User:Erik Zachte/Archive

I did the "Juliana" rewrite and am working on a complete revision of Prince Bernhard but if you like, you can save me the work and I will do his daughter Irene instead...DW

Well, thank you for adding so much information about LPF. I'd much rather have somebody knowledgeable writing an article in good but imperfect English than somebody who knows nothing writing an article in perfect English. :) DanKeshet

Hi. About the , before you put it on too many pages -- jpg is the wrong format to use for line images: the image looks a bit grey & blurry. It would look much cleaner as a PNG, plus you could use transparency so it will blend on any colour background. -- Tarquin 16:24 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)

Changed File:DirectSum.jpg into File:DirectSum.png It is not transparent yet though. Erik Zachte

transparency is not vitally important, it's a nice touch we can add later, without having to edit any pages since the system will treat the same filename as a new version of the image. -- Tarquin

Why are we doing this sort of thing at all? It looks horrid! — Toby 10:25 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)

Apparently, some browsers can't see the HTML entity. I think it was Axel who recently changed the "equivalent" symbols on the Modular arithmetic page to plain yucky "=" for the same reason. We need to get that TeX-to-PNG proposal up & running :( -- Tarquin

I realise that there are some problems with character entities on old browsers that infect all of the math pages. But IMO the inline pictures look quite jarring. (Depending on images for things that aren't images is also theoretically distasteful.) Another alternative is to use "(+)" and "(x)" (or "(×)"), which are fairly standard in ASCII environments. Indeed, I see that I used "(+)" on Abelian category once (although I got rid of it just a few hours ago as I rewrote that page). How would that go? — Toby 17:26 Oct 31, 2002 (UTC)

I agree that images are not optimal. But &oplus; is even worse. We are not talking about old browsers. I use XP - Explorer 6. Erik Zachte

That's odd. I'm checking IE 6 for Unix now, and I see that it has a few inexplicable empty spots where some characters are unsupported -- &oplus; among them. (Not that I disbelieved you, but I wanted to resolve the discrepancy with my memory that IE 6 supported this stuff, and to see if it was an operating system issue.) That's discouraging. Well, then I agree that &oplus; is bad, but I'd still rather use ASCII than images. I won't put in any more &oplus;s or &otimes;s, but I'll probably still change your images to ASCII representations when I edit articles containing them -- hoping that this doesn't piss you off. (I won't be tracking the images down and changing them, however; I don't have that kind of ruthlessness ^_^.) — Toby 13:56 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

Sorry for not responding sooner, but I see your problem with the Zuiderzee Works map has "solved" itself. If I recall correctly, there appears to be a problem with IE5 and Win2000 in Wikipedia, which would also explain why it did look fine in IE5 and Win98SE when I tested it. Scipius 14:55 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

Opps! Thanks for finding the 'missing element'. --mav 19:09 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)

More on my talk page. --mav 00:14 Nov 4, 2002 (UTC)

Also some ideas at talk:Periodic table. --mav 02:32 Nov 4, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks for checking the element pages for errors. I had planned on doing this after finishing the entire perio table but since other xx.wikis are copying the tables it is good to do this sooner rather than later. --mav

The language links on [1] are broken (backslash instead of slash). The same problem precludes the JavaScript navigation from working, the reference to the script file contains a backslash. Strange that someone with your hacking skills would create backslash-references -- Windows user? Speaking of hacking skills, integrating something like gnuplot to generate GIFs from the data would be mighty cool. —Eloquence 03:46 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

All links except for the zoom buttons work now. I don't think that Microsoft did anything right by ignoring backslashes -- this inevitably leads to broken pages on all systems that abide by the standard. Regarding plotting, IMHO gnuplot-generated GIFs look fairly professional (example), I can send you some script templates to work with if you want. I'm not familiar with gplot.—Eloquence 14:46 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Could you add a wordcount to the Wikipedia statistics? This would be useful for Wikipedia:Size comparisons, because most other encyclopedias use a word count. If you do, remember not to count punctuation -- you may simply want to feed the articles through wc instead of inventing your own counting routine.—Eloquence 13:24, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

Wordcount: I'll see what I can do. A quick search on Google tels me wc is a Linux tool, not a perl function. I'm developing under Windows, so I'll have to do something myself, I guess. I'm wondering anyway on what target wc is run: if it counts rendered text that's ok, but probably it counts the source, including wiki and html tags. I'm also considering to change my criteria for mean article size and use visible text instead of raw source, that is exclude wiki and html tags, hidden part of links, headers (visible, but not really containing unique information). I used these criteria for my alternative article count column already.
By the way: I added charts (some more to come). Erik Zachte 23:55, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

You can get wc and other Unix tools via Cygwin -- it's in the textutils package. This will prepare you for your conversion to the light side. I'm sure there's something equivalent on CPAN as well.

The charts don't work in Mozilla -- seems to be a JavaScript thing. —Eloquence 00:03, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)

Turned out to be an obsolete cached javascript file at E's PC. Erik Zachte

I wonder how many Wikipedians know there is a vote going on.

It was advertised at the village pump, on recent changes, on wikipedia:list of ongoing votes, and on some relevant talk pages... but there's a limit to how much you can advertise before it's spam. :-/ Do you have any suggestions? Martin