User talk:Joshua David Williams

Readme: I appreciate your note. Unfortunately, I dropped it in the bit bucket before I got a chance to read it. If you feel your concern is important enough to bring up again, feel free to climb in and find it yourself.

Joshua David Williams

Current talk page

Archive 1

Thanks for the note.

Now that I think of it , it probably wise for you to remove the name of your school from the user page. Ill let you do it. Cheers David Tribe 23:08, 10 April 2007 (CDT)

Hi Joshua. "kill two birds with one stone" is a 'proverbial saying'; a colloquialism is different, it is a written expression that tries to mimic the informal things we say in speaking - it's from colloquy meaning speaking together, and it includes slang and words that are misused. If you write that something is a no-brainer for example, you're using a colloquialism. (I'm looking here at the Chamers Dictionary of Etymology to confirm this.) Some novelists use colloquialisms extensively to generate atmosphere - don't know if you've read "Trainspotting" by Irvine Welsh, set in my home of Edinburgh; if you try you'll find it tough, because he writes almost wholly in Scots colloquialisms. Gareth Leng 10:54, 11 April 2007 (CDT)

Editing the checklist

You should actually replace "last edited by" with ~~~~. The field isn't used to maintain a history.

Underlinked?

I notice that you classify a number of your articles as underlinked. This means that none of the expected links to the article are present. I realize that can be a bit of a judgement call, but I often wonder what is missing. Arer you aware that under "toolbox" you can click "What links here to" to see what links to your article? Greg Woodhouse 10:52, 13 April 2007 (CDT)

BSD Image

See my email about. Stephen Ewen 21:52, 13 April 2007 (CDT)

Josh, in reply to "Hey, do you have any questions for McKusick, the copyright holder of the BSD Daemon"
What all should we ask, other than what you've got over at Talk:BSD_Daemon? I suppose you could add to that
"Do you have a version of the image that is 'more freely licensed'? That would be more appropriate on a site such as Citizendium. Thanks"
Having the BSD logo under a non-BSDish license is somewhat, um, hypocritical, no? I guess if we get permission from him we can use that, although that's not the "best answer" I'd think. --Eric M Gearhart 14:22, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

I would second that. Stephen Ewen 21:22, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

On Talk:BSD_Daemon you mention a permission page, and the link to the one you meant was broken. That's why I didn't realize you received a reply lol. I fixed the link. I'll take a look in a little while about adding more to the story. I don't know if the daemon is as well documented on USENET as Tux is though --Eric M Gearhart

I'm not trying to be paranoid or anything here but a.) does he realize he can join CZ too? and b.) Do we have permission from him to publish his emails? --Eric M Gearhart

Well yes to be safe delete for now (preferably speedydelete the page so that it's not in the history) however you could just ask him if you "have his permission to publish the correspondence" (or something that sounds professional like that lol). By the way, BSD is an interesting "beast." It's a lot like Portage in Gentoo, if you've ever run it. /usr/ports is very well laid out and whatnot. I've dabbled in FreeBSD here and there in the past, the thing that turned me off was lack of some hardware support and whatnot. On servers the BSDs are great though (however Linux's recent huge strides in virtualization have me back on Linux. Hmm Virtualization needs an article) --Eric

Things like OpenVZ and Xen for server-side virtualization are awesome too... imagine taking your Qemu example and applying it to servers. "OK before I update things and possibly break everything, I'm going to take a snapshot of this entire server as it is right now, all without taking the server down at all" or "This host has 3 servers running Virtualized on it. One of them is really getting a lot of hits and need to be moved onto another box with more horsepower. I'm going to live migrate it to this other server without taking anything down and without the users noticing at all." Virtualization is cool :-) --Eric

Haha dude this is happening right now! Virtualization has taken off in a huge way in the last year or so. Google OpenVZ or Xen and you'll see what I mean. I've got a server that has several OpenVZ "Virtual Environments" running on it right now, at nixwizard.net... I even took a snapshot of the entire server as a backup the other day as I described earlier. Cool stuff. --Eric

Hey I added a "click the image" blurb under the Daemon, for clarity. The gallery's a good idea too... I'd think we can reuse that one on Tux --Eric

Yea I was trying to figure out if there was a way to do a custom link when you click on the pic (to BSD Daemon/Gallery). I guess what you've done is the best way to do it. Hmm. --Eric

More on bytes?

You're the author of the article, so it's kind of up to you how much you want to include. Sure, you could dig more deeply into the topic, say by talking about the physical representation of bytes, encoding schemes, etc., but I think it's more important to have a tautly written article than to try and include everything there is to be said in one article. You probably do break things up into subtopics more than I would, but perhaps that's a good thing. My one equivocation is that a casual reader is not going to want to follow all the links to subtopics, so you need cover the main points in the primary article. In the case of the connection to Gulliver's travels, I think that's of sufficiently general interest that it's reasonable to cover it in the main article.

Oh...and you might want to note that in the TCP/IP suit of protocols, MSB first is always used, and it's known as "network byte order". Greg Woodhouse 22:12, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

unix filesystem

Hello Joshua,

I noticed that you have written articles on /dev/null and /dev/random. I was thinking about writing an article/series about the typical unix directory structure, i.e.

• / -- "root"
  • /bin/ -- contains a small set of binaries necessary for system administration. Put into a separate directory so that it can be put onto a separate partition.
  • /etc/ -- usually contains configuration files
    • /etc/passwd
    • /etc/init.d/
  • /usr/
    • /usr/bin/
  • /lib/
  • /include/
  • /dev/
  • /tmp/

etc etc etc

With an short blurb next to each one, and links to notable files/subdirectories in each... Interested in collaborating? --Nick Johnson 13:17, 16 April 2007 (CDT)

Great! Maybe A tour of the filesystem of a typical Unix? --Nick Johnson 13:23, 16 April 2007 (CDT)

models

Apple had the following 2 models: II, II+, IIc, IIe, ][e, ][c, after that it became //gs the latest incarnation. Robert Tito |  Talk  18:46, 19 April 2007 (CDT)

congrats

with the article you contributed to largely become approved. Robert Tito |  Talk 

I have to add my voice here. Why is this approval important? To me, it's not so much that it is the first approved computers workgroup article, but because it is an approved article written not by experts, but largely by a bright 18-year-old whose work experts could look at and say "Yes, I am confident to sign off on this." That's cool, and something that can be found in no other Web 2.0 project I am aware of, and this approval is a CZ first among many of the same type that I think will follow. Stephen Ewen 22:17, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Congratulations Josh! Well done! Nancy Sculerati 16:15, 21 April 2007 (CDT)

I just want add my congratulations, too. You've done a great job with this article, and seeing an article through to approval is no small accomplishment. Greg Woodhouse 16:45, 21 April 2007 (CDT)

last comment on Tux talk

Hi Joshua, I had to zap your last comment when I made the move from Talk to Talk/Draft. They got overwritten! You might want to make them again;) Congratulations, I hope you enjoyed writing it as much as I did reading it! --Matt Innis (Talk) 22:11, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Great tux

Congrats. This is an important step for Citizendium, and I just love the pix and the story. It's not too long either. Regard David. David Tribe 22:41, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Archives

I just noiced in the Tux archives history that I undid your page move. I moved them without realising you had just moved them today, other wise i would have discussed with you first. The reason I moved them was to keep it consistent with what we have been doing with the other approved articles and to allow the Archive box to function normally.

I realise the draft talk page is now the active one, so your move was logical but we have been avoiding using the draft 'name' in pages where possible. For the current talk page of Talk:Tux/Draft it is unavoidable since people working on the draft page will invariably be using the Draft versions talk page as they edit. This is the one exception. The approval page does not include the Draft sub category either (Talk:Tux/Approval). Good job on the approval. Chris Day (talk) 03:44, 21 April 2007 (CDT)

Unix-like and what it means

Hi Joshua - Originally, I had written that Linux provides a user experience like that of Unix. At shell level, this is very true. The same varieties of shells still exist, and they work pretty much the same as the Unix shells did 15-20 years ago when I worked in Bell Labs. It is only the windowing systems that are new since Unix. But from a shell-scripting point of view, Linux and Unix are practically interchangeable. I wasn't sure if you've had a chance to gets your mitts on any huge Unix systems yet, which is why I'm writing about it. Cheers.Pat Palmer 21:37, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Image

Hi Josh. Image:Tux_micro.jpg is actually copyrighted. Check out the page from which it came. Do me a favor and email the owner, eh? Stephen Ewen 00:01, 27 April 2007 (CDT)

Thanks, Josh. Stephen Ewen 19:24, 27 April 2007 (CDT)

Small problem with Image:Homertux.png too. What is the source of the image? And does Ewing's release apply to Anton's Homer image? All the others check fine. Stephen Ewen 20:04, 27 April 2007 (CDT)

Hey!

Great to see ya! Stephen Ewen 01:00, 30 October 2007 (CDT)

Thanks! :) --Joshua David Williams 01:01, 30 October 2007 (CDT)

Please join us for Biology Week!

Hello Joshua, I am giving you this personal invitation to join us this week for Biology Week! You're a Citizendium Biology Author and we need authors as much as editors here to get involved. Did you know that there are over 200 biology authors here? Yep! Please join us on the wiki and add or revise biology articles. Also, please let your friends and colleagues who are biologists, biology students, or naturalists, know about Biology Week and ask them to join us, too. Any way you can help make it an event would be most welcome. Think of it as a Biology Workgroup open house. Let's see if we can kick up activity a notch! Thanks in advance! --Larry Sanger 14:53, 22 September 2008 (CDT)

The first Biology Week took place here from Sep 22-28, 2008.