User talk:NWoodruff

Hey. What's your opinion on the new page layout? It was suggested on the talk page that the graticule page be rewrote to make it a bit clearer. Do you want me to go ahead and look up all past expeditions in the graticule and link to them at the top, under the ones for January? I just tried to separate the plans from the actual expedition pages. Just thoughts. Thanks. Woodveil 03:49, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

It is still not clear from reading the geohash-by-geohash summary descriptions on the Atlanta, Georgia page which geohashes were attempted and which were merely looked up and listed. No one wants to have to click on every link to to see if there was a successful expedition or not. This is exacerbated by the heading "Geohashes Scouted" because scouted is used by some geohashers to mean they drove by to make sure it wasn't behind a fence or they visited a day early to make sure it was a good location before inviting their friends. I would recommend separate lists of those that resulted in coordinates reached, coordinates not reached, and those that were merely locations looked up on peeron but not visited. Most active graticules don't list the last, except perhaps for particularly notable locations.

In addition, consider including a word or two of interesting details about your best expeditions in the summary line, so people can see which would be interesting to click on. Like "overnight camping", "rented a horse", "neighbor called the cops", "best hot dogs ever," "thwarted by circus tents". As you do more expeditions than most graticules, it might be better to move the older expeditions to a subpage every couple of months instead of just once a year. Good picture. -Robyn 15:05, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

We do more expeditions in one month than most graticules have ever done. Good picture of what? --72.243.74.114 15:40, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

True, but one expedition in a month is more than most graticules have ever done.  :-) -- Benjw 15:43, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Picture of your graticule. Did you take it? -Robyn 15:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I stole it from my local radio station. Someone from 96.1 FM took the picture and posted it on the radio stations web site. I had it as my desktop of my computer for a while. There were a number of tornado pictures that people uploaded, but I thought that one was the best.

Oh, expeditions with green arrows are successful. Expeditions with red arrows are unsuccessful.

Beta Tests

The anonymous user who keeps recategorizing the February 19th beta test run as Retro expeditions is coming from your IP. If it's you, please stop. It's only a retro if the coordinates were for a day different than the expedition. Those early-2008 meetups were tests of the algorithm, actually conducted in February. Please revert any other such changes you made. Also, could you please log in before editing general pages so that people know who is making the changes? -Robyn 16:24, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

On the other hand, thankyou for taking the time to edit categories that you thought were wrong. There are a very large number that need doing, and I'm grateful to anyone who wants to help! Can point you towards further pages that need editing if you're interested. -- Benjw 17:09, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I Volunteered You ...

Your opinion, code and enthusiasm may be applicable to current discussion in Talk:Most active graticules‎. -Robyn 00:35, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Did you include all Portland's expeditions in your latest update? One of the reasons Thomcat updated so slowly is that he did try to find expeditions that hadn't been reported properly, and made sure they got included. Portland has a lot of expedition reports to write. I think they have a few left for April. -Robyn 05:30, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Image file sizes

Greetings Nwoodruff - Please try to scale images down to a reasonable size before uploading.. wiki suggests 150kb. A good example is roughly 800x600 at 70% JPEG quality. That's still large enough to make out all details and keeps the server happy. :) -- relet 14:15, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

In any case, 3-5 MB are much too large, especially considering you're a very active geohasher with lots of expeditions. --ilpadre 16:14, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

May I echo relet and ilpadre? Smaller images do help the server and also those of us who like to read other people's expeditions. A 6MB photo of two dogs sitting on a lawn is maybe a little bit unnecessary.  :-) You can simply reduce the size in something like MS Paint if you haven't got commercial photo software (like I haven't). -- Benjw 16:38, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Are you guys kidding? Help the server? Do you even know how this software works?

First of all, every image that you look at on any of these pages is 200x150, NOT the uploaded size. Every time you upload an image file it is automatically made into a thumb image. Every image that you view is a thumb image. Take the photo of two dogs sitting on a lawn [1]. This is the actual image that you see. It is 7 Kilobytes.

if you click on that file, you get to see the wiki page about that image. That image is automatically changed to a thumb nail of 800x600. Here is the thumb image [2] at 800x600.

if you then click on that image of the wiki page for that image, ONLY THEN do you get to see the full resolution of that image. NEVER EVER does that full resolution image ever transfer over the server unless YOU decide that you want to see the FULL image resolution.

Everyone else only sees the 200x150 7kb image, EVER.

I have a 16Gb HDSC card that I have in my camera. I have every single last picture I have ever taken with this camera still on this card. I have a movie of me driving from my front door at home to the front door here at my office some 42 miles away and a hour and a half drive. I have only used 5Gb of that card.

Hard drive space is cheap.

I am starring at 3 U2 rack server each one of them is 2 terabytes of server space. My company purchased each one of those for $499 each.

Hard drive space is ridiculously cheap. A 1 Terabyte drive is now $80[3]. That is 1 MILLION 1 megabyte images. I'll never upload 1 million images.

If the web master would like for me to donate a 1 TERABYTE drive to the cause as a way of a Geohash tax for my extended storage space, then have him contact me and I'll send one in just for my storage needs.

But, NO. No matter what size of an image file anyone uploads, all you see is the thumbnail of that picture.

NO matter what size is uploaded only the thumbnail image is sent over the internet unless specifically requested. As a matter of fact, expeditions that have 10 pictures or so per page, use far more bandwidth that I use.

So, if you want to complain about images and sizes, you need to complain to the groups that put far more images on their pages than I do.

Not only do we host our own websites, we also use a hosting company Vortech [4]. They host for us more than 500 domains with unlimited hard drive space and all that costs us is $30 a month. So, my extra 120Mb of image files isn't costing the wiki page any more money that it would if I only uploaded 200x150 thumbnail images.

And NO, I'm not hurting their servers.

Hurrah! We had a bet on. Several of us predicted that would be your response.  :-) -- Benjw 18:05, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Of what, that I would have to explain how web hosting works, for people that don't understand it?

Or, that I would have to correct someone that speaks of nothing they know about? I have to do that almost every day of my job. I get people every day claiming to be experts that actually end up knowing nothing. --NWoodruff 18:30, 9 June 2009 (UTC)