User talk:Neilc/Archive1

Neil - hello and thanks for your appreciated spelling corrections to my page on D.D. Sheehan. Just wonder how you came across it. Niall. User:Osioni.

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Ok. That makes sence. --RuiPaulo 11:03, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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Why did you removed Programming Tools section from Thread (computer science) ? It wasn't that pointless, you know... --RuiPaulo 11:03, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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Thanks for some of your recent excellent edits on various poker articles, esp. the holdem article. I have said on many of the talk pages for poker articles that there's some very misleading (sometimes totally bogus) advice here; hopefully we can improve this in the near future. Revolver 23:14, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! Yeah, I noticed your comment after making some initial changes, so I decided to go back and make some more changes. There is a lot of room for improvement in the poker-related content here on Wikipedia -- I'd like to see it improved as well. Neilc 00:44, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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The use of endl is redundant because the output buffer is flushed when the program exits (ISO/IEC 14882:1998 §3.6.1, §18.3), so there is no reason to explicitly flush at every output; it only makes the program slower.

Having said that I didn't realise I'd reverted your edit to change it back to endl, I just assumed I'd meant to change it and forgot. I don't have a particular preference either way, so if you want to change again, feel free (but I'd rather see example 3 changed to use \n myself). —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 21:31, 2004 Jul 27 (UTC)

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Please feel free to do as many external links as you like—there are several thousand left to do and the sooner it's finished the better :-) —Kate | Talk 03:44, 2004 Jul 31 (UTC)

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I'm not sure what spellings you actually changed in the "gender role" article, but please be aware that when an article is started by someone using British spellings, we are supposed to stick with that set of conventions. Thanks for helping with the article. P0M 01:24, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I went back to your version and restored it, minus the last section which I had replaced for the reasons mentioned in the Discussion page. Sorry that I upset you, but you had marked an edit that appeared to have changed virtually every paragraph as "minor", and I couldn't see what you had actually changed. (My browsers all fail to distinguish new and old versions by color, so I have to read things line-by-line.) I did fix all the spelling errors by copying out the text and then running it through my spell-check editor. So if you corrected only spelling errors we should have come out at the same place. Now, reading what you wrote on my talk page, it appears that you made substantive changes that I failed to see. P0M 02:08, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

After I restored what you had edited I ran my spell-check software again and discovered the same 3 items that had needed changing in the version before your edit, so I'm even more puzzled. I thought you wrote that you had corrected spelling errors. I find it hard to pick out the edits I just made myself, using Mozilla on a slightly decrepit IBM, so it is hard for me to know what changes of yours I ought to have gotten when I reverted to the version you edited. Hopefully it is all there now. P0M 02:21, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

for what it's worth

I switched over to Ms Explorer and checked. For what it's worth, I don't think I ever lost any of the edits you made (even though I went back to a version before you did your edits) because I repeated your work. There were eight misspelled words that I either preserved unintentionally from your edit (sometimes the editing software does funny things when files are saved), or repeated and then totally forgot about. Either way, they all got fixed. I did, however, find a few more mistakes, which I wouldn't have noticed otherwise, and fixed them too. Anyway, I hope that all's well that ends well. P0M

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Alekhine's Defence

I started it. Feel free to expand.--Sonjaaa 20:11, Sep 5, 2004 (UTC)

Jónas Hallgrímsson

Hi Neilc: i notice that you have been making some fine edits to the Jónas Hallgrímsson article. Here is [perhaps] another one that you can do. i can't. In the poem just added there is a reference to 'Snorri". This needs to be linked to Snorri Sturlusson, but i don't know how to do it without adding the whole name into the poem. On another note, I leave New Mexico in three days to drive to Toronto for a hospital visit. I'll likell go right past you and shall wave as i do. Carptrash 14:52, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Khmer Rouge

I hate to bother you, but would you mind making your changes to the last copy of the article Khmer Rouge that I edited? User VeryVerily is waging edit wars all over the place and stubbornly reverted about ten batches of changes made by me and one or two other editors. Shorne 12:09, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

BSD licensing

Hi,

I noticed that you reverted my edit on the BSD licensing scheme. You mentioned that the content was factually inaccurate; could you provide specifics on that? I think that a comparison of the BSD license with other licensing schemes would be a valuable addition to an article section about BSD licensing. My understanding is that the licensing differences are very important to companies adapting BSD and Linux (such as Apple), and to a lot of users. If there are factual problems with what I wrote, I'm glad to have them fixed, but removing the material without discussion makes it hard to make things better.

Thanks, -- Creidieki 01:23, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

80.58.0.109

Damn! You're on top of that spammer, aren't you? Good work. – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 20:38, Nov 5, 2004 (UTC)

External links

Hi Neilc. I've been doing some External links fixes, and I'm having the problem where about every day at least one of the original aricle authors always come back and revert my changes. Any suggestions on how to deal with this besides just reverting it back and explaining? Marknen

External links

Good job with the external links project. It'd be nice if there were some built in style tips that appeared when you preview an edit that uses a non-standard style technique. Something like "It looks you have the stub tag in the middle of the article. That should really go down bottom." - Lifefeed 23:15, Nov 28, 2004 (UTC)

OAS

It has long been decided that only the continent template belongs at the bottom of country articles. Other templates should go on the foreign relations page. - SimonP 03:05, Nov 29, 2004 (UTC)

Unification of the different Wiki fixup projects?

Greetings TB, Neilc, Sietse Snel, and Erik Zachte! I'm posing this message on each of your four talk pages, asking you if you're interested in unifying the different Wiki fixup projects (User:Topbanana/Reports + User:Neilc/External links + User:Sietse_Snel/Fix_common_mistakes + Wiki Syntax Project + Erik's list of HTML problems that he emailed me a subset of).

Currently, we all have different pages at different locations listing different types of problems. What I'm wondering is whether we and the Wikipedia would all be slightly better off if we had one location that contained all of the outstanding problems from all of these different projects. It would be the ultimate clearing-house for problem-finders like us to list problems, and for contributors to go find list of things that need fixing, and fix those problems.

Consider the benefits:

• One page address for all problems is easier to remember, and we'd set up a super-short shortcut (e.g. "WP:WF") that was very easy to remember.
• It's easier to avoid duplication by seeing what other people are already doing - for example, I've started searching for redirect problems, only to find the Topbanana was already doing something similar. I didn't mean to do this, but I simply didn't know it had already been done.
• It evens out the workload - currently one person's problems all get finished, and another person somewhere else has a new batch that's suddenly done and ready for fixing - and it's hard for the contributors to know where to go to find outstanding problems.
• If we have one page with everything on it, we could list it as a place for newbies to start out doing productive stuff when they're new to the Wikipedia - and by seeing and fixing the types of problems that came up, they'd be that much less likely to make those mistakes themselves.
• There's a momentum that builds up from having a continuous supply of problems, rather than having a stop-start supply. If problems stop coming, contributors stop checking - they like to see new problems, and feel a part of community project that's getting somewhere and doing something useful.
• With one central repository, if you go on holidays or disappear for a few weeks or contribute new problems very infrequently, it doesn't matter - someone else will still be doing something useful while you're off doing other stuff.
• New developers could easily add problems they found to the page, and indeed would be actively encouraged to do so. Rather than a series of independent and competing efforts, it would be one combined effort, with people actively encouraged to expand the scope with new systematic searches for problems (such as Erik, who out-of-blue sent me a list of HTML problems a conversion script of his had found - this is the exactly the type of thing we need to actively encourage, because the whole Wikipedia is that much better off for it).
• It would make it easy for the contributors to know what's out there - There may be other fixup projects already running that I don't know about, and it would be really good to include them - I haven't omitted anybody deliberately, so if there are omissions, it just proves my point that currently it's hard to know what's out there.
• As the number of articles in the Wikipedia grows, the need for some systematic central repository of problems grows - and the pace of growth shows no signs at all of slowing.

What do you think? Are you interested? I'm completely open to your suggestions - and to get us started, can I just throw some ideas out there:

• It would be good to have a WikiProject location (and it does NOT have to be "Wiki Syntax" - it could be "The SuperList of things that need fixing", or "Wiki Fixup", or any other name you like).
• All problem-finders would be listed in a special credits section (and for the record I'm more happy to be the last name on the list :-) ) - so that everyone still gets recognition and credit.
• It would be good to have the current list of locations redirect to the new central location, wherever it is, so that any pre-existing links still work.
• Some basic criteria for the scope of the new project would be good (something like: Covers the whole English Wikipedia; Has lists of problems; The list of problems should be generated by some type of automated process - e.g. software or database query - which ensures that it's systematic and repeatable; The problems listed should be simple to fix, so that the barrier to entry for contributors is low; And it would be good if when contributors fixed problems if we could ask them to put a link in their edit description that pointed back to the central location).

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe it's a bad idea. I'd really like to think it could work. Maybe it's a good idea. You tell me.

P.s. To save lots of different messages on different pages, can we please have one location where everybody can speak their mind? How about Topbanana's talk page ?

All the best, -- Nickj 07:11, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Might I suggest, being the nosey sod that I am, the project talk page for maximal coverage? --Phil | Talk 09:32, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)

Trust Fund Manager

Although Trust Fund Manager needs cleanup, or possible merging with another article, it does not appear to me to meet any of the speedy deletion criteria. Why did you feel this article should be deleted? - RedWordSmith 04:25, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)

Iraq-9/11 Link

Hey. I just wanted to discuss some things about the Condoleezza Rice article. I think there needs to be some designation from rhetoric Dr. Rice says, and actual facts. Just because she perpetuates a belief by the Bush administration that Iraq had some connection-- or even effect-- on the attacks on my hometown does not make it true. At first it was in the name of WMDs, and now this is. Although many people in the U.S. do believe such a link exists, the article should note that there are many that do not as well. I defend the words I used ("hypothetical" and "controversial") to describe this link, because anything otherwise would make wikipedia just like the other printed encyclopedias out there. Since there has been no real work done to prove to disprove a substantial link between Iraq and 9/11, I think language should be used to indicate so. We may just have beef over semantics, maybe you can explain it better? --Howrealisreal 18:52, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for getting back to me. In your response, you reference your own logic concerning the 9/11-Iraq link that I feel speaks volumes as to why we should revise or include another sentence in the Condoleezza article. You claim: Sadam's government in the Middle East was dysfunctional and thus allowed Islamic radicalism to flourish, but I can argue that you are entirely wrong. You should remember that the Baath party was operating as a secular state, with religion at a secondary position to faith in the dictator. Aside from a hatred of America, there is no other common ground between Islamic extremists and Sadam, and most likely extremists would be against Sadam's government for his reign. You claim that this topic is not controversial, well perhaps it might not be in Canada. Here in NYC we take 9/11 very personal. This has nothing to do with if you are a Republican or Democrat, it has to do with accurately documenting a current phenomenon. There is, undoubtedly, almost a majority of people here in the U.S. that believe in a link between Iraq and 9/11, but they do so not because they have spent the time to research it, rather because they have taken the word of the Bush administration. If they had spent some time to check the facts, they would see that neither side really has any substantial evidence to make a claim for or against a connection. If you feel that you are serving out your duty as an objective historian by spouting out propaganda, you should realize that sometimes you need to be critical in order to be neutral. You claim that "any reasonable reader will see the quote as Rice's opinion, no more and no less", but as National Security Advisory her words take on a greater impact. You are right that she outright says that "Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the actual attacks on America", but just like your faulty logic, the end of her quote (that you conveniently left out) states that Iraq lead to the circumstances that caused 9/11. I would like to add to the end of the section in question, something to the extent of: "Although many people in the U.S. believe in such a link, there are also many that do not." It's not silly, it's called fair. --Howrealisreal 00:14, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Here's what I think the case is: I think that Dr. Rice is a very smart woman who uses ambiguous language so that people like yourself find every loophole in her language to argue every angle possible as devil's advocate. If you can't read your own response and see how much of a stretch you take... You say that because Saddam's government made Islamic radicalism popular, there is a connection to the same train of thought that is responsible for 9/11. By your same reasoning, the U.S. and Israel would also be connected to the rise of Islamic radicalism. How come we don't see the same level of intervention into these places like we do in Iraq? I would really prefer that you leave my contribution to the article until you can find proof that Saddam's Regime specifically popularized Islamic radicalism, and especially toward the U.S. --Howrealisreal 01:27, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I am sorry if I come across as confrontational. I agree that I get overly passionate about certain things like this. You say that you hope that "the neoconservative notion [of] the best way to make progress against Islamic radicalism is utterly common knowledge," and it is-- I don't doubt that-- but there is a BIG difference between common knowledge and common acceptance. You misunderstand me when you say that I'm imposing qualifications on your edits, rather I am just asking you to back up what you believe. You claim that Saddam gave rise to Islamic extremism towards the United States, but how? You claim that "within most circles, [you] doubt [Condoleezza Rice's] statement would have raised any eyebrows," but who else, by your own admission, besides neo-conservative/liberal war hawks believes it? I agree, support for the War on Terror transcends both political parties, but that doesn't mean that it is correct. To conclude this issue, the NPOV policy clearly states "that we should fairly represent all sides of a dispute, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct." I don't think my latest edit implies that either side is correct, but without it, the article would fail to be fair to me and the viewpoint that I represent. Thanks for this wonderful debate. --Howrealisreal 02:02, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You say the function of the article is to document "Rice's belief in a fact, not the fact itself," but you contradict yourself where before you admit that what Rice says is not concluded to be fact: It is a belief. While you are given the right on wikipedia to make your claim that her belief is valid, I also expect of you to let me have an equal right to express my belief that represents a viewpoint that disputes her belief. What is the harm of including an additional take on the situation as indicated the NPOV policy? Jimbo Wales is right, we should write about what people believe. My edit documents one belief, that a "majority of Americans do believe in the link," but also notates, in fairness, that others no not believe in this. If anything, by removing my edit, you would be violating the very quote from the founder that you use to justify your case. It's okay, I don't think you are stubborn. --Howrealisreal 04:43, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

• Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
• Multi-Licensing Guide
• Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk) 19:10, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

The Humungous Image Tagging Project

Hi. You've helped with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax, so I thought it worth alerting you to the latest and greatest of Wikipedia fixing project, User:Yann/Untagged Images, which is seeking to put copyright tags on all of the untagged images. There are probably, oh, thirty thousand or so to do (he said, reaching into the air for a large figure). But hey: they're images ... you'll get to see lots of random pretty pictures. That must be better than looking for at at and the the, non? You know you'll love it. best wishes --Tagishsimon (talk)

Your Edit to Itanium

Please try to write in proper English sentences. Having added text to the Itanium entry a couple of days ago, I'm now having to correct the errors you introduced into my paragraph. Timharwoodx 09:02, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Enjoyed your presentation

Hi Neil, I enjoyed your PostrgreSQL talk at LCA2005 on Friday afternoon; I'd never really realised how much was involved in parsing SQL queries, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. It was sort of bizarre knowing of someone only from their stuff on the Wikipedia, and then seeing this whole other DB technical side to them! I would have introduced myself and said hi, but between the time I knew what you looked like and the end of the conference, I only saw you once when you looked pretty focussed on your laptop, so it seemed intrusive to bother you at that point :-( If you'd put your picture up on your user page, you would have given me a head start (of course, I haven't done that either, so I'm not really in a position to comment!). -- All the best, Nickj (t) 08:47, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

GC and type safety

Hi Neilc, I've reworded the type safety article using your suggestions. I reworded it to say that dangling pointers across structurally different types is the problem. I think GC must still be mentioned, because that's essentially the only solution widely used to solve this problem. I've made the article speak of the generalities, such that I hope you agree with the current wording, but I also think we don't need to beat around the bush and contort ourselves away from even mentioning "garbage collection". For example, for learning new concepts it can be really helpful to people to see an example they are familiar with. Perhaps we could add a paragraph that lists other ways the cross-type dangling pointer problem can be avoided. Also, the Pierce quote is quite definitive, and is even more strongly worded in favor of GC than the wiki article itself. MShonle 18:26, 14 May 2005 (UTC)

Charles Fortescue

Hi Neilc: I agree that Fortescue should have his own biographical article but right now all the info I have doesn't even make a good paragraph. He must have an interesting life, to come from York Factory to working for Westinghouse in the U.S. The Queen's link I though was interesting because he was in the first graduating class of electrical engineers from the Queen's program.I plan on hitting the U of M library this week to see if I can find more IEEE historical papers (the IEEE Web site says they exist but I haven't paid for the extra acess to get them on-line). Could you put up with the present situation for a few days till I can get a little more info? --Wtshymanski 05:45, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

3rr

Please refrain from undoing other people's edits repeatedly. If you continue, you may be blocked from editing Wikipedia under the three-revert rule, which states that nobody may revert an article to a previous version more than three times in 24 hours. (Note: this also means editing the page to reinsert an old edit. If the effect of your actions is to revert back, it qualifies as a revert.) Thank you. --W(t)

Well, I have been discussing the issue with the anon user who keeps trying to insert his edits into the John Laughland article, on that article's talk page. I think his version of the article is blatantly POV, but he continues to revert my reverts. Given the 3 revert rule, what is the right way to handle this? Should I just let the current version of the article be the anon user's version, and discuss the issue?

Anyway, my apologies for violating the 3-revert rule -- I had thought this would be a reasonable exception, but obviously not. Neilc 02:49, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Your work on keeping things NPOV is appreciated, but the only exception to the 3RR is vandalism, as defined on the wikipedia page on it. Anything else and it would become too easy to game. Your best bet in cases like this asking for help reverting, either by leaving a note for a friend who happens to be editing, or by using WP:RFC, or if things get really unpleasant, WP:AN/I. For now, I've reverted as even though I'm not quite clear on which (if either) version is NPOV, big un-edit-summaried replacements and deletions are bad. I'd encourage you to keep trying to engage a dialogue about the changes and merge both versions into one that's acceptable for everyone. If all else fails, try Wikipedia:Dispute resolution. --W(t) 03:00, 2005 Jun 1 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions; I'll work on trying to produce a version of the article that satisfies everyone. I agree the current revision is pretty bad as well, so there is definitely room for improvement. Cheers. Neilc 05:33, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

3RR

Hi Neil, I see that you and User:83.157.170.54 both violated 3RR at John Laughland. I haven't blocked you because you stopped reverting after Weyes' warning, but this is to let you know that if you violate it again on this or any other page, you're likely to be blocked without further warning. Please try to reach consensus on the talk page, and consider asking for page protection to stop revert wars in future, rather than risk being blocked. Cheers, SlimVirgin ^(talk) 05:43, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Question

Hi there. A quick question if I may. I'm a quite new to Wikipedia and noticed on a recent edit that in the edit summary you typed (->Books) on the page Garry Kasparov. Just wondering if you could explain how you do the '->'. Thanks. User:Forbsey37 13:53, 05 Jun 2005 (UTC)

lots of edits, not an admin

Hi - I made a list of users who've been around long enough to have made lots of edits but aren't admins. If you're at all interested in becoming an admin, can you please add an '*' immediately before your name in this list? I've suggested folks nominating someone might want to puruse this list, although there is certainly no guarantee anyone will ever look at it. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:43, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Hash tables - removing my edit

Hi Neilc, OK, you are correct, there is no such thing as "near constant time" in the O-notation. But the only sensible consequence of that is to state the correct complexity of hash tables, taht is O(k) (k being the key-length) and not O(1).

I just didn't know how to garcefully say, that any performance motivation for Hash tables along the lines of O-notation is typically wrong and O(1) is not the correct complexity no matter how often it is written down in books or web-pages.

As i am new to Wikipedia editing, it would be nice to find an agreement on how to explain these facts to the wikipedia user curious about hash tables.

We can also discuss these matters via mail, if you like: i underscore see at macnews dot de

Well, hash tables are (average-case) constant-time with respect to the size of the hash table, which is what people usually care about. Assuming that the hash runs in linear time (which isn't necessarily the case!), then sure, they would be O(k) where k is the key length. That's worth mentioning, but I don't think it's that important -- we're usually concerned with describing how the performance of the hash table changes as the size of the table grows, not as the length of the key grows. Neilc 12:28, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

C macros

On the XOR page you said in an edit comment "fix macro definition -- do { ... } while (0) is required for multi-stmt macros, other minor fixes".

I don't think that's true. If you have multi statements, call it "...", then a "{ ... }" is sufficient. Any place a "do" can occur you can add a new compound statement (i.e., the {}'s don't need to be part of a control construct). MShonle 18:44, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Krag-Petersson

Hi. I noticed you did a bit of spellchecking on 'my' article on the Jarmann M1884. If you're interested in old rifles (which I assume, since you did take the time to correct an article on an old Norwegian rifle), you may be interested in the article on the Krag-Petersson, currently up for FAC at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Krag-Petersson. Your comments and feedback will be greatly apricated.

Thanks for your time, WegianWarrior 11:56, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Helpfull? Man, I'm in your debt - while my spoken english is pretty good, my written english shows I'm not a native =) If I can ever give you a hand, just let me know. WegianWarrior 03:51, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Neil: The 'nuts'

I have no written reference. However a poker channel I watch regularly attests the explanation about how the expression 'having the nuts' came about. Personally I find it satisfactory.

PostgreSQL

Thanks for the MVCC comments. There has been some work on PostgreSQL support in MediaWiki but the person who did it hasn't really worked on it for a year or so and it's not usable with the current MediaWiki version. Would be good to see it (and support for all other significant databases) but it probably needs someone who wants to use it in real production systems to implement it and make sure it scales as well as the MySQL database side does. If it's something you find interesting and want to use, go for it! :) All it lacks is the person or people. Jamesday 21:18, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it's being actively developed and works with current code, although the additional UTF-8 strictness in 8.1 breaks a few things because it has been expected to cram a lot of non-text stuff into text columns (just as mediawiki does on mysql). The code is on pgfoundry and hasn't yet be submitted to the main codebase, perhaps in an attempt to keep mysql from hiring the folks working on it! --Gmaxwell 15:51, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Bitmap indexes in PG

I noticed in Comparison of SQL database management systems you recently made an edit "PostgreSQL 8.1 does NOT implement bitmap indexes; in-memory bitmapping of indexes is really an unrelated technique that happens to have "bitmap" in its name". I don't think this is exactly true because there is a GiST implimentation of bitmap indexes [1]. Since it's not yet in the main distribution, I've left it as No but I've ammended the footnote. It does bring up a question of how to handle features that are not in the main distribution in such places, since it doesn't seem fair to punish PG for being modular enough to keep some things out of the main distribution. --Gmaxwell 15:51, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

That's sounds reasonable. From a brief look at that site, I'm really not sure why you would want to use GiST to implement bitmap indexes: GiST is a framework for implementing hierarchical (tree-based) indexes, which a bitmap index is not. I haven't looked at the code, though. I'm also not aware of anyone using that code in production, or of any plans to merge that implementation into the core distribution (there are some folks working on a real bitmap index implementation, but that would be in 8.2 at the earliest). Thanks for the link. Neilc 16:51, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

It's amusing, I'd initally had a comment in my reply about "I don't know how they fit that into GiST". ... I'm guessing the implimentation isn't optimal in a number of regards.. probably defeats the purpose of a bitmap index except in a few corner cases. I'd be much more interested in seeing SP-GiST in PG, so I could have tries. :) --Gmaxwell 17:14, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

semantic discussion - java platform dependancies

I think that sentance is unopinionated and relevant especially from a hardware point of veiw.

how would you re-word it so i can add it in again?

I don't see the point of the added text. Obviously, Java is going to depend on the existence of a JVM or similar runtime support. That doesn't mean that "Java is not platform independent" --- it should work on any platform that provides a compliant implementation of the JVM. Most languages require runtime support of some kind or another: C requires libc, for example. If Java's dependency on a JVM makes it "non-portable" and "not platform independent", I'd like to see what you would accept as portable. Neilc 20:25, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikimedia Canada

Hi there! I'd like to invite you to explore Wikimedia Canada, and create a list of people interested in forming a local chapter for our nation. A local chapter will help promote and improve the organization, within our great nation. We'd also like to encourage everyone to suggest projects for our national chapter to participate in. Hope to see you there!--DarkEvil 15:03, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Please check your WP:NA entry

Greetings, editor! Your name appears on Wikipedia:List of non-admins with high edit counts. If you have not done so lately, please take a look at that page and check your listing to be sure that following the particulars are correct:

1. If you are an admin, please remove your name from the list.
2. If you are currently interested in being considered for adminship, please be sure your name is in bold; if you are opposed to being considered for adminship, please cross out your name (but do not delete it, as it will automatically be re-added in the next page update).
3. Please check to see if you are in the right category for classification by number of edits.

Thank you, and have a wiki wiki day! BD2412 T 03:35, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

SQLite

I noticed that your edit of the SQLite entry has this comment:

remove some irrelevant text: the fact that some versions of SQLite happen to have concurrency bugs w/ temp tables is not worthy of inclusion in the article

Well, only the latest version 3.3.4 solves this problem - all older versions have this concurrency bugs, not some. So my opinion is the information about solving this bug by upgrading to the latest version should be re-instated. --Zero0w 03:07, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

While the concurrency bug with temp tables is concerning, I don't think there is any point documenting specific bugfixes in the Wikipedia article for SQLite: it doesn't seem very relevant. particularly if you're not already using SQLite (which is likely the main audience of the article)

The previous paragraphs (where the comment was posted) in the article does relate to concurrency access issue. From a performance point of view, SQLite users are very likely to use the temporary table feature and it does merit inclusion for using/upgrading to this version. Also, I would disagree the main readers for Wikipedia are users not already using a particular software. In my experience, for a lot of software entries, Wikipedia provides arguably the best or most balanced source of information comparing to specific community sites or even official pages of software projects. --Zero0w 06:04, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

templates substituted by a bot as per Wikipedia:Template substitution Pegasusbot 06:33, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

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Admrb♉ltz ( T | I | E ) 21:20, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

quick thanks

Thanks for the IPC clarification on the sqlite page. I had a change like that ready to go but a power failure knocked out my cable modem. I was more than a bit confused when I got back home and saw it already done! :) --Steven Fisher

Long talk page

Greetings! Your talk page is getting a bit long in the tooth - please consider archiving your talk page (or ask me and I'll archive it for you). Cheers! BD2412 T 00:18, 17 June 2006 (UTC)