Difference between revisions of "User talk:Murph"

Revision as of 03:47, 12 June 2015

How are you able to board the Aeris 3A?

Hi, how are you able to board the Aeris 3A as you said here? I'm stuck on the ladder which is to far back, so I can't reach to the cockpit. — xZise [talk] 16:15, 18 November 2013 (CST)

It's a case of getting to the top of the ladder, then jumping onto the winglet using Shift+D+Space. Not the easiest thing to do, not 100% reliable, but it is possible. --Murph (talk) 23:15, 18 November 2013 (CST)

Ordinal character vs degree symbol

Hi I noticed you use the masculine ordinal character (º; U+00BA) instead of the degree symbol (°; U+00B0). There is technically a difference, so if possible it would be good when you use the degree symbol in the future. — xZise [talk] 11:15, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Damn, you're probably right! I thought it was opt+0 (OS X 10.10) for it, but I'll gladly accept that could be the wrong magic keypress. I'll try to figure out the correct one. Thanks.  :-)

--Murph (talk) 13:06, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Yup, you are absolutely correct. opt+0, which I mistakenly used, gives:

º

MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR

Unicode: U+00BA, UTF-8: C2 BA

I needed shift+opt+8, which gives:

°

DEGREE SIGN

Unicode: U+00B0, UTF-8: C2 B0

Now I just need to somehow remember that obscure key combination for the next time… ;-)

--Murph (talk) 13:24, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Hehe ;) Well I checked the Unicode codepoints for the characters you've written and got 00BA back ;) so I was pretty sure that it's different. Funny thing though: My font in the browser displays it underlined so the difference is obvious to me ;) (that is how I discovered that). — xZise [talk] 14:57, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Ahh, I was wondering how you had spotted it. They are pretty much indistinguishably identical in my font. I've revised my recent edits to correct them.

--Murph (talk) 15:28, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Position of description

I noticed you moved a lot of descriptions. I personally think that they are worthless for an article. It's a funny/snarky comment about the craft but it doesn't help you to understand that craft which is why the description in most cases is one of the last “trivia like” sections. — xZise [talk] 13:38, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

I think it was just the stock craft I changed. Yes, overall, some of them are relatively low value, but others actually do state the intended role of the craft, or tell you something about it. Even those that don't tell you much, KSP is a quirky game with a variety of humour spread randomly through it, and I don't see why the official wiki should shy away from that, as long as it doesn't get out of control and make it significantly difficult to read the articles, or get confusing about the line between humour and factual information. It just seemed to me to have a reasonable logical flow to it as (lead para)->(Squad's description)->(detail). They are all reasonably short, and clearly marked, so I don't feel the less useful of them are causing difficulty with the overall flow of the article. Over the years, I've seen the technique of inserting sometimes humorous, sometimes philosophical, etc quotes and/or thoughts quite widely used in a variety of literature, from something on the cover of technical reports, to something inserted at the start of every chapter of a book (ranging from tech books to fiction). I'm not advocating changing all of the parts like that, but on balance I think the craft articles are better with it at the top and it doesn't harm access to the primary detail content below it. Typically, with a float right picture, the quote and the picture should end fairly closely in the vertical flow, giving the full width to the main content below them. --Murph (talk) 14:09, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Template:Documentation

Leaving a message on my own talk page to preempt any possible queries. I'm importing Wikipedia's Template:Documentation, as a first step towards addressing some of our undocumented non-trivial templates, with the goal of making life easier for editors. It will take a little time, and is a work in progress. I fully intend to sort out all the red links, odd categories, broken images, etc. --Murph (talk) 06:43, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Update. It's still ongoing. Much of the framework is in place now, but still many links to fix, and bits of tidying up and polishing to do. Images will remain broken on stuff that's not visible to ordinary visitors, to be fixed later when our wiki's image uploads are working again. Images visible to visitors, I'm fixing as best I can with the broken image handling (making use of the few images which are working, but even those fail if you want a different size to the sizes that were cached by the server before it broke). --Murph (talk) 16:47, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

*mbox

Is there any advantage from having the different *mboxes? Couldn't we use {{Box}} for all of them? To be honest I'm a bit overwhelmed by your changes with the templates copied from Wikipedia so there might be other cases were just copying Wikipedia's implementation isn't sensible to us. — xZise [talk] 11:11, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

The main advantage is that it made it much quicker to pull in other templates. There wasn't a specific need for the full *mbox family from WP, although we already had bits of them laying around from a long while ago. I pulled them in as a matter of convenience to support other templates. I could potentially convert them into compatibility templates which ultimately use {{Box}}, or even convert in the opposite direction (not that I'm actively proposing that), but that is a slower and more complex process than just having them available as-is.

Pretty much all of the end-user-visible WP templates that I have imported are quite mature now, there shouldn't be a great deal of ongoing maintenance needed for them (and it should be fairly easy to import newer revisions of non-Lua functionality from WP, as I am actively trying to minimise the differences). Once I've finished cleaning things up (cleaning up my own work), they will just work as designed.

I'm not trying to pull everything in from there, just have a solid and reasonably comprehensive core which supports easy template documentation and future cases where we see an individual template on WP that would be useful (i.e. many of the cases are dependencies for more useful stuff). It also supports routine editing of main articles, when editors familiar with WP's templates can just use what they already know, i.e. I hope that it makes our wiki more accessible to a wider group of editors.

Yes, some cases don't make immediate sense to import from WP, such as {{Infobox}}. Others, like {{Navbox}}, we were moving towards emulating WP (and already had a copyright infringing, unmaintainable, and undocumented instance of it), but in a way that was harder to maintain and offered less functionality.

--Murph (talk) 11:38, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Moving page

Hi I've to admit that when I move a page it also suggests to move (up to 100) subpages (e.g. moving Foo will move Foo/bar with that option). The only problem is when it doesn't move the subpage because its target already existed (the flag pole had this in two languages). There was sometimes an issue (at least before the update not sure if it happened after it) that it didn't move the subpage because of an error. I'll also take a look at commons.css later sorry for the delay. — xZise [talk] 08:30, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Sure, but you paid attention to the details to produce the best possible overall result, including the manual bits where the automatic help from MW fails. So, thanks for doing that.  :-) --Murph (talk) 11:14, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Could use some markup help

Hey, I was wondering if I could get your help with the project I'm working on over here: User:VariousMetals#New stats table template, User:VariousMetals/Stats table, User:VariousMetals/Template:Stats table header

Basically, I'm trying to create a universal template for part stats tables that would automatically select headers based off of a set of input parameters listing the modules used by the parts in the table. The code I have there so far is probably pretty inefficient, and doesn't really work properly. Ideally it would be condensed into a single page rather than being split into Stats table and Stats table header, but I had trouble keeping the size of the template manageable unless I split it off. I was hoping you could help me improve it, since you're the markup expert around here (you have my full permission to edit anything in my userspace if you need to). VariousMetals (talk) 15:32, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Sure, I'll take a look when I get a moment. Hopefully sometime today, once I've finished up with some cleanup work on the navboxes. --Murph (talk) 16:23, 11 June 2015 (UTC)

Ok, so I think I see where you are trying to go with your ideas so far, the general direction. It does seem like it's worth investigating, to see if it gives a better overall result than the status quo. I think I can see some good sense in it in terms of maintainability and ensuring consistency between the various tables. I've got some ideas for how to move it forward. I'm slightly concerned about passing table data rows into the template due to the sheer number of pipe characters needing to be escaped for the larger tables, i.e I'm not sure that "content=<100s of table cells>" is such a great idea. I'm going to throw together my take on what you've started, and we can take it from there. I'm still running the ideas around in my head right now to pick the "best" approach for it, but should start some code quite soon. --Murph (talk) 03:47, 12 June 2015 (UTC)