User talk:Nuwewsco/Archive 1: Difference between revisions

Your actions with User:Raymond_Lopez

Your actions in this case have shown your extremely inane conduct. You really strive to be a Wikipedia admin? You become an admin by contributions, not by attempting to kiss ass. I fully support Raymond Lopez's actions in replacing Stirling Newberry's publicity pic with a true and accurate pic. You shouldn't revert unless you know what's really going on. That's all for now. 67.18.109.218 01:36, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the entry User:Raymond_Lopez! Although logging out does mean your entries won't be created under your user account, it's pretty obvious who it is (see history of User_talk:67.18.109.218 page).

(User warned on several occasions for blatant vandalism. The warning I left related to vandalising the image on User:Stirling_Newberry's page; further reported for admin intervention after ignoring final warning.)

Minor edits

Thank you for your edits to deniable encryption. I just wanted to say that the edits werent "minor edit"s and shouldn't have marked as such. See Help:Minor edit for details. -- intgr 03:57, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Fair comment; a slight case of intending to only do a bit, and setting the "minor edit" flag; then getting a little carried away and doing than I had anticipated! Nuwewsco 15:23, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Maxt

Just letting you know, the RFCU you filed has been completed and acted upon. Luna Santin 11:28, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Re: Image:Unix-history.svg creation

Hi, I didn't create the original image, though I did modify it for better readability. The tool I would recommend using for diagrams like that is Inkscape. Inkscape is a free program (open source) for doing vector based art, and is very effective for making diagrams. It works natively in SVG, and is fairly easy to use.

Inkscape home page

User:Phidauex/SVG_tips - This article may be helpful, it has some tips for getting started with Inkscape. Don't forget to do all the Inkscape tutorials, as well, they are really helpful.

Phidauex 15:30, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that - it's pretty neat! Nuwewsco 18:14, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Good work

Thanks for the categorising!--Cronholm¹⁴⁴ 20:25, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

mathematics topics lists

Please look at lists of mathematics topics. Carefully. That page is a FEATURED ARTICLE, having been so voted after long discussion. There are good reasons for that. You do not know what they are, if we judge by your proposal to delete the list of Fourier analysis topics. One does not delete a topics list because of the existence of a category. We've had this discussion at great length over three or four years now. You clearly don't know about it. You should find out before you do things like this. Michael Hardy 20:02, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

... I'll provide links to some of the discussions later; I'm a bit rushed right now. Of course, obviously, talk:list of Fourier analysis topics is the wrong place to look, since that's only ONE topics list. Michael Hardy 20:13, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Lists of mathematics topics may be a featured article, though the page I suggested for deletion (List of Fourier analysis topics) wasn't; and since:

• There's absolutely no indication that it relates to a larger series (there's no back link to Lists of mathematics topics)
• It looks like it's been made redundant by Category:Fourier analysis
• The suggestion it be deleted was raised a long time ago on Talk:List of Fourier analysis topics - and with no objections at all , it would probably make sense if you had added your comment to List of Fourier analysis topics's talk page to make it clearer why it should be kept, in case anyone else reads it and comes to the same conclusion as I did?

I've no problem with it being kept - though for the above reasons, you can clearly see why I suggested it for deletion!

Toucan (Software) Notability

Hi, just wondering why you you think the Toucan (software) article is not notable enough, it is certianly more notable than a number of the other Sourceforge apps on Wikipedia, both by numer of downloads and articles returned by Google, is it simply a case of increasing the number of atricles linked to? For the record I am the author of Toucan, although I didn't set up the page. Would you recommend merging it into the PortableApps.com article, it seems a bit big for that? Stevelamerton (talk) 20:01, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Ah - you've got that the wrong way around. What makes you think Toucan is notable? The argument that other software have Wikipedia articles isn't relevant, neither is the number of articles which link to it. Take a look at WP:N for further information; for example, does Toucan really' have significant coverage from independant sources? AFAICS, it doesn't... Nuwewsco (talk) 13:57, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Bias Regarding PortableApps.com?

I'm John T. Haller, the owner of PortableApps.com. I've had a number of folks contact me via email about the apparent negative bent on PortableApps.com that some of your edits appear to have. Removing PortableApps.com from the U3 article despite the fact that it's a more popular competitor and just as much of a 'system' as U3 is, systematically removing PortableApps.com from the various articles on some of the software that we base portable apps on including those of authors we work with and who link to us, adding a comment about a bug report to the introductory paragraph of the PortableApps.com article, etc. I'm hoping that this is based on a simple misunderstanding and not out of some malicious intent. The notion of the bug in Firefox Portable appearing in the introductory paragraph, for instance, whereas in the U3 article there is no mention of issues like this despite the fact that there are far more issues with many apps on that platform. Or the biased (and without citation) claim that 'many' of the apps we publish are already portable when most are not... and the ones that do have a 'portable' package often leave registry keys behind, have broken MRU lists as you move PCs, require admin rights to run their installer, lose config files, etc. Again, I'm hoping that this is due to a simple misunderstanding and/or some misinformation. I look forward to hearing back. CritterNYC (talk) 23:51, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

As the author of portableapps.com, I can understand why you might be biased, though would like to gently point you towards WP:COI

Given the fact I've only made a whopping great three changes to Portableapps.com, I doubt very much that you've "had emails" about my edits! If you have had any though, I'd recommend replying and pointing out the full URL to the Wikipedia article - it's not the only primer on what a Wiki is, but could help people understand what they're about!

I did remove a reference to portableapps.com from a few articles, where those links looked to be plain simple spam; the software in question were "portable" anyway. A fair number of other software articles which linked to Portableapps.com I left as-is (see Special:WhatLinksHere/PortableApps.com for the current "what links here") as they looked particularly relevant to it.

Re bugs with Firefox, I'm not actually aware of any offhand, (though I haven't exactly been looking for them!). As a result, it would be difficult for me to make an edit about one! (You might want to check your facts there - see the history tab on whatever article you're thinking of.) FWIW, I suspect you'd be better off any faults you find to the Bugzilla(?) fault tracking system Firefox uses; or mentioning them in the Firefox article if they're particularly significant.

From your comments above, it does sound as though you're saying that you've been fixing large volumes of bugs in huge amounts of open source software, before repackaging it, rather than feeding back to the original authors?! Nothing wrong with that (it's one of the things open source purposely allows!), but feeding changes back helps authors to improve their software, and would mean (if it's really what you've been doing) you wouldn't have to keep patching future versions, every time your repackage them! (If your changes were accepted, of course...)

Personally, I've nothing against any opensource software - including Portableapps.com. The edits I've carried out are pretty fair comment in all places I've done them, and certainly follow WP:NPOV.

I can understand that you're not too keen on hearing a viewpoint which doesn't praise you to the heavens, and instead gives a more impartial view of things, but then again - that's one of the key points of the Wikipedia; due to it's nature, it's often far more objective than many other WWW sites!

Nuwewsco (talk) 19:36, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Howdy Nuwewsco. First off, I went back to look at the Wikipedia article history and you're right, the Firefox bug was someone else. My apologies for mistakenly thinking it was you.

I had an issue with one of your edits in particular I'd like to discuss in more detail. First, was the item listed in the criticisms section as that definitely doesn't seem to be NPOV. Placing things like 'releases' in quotes just seems bias. We do take some software that is already portable and repackage it. Take Pidgin, for example. They have a set of instructions on their site to make it portable. But, they're a bit complicated for the average user. It involves using the installer (which you can't use unless you're logged in as an admin) to install it locally, copying files from multiple directories, deleting language files if you don't want them, renaming a file, writing a batch file launcher and setting an environment variable if you want to set the language, etc. In short, they're complicated. Pidgin Portable installs without admin rights, allows you to optionally leave out the additional locales, sets up all directories and files for you and has a simple setting to change if you'd like to change the language (or picking it up from the PortableApps.com Platform in the next release automatically). In addition, it portablizes various settings in the config files that are normally hard-coded to specific drive letters. I've discussed this with one of the Pidgin developers and, though they're not interested in incorporating it into their build process (a bit too platform-specific for them as they want to keep everything as platform-neutral as possible), he could see the appeal and had even made suggestions for improving it and ensuring it works more as their set of instructions does. A similar situation arose with KeePass as we wanted an easier way for people to be able to get it into the menu and to ensure users could automatically have their password file open on launch (which doesn't work with KeePass' zip file). I've had an ongoing chat with Dominik Reichl about the PortableApps.com Package and he's been quite happy with it as it's also gotten KeePass a bit more exposure and more users (it'll be half a million in a couple months). In fact, you'll find a link to KeePass Portable right from the KeePass download page. Other apps like Notepad++ were portable, but upgrades were more difficult, the most recent files list broke and it left a registry key on each PC you use it on. We packaged it to solve those issues.

In addition, as you'd suggested, we try and work with the developers to add features to make portablization easier. Most aren't interested in some changes (changing a most recently used list to be relative for the few % of their users that want to be portable) but will make others (switches to use config files instead of the registry, fixing auto-updaters, etc). We've been working with Mozilla, for example, on a couple different bugs that impact portable users and ensuring they get handled. Other apps, like WireShark, have opted to do their own PortableApps.com Format package of their apps and these have proved quite popular as well (I actually owe them an email on improving their launcher).

Basically, I'd like you to take another look at what is actually going on with these apps before making sweeping statements like the one you'd made in the criticisms section. I'm quite amenable to constructive and accurate criticism where warranted. PortableApps.com certainly isn't perfect. You have to make some compromises, but I think we've been making the right ones.

Thanks for your time. CritterNYC (talk) 04:40, 28 March 2008 (UTC)