User talk:Tepples/Archive 3


 * This page is an archive of old discussions from 2011. Do not modify this page. If you have anything to add to the discussion, start a new section on User talk:Tepples.

Cross-wiki spam
In a couple of recent deletion summaries, you mentioned that you want to despam some wikis linked to from the deleted pages. What can you tell me about these wikis? (About how many are there? How big is each? What topic areas do they cover?) Eighty5cacao 13:41, 18 April 2011 (MST)
 * The linked sites cover any topic you can think of. Here is a sample of the links on such pages. Not all of them run MediaWiki, and I've obscured the links so that even crawlers unaware of nofollow don't pick them up.


 * This should get you started. --Tepples 15:04, 18 April 2011 (MST)

rawther
What is the origin of this apparently intentional misspelling of the word "rather"? Is it related to the Animal Crossing series or something else entirely?

See for example C++ vs. C and various NESdev discussions which I'm too lazy to dig up now.

I am aware that it is almost eye dialect but not quite, since it does imply a nonstandard pronunciation. Eighty5cacao 14:26, 23 April 2011 (MST)
 * Blame Kay Thompson. --Tepples 14:40, 23 April 2011 (MST)

NESdev is down
This appears to be a database problem and affects both the wiki and forums. I have yet to check whether it affects all of Parodius Networks. Eighty5cacao 17:49, 27 May 2011 (MST)

Withdrawn, ok now. Sorry to bother you about what turned out to be scheduled maintenance. Eighty5cacao 17:57, 27 May 2011 (MST) (last edit 00:17, 28 May 2011 (MST))

Possible Main Page vandalism, etc
Do you see a legitimate purpose to [//pineight.com/mw/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=3585&oldid=407 this edit]? (Cf. Luigi board.) If not, what should we do: semi-protection, full protection, or an ABUSE filter? Googling  shows that this is unlikely an automated spambot and is possibly related to an Internet meme.

Digression: In the part of your "Vertigo" cryptomnesia demo where you are singing, what does the "P" suffix in "Pino P" mean? (I understand "Pino" just fine; I don't need that part explained.) Eighty5cacao 17:41, 8 June 2011 (MST) (last edit 18:02, 8 June 2011 (MST))


 * Semi-prot seems appropriate for now. I've moved the meme talk to a page where it looks more appropriate. As for "Pino P", that's from a short story by Frank Thomas Smith. It has nothing to do with a big blue bird, no matter how many words you think you can make before the sun goes down. --Tepples 18:53, 8 June 2011 (MST)
 * Clarification: The description as a "meme" may have been inaccurate. It may indeed have been spam of some sort, or at least a non-notable meme; some of the Google results are shady-looking blogs, and none are Know Your Meme or Oh Internet. Eighty5cacao 19:48, 24 July 2011 (MST)

Spam spam spam: a couple of comments
First of all, sorry for getting too clever with my edit summaries and also failing to see through all the misspellings. It was getting late, and I should have realized that the blankings probably weren't necessary at all.

BTW, I have experienced occasional slowness, timeouts, and CSS load failures on this wiki in the past couple of days. Anything to do with the spambots perhaps? Eighty5cacao 11:19, 24 July 2011 (MST)
 * The timeouts are probably just Go Daddy being Go Daddy. --Tepples 17:31, 24 July 2011 (MST)
 * Ok. It was fine right after my last post here. Eighty5cacao 19:44, 24 July 2011 (MST)
 * This site is returning pages unusually slowly or failing to return pages at all today. I just checked, and pineight.com is hosted with name-based virtual hosting on the same IPv4 address as over 1,000 other web sites. The same IPv4 address doesn't necessarily imply the same server, given reverse proxies and all, but that's still potentially a lot of load for one machine. There's also an alert about what appears to be a connectivity issue with Go Daddy's ISP. --Tepples 14:06, 25 July 2011 (MST)
 * &larr;

Since the last post here, I've still had sporadic failures to load stylesheets (a little over once a day) but full-page timeouts very rarely (only once IIRC). Everything performs ok when it's working. The alert mentioned above is marked resolved if I'm reading it right, which I'm probably not...? Could the existence of a user stylesheet be exacerbating the performance issues? Eighty5cacao 16:05, 3 August 2011 (MST)
 * The problems mentioned above have gotten better in the last couple of days. Some of the later issues could have been on my end. I meant to mention that I am subscribed to the site's RSS feed for recent changes in all namespaces, but that probably isn't a big deal for server load.
 * I was also about to suggest disabling some older abuse filters, but we'd have to watch and wait a little longer. (The AbuseFilter installation here doesn't seem to show performance statistics, as the one on Wikipedia does.) Eighty5cacao 19:00, 9 August 2011 (MST)

Unofficial Nestopia builds
This concerns an issue on the NESdev forums; sorry for asking you again:

Regarding young indiana jones new ppu discovery, nestopia help... (p. 13), I would like to report the observations I recall from testing Keith Kelly's build when it was originally released.

I would recommend against including Keith Kelly's input polling changes in plasturion's IndyFix series, since they break Camerica's BMX Simulator from the Quattro Sports collection. As far as I understand, official Nestopia polls host input devices 5(?) times per emulated frame to support mid-frame input transitions as required by BMX Simulator, and this is the "screwy input (polling|timing) logic" mentioned in the changelog. I recall Martin several years ago posting the relevant code snippet on the NESdev forums, though it's too much hassle to find it now.

I also disagree with Keith Kelly's thread priority changes. I found his build to be slightly less smooth/responsive than official or plasturion's versions (though it was never grossly unstable). Eighty5cacao 18:41, 3 August 2011 (MST)
 * I started to bring it up there. --Tepples 19:12, 3 August 2011 (MST)
 * Now that I've actually bothered to search on Google, I can tell you that Marty's relevant post is this one. I have not confirmed whether such code is actually in the current Nestopia source. Eighty5cacao 21:41, 3 August 2011 (MST)
 * &larr;

BTW: "FCEUX simulates bus conflicts, Nestopia ... do[es) not" &mdash; wrong. Sorry to inconvenience you again. Eighty5cacao 18:25, 7 September 2011 (MST)

Phasing out pinocchio.jk0.org
I noticed this and this. Can you comment more on the reason?

Will action be taken to correct the links on the [//pineight.com/dwi/ simfile page]? The audio file for "The legend. (period)" seems to be hosted at ; will it be migrated too? Eighty5cacao 19:15, 23 August 2011 (MST)
 * I might this weekend once I get time. I'm still getting used to my new computer. --Tepples 06:00, 25 August 2011 (MST)
 * As for the reason, I was guessing that the immediate cause was financial/logistic trouble of the hosting operator, a short-term goal is SEO, and a long-term goal is to facilitate HTTPS support. Does any of this sound about right? Eighty5cacao 14:18, 25 August 2011 (MST)
 * Mostly logistic trouble. First, pinocchio.jk0.org was my home computer, and I wanted what was hosted there to remain up despite loss of power, loss of Internet connection, or loss of incoming connections on port 80 at home. Second, part of the redirection depended on No-IP, which is slowly shifting services from free to paid for bullshit reasons like the number of hyphens in a hostname. Third, I want to get the whole thing under a DNS domain that I control. I hadn't taken HTTPS or SEO into account. Fourth, the host for pineight.com appears to have expanded the available GB of storage and traffic, so the storage limit excuse for not putting everything on pineight.com is no longer valid. Fifth, I've since learned Python for my day job and written an FTP-based sync program, so the excuse of not having to go to the effort of manually FTPing my files up is no longer valid either. --Tepples 03:43, 26 August 2011 (MST)
 * &larr;

I guess SEO and HTTPS would fall under "get[ting] the whole thing under a DNS domain that I control" &mdash; I was on the right track; I just didn't explain myself well enough. Back to the original question: Will the audio file for "The legend. (period)" be migrated to ? Eighty5cacao 12:51, 4 November 2011 (MST)
 * It's migrated now. --Tepples 14:20, 4 November 2011 (MST)

niwa
Why do some interwiki prefixes start with the letters ? (They are all related to Nintendo franchises.) What does this stand for? Eighty5cacao 19:52, 21 September 2011 (MST)
 * Google "niwa", and the second result is the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, full of Nintendo-related wikis that got fed up with changes to Wikia policy. --Tepples 05:19, 22 September 2011 (MST)
 * Yeah, I didn't do my homework again ... I guessed the Wikia-emeritus part but didn't bother googling or looking harder on the wikis themselves. Ok, thanks. Eighty5cacao 07:46, 22 September 2011 (MST)

Note to self: a dog
"a dog." is beating Ryan Gosling. Note to self: Is a remake of "Who's Cuter" warranted with the new cartoon characters and celebrities that have emerged in the past decade? It was just a moe vs. "hot" contest anyway. --Tepples 08:16, 4 November 2011 (MST)
 * I am slightly in favor, but perhaps start with a bugfix release of the original Who's Cuter? (Would distributing the fix as an IPS patch help with copyright concerns? Probably not, I admit...)
 * BTW, I have another Who's Cuter test in progress. Yes, I've been busy with schoolwork, and yes, I've been using savestates. I should finish within a couple of days. Eighty5cacao 11:10, 4 November 2011 (MST)
 * There used to be a web site called whatsbetter.com where people would upload pictures of things and they'd be entered into a database and presented two at a time to visitors. A visitor would click one and the database would be updated using something like the Elo rating system. It's gone now, but I don't remember it being due to pressure from owners of copyright in the various characters. --Tepples 12:29, 4 November 2011 (MST)
 * To clarify, the patch would probably affect only program code and not graphics. "Probably not, I admit" was an attempt to cover my @$$ for any errors in my reasoning &mdash; might inducement issues arise if you are the developer of both the original program and the patch? The images may be considered fair use in this context, I suppose. Eighty5cacao 12:49, 4 November 2011 (MST)
 * &larr;

I got it building in my new ca65 environment. [//pineight.com/nes/cuter-temp.zip This build] runs on a PowerPak and has a lot of the cargo-cult code taken out. I didn't update the compression tech or the UI yet. I'm thinking about replacing the stride-13 pass with a preprocessing pass of rating each from 1 ugly to 5 cute. I thought about getting rid of the gonks (Manson, Davros, Cacodemon) until I remembered two things: 1. people were ranking Manson above Hanson, and 2. I need some sort of control group in the experiment. Expanding it past 32 would take even longer. What bugs were you talking about that need fixing? --Tepples 13:26, 5 November 2011 (MST)
 * On some test questions, at least in Nestopia, the top half of the screen flickers between the correct image and a copy of the bottom image. Also, I think our previous discussion determined that it was a "bug" (or valid enhancement request?) that the test should return to the title screen rather than directly restarting after showing the results.
 * I've been using the build linked on the NESdev front page. (There seem to be two revisions in GoodNES; I haven't checked which, if either, matches the version on NESdev.) I will finish my current test on the old build within 24 hours from now; then I will start a new test with your new build.
 * Why is it a problem that "people were ranking Manson above Hanson"? Eighty5cacao 16:13, 5 November 2011 (MST)
 * In the latest build, it just shows the items in the final order. Sixteen presses of Up or Down return to the title screen. UI changes would make this clearer, but I wanted to get something known to work on an NES to make sure we're on the same proverbial page before I put in any UI changes, improve the compression, or switch to the new art style for the characters. I don't know about this flickering; the latest build works for me in FCEUX and on an NES. Even Nintendulator has shown flicker on a couple of my other ROMs that use a similar mid-screen CHR bankswitch. And the higher-than-expected ranking of Marilyn Manson is not exactly a problem as much as a valid reason to keep the gonks and evict something else. I just wonder which to evict in favor of e.g. Tom Nook from Animal Crossing, the Prince from Katamari Damacy, Twilight Sparkle from Friendship Is Magic, or Lady Gaga. --Tepples 17:03, 5 November 2011 (MST)
 * To reiterate: I was using the old revision to do my last test, and I will need to continue with it for a little while because I have savestates for it. I will finish my last test on the old revision within ~24h and then start using the new one ASAP; something you did probably fixed the flickering, but I still need to check. Eighty5cacao 17:59, 5 November 2011 (MST)
 * [Continues at Talk:Who's Cuter]