Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Rich Farmbrough (talk | contribs) at 19:53, 1 April 2012. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

I will generally answer here. R.F. Warning: a therefore can become a wherefore (George Orwell)

Template:Mirror me

IMPORTANT. Due to the volume on this talk page I archive semi-manually, a 2 day archive time is not fast enough to keep it clear and is also too fast to allow me to deal with every thread completely. If you feel that a thread has been archived too soon please copy it back here and note that you have done so both on the thread both on archive and here. Thanks. RF

• This page has been viewed 383949 times. Plus one when I wrote this, plus you looking at it now.

From SignPost

Approximately 3% of editors account for 85% of contributions to the project, according to the statistician, and participation among this group has declined "even more sharply" than the active registered userbase in toto.

Funny that. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 9 September 2011 (UTC).

Quote

User:Kotinski - for whom I have always had respect.

...find something more productive to do with my life than continually trying to present rational argument to people who aren't interested, in an environment where only the drama-mongers and edit-warriors are rewarded. ... I'm feeling a great sense of relief that I won't be spending tomorrow or the next day arguing with morons about trivia.

I know exactly what he means. The "real life" equivalent to how I feel, I suppose, would be an engineer who is working on various jobs and is constantly interrupted by a couple of guys with Home Depot tool-belts (and probably propeller caps) telling him the advantage of triangular slotted screws over hex drive, and occasionally emptying his boxes of screws in the gutter, replacing random screws with the preferred variety, and calling the police, saying "someone is vandalising safety structures with dodgy screws"... And the police believing them.

Rich Farmbrough, 22:55, 26 March 2012 (UTC).

Blocked

I have blocked you for a period of one month. Period is probably moot - the talk at AN is of opening a request for arbitration. If this happens, I expect you will be unblocked to participate.

The automated sockpuppet category creation is a truly monstrous failure of end-user (ie the community) testing. The community neither needs nor wants those categories - mostly if it needed them, it created them as it went along. You have succeeded in badging editors as socks/masters who were actually cleared, and you are connecting IPs with sockmasters, which is in breach of the privacy policy...not to mention that since the cases are older than Noah, the IPs are almost certainly being used by some poor innocent by now. --Elen of the Roads (talk) 23:34, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

That is a severe case of bollocks. The user pages are in the categories regardless of whether text sits at the usercategory page. If the sock-tagging community is lackadasical in removing sock-tags, then that great big enormous huge carbuncle on their user page is the thing that is connecting the IPs with putative sockmasters in breach of hows-your-father. Good grief Charlie Brown! Rich Farmbrough, 23:45, 30 March 2012 (UTC).

Think of it as a change in routine, and a change of pace...

The block may be a blessing in disguise.

This may give editors who have had a hard time keeping your attention the opportunity to converse with you on a more meaningful level (i.e., not rushed).

Why would we want to?

Because you are an expert on many aspects of Misplaced Pages.

This vacation gives you valuable time to share your expertise and experience with other Wikipedians.

Personally, I have many questions for you... – The Transhumanist 03:55, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Hey

I just took a look at your user page, to see if it provides any info on the types of questions you would be able to answer, and I noticed you're from London. Half my family tree lives around there.

I haven't been to London since 1997. Almost got killed jaywalking 3 times, due to looking the wrong way before crossing. I guess it's not "jaywalking" over there, because it's legal — for you it's just crossing the street. I think it's cool that you have the right to cross the street. Here we are subject to getting ticketed by the police if we cross anywhere other than at an intersection.

By the way, that you drive on the other side of the street over there makes it easy to spot foreigners. I noticed many of them looking the wrong way.

I also learned that clotted cream tea is not tea with clotted cream in it. :) The Transhumanist 04:46, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Mm, worth going to Devon and Cornwall just for the cream teas. They are good elsewhere but that is the home of the cream tea. Rich Farmbrough, 16:15, 1 April 2012 (UTC).

Incidentally the Magna Carta had a provision for access to the highway I believe. Other rights, of course, have been eroded massively over the last 20-30 years. Notably extra-territoriality, retroactive legislation, double jeopardy, right to silence, the rights of the second chamber and just about anything that might be construed as "fundamental" has been thrown to the wolves of political opportunism. The few that have been saved have been as much as a result of the political opportunism of the opposition of the day as principled resistance by backbenchers. Of course historically it was ever thus, but the extremism of recent events, considering that we are not in the straitened circumstances of previous eras, is telling. Rich Farmbrough, 16:49, 1 April 2012 (UTC).

What is the most advanced operation you've used AWB for?

And how did you do it? The Transhumanist 05:38, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Hm, well I did use it for checksum calculations and ISBN hyphenation. Basically I wrote a perl program to write a program to write the rulebase.The hyphenation was just a large number of rules, but the calculations involved implementing a partial arithmetic parser in regular expressions, including full addition and multiplication tables modulo 11 (and possibly 10 as well). Rich Farmbrough, 16:03, 1 April 2012 (UTC).

What do your bots consist of?

I.e., what are they made of (what languages, programs, etc.)? The Transhumanist 05:01, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

I use perl and AWB. For example the main bot runs on perl (because I was being blocked for using AWB), but if I have a one-off job it is often quicker to use AWB. Even there though I use perl to write some of the rules. Rich Farmbrough, 15:58, 1 April 2012 (UTC).

Wow, that's a lot of edits

Still number 1, I see. And closing in on the 1,000,000 edit mark. The Transhumanist 05:25, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but blocked... one could hypothesise a link, between people who do very similar edits to me, and call for me to be blocked using Freudian analysis, but that would be unkind (if funny). Rich Farmbrough, 16:04, 1 April 2012 (UTC).

Can AWB be used to remove redlinks from a list?

(For example, see: Outline of Mozambique)

How?   The Transhumanist 05:44, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Kinda.

Use the list maker to make a list of "Links on page (redlinks only)".

Save the list to a text file.

Replace the carriage returns in the text file with "|". Copy the content.

Create a normal rule that replaces \\] with $1

Run it against the page in question.

Rich Farmbrough, 16:13, 1 April 2012 (UTC).

Do you have a perl script...

...that opens a file, does something to it, and then saves it under a new filename?

I need to see how that is done. The Transhumanist 05:51, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Er... so I think we covered this? Something like.

OPEN FILE, "<:utf-8" , "oldfile";
while (<FILE>){ $text .= $_}
CLOSE FILE
# do some stuff
$text =~ s/e/z/; #  replace e with z to even up letter usage across the universe a little
OPEN FILE, ">:utf-8" , "newfile";
print FILE $text;
CLOSE FILE

Rich Farmbrough, 16:08, 1 April 2012 (UTC).