Forum Talk:Content

Pat Palmer's User Talk Archives

Archive 1, 4-27-07: User_talk:Pat_Palmer/Archive1

Unix-like

Yes, I've had the pleasure of working with several variants of Unix in the past, actually. Thanks for the note, though :-) --Joshua David Williams 21:41, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Your JIT image

Pat, what did you create

with? It looks a lot more professional than my

. I'm running Linux, and the closest thing I've found to making professional-looking diagrams is maybe OpenOffice Draw. Eric M Gearhart

Re: "He he. That thing is a patchwork."
Yes mine is too unfortunately. I started work on it during a slow shift at work with MS Paint (when every link we monitor is green it gets boring in Iraq...) and finished it in the KDE equivalent of paint, Kolourpaint. It's a big hack too unfortunately. I will try my hand at recreating it in maybe OO.o draw or GIMP or something. Also I'd like to add more descriptive icons to each layer, such as Tux on the OS layer, Duke on the Java layer and something that represents "programs" on the "Actual Java Program" layer.
In reference to Paint Shop Pro, I've read about Paint.NET, which is an open source "better Paint than Paint." Have you tried it? If I can I'll try and get it working in Mono on Linux :/ Eric M Gearhart

If you're rested....

..feel free to take her away. There is clearly something obvious I am missing in the stacked if statements. We could revert back to only having two groups but I am pretty sure from the checklists i have seen we will need to be able to accomodate three different workgroups. Chris Day (talk) 22:59, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

I think i figured out a partial solution. I say partial since the group2 parameter must be used before the group 3 one, but i think we can live with that. See what you think. Thanks for any input and tweek/ rewrites. Chris Day (talk) 23:31, 26 April 2007 (CDT)

Number vs. Numeral

I see you've changing "numeral" to "number" in a number (no pun intended) of places. I wonder what the rationale is: my undefrsgtanding is that a numeral is a symbolic or graphic representation of a number. So, it makes sense to call 110 the representation of 6 (thought of as a number) as a binary numeral. The dictionary definition seems to allow not only "digits" but groups of symbols that, taken together, represent numbers as numerals. Greg Woodhouse 13:46, 28 April 2007 (CDT)

Random comment: I responded to your comment about "human-readable" on Greg's talk page. - Greg Martin 15:58, 29 April 2007 (CDT)

Images

Hi. We appreciate very much your contributions to the Citizendium. I was hoping you could help clear up a matter about the images you recently uploaded. They are lacking clear copyright and source data and need to have it as soon as practicable to avoid deletion. To fix the problem, please review the images you uploaded (click on "my contributions" at the upper-right to re-trace your steps or see the links I added) in light of Images Help—Copyrights. If you need additional help, just ask a constable or leave a message on my talk page and I'll be more than glad to assist. — Stephen Ewen 21:49, 30 April 2007 (CDT)

Thanks!

for changing my external links to references in the "Spelling reform of 1996" sub-section - I apologise for my laziness/ignorance of CZ markup! Wahib Frank 11:11, 12 May 2007 (CDT)

Switch

I undid your change of switch to electronic switch on the OSI seven layer model page, but not in Quantum mechanics (where I think it's right on target). See the (OSI) talk page for an explanation. Greg Woodhouse 11:40, 12 May 2007 (CDT)

Telecomunications

It sounds like we have some common interests. My masters is in mathematics rather than computer science, but I have a longstanding interest in telecommunications, and it's good to see someone with a similarr interest. Aree you planning on working on articles in this area? By the way, I work primarily on the infrastructure components of the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs health information system (yes, I'm one of those people), and so you can probably imagine that networks and telecom are no small issue. I guess I've just missed mathematics, and so I've mostly been working on articles in that area. Greg Woodhouse 14:25, 12 May 2007 (CDT)

History of computing article - ready for approval?

I just came across this article, and it's looking very good. I'll try and look at it more closely this afternoon, but I wonder how much you have on your "to do" list for this article.

Pat, my apologies on the strike-out sections. I emotionally made those edits and I regret it. --Robert W King 10:01, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

Central processing unit article

Just a heads up that I've gone ahead and nominated Central processing unit for approval. (You appear to be the only person that has worked on the article recently). I think we still need to clarify its WP status, but it looks like an excellent introductory article. Greg Woodhouse 11:30, 14 May 2007 (CDT)

Problematic Images

Pat, Image:Pentium_II_front.jpg and Image:I8088.jpg, uploaded from WP Commons, lack documentation that they meet CZ's two-pronged test. See Help:Images#Images_from_Wikipedia.2C_Wikimedia_Commons.2C_Flickr.2C_etc. and kindly fix this matter by either acquiring the real names of the Wikimedia uploaders, or by finding alternatives, perhaps at Flickr where a great many people have their real names in their Profiles. Let me know. Thanks! Stephen Ewen 05:02, 16 May 2007 (CDT)

Pat, that you took the photo at http://flickr.com/photos/alexandre_f_j/364725756/ as public domain is completely understandable. But on flickr, "this photo is public" only means it can be viewed by the public. If you look close, that image is copyrighted, all rights reserved. As flickr, go to their search but choose advanced search and there is a place to search only Creative Commons licenses photos. If you do not find such a photo, just email the person at flickr and ask them to release the photo under a Creative Commons by-sa license. MOST people will say yes. Also, before you use the photo, you have to go into the person's profile. Is their real name there? If not, will they tell you in private email so you can actually attribute them as such? Stephen Ewen 12:01, 16 May 2007 (CDT)

Timeline Format

Pat, what do you think of this? Feel free to comment. I'm still trying to find out how to make it wordwrap. Perhaps some CSS/Wiki god could make a Template:TIMELINE. --Robert W King 13:17, 21 May 2007 (CDT)

Retrieving old versions of an article

Pat,

I'm sure you know this, but you can retrieve old versions of an article from the history tab. And I certainly did not intend for anything I said to be interpreted as "permission" to delete your work! Greg Woodhouse 21:10, 23 May 2007 (CDT)

WP checkbox

For the article Design Patterns I noticed that you have removed the "from Wikipedia" checkbox every time. I thought it was unintended so I restored it, because in article history it says it was from WP. Regards. If it was indeed from WP, please do not remove the checkbox again. Regards. Yi Zhe Wu 21:23, 24 May 2007 (CDT)

The flag should remain removed. Please see Talk:Design Patterns for an explanation. Pat Palmer 21:38, 24 May 2007 (CDT)

Sorry for overlooking that :-). However, just a question, the rules say even one line from WP should be tagged, but there are exceptions around. I'm kinda confused... Yi Zhe Wu 21:37, 24 May 2007 (CDT)

Re: Perl closure

Hi Pat, basically I agree that perl_closure isn't worth a stand-alone article. OTOH it is not really central to perl and I didn't want to clutter up the main article more than it already is. The reference in the Perl article is actually a negative one, it talks about unreferenced lexical variables going away, closure would be an example for an exception (well, a "hidden" reference actually). If at all, the link would probably fit better in the part about anonymous subroutines, which I wrote as an afterthought. So I am leaning to eliminate the whole thing rather than expanding the stub, or even including it in the main text. But if you want to give it a try, that's fine. Gruss aus China (nicht mehr lange), --Georg Heidenreich 12:32, 9 June 2007 (CDT)

Welcome back

Welcome back.  :-)  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 23:09, 23 August 2007 (CDT)

Thank you for the welcome!Pat Palmer 14:11, 26 August 2007 (CDT)

Things can't be workgroupless

Just so you know, Topic Informant Workgroup is not an approving workgroup. Thus, Larry Sanger is now without a workgroup that could approve it.[1]  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 02:05, 24 August 2007 (CDT)

Stephen, thus it seems some workgroup needs to adopt the article. I'm not sure it belongs in Computers...although Citizendium and Wikipedia are internet projects, I see Larry's skill set as political, social, sociological. Still, if you think it ought to go back in Computers, feel free to add it back.Pat Palmer 14:11, 26 August 2007 (CDT)

Closure move

Hi Pat, I've moved "Closure mathematical" to "Closure (mathematics)". Could you also please help setup a disambiguation page for the term "closure" and perhaps name your computer science article "Closure (computer science)" for the sake of uniformity? TIA. Hendra I. Nurdin 20:29, 17 September 2007 (CDT)

See...

...this.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 22:21, 20 September 2007 (CDT)

Big O and little o notations

Hi Pat. I just updated the entries on big O notation and little o notation in the mathematics section and thought you may wish to include them as computer science articles as well, or perhaps add something to them. Thanks. Hendra I. Nurdin 04:04, 23 September 2007 (CDT)

Thank you! I have done so.Pat Palmer 11:31, 23 September 2007 (CDT)

Apropos of...

...absolutely nothing, I love reading other people's user pages.

How versatile you are!

Aleta Curry 16:42, 29 September 2007 (CDT)

Software engineering article

Pat, I noticed your comments in the forums regarding "history of..." sections in computing articles and am currently having a discussion about the very same matter in the talk page for the Software engineering article. I would welcome your input on this (so the discussion doesn't go on too long and get out of hand), and also on any other aspects of the article you care to comment on. I'd like to try and get this article to an approvable state as soon as possible. Many thanks. --Mark Jones 21:07, 22 October 2007 (CDT)

---

Forums?

The forums do not work for me, many tries over several days always time out. I'm on a moderately aful connection, but not that bad. Everything else seems to work. Are the forums down? Does the Great Firewall of China block them?

Main thing I'd want to post is a link to User_talk:Sandy_Harris/Permission. That gives us access to quite a lot of material on cryptography and network security. I plan tomine it myself, but others might want to as well. Sandy Harris 16:44, 24 December 2007 (CST)

old archive

Do you consider this old temporary archive still useful? And what about this one? Please let me know (I feel like deleting it). Cheers, Aleksander Stos 12:14, 7 January 2008 (CST)

Thanks! I'm "tidying up" our database. Aleksander Stos 01:05, 8 January 2008 (CST)

Party! You're invited!

Pat!!! Hi — Your neighbourhood Mistress of Ceremonies here. Don’t forget to come on over to the party and sign in at one of the categories! Aleta Curry 16:44, 9 January 2008 (CST) say ‘hi’ to me here.

Core articles

If an important article was created after Sept 25, but not because of the core article initiative (e.g. NP complexity class), should it be counted? Also, can you give me your perspective on which articles I've put in each category (first 33 / next 66 / rest)? Warren Schudy 22:07, 9 January 2008 (CST)

I'd like to add a separate entry for the theoretical RAM model (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_model). I dunno why I wanted to put that in the same article as physical RAM, but on second thought they should definitely be two separate articles. The RAM model deserves at least 2 points, I think, because it is a theoretical model very similar to real computers. How about adding RAM_model as a 2-pointer, reducing Alonzo Church from 2 points to 1 point and removing SMTP? Warren Schudy 22:59, 16 January 2008 (CST)

Change made. BTW, it turns out the theoretical model RAM stands for Random Access *Machine*, so I was really off-base merging that with the Random Access *Memory* artcle! Warren Schudy 09:18, 17 January 2008 (CST)

Fixing this and that...

Yeah, the only problem is that I spend so much time fixing this and that that I don't have any time to work on content! There are a whole bunch of computer, computer networking and computer history articles I want to write, but I keep getting diverted! J. Noel Chiappa 22:00, 20 April 2008 (CDT)

Disambiguation

The proposal I did on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jnc/Disambiguation (see also it's Talk: page) - covers it pretty well, I think. There's a recent thread on the forums that covers it, too - look towards the end of the thread. J. Noel Chiappa 13:23, 21 April 2008 (CDT)

Hi, I've finally gotten around to writing a draft proposal. You can see it at CZ:Proposals/Disambiguation mechanics‎; comments appreciated. J. Noel Chiappa 12:00, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

Pulling up a cup of coffee ...

thanx for the welcome, very nice to meet a friendly villager. I'm rather new here and i'm enjoying doing my little bit here and there ... Christopher J. Reiss 19:01, 21 April 2008 (CDT)

Your work today

Pat, Just a note saying that your work on History of computing is noticed.... it's coming along nicely! Eric M Gearhart 00:12, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

Redirects

Hey Pat. I see you have been making some disambig redirects. When you move a full page cluster, you have to move the metadata and approval pages as well. Also, there are still a lot of pages that are directing to the disambiguation page when you first move it. I think those are best edited by hand, because they require context that a bot can't provide. I'm happy to do those, but I don't want anything to fall between the cracks. If you want someone to help move pages or redirect redirects (funny as that sounds), just hit up my talk page. Thanks! John Dvorak 16:01, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

you'll like this....

http://www.technospot.net/blogs/9-old-computers-ads-you-did-not-see/ Stephen Ewen 22:14, 7 July 2008 (CDT)

A question about questions

Pat, our group is writing about speech recognition. This is one aspect of a subject referred to variously as Computer Speech, Computer Speech Technology, Voice Recognition, and Natural Language Processing. If I want to ask a question about structure and where we should be writing, do I put it in the forum, or send it to the mailing list? Samuel C. Smith 08:33, 21 July 2008 (CDT)

Convergence of communications

Your comments on smartphones reminded me of several things, including that definitive form of documentation:

ATM: solving today's problems...tomorrow MPLS: ATM without cells

I have a half-article, half-catalog called convergence of communications, which I do think can help people talk about applications, rather than getting overly focused on platforms, which may be marketing-speak anyway. Comments welcome.

Over at the Other Place, too many people were still trying to force obsolete OSI terminology into new articles. I try to help see we don't fall into the same traps here. Interestingly, some of the less publicized ISO work, such as the Internal Organization of the Network Layer, helps quite a bit on understanding where things like ARP fit. I did start a stubby address resolution protocol theory article, although it's fairly specific now rather than dealing with the details of logical versus media addresses.

Often, we don't think enough about historical context. Too often, people are focused on what they heard in the last quarter. Now, it's long been a theory that each generation thinks it invented sex, but never considers that if that is indeed the case, how did they get here? Recent generations seem to think they are the first to grow up with the Internet, but again fail to asks "but how did the networks get here?" Tom Standage's book, The Victorian Internet, shows how a surprising amount of what we think is Internet culture was present in 19th century telegraphy.

Howard C. Berkowitz 00:49, 22 July 2008 (CDT)

Hi!

Thanks for your suggestion -- I went ahead and left a note on that editor's talk page.—Nat Krause 00:41, 23 July 2008 (CDT)

EZ formatting

Hi Pat,

I moved your CIS course homepage to CZ:CIS 700 Special Topics 2008 in order to go conform with the addresses of other Eduzendium course entries. I also modified the EZarticle templates such that you can now link back to your course homepage. For an example, see Speech Recognition. Cheers, Daniel Mietchen 10:25, 6 August 2008 (CDT)

From your friendly neighbourhood mistress of ceremonies

Hi Pat!

I see you signed in at The August Party.

I enjoyed reading Grounds for Sculpture. I didn't even know that New Jersey *held* a State Fair--fancy!

I completely forgot that you said you were leading an intersession Eduzendium course. Hope it's going well.

Do join us on Wednesday September 2nd for what I hope will be a very active party with music, music, music. Theme: "My Favourite Band" (or, 'ensemble' or 'group' or 'orchestra' or 'singer' or 'recording' or...? Aleta Curry 00:27, 8 August 2008 (CDT)

Ditto on the praise for the Grounds for Sculpture article. Our friends in Cranbury introduced us to that excellent site when we visited them last New Year's Eve. Our son especially liked the "exploded motorcycle" sculpture (we're not sure if he's going to become an artist, an engineer, or both) in the building with the coffee shop in it. Bruce M.Tindall 19:30, 10 August 2008 (CDT)

Never mind world hunger...

But will AJAX, with some DOM or other, end RAM hunger? (although I may be running into more CPU than RAM problems on my desktop)

I'm now scared to write a military article about the luckily obsolete MIM-3 Nike Ajax surface-to-air missile, the ancient warrior, or, for that matter, the cleansing powder.

Howard C. Berkowitz 21:38, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

Fine with moving text

Pat,

I spent over five years in OSI protocol research, where our leadership kept telling us that OSI was the answer. As far as I can tell, no one ever defined the question.

There is absolutely no need to have a cautionary comment about the quality of data in the introduction about what essentially is a technology article. On the other hand, I think we both realize that enthusiasm was making certain of these technologies solve world peace, give a brain to each pop starlet, and show us the way around the speed-of-light limit.

It concerned me, however, that the technology was being thrown at problems, and the output described as bright and beautiful, yet there was absolutely no concern about the quality of the input data, the choices of normalizing and combining different data sources, and the inferences about the utility of the output. Google Maps is a good example of a source that people are throwing at problems, without necessarily understanding the discipline-specific constraints on the data. A side benefit of these examples is that I wrote a good deal more about geospatial intelligence.

Nevertheless, I find mashup to be a ill-defined solution in search of a problem. While I still really can't define it, it appears to be some flavor of what used to be "enterprise dashboards", when they stopped being "executive information systems," but wrapped in a lot of web technologies. I saw quite a few of all of these dazzle nontechnical executives with essentially meaningless data. I've also seen medical and military and network management multiple-sourced displays that very thoughfully address the issues of making justified correlations and not exceeding the inherent accuracy and precision of the information. Sometimes, a good tool is distinguished not by how much information it produces, but by how much irrelevant or distracting information it can remove from raw sources.

Several questions about mashup still seem unanswered. There's a good deal about how it does things, but very little about the cognitive function it plays, how it differs from ideas such as dashboards, and, in general, why it is needed other than it's a new capability.

Even ignoring the assumptions about XML being a gold standard for transfer, I remain concerned that anyone assumes that they can happily combine syntactically compatible data sources, with no mention of ensuring their semantic commonality. Call it normalization or postprocessing, but to derive meaning, some preprocessing usually is needed for combining, and, certainly with graphic data, postprocessing to remove artifacts. I thought I was hearing a flavor that Google Maps would displace geographic/geospatial information systems, when they only loosely deal with the same problem space.

Howard C. Berkowitz 10:11, 16 August 2008 (CDT)

Image Change

Hi Pat. I change the older image with this one that I made from scratch.

I had editing the image that I downloaded from the internet. It was not copyrighted, but still in order to be safe, i have uploaded a new image that I just created.

Thanks.

Please join us for Biology Week!

Hello Pat, I am giving you this personal invitation to join us this week for Biology Week! I hope you have some time in the next few days. You're a Citizendium Biology Author and we need authors as much as editors here to get involved. Did you know that there are over 200 biology authors here? Yep! Please join us on the wiki and add or revise biology articles. Also, please let your friends and colleagues who are biologists, biology students, or naturalists, know about Biology Week and ask them to join us, too. Any way you can help make it an event would be most welcome. Think of it as a Biology Workgroup open house. Let's see if we can kick up activity a notch! Thanks in advance! --Larry Sanger 14:25, 22 September 2008 (CDT)

The first Biology Week took place here from Sep 22-28, 2008.

case sensitive names

I'm not sure if it is possible to have a title with a case sensitive name. Certainly you will need a trick such as different font. Let me know if you find a solution to the problem. Chris Day 13:49, 2 October 2008 (CDT)

I just cleared out vim for you. Chris Day 13:54, 2 October 2008 (CDT)

Alternative medicine

These comments are from Howard Berkowitz; I'm moving them here from Talk:Complementary_and_alternative_medicine

The {{subpages}} template is designed to be used within article clusters and their related pages.
It will not function on Forum Talk pages.

I am archiving this article and its talk page and starting us over

Here goes. For future reference only, here is:

• Complementary_and_alternative_medicine/article_archive
• Talk:Complementary_and_alternative_medicine/archive.

Alternative medicine

Below are Howard Berkowitz' comments on my recent archive to Complementary_and_alternative_medicine, which I am moving here to unclutter the field there:Pat Palmer 00:00, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

A proposal for a fresh start: integrative medicine

Pat, to some extent, I've tried a new start in integrative medicine. I will, to some extent, defend the problem that people are seeing different practitioners, who could work together, but there is no coordinated care. A conventional physician must know any herbals or dietary supplements the patient is taking, or, variously, a drug could be prescribed and cause a deadly intercation, or laboratory results are completely skewed. If a patient chooses to use an herbal preparation, and the medical prescriber knows it, different choices can be made.

"Complementary" is not, to reasonable practitioners, a bad word. "Alternative" is a problem, when it is seen as a substitute. integrative medicine is a paradigm of cooperation. For example, I've been involved with several multiphysician groups that either have in-house acupuncture, manipulative therapies, or routinely cross-refer. I lost a close relative because an "alternative" practitioner decided that his particular discipline would cure everything, and missed basic signs of major internal bleeding. Pain management clinics are very frequently multidisciplinary, which, perhaps, is another way of saying complementary. Physicians often don't know how to teach visualization, meditation, and other techniques that they agree are worth trying in chronic, or even acute pain. I'm as bioscience oriented as anyone you will find, but if I get a headache, I use some learned visualization techniques first -- and take conventional medications if they don't work in 15-20 minutes. I might decide to take acetaminophen and then use relaxation and visualization.

As a term of art, multidisciplinary tends to involve multiple defined medical specialties and subspecialties, where complementary simply refers to things not in a core medical curriculum. Some of those things, under that definition, are as straightforward as art therapy, therapeutic massage, and manipulation. There are some exciting synergies: certain manipulative therapies can only be done with a patient under anesthesia. That may look like a patient going into an operating room with the anesthesia equipment, then a chiropractor, working with the anesthesiologist, does the manipulation. A friend of mine is a dual-boarded (family and emergency medicine), but also is osteopathically trained and can do the manipulations himself.

Actually, I rather like the couple of paragraphs above, and may take them to integrative medicine. I would like to invite everyone to work in that framework, because the whole idea of integrative medicine is about collaboration. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:51, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Howard, would you please move this debate to MY talk page and give people some space here to try this? I'd very much appreciate it. You and I can talk offline about some of these issues.Pat Palmer

:-) Rather than hiding...

There are Domain Name System and Anycasting. Now, yes, there are alternative roots for DNS, which does sound rather herbal, doesn't it?

As I've mentioned, I have been working on some individual complementary (meant descriptively, not pejoratively) medicine articles. Indeed, I discovered we didn't have an article on nursing. Nurses aren't just physician extenders; there are some particular disciplines and training approaches that complement a medical approach. I've just started to address how much antipathy wa generated by the term "nursing diagnosis" replacing "nursing assessment", but, while there are politics involved, there are certain different but valuable cognitive processes in contemporary medicine and nursing. Howard C. Berkowitz 00:09, 27 December 2008 (UTC)