User talk:Rich Farmbrough

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Revision as of 15:37, 6 June 2012 by Rich Farmbrough (Talk | contribs) (Credit where credit is due)

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Greetings!

I visited your talk page today, and I saw a link to this wiki. I see close to a dozen people signed up today -- maybe other visitors to your page.

Ideally we could be completely fickle, and package up our contributions and port them to any wiki we want. Did you see there was a link to upload any article from the wikipedia? I'll have to try that. Some other wikis I have tried, like http://complexoperations.org, don't support {{cite}} templates, making porting article there take a considerable hit per reference. I have also made a meaningful contribution to http://Citizendium.org. Both of these wikis have interesting local adaptations to the mediawiki software.

Are you old enough to remember the wars between fans of the emacs editor and fans of vi? Emacs fans used to say "Why even Bill Joy (vi's author and the founding vice president of technology for Sun Microsystems) doesn't use vi anymore." I heard this claim for years. Then I read an interview with Joy.

He explained that since everyone had the source to vi, it was so likely to be locally modified, that, if he were visiting some other site, and decided to give a little demonstration, he was very likely to find laconic vi wouldn't work. So, when he visited other sites he would always used the 1970s era ed -- a simple non-visual editor.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 01:49, 6 June 2012 (MSD)

Ah yes, Ed (unix)... I used it for ages while waiting to see who would win out of vi and emacs. Same with shells, I feel I should probably used tsch, but I end up using the default. Rich Farmbrough (talk)
(talk page stalker) Vi... what a blast from the past. I haven't used that for a decade or two. Since this seems to be an old-timer discussion, I thought I'd join in, hope you don't mind. I remember the good old days writing scripts for tcsh and bash. I grabbed slackware when Patrick V. first released it. Speaking of slackware, I remember when the Church of the Subgenius was all over Usenet, and their kerfuffle with Co$. I see Modemac was one of the first admins on Wikipedia. Back in the early days of Wikipedia, it seemed like it attracted a lot of the "Usenet refugees" (as I like to call them), myself included. Those were the good old days, when you knew most everybody that was on the net. Fun times. Thanks for bringing back some fond old memories. Web (talk) 07:42, 6 June 2012 (MSD)
I was fairly quiet on Usenet, I joined the IPV6 mailing list, thinking I could contribute, but it was all pretty well sussed out. I gave up before the real spam wave hit it. I had Coherent's unix, and possibly a copy of Xenix. I also got the full monty SCO unix with masses of addons when work threw it out (on 5 1/4s), but never used it. I have a rackmount server that is supposed to run Linux, but it's too noisy, so I just use my consumer PCs locally. Rich Farmbrough (talk)
  • There used to be a newsgroup devoted solely to new sites joining USENET. It had a standard form the new systems administrator would fill out, saying where they were, what the did, what kind of computer(s) they used, and how many users they had. I happened to notice when Memorial University in St John's Newfoundland joined. Once upon a time, including 1981-2 when they joined, other Canadians liked to make "newfies" the butt of stupid jokes -- you probably had the same kind of jokes where you were from, targetting some other group. Anyhow, appended to the end of this standard form the systems administrator said:
"P.S. Henceforth anyone posting newfie jokes to the net should append their name, address -- and next of kin.".
Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 18:17, 6 June 2012 (MSD)
The research I was doing at Oxford last year was under a Newfie Fellow. I guess he must miss the Newfie jokes. Rich Farmbrough (talk)

Credit where credit is due

I really have to give you credit, Rich. Please let me explain. I dropped out of Wikipedia many years ago because I found it to be draining. Just absolutely draining. So I try to limit myself to articles and rarely post to talk pages or contribute to discussions at notice boards or the village pumps. By limiting my involvement, it seems to have given me a 10,000 foot view of Wikipedia. I don't have a horse in any race so I see things more clearly. I do still keep an eye on things though and from my perspective, you've been put through the wringer. I can only imagine the hell it must be for you. But through all this, I haven't seen you lose you cool at all. You've been courteous and respectful. You truly are an honorable gentleman so I have to give you a lot of credit for that. As we all know, there are very few people on Wikipedia that can be called honorable in the best of times, much less going through what you have. You really deserve a lot of praise in my opinion. It is a testament to your character as a human being.

I also want to thank you for helping over here. It is very generous of you. I hope WikiAlpha will provide you with a calmer place to edit and one that appreciates you hard work. Perhaps it will relieve some of the stress you must be under. Lord knows, you certainly deserve to have some stress free time. Anyway, thanks again for your help. I really appreciate your efforts. All the best. Web (talk) 15:44, 6 June 2012 (MSD)

I am glad you think so. It is a pleasure to help here, if we can get the API sorted (I may be making a blunder, of course), we should be able to achieve a fair amount. Rich Farmbrough (talk)