Yikes.

Other interesting speculative activities: speculative car buying (just in case your old clunker dies); speculative registering to repeat a college course (just in case you fail the final exam); speculative purchasing of a wedding ring (just in case she says yes).

@allquixotic eh?

@nhinkle Was replying to "just incase". :P If the goal is to write a blog post just in case no one else did, and if someone else did then yours is discarded, that's kind of sad. In an "aww" way.

Duplicate effort, and all that.

wait who's writing something just in case?

@nhinkle I don't know how to quote people in chat, so I'll just refer you to <the last thing Aarthi said in chat>.

You even acknowledged the message by saying "umm OK". Short-term memory loss?

@allquixotic there is no permanent icon for Local Area Network in Network and sharing center. That's what i'm talking about

@EinsteinsGrandson I see what you're talking about now, let me look into it

@EinsteinsGrandson >_> Yes there is? It's the Realtek connection.

oh. yeah. that.

@DarthAndroid What is he talking about? Fill me in. I'm still totally in the dark about what is or isn't appearing when it should or shouldn't. Apparently there's something significant about the Network and Sharing Center that I don't know. This could be a good SU question rather than a chat topic.

(if it's valid, that is.)

@allquixotic When he unplugs the cable, the Realtek connection goes bye-bye

@allquixotic He has an onboard or PCIe ethernet card, and when he disconnects the cable, he expects the adapter to still show in network connections, albeit "Disconnected"

instead, the adapter disappears completely

@DarthAndroid And it doesn't? O_o (NB: I can't see the second image.)

Oh. Yeah, alright.... that's rather crazy. I see the issue now.

I want to say I remember an "Only show connected adapters" setting somewhere, but I can't for the life of me figure out where if I did.

@DarthAndroid That setting is for the system tray.

Oh god, and now clippy wants to help me find the setting.

@DarthAndroid Clippy is so eager to help. How can you not love him?!

He gets me bent all out of shape.

@DarthAndroid An even more interesting question would be, does his NIC still show in the Device Manager with the cable unplugged, or does the device completely uninstall from the system?

It could be a power management setting, though. Think about it: you have a NIC. It takes voltage to sit there and idle and say "nope, not connected to anything". If there's no cable plugged in, and you can do jack detection without turning on the entire ASIC, why not shut the whole thing down?

@EinsteinsGrandson Win+Pause -> Click Device Manager; Does the network card still show up in the Netowrk Adapters section when you disconnect it?

@allquixotic Sounds plausible.

@allquixotic My first instinct would say it would take too long to reinstall the device every time you unplug the cable, but I suppose your average user isn't constantly swapping cables are they?

A feature like that would drive me insane.

@r.tanner.f Generally not. But I suspect that the device itself isn't being removed completely from the system's awareness; but some kind of PCI-E or ASIC-specific power management might be at play.

@allquixotic Okay. A feature like that would be really cool actually...

@DarthAndroid No, it also disappear from there

What model is it?

@r.tanner.f It probably saves about a pound of CO2 emission (from coal power) over the typical lifetime of a computer, if the NIC were never plugged in at all.

@DarthAndroid Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller

@EinsteinsGrandson That description doesn't give nearly enough information. We need the PCI ID from the Device Properties in Device Manager.

Go into Device Manager, right-click the device, go to Properties, then go to the last tab on the right, and click the dropdown box and find the vendor ID and device ID.

It should be numbers from 0 to 9 and letters A through F. Four digits for the vendor and four for the device, possibly with a colon between the two.

Google says BIOS LAN power-saving features

Actually it's the second to last tab from the right.

h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/…

"Details"

Oh, lookie there, the last tab on mine is "Power Management" with a "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" option. I think that's the winner.

under Details, under the dropdown box, pick Hardware Ids, and just read off the VEN_<4 characters> and DEV_<4 characters> items

@r.tanner.f So my intuition was right. :-)

They might have some kind of physical jack detection that can passively (with no / very little electricity) detect a cable insertion and fire up the ASIC.

(Aka, Magic)

I doubt it sleeps at all if you have a cable plugged in, but as long as it's plugged in (and there's a device on the other end), it probably shuts down most/all of the hardware, saving a small amount of energy.

Multiply that small savings by all the desktops in the world and that's not peanuts.

yo yo @soandos you around now?

@KronoS whats up?

you get it figured out?

Nope

shall we give it a shot?

please :)

let's move over to there ^^

@allquixotic there is hardware id, but no vendor id and device id

@EinsteinsGrandson The "VEN_" and "DEV_" entries under "Hardware Ids" are the vendor and device IDs.

Hey @allquixotic I'm back ;)

from those codes we can look up exactly which ASIC model it is at PCI Database

@Zach Oh good lord! Why?!?!

/me hides

lolol

@allquixotic i've got 4 of them:

the stupid encodings...

I can't figure out why some add the double double quotes

No! The encodings! The encodings! The encodings, they TORMENT MY DREAMS!!!!!

RUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

...

the encodings...

they're inconsistent

no more

I think this stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… is appropriate

@Zach Yes, most certainly.

seriously...I don't get it

it seems completely arbitrary

although

I am on a pc now

@EinsteinsGrandson You have a Realtek RTL8167. That "RTL8167" refers to a specific integrated circuit. We can correlate that with its features and figure out for sure that, yes indeed, this is a feature.

time to try that vba script again?

lolol

@Zach No. No VBA. The thing is, bud, that the behavior occurs even though the input data, at a binary level, is exactly identical -- except that the ones with double double quotes have a comma or a newline in the text.

Bob figured it out and explained it, I starred his explanation.

ahh okay

@allquixotic so what should i do?

The essence of the problem is that, IF your HTML body contains any comma or newline characters, THEN Microsoft Excel (note: not LibreOffice) will, during a copy and paste, treat the data as if all the quotes are doubled up.

god excel whyyy

@EinsteinsGrandson Are you wanting to override the power management feature, waste energy, and cause the ASIC to always be on, even if nothing's plugged in, just so you can see it in Network & Sharing Center?

@allquixotic but generally it should be visible, 'cose it's a standard, that Local Area Network is always in the list of Network connections, am i wrong?

@EinsteinsGrandson Yes, you're wrong. It's not a "standard". There is a feature of your hardware that causes it to turn completely off if nothing is plugged in, to save energy. When it's off, it makes no sense to show it in Network and Sharing Center, because you can't do anything with it anyway until it comes back on.

The hardware spec shows that it has a sleep state called D3cold which means it can "shut down" and "boot up" independently of the motherboard/CPU.

@allquixotic ok, i see now

realtek.com.tw/products/…

The device supports the PCI Express 1.0a bus interface for host communications with power management and is compliant with the IEEE 802.3u specification for 10/100Mbps Ethernet and the IEEE 802.3ab specification for 1000Mbps Ethernet. It also supports an auxiliary power auto-detect function, and will auto-configure related bits of the PCI power management registers in PCI configuration space.

I can't wait to try out Logitech's new mechanical :D

@allquixotic So just to be clear (because this is absurd to me), Excel will only add double double quotes on copy paste from the cells that contain either a newline (as in \n) or a comma (as in ,)?

@Zach Yes. But the underlying data is bit for bit correct. The data itself does not contain those characters; it is added by Excel.

If your eCommerce software is reading from the file and is not copy-pasting, then it won't experience the problem.

And the skus.xlsx I sent you yesterday should work.

@allquixotic Okay. Then the only thing I don't understand is why some cells that contain commas will copy over just fine (without double double quotes)..

It'd only foul up if, for some stupid reason, the method for uploading your data into the eCommerce software involves VBA automating Excel, and having it automatically copy data to the clipboard.

@Zach That's weird, I don't know the answer. Maybe ask a question on SU. And be sure to explain that you're completely certain that the underlying data doesn't contain a problem (I examined it with a hex editor).

@allquixotic Awesome, man. Thank you so much for your help.

Do you really need to care, though?

Hm?

Like I said, if your eCommerce software isn't using the Windows Clipboard to copy data and using Excel Automation to automate Excel to read the data, then this behavior won't impact your import of the HTML data to your eCommerce platform.

So if that's the case, you can just be like -- "Pssh, why do I care what Excel does when you copy to the clipboard? It's broken but I'm not using that anyway".

Yeah, you're right. I'm just curious as to why this would ever happen in the first place.

Bob theorized that it's somehow formatting it as a CSV when it copies to the clipboard.

Think about it. It adds quotes at the beginning and end of the file. It escapes quotes within the file by adding an extra quote to signify that it's escaped.

It's definitely looking like Excel is trying to format the exported data so that it's a valid CSV file.

Excel?

And yes, that does make sense.

Excel.

I found a simple test case to reproduce the behavior.

Create a new spreadsheet.

In the first cell, type in this data:

Copy and paste it to Notepad.

Bam.

Alt+Enter goes down to a new line.

Damn.

There it is.

All its glory.

I found an even simpler test case.

A quotation mark, a new line (Alt+Enter), then a character.

So it's not commas. Just newlines.

pseudocode: IF [ cell data contains a newline ]; THEN [ add a quotation mark at the start and end of the cell value and add an extra quotation mark next to each quotation mark already in the cell value, when copying the data to the clipboard ].

It'd make a good SU question where you answer your own question, I think.

@allquixotic Go for it.

I'm still pretty surprised that's all it's dependent on.

No! I can't bear to even contemplate this Cthulic behavior any more.

And I wonder why some of my cells contain newlines while others don't.

But you earned the reputation!

As did many others here too.

(cough @Bob)

@Zach Maybe it's carriage returns? AFAIK, just a carriage return character (with no corresponding newline) won't cause most text editors on Windows to indicate a newline, but it'll still be in the file, and Excel could interpret that as a valid condition for the behavior in the "THEN [ ... ]" I pseudocoded above.

Cool, I was just looking that up.

This is madness. Trying to comprehend what was inside the minds of the developers when they build Excel? Folly!

ALT+Enter in Excel produces, AFAIK, \r\n (carriage return then newline).

I'm curious if just \r or just \n would trigger it. Those characters aren't interpreted, at least in Notepad, as sufficient to go down to the next line; generally the characters don't even show up in the text at all.

So your input data might look like it's all on one line, but it may have a hidden newline that only a cross platform text editor like jEdit would point out.

My god.

It's easy enough to search for the ASCII code for carriage return or newline in a hex editor.

Recommendation for a pc hex editor?

Hang on. I'm trying to find it in Notepad++.

You still looking at the SKUs? If you are, 100 pastes sanely while 100KA adds the double double quotes.

Yeah, I have 11KA open.

I'm not seeing any newline or carriage return characters.

LOL

LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL

It's tab, in addition to newlines.

There's a tab character. And it's in this file.

And decisively not in 1175.

I amend the pseudocode thusly:

Who starred my lolspam as interesting? haha

@allquixotic Loss of mental faculties is worth a star IMO =D

So, let's summarize: (1) three different people have written you a program that more or less accomplishes your task in four different languages; (2) hopefully by now you've either accomplished the eCommerce input or you're about to do it; (3) in addition to solving your immediate query, we also discovered a nasty (lolworthy) bug in Excel through much exploration.

Who ever said Root Access was all about ponies, handcuffs and the malicious bending of sentient paperclips?!?!

@allquixotic Only Microsoft could do this to a man who otherwise writes technical documents.

@r.tanner.f And the sad part is, I have a Word and an Excel process actively running (and being used, more or less) for 40 hours a week, at the very least. And I used them even more in my college and interning days.

I've used these programs almost as long as the people who developed them, and I never knew about this behavior.

I started on Office 95.

Now we need to spread the word to the world, and it'd be awesome if we could do something like this in the answer in order to get some lucky SOB 4432 upvotes.

@KronoS: Updated the blog post because I think some copy / paste mistake happened with the link, also noted the start of the contest in the title and some smaller changes. Hope it's okay.

@TomWijsman perfectly fine

@nhinkle: Are you working on the blog post? Perhaps you can somehow manage to make the URL important in the community bulletin. (cc @OliverSalzburg)

If linking to out-of-site URLs is possible from the community bulletin.

I think the question needs to be about putting HTML in Excel, and the answer needs to be something about the Merciless God of Misdirection, The One Called "Clippy" (a reference to Root Access / SU in general).

@TomWijsman what do you mean? what blog post? the meta.su question or an actual blog post?

@Zach Naturally, the question should originate from you. I'll answer.

But I'd think some theme change on the site would work out better, but well, it's the first day, no worries....

@KronoS Once you're logged in... Introducing the Windows 8 Challenge

But well, no hurry, can also be tomorrow. Was wondering whether we could contribute to make it more awesome somehow, or to help if he's short on time, or ...

@KronoS Ah wait, I've catched up. Nevermind...

@KronoS @TomWijsman we're working on a blog pot

H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

Fourth DoA graphics card from Dell. Yay.

BANNER ALERT!

@TomWijsman cool!

I'm installing Windows 8 this weekend for the sole purpose of obtaining a Super User t-shirt =D

@nhinkle: There's also things on our profile, I just noticed.

Seems the tiles at the bottom of the challenge are anonymous.

Although yeah, those are big categories.