User talk:Plugwash

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I have a strong dislike for splitting up conversations if i have posted on your talkpage i WILL have it on my watchlist Plugwash 15:24, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

archives

• /archive1

Contents 1 Electronics 2 Transistor operation 3 PNG 4 Lossy data compression 5 Removal of discussions 6 Manchester vote 7 Moving Pages 8 FAT - "i don't belive this is correct" 9 Honeypot 10 Ken Kutaragi 11 Village Pump data loss 12 PNG's Not GIF 13 ISO/IEC 8859-* 14 Comment 15 Recent edit 16 who is that? 17 ASCII 18 Image:Polizia_di_stato.png 19 Wikipedia:Manual of Style (China-related articles) 20 Code pages 21 Images of "distribution boards" 22 Ohm 23 Caron/hacek vote 24 Fixing of RTL text on Scrabble letter distributions 25 What exactly I changed 26 UTF-8-MAC 27 CSS and mirrors 28 Tesla Suggestion 29 {{Major programming languages}} 30 from your userpage 31 Flag Template 32 Page move 33 Wikipedia:WikiProject Linux 34 Meth Mouth image 35 Domestic AC power plugs and sockets 36 That FAT 512 root dir entries discussion 37 Deletion of Template:8 bit charset comparison 38 PCI Express 39 "Pins" in the root canal

[edit] Electronics

Hi plugwash, I notice that you contribute to Electronics articles. Have you considered joining Wikipedia:WikiProject Electronics? That would be a good place to talk about the BJT control Snafflekid 23:53, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Transistor operation

We know about the relationship between base current and collector current. But the correct explanation is that the collector current is exponentially dependent on the BE voltage. See Bill Beaty's site. amasci.com. --Light current 00:34, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

exactly whereas that WP article seems to say the opposite that the current control is the real reason and the voltage is just a way of modelling it in other words it has it backwards! Plugwash 00:40, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Can you re-phrase your last comment please?--Light current 02:10, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] PNG

Sorry I didn't respond earlier to your question about PNG...I've been out of town for a while. Your supposition about my original interlace proposal is correct. I had experimented a lot with interlacing because the original Piclab was developed on a small 286 DOS machine, and had to be able to de-interlace GIF images that were larger than memory. --LDC

[edit] Lossy data compression

Please see my additions to the discussion on Talk:Lossy data compression. --Shlomital 22:32, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of discussions

If you don't want people to delete stuff from your talk page, then why don't you state it on your user page? Or is there some policy about this that I don't know about? --logixoul 12:56, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Apparently there isn't. --logixoul 14:53, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Not going to reply, are you? :-D --logixoul 21:13, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

All righty then, I'm not watching anymore. :p --logixoul 08:02, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Manchester vote

I noticed your comments on the City of Manchester page. Please vote about the Manchester - City of Manchester situation at Talk:City of Manchester#Straw poll. G-Man 20:58, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Moving Pages

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought I could only move a page to a new page that was not on the server. If it was there, I thought I got the admin message. All DONE. Moved George Kelly (gangster) to Machine Gun Kelly

Thanks! WikiDon 17:08, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] FAT - "i don't belive this is correct"

About your last edit to File Allocation Table. Do you have a source? AlistairMcMillan 15:36, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

From memory the mention of FAT sotring extended attributes in a large file was mentioned in the cygwin docs (in a cautionary note about turning on a feature that used them). The mention of filesharing for macs being only supported on ntfs was in the windows 2K (may have only been 2K server) help somewhere. I don't have exact locations though. Plugwash 15:39, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I've tested in Windows 2000 on moving a file with Macintosh Finder Info and Macintosh Resource Fork streams to a FAT32 drive and Explorer informed that the extra streams (and listed them) will be lost on the copy.

I never tested behaviour with EAs but ASAP I will install an OS/2 in HPFS and NT 3.51 and move some files with EAs to a NTFS drive and then to FAT drives with various versions of NT (3.51, 4.0, 2000, maybe XP a.w.)

Should you need me to test also behaviour with NT 4 about Mac resources? I think I can install it with SFM and a old MacOS 8.1 and do some testing.

— Claunia 16:56, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I've just tested and wrote a section about the ADS in FAT.

[edit] Honeypot

I like what you added. At the time of my honeypot I specifically notified Alan Brown, operator of ORBS, that he could test and list my system any time. The list of open relay addresses he published was the "aged" list, IP addresses that had been listed for more than 30 days. He theorized that some spammers used blocklists as a readily-available source of open relay IP addresses. These would be fully useful to send spam to recipients not portected by that list. If the block list is operated responsibly (my bias is in effect in this statment) it's no problem at all for the honeypot to be listed. My honeypot was actually also a server and I was a bit cavalier in what I said. Still, ORBS was so little used by the operators of the servers to which most of my users' email went that there were very few instances of legitimate email being blocked. It is far better for a honeypot ot have no valid SMTP function: then it's pure and easier to run. Being on that list increased the chance that I could block spam.

I got listed by MAPS, too, for announcing my honeypot (long discussion of what that meant left out.) I dealt with that by creating another server that was used as a smart host by my actual server: that other server's IP address never ended up on any list.

Listing entire subnetworks may be done, but it's way too harsh against a single open relay. In my opinion.

But, as open relay abuse seems to be a very small part of the current spam picture it's all pretty much academic, anyway. I know of one Jackpot site, and it mostly traps spam from Asian IP addresss to Asian email addresses. Perhaps operators of open proxy honeypots and zombie honeypots should heed your warning. The latter, in particular, may not need to care, as they may be in a block of IP addresses that would already be blocklisted just because of the nature of that block of addresses (e.g., dynamic.) They're listed either way.

Minasbeede 19:31, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ken Kutaragi

I'm requesting your opnion about this dispute. Lot of POV-Pushing, the article is currently blocked. --GroundZero 23:58, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

hmm i know very little about sony and i've never edited that article any particular reason you are asking me? Plugwash 00:03, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Village Pump data loss

A recent edit of yours appears to have nuked both my comments on other threads. I'm wondering... what happened? — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 22:54, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Such things have happened before when db slaves get out of sync i'm not sure if thats the case here though. Plugwash 23:17, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] PNG's Not GIF

I hope this is proof enough: PNG (Portable Network Graphics) Home Site

My personal recollection is that Tom Boutell came up with the name, intending both the recursive acronym for GNU-folk and the "official" one for the record. I suggested we do a lossy one as well to replace JPEG, which I called "PNP" for "Portable Network Photo" and colloqially pronounced "pinup", but that never caught on. --LDC 22:05, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ISO/IEC 8859-*

Why did you move all the articles to ISO/IEC 8859-*? ISO/IEC 8859-15 and other articles doesn't mention IEC at all, and I've never seen it used on the net with IEC. I question whether it's even pedantically correct to call something created by ISO, maintained by ISO/IEC, and now not maintained at all "ISO/IEC". More importantly, they're not called ISO/IEC in the Wikipedia pages, they're not called ISO/IEC by the IETF charset group, and they're not called ISO/IEC on the net. I plan to move these back shortly unless given a good reason otherwise, which would probably mean some evidence that this was discussed and agreed upon.--Prosfilaes 19:55, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

all i did was merge in a load of (mostly) stubs that basically said "iso-8859-? is the ianas name for iso 8859-? combined with the C0 and C1 control codes" and/or duplicated information from the C0 and C1 control codes article. the change from ISO 8859-? to ISO/IEC 8859-? was not made by me and i'd personally be happy to see them moved back. Plugwash 20:06, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comment

I cannot sufficiently comment on your reversion of WP:AUM without violating Wikipedia:No personal attacks. Lucky you. -- Netoholic @ 04:26, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

personally i have very little sympathy for you, you shaped that page through revert wars then convinced arbitrators to side with your interpretations. in the meantime you tried to implement it through revert wars which lead to protection making life difficult for those who wan'ted to edit templates. I just wish brion (who seems to have been the only one with sufficiant authority and knowlage to resist you) had got involved sooner. Plugwash 04:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent edit

Regarding this edit, can you provide a link to the discussion (or at least which village pump it's in and the name of the section it's under)? Thanks! —Locke Cole • t • c 14:49, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

it seems it either wasn't on the village pump or someones deleted it and i'm having trouble tracking it down. Plugwash 15:23, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Well if you happen across it, please let me know. It couldn't be the discussion at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css could it? —Locke Cole • t • c 15:25, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

got it MediaWiki_talk:Common.css#CSS_hack_reduces_accessibility.2C_confirmed Plugwash 15:28, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Ah okay, thanks! =) —Locke Cole • t • c 15:36, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] who is that?

Before you, um, got involved on WP:AUM, I don't ever remember bumping into you, but you speak about subjects that very few people know about. Who are you? Did your username get changed? Are you a sock puppet? -- Netoholic @ 20:38, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

nope not a sock and this is the only username i've ever used on wikipedia. What exactly are theese "subjects that very few people know about" Plugwash 01:51, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ASCII

Thanks for your good work on the ASCII article, especially on the list of external links. I've just suggested on Talk:ASCII that we drop the link to www.asciivalue.com. I would value any comments you might have. Chris Chittleborough 05:31, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Image:Polizia_di_stato.png

Would you like me to delete this image, now the discussion is over? ed g2s • talk 17:16, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Manual of Style (China-related articles)

Hi there! I noticed your edits to the guidelines. What is this "update to 1.5"? Does that mean that we could wave goodbye to those weird &1234#'s and simply type in foreign characters as they are, and people from around the world can still view them without distortions?

This Unicode issue is very confusing for intellectually challenged people who know virtually nothing about encodings (yes... that's me) and has led to many unnecessary, time-wasting conflicts among editors. *SiGh* I'm so frustrated =|

Thanks!

(btw, the language spoken by people in China is spelt "Chinese" :P) 199.111.230.195 20:24, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

In a nutshell yes you can now type chinese straight into the wikitext and it will be stored fine. Browser support should be pretty similar for either the entites or the characters used directly though there will undoubtablly be exceptions both ways. Most other wikimedia wikis were on utf-8 already but due to the way things were handled at the time and ens size converting en before the 1.5 upgrade would have been prohibitively time consuming. Version 1.5 of mediawiki got the final bits of infrastructure for converting existing text on demand in place and made some pretty deep changes to other tables meaning the conversion came essentially free as part of the upgrade process. Plugwash 20:33, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Ahhh... thanks =) 199.111.230.195 00:06, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Code pages

Hi Plugwash,

I just realized all articles on 8xx code pages (Code page 857, Code page 858, etc.) seem to say cps's lower 127 code points are the same as ASCII's, which, regarding the graphical characters, is not 100% correct - would you favor to correct this? I would. Bye, --Abdull 19:15, 19 February 2006 (UTC) (P.S. this comment is on my watchlist :)

Sure though i don't particuarlly like the curent layout of code page 437 etc either. i think we should show both grids for the 0x00-0x1F range and then describe where each of them fits in. Plugwash 19:54, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Like this?

	.0	.1	.2	.3	.4	.5	.6	.7	.8	.9	.A	.B	.C	.D	.E	.F
0.	NULL 0	☺ 263A or SOH	☻ 263B or STX	♥ 2665 or ETX	♦ 2666 or EOT	♣ 2663 or ENQ	♠ 2660 or ACK	• 2022 or BEL	◘ 25D8 or BS	○ 25CB or HT	◙ 25D9 or LF	♂ 2642 or VT	♀ 2640 or FF	♪ 266A or CR	♫ 266B or SO	☼ 263C or SI

Abdull 21:38, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Not bad though could do with a little tweaking for a more even look ;)

	.0	.1	.2	.3	.4	.5	.6	.7	.8	.9	.A	.B	.C	.D	.E	.F
0.	NULL 0	☺ 263A or SOH	☻ 263B or STX	♥ 2665 or ETX	♦ 2666 or EOT	♣ 2663 or ENQ	♠ 2660 or ACK	• 2022 or BEL	◘ 25D8 or BS	○ 25CB or HT	◙ 25D9 or LF	♂ 2642 or VT	♀ 2640 or FF	♪ 266A or CR	♫ 266B or SO	♬ 263C or SI

[edit] Images of "distribution boards"

I've got some. Want any of them? 68.39.174.238 08:35, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

IE, a pic of one with the front on, since I think you were the one talking about duplicate images on that page. 68.39.174.238 16:41, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Sure provided the person who made them is prepared to release them under [license acceptable to wikipedia] etc

BTW if you log in then you can upload them yourself. Plugwash 17:10, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Yea its my board and I can do WHATEVER I WANT WITH IT AHAHAHHAHHAH (Well, the image(s) anyway). 68.39.174.238 00:17, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

? 68.39.174.238 22:53, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Never mind, I got someone else to upload the pics. 68.39.174.238 01:25, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ohm

There's a vote at Talk:Ohm (unit) to reinstate as the primary topic after a move from Ohm. Have an opinion to share? Femto 16:56, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Caron/hacek vote

There's a vote on Talk:caron where the article should be if you're interested. +Hexagon1 (talk) 10:07, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fixing of RTL text on Scrabble letter distributions

Thank you! Soo 15:50, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What exactly I changed

Hello, some users of German Wikipedia wanted to use the animation in personal Babelboxes on their user pages. User:Dudenfreund reported trouble with this combination. The .gif was displayed in incorrect size, and the animation was stuttering. I don´t know the exact reasons for the trouble until today, but I know some settings which may cause strange displaying in some browsers (especially the Internet Explorer). So I changed the method of pixel removal (I hope I translate that correctly) from "never" to "background", the number of repeats from "65535" to "never ending" and I increased the speed a little bit. The first change was (I think) what caused the trouble. The second setting would have made the animation stop after 65,535 repeats, now it will rotate forever 8-). And the 3rd change is one for the eyes, it runs faster now, so the rotation looks smoother.

All changes were made with Ulead Gif Animator 5.0. If my changes caused any other trouble, feel free to revert, but please report me, so I can edit my .gifs with a maximum of compatibility. The rotating earth is displayed now in some babelboxes like here. I hope I could help you. And sorry for my bad English, I´m just a stupid German

Owly K

Hmmm... I don´t know gifsicle, but I compared the first version and your edit. I think, the changes you made were the reason for the trouble. But I´m not sure. I think we should try and look what will happen. Owly K06:01, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] UTF-8-MAC

Thank you for fixing up the UTF-8-Mac area of the UTF-8 article. I knew somewhat what was going on there and knew it was important enough to be mentioned, but you definetly seem to understand it better then I do :D - The DJ 18:41, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] CSS and mirrors

Actually the bit about CSS and mirrors (as seen in WP:HIDE) was a result of a comment by Brion VIBBER. I guess many mirrors use their own CSS and not Wikipedia's (OTOH, installing an extension like m:ParserFunctions is a lot less controversial; and templates such as {{qif}} are copied along with all the other data AFAIK). I think Brion's quote is on Wikipedia:Don't use hiddenStructure. —Locke Cole • t • c 18:01, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Mirrors that just copy everything and dump it into a fairly plain mediawiki install will be fine. As will those that keep and eye on wikipedias css and merge changes as needed. OFC there may be mirrors in between that use thier own css without watching whats going on but i can't imagine that covers all mirrors. Plugwash 18:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tesla Suggestion

Hi, Plugwash. I'd just like to remind you to not bite the newcomers. I understand that the edit war over Nikola Tesla's nationality is stupid, but it's nothing worth losing your head over. Elitism over whether someone does or doesn't have a registered account and talking in caps will only provoke people into being stubborn. Maybe it's time to think about contacting an admin about making the page semi-protected. --Rocketgoat 20:38, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Right if its a genuine newbie who doesn't understand that this is a colaborative editing site thats one thing. But this person clearly knew that it was and that he could get away with bossing us arround and pushing his pov. Plugwash 21:00, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] {{Major programming languages}}

You might be interested in Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2006 May 25#Template:Major_programming_languages. Cheers, —Ruud 21:51, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] from your userpage

I am from INDIA...my doubt is "why is that a Ground or earth pin is of greater diameter when compared to that of Phase or Neutral"

If found the answer to this plz mail me to odaysuresh@lancogroup.com.

thanking you. Odaysuresh 12:16, 19 June 2006

I don't know for sure why BS546 did it that way but i'd guess it was to make sure that under no circumstances could the ground pin go in the wrong hole.

[edit] Flag Template

Regarding your idea, how would you go about doing that in the template? You're absolutely right, and I think it's a great idea. Any way I can help? Uris 17:09, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Page move

Another proposal to move Caron is currently underway. Since you participated in a past discussion of this, you may be interested. Jonathunder 17:26, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Linux

I thought you might be interested. Best wishes, Samsara (talk • contribs) 17:53, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Meth Mouth image

Hey, I saw you removed the meth mouth image from the dental caries article. Meth mouth is an example of rampant caries. The same thing is the case with xerostomia-related caries. With this in mind, do you think it would be ok to put the image back up? (and coincidentally, I took that picture from one of my patients.) :) - Dozenist talk 21:57, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok sorry didn't realise that put it back if you wan't but at least label it as such. Plugwash 11:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok, will do. I did not want to touch it until I heard from you, and so I will put it back up. - Dozenist talk 20:28, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Domestic AC power plugs and sockets

I see you've been active at Domestic AC power plugs and sockets, which is up for a featured article review. Detailed concerns may be found here. If you can help us address the issues raised on the FAR, perhaps the article's featured status can be retained. Regards, Sandy 13:20, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] That FAT 512 root dir entries discussion

Hi, you had started the discussion on the FAT page, but have not replied recently. Are you convinced now that it's possible to have more than 512 root dir entries in a FAT disk? If so, what argument convinced you? -- Tempel 09:07, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The discussion so far hasn't convinced me either way, it appears to me that it is possible to generate a disk with more entries (and for that we can cite mkdosfs's man page) but it also appears that windows may have problems with such disks. Plugwash 11:10, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion of Template:8 bit charset comparison

Hi,

I tagged Template:8 bit charset comparison for deletion. Thought to notify you, in case you have then worked on it without committing your changes. —Gennaro Prota^•Talk 19:55, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Go ahead and delete it, i don't remember exactly what it was going to be but i belive it was something that involved conditionals and my idea for creating conditionals didn't work out. Plugwash 22:19, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] PCI Express

Can you explain your removal of the ref in the PCI Express article? I looked at the ref and it seems both accurate and authoritative to me. It also directly covers the claim it's attached to, although to be honest that claim is non-controversial and doesn't really need a ref anyway. (respond here, I'll see it) Maury 20:34, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Our article states "PCIe transfers data at 250 MB/s per lane. With a maximum of 32 lanes, PCIe allows for a total combined transfer rate of 8 GB/s." which to the best of my knowlage is correct and is consistant with PCI-e being intended as a superior replacement for PCI, PCI-X and AGP. The linked articles figures are all lower than ours by a factor of 8 which I am pretty convinced is wrong (and someone else posted on the talk page to point out). Plugwash 20:42, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

So is this a bits/bytes issue? That was not clear. Here is a better ref then: [1] Sadly it too mixes bits and bytes at random. BTW, it does disagree with the highest speed, slighly, putting it at 6.4 MBps. Maury 20:55, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Picking that new reference apart it is frankly terrible.

"Although this sounds limiting, it can transmit at the extremely high speed of 2.5 Gbps, which equates to a burst mode of 320 MBps on a single connection." <-- first screwup, quoting the value which has not been 8b10b corrected in bytes and describing it like that is highly misleading.

"This encoding explains differences in the published spec speeds of 250 MBps (with the embedded clock overhead) and 200 MBps (data only, without the overhead)." <-- it gets worse, he's now gone from not applying the 8b10b encoding at all to applying it twice!

The 6.4 GBps figure in his table seems to be a result of him counting both directions for an x16 slot (our figures are the bandwidth in one direction which is more realistic since symetric traffic patterns are rare) but then applying 8b10b TWICE (as mentioned above).

Finally despite being on the site of a well respected computer company note the disclaimer at the bottom of the page it really seems like this was written in a hurry for some tutorial series.

The real problem is that few wikipedia editors have the access needed to make proper cites (proper cites defined here as citing the actual standards which are unfortunately in many cases pay to access) but there is huge pressure from the wikipedia cabel be to have cites for everything. The result is that articles end up full of cites from sources that are full of inaccuracies and in many cases no more authoritive than wikipedia itself! Plugwash 21:24, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Well this seems odd to me. Don't you find it strange that otherwise authoritative sources like Emulex and IBM would be so full of mistakes? Maury 14:39, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Well i've never heared of Emulex before but as for the IBM article given the disclaimer at the bottom which essentially implies that its the unchecked work of one person it doesn't entirely surprise me that the content is extremely poor quality. Plugwash 21:07, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Pins" in the root canal

Please see Talk:Crown (dentistry) for an answer to your question. DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)}