Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2011 September 11

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September 11

HTML Scrubbed

I wrote a note to a private posting board and when it was posted it was not printed but had a note saying an HTML attachment was "scrubbed". When I clicked on the link provided my note was there but in the HTML format and very difficult to read. Why is this done and what does "scrubbed" mean? FCVCO — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.67.241.116 (talk) 00:21, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Is it possible that you tried to post an attachment, and that it was "scrubbed" (i.e., discarded) and replaced with HTML, because the board didn't accept attachments? --Orange Mike | Talk 00:44, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for writing....I didn't attach anything to my email - I just sent it written directly on the email page. All of the info in my email I sent is there, its just in the HTML format with all of the editing symbols which I don't understand. One sentence requires scrolling over and over to the right and with all the ></...\[] etc. its just very difficult to read my post! Why would something be scrubbed/discareded anyway? (fcvco) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.67.241.116 (talk) 00:59, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Websites that accept text from users will have some kind of limit on which HTML tags the user can place on the page, for security, to prevent the use of excitingly dangerous tags like, I don't know, <object> or <script>. If you literally send emails to this page, using an email client, then it sounds like the problem is that your email client is configured to send HTML rather than plain text, and the page isn't prepared to show any HTML formatting. Scrubbing might mean the conversion of the functional tags to non-functional, visible versions.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:46, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Problem with Whirled website

I tried to go onto the website known as Whirled (http://www.whirled.com/), but when i did, there was no playing screen. Logging out then logging back in didn't work, refreshing several times didn't work, and updating my Flash player didn't work either.What is wrong and how can I fix the problem? I am using a Windows 7 for this. Strangely though, the playing screen successfully loadad on my Windows XP, but i don't want to use XP because it runs too slowly. 72.235.221.120 (talk) 04:24, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

You said you tried "logging out and back in". Does this mean a full reboot ? If not, try that next. StuRat (talk) 15:52, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

blocked web pages

I requested some blogs to send their blog pages by giving my email address. But I don't receive any updates. why? some say it is due to spams. How can I overcome this problem. Thank you175.157.100.140 (talk) 06:48, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

It may be that your e-mail program's spam filter is blocking the e-mail from the blogs. If your e-mail website or program has folder named "Junk Mail" or something similar, take a look inside to see if the blogs' e-mails are inside. If they are, it is possible to set up a whitelist to tell your e-mail program to always deliver e-mails from those blogs to your inbox. Comet Tuttle (talk) 15:48, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

What exactly is an "atomic move"?

I'm assuming it has something to do with graph-based traversal algorithms...

This originally came up when I was looking at an algorithm for solving solitaire games, where it was mentioned but without explaining what one was... http://cards.wikia.com/wiki/Patsolve?cb=8733 . It makes use of atomic moves Acoustic visions (talk) 17:33, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Google for once hasn't been any help, I can find several questions if some programming language can move something atomically, but can't find anything that actually specifies what an atomic move is compared to a regular move, and so on.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Acoustic visions (talk • contribs) 17:32, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I think the term come from artificial intelligence, not graph algorithms. From web searches, it seems that an atom move is one that's not decomposable into simpler moves in the game involved. I.e., it's not a maneuver that consists of a number of fundamental moves. Does that make sense? --108.36.90.144 (talk) 17:55, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

The search results you found about "if some programming language can move something atomically" are probably people asking about low-level atomic operations in concurrent systems (to do with linearizability and transactional integrity). That's really quite a different meaning of "atomic" than the game/AI sense you're interested in. -- Finlay M^cWalterჷTalk 18:08, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

That(so some degree) reflects how useless Google was with some of the results... I think the first response suggesting it was artificial intelligence was correct, but I still have no idea what an "atomic move" is...

The closest answer I've been able to find is on this pdf: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~sgs/robots/my.stuff/robots.project.pdf and it still doesn't actually say what an atomic move IS... Acoustic visions (talk) 19:24, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Somewhat more examples are listed here, http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/3127/dissertation.pdf but there still isn't a "general" definition of what an atomic move in Computer Science / Artificial Intelligence actually is... Examples: "A single atomic move for this design is also simple: a transition of one module from its current lattice location to an adjacent lattice location." "Hence, an atomic move for this design is less simple: it involves a single module making an attach or detach operation (to connect to another module or break a connection) as well as a possible motion within any of that module's degrees of freedom." "An atomic move for this category would then involve a module detaching from the collection, moving through the environment to a new location outside the collection, then reattaching at that new location." "As described earlier in Section 2.1.1, with lattice style modules an atomic movement would be to move from one discrete lattice location to another adjacent location."

And so on... Acoustic visions (talk) 19:32, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Our article Atomicity disambiguates to three related meanings in computing. Does that help? Nimur (talk) 04:47, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Seeing that you don't seem to think you have a satisfactory definition, I'll tell you what I think atomic moves are about. Someone who's an expert in AI can tell me if I'm mistaken.

In AI, there's a type of problems called planning problems. In a planning problem, a particular configuration of the "world" is modeled as a state in a state space. The goal of the problem solver is to bring the "world" from an initial state to a goal state. There are types of "moves" available to the problem solver. Each "move" is called an operator. Applying an operator will bring the world from one state to another. The state space together with the operators implicitly define a directed graph, with the states as the nodes, and the links labeled with operators. Expressed in these terms, the goal of the problem solver is to find a sequence of operators that will bring the world from an initial state to a goal state. Each (application of an) operator is an atomic move, in the sense of a fundamental operation.

Consider the problem of solving a Rubik's cube. Each configuration of the cube is a state the world can be in. The atomic moves in the game consists of turning one of the 9 possible "slices" 90°, either clockwise or counterclockwise. The goal of the game is to find a sequence of moves that will bring the cube to a goal state. A lot of the solution algorithms that you can find are expressed not in terms of atomic moves, but routines that are sequences of atomic moves. If your solver works exclusively with those (non-atomic) routines, the search problem may be easier and it may find a solution quicker, but the solution found is not necessarily the shortest. On the other hand, if you have a solver that works only with atomic movies, the search space is big and you may not be able to find a solution in a reasonable time by searching.

Does that make sense to you? --108.36.90.144 (talk) 04:43, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Malware in link

I want to report malware at sites linked within an article. I'm not sure where to do this. The page is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu . There is a link in the main body and also one in the external links that points to the site http://www.chindogu.com/ . This page has malicious code that creates popups and attempts to get the user to execute code. It is very obvious. Please edit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.90.63.93 (talk) 23:47, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

 Done --Σ _{^talkcontribs} 23:48, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I haven't encountered any popups or malware at that site. ¦ Reisio (talk) 00:11, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

None for me either. And [1], [2], [3] & [4] (not direct link) don't report any problems either and Google doesn't mention any problems over the last 90 days [5]. AGF here I suggest the OP do a major scan of their computer ASAP. Nil Einne (talk) 03:19, 12 September 2011 (UTC)