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.

Josh's talk archives

Archive 1, 4-11-07: User talk:Joshua David Williams/Archive1

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)