User talk:Dvgrn

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Revision as of 17:50, 10 September 2018 by Dvgrn (talk | contribs) (→‎Small-infobox disease: looks like it's caused by adding RLE and not noticing that it matches an article pname)
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Just discovered conwaylife.com thanks to a link sent by Alan Hensel.

Have just been trying to sort out a possible new feature for Golly 2.1, as it happens (see the golly-test discussion thread). Koenig's Object Database is one possible place to look up small patterns, and it looks as if conwaylife.com might be another.

There's also the (probably separate) question of where to put larger engineered patterns, and collections of patterns, that people might want to download and look at. Might be possible to build this functionality into Golly to some extent, also, along with the reverse lookup function.

The main trick here is to somehow avoid the inevitable dead-link problem, as people's individual web sites move or go offline. Presumably Golly either has to point to a permanent central location where *all* the available collections are stored -- or at least there should be an index page in a central location, which can be updated as things change. That way it won't be necessary to keep downloading the latest version of Golly to avoid dead links.

Welcome! If you'd like to be able to access the database used by our site, you're of course more than welcome to. RLE files are generated by plugging in a pattern name to a URL like the following: http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=glider.rle, where of course you replace "glider" with the name of the pattern you want (in lowercase, no spaces or special characters). You can similarly get Life 1.05 or Life 1.06 files if you so desire by going to something like http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=glider_105.lif. In order to make patterns actually searchable from within Golly (or have the patterns auto-propagate in a menu within Golly or something like that), I could write a simple script that outputs a plaintext list of all the names of patterns in the "official" database, or a plaintext list of all the patterns, along with their RLE header comments if that would work well for you guys.
I also already have a script coded that allows people to save their patterns to the public ConwayLife.com database. It takes in an RLE string, a pattern name and optional comments and saves it online, so if you can send a POST request to my server from Golly, then you could have a "save online" option (though the current set-up makes the public database easy to overwrite - someone could come along and save another pattern under the same name as yours, thus overwriting it).
I'm currently the only person with access to modify the "official" database, but I'm sure I could code a form that allows some of the more interested Life gurus to "log in" so that they have access to modify the official database if there's an interest in that. Nathaniel 19:38, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

LifeWiki:Tiki bar

Howdy! The LifeWiki's lacked a central discussion page so far, so I've gone ahead and created the LifeWiki:Tiki bar as a friendly place where the community can get together to discuss things in a relaxed atmosphere. You're cordially invited to join in!

The first discussion I started is on how to best integrate the LifeViewer applet (LV:Viewer) that is now available on the LifeWiki thanks to User:Nathaniel's efforts.

See you at the bar! Apple Bottom (talk) 11:22, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

Small-infobox disease

Saw you mention said disease here --- I take it that's referring to the embedded LifeViewer? Yeah, worth investigating; I may take a look tomorrow, assuming that I'm less tired then and that nobody else has yet. Apple Bottom (talk) 21:28, 8 September 2018 (UTC)

Just took a look, BTW, all the relevant LifeViewer configuration snippets (/default and /oscillator) are loaded as they're supposed to, on oscillator pages. Neither contains any specific instructions regarding zoom level or GPS, of course, so articles lacking viewerconfig infobox lines will default to rather small and hasty LifeViewers. This could be changed, using the above templates.
Or is that "disease" something else after all? Apple Bottom (talk) 15:57, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
I'm not entirely sure. Thanks for doing a review, and I think things will just keep getting better from here. It was just that I thought I remembered setting up buckaroo as an example of the use of LifeViewer in an infobox. Now that I look back at the history, I think what I was remembering was my addition of RLE:buckaroo as a sample for Template:Reflector. The embedded viewer has all the right LifeViewer config, but I guess I didn't think to go look at the actual buckaroo article and add viewerconfig there. Silly me.
There may be a few other similar cases where RLE:patternname was added, with the effect of downgrading an article's infobox to a small and hasty LifeViewer view -- but with any luck the number of "diseased" articles is decreasing now. The combination of infobox, RLE: namespace, and viewerconfig line in the article is really not too bad! I hope the system gets more widely used, as people get used to configuring LifeViewer and we start to have more good working examples available to copy from. Dvgrn (talk) 17:50, 10 September 2018 (UTC)