User talk:David Applegate

Trouble Uploading Graphics

I am having trouble uploading a graphic. See the upload log. Jon Awbrey 00:07, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

I got it to work, but now all the previous attempts are there, too! Jon Awbrey 02:44, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

http://oeis.org/wiki/File:Rote_2_Big.jpg

Jon, it appears that you got the uploads working, but after multiple attempts. The wiki maintains a version history, so the old ones are still there as history. Were there any problems beyond cache refreshing that I should look into? David Applegate 22:53, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Things seem to be working okay now. After the first few uploads I had been getting a message saying that an index page had been created but that the file itself did not exist. When I checked with the New File Gallery it would show "file missing" under the corresponding entry. It was only after 2 or 3 tries that all the versions would show up at once. At any rate, it looks okay now. Jon Awbrey 02:04, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

David, I knew as soon as I said that it would go off again. I will leave the upload log and missing file notice as they were this time. Jon Awbrey 15:40, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I see what you mean. I'll have to poke around and try to see what went wrong. Please leave it alone until I give you an update. David Applegate 18:49, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Check. Jon Awbrey 19:04, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

I found the problem -- there was a file permissions problem on some parts of the uploads area that caused the process to terminate before it had made all of the links, whenever it hashed the uploaded file into one of the areas with the problem. Thanks for pointing it out, and being patient. Please re-upload the ones that failed, and let me know if you run into any more problems. If you'd like, I can purge the bogus "old" versions that got created during your attempts. David Applegate 00:25, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

He's baaack. Durned persistent little wiki-poltergeist that one. I got this far before it quit again:

http://oeis.org/wiki/File:Rote_21_Big.jpg

Jon Awbrey 01:40, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

And he's hiding again! While I was working on debugging it, File:Rote_21_Big.jpg, File:Rote_22_Big.jpg, and File:Rote_25_Big.jpg, all of which had been troublesome, fixed themselves. Let me know if you run into it again, and I'll so some tests as well. David Applegate 04:24, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Apparently it's the wiki that loves only some numbers. Thanks for the gumshoeing work. I've got just 3 more in this series to do tomorrow, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Jon Awbrey 04:34, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Just to give you a bit of an explanation: An uploaded file is hashed to a path like "3/3c/Rot_22_Big.jpg". The directories "3" and "3c" are created as needed, and at least one of the problems is a ownership conflict (caused by me) in those directories. That is why it likes some numbers -- those that hash to a problematic directory. But that may not have been the only problem.

Hi Dave — I'm having problems uploading images again. If you want to delete those several attempts at uploading "Riff 123456789 Big.jpg" and "Rote 123456789 Big.jpg" I could just start over from scratch. Jon Awbrey 04:15, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Those latest images are showing up now. You could delete all but the current versions if you want. Jon Awbrey 21:35, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

Mouseover Text

One thing that is really cool about classic OEIS that doesn't work in the wiki is that when you mouse over an A-number, the description of the sequence is displayed. So if you go to A137627 classic and put your mouse over the "A137625" in the definition (without clicking), the text "First prime in runs where p+4 is semiprime (runs are k=1,2,3,...)." is displayed, but if you go to A137627 wiki and do the same thing, you get "A137625" displayed (which is totally useless). I don't know if it's easy, difficult, or impossible to make the wiki version work like the classic version, but I thought you should at least be aware of the difference. Michael B. Porter 07:38, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Michael, thank you for your comment. Yes, we're aware of this difference, and have explored solutions. Unfortunately, although it presumably is possible, it requires significant changes in the wiki software - the mouseover text in the wiki is the page name, and page names aren't allowed to contain many useful special characters (such as []{}|) because they are significant to the wiki syntax. The solution is probably to augment the wiki software to support a mouseover title that is different from the page name, but that will take some work. David Applegate 14:56, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your answer. I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the difference. Michael B. Porter 07:11, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Byte Counter on the Recent Pages Display

It's reporting excessively high numbers of byte increments for page edits. They were correct last night, but sky high this morning. Jon Awbrey 17:05, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Interesting... I performed a major edit last night (a small change in the formatting of every sequence page), and used a bulk upload utility which doesn't update the recent changes data. So, I followed it up with another utility which updates recent changes. Apparently it doesn't calculate the byte differences correctly. Debugging this will be a pretty low priority, though. David Applegate 17:33, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Searching in Wiki

I'm having trouble searching in Wiki mode. If I try just "1,1,2,3,5,8,13" I get a whole lot of sequences with those numbers in various positions, and if I put it in quotes, I get similar results. The classic interface comes up immediately with the obvious result A000045. Am I missing something? Michael B. Porter 02:17, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

That's one of the known problems listed on the ToDo page. David Applegate 05:14, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

OK - thanks. Michael B. Porter 02:14, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

SVG images?

Would it possible to use SVG-images in this Wiki? Either with automatic conversion to PNG's like in Wikipedia, or if that would load the server too much, then serving them to the users just as raw SVG's, which work with Mozilla and Opera, but currently not with IE. Could we shortly test this by allowing extension .svg in the uploaded images? Antti Karttunen 23:23, 11 February 2010 (UTC)

I've enabled .svg image uploads. I haven't had time for any testing yet. Please let me know how well it works. David Applegate 20:51, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Works better than I expected! See:

Thanks! Antti Karttunen 21:02, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

I did some quick tests: MediaWiki appears to insist on rendering SVG's as PNG's. However, you can get to the raw SVG from the image page. David Applegate 23:35, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Fortunately, it does it well enough. See at the end of my user page, scales nicely! Antti Karttunen 23:45, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Upload failed

On 2010 July 25 I tried several times to upload "File:SquareNumber16.png". It always failed. ‎Any proposal? Thanks. Peter Luschny 22:48, 25 July 2010 (UTC) I found the file at but it does not show up in http://oeis.org/wiki/User:Peter_Luschny/FigurateNumber . Can you help please? Peter Luschny 22:34, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

When I check now, it seems okay. However, I did look earlier and it wasn't (so it's not just you). There have been some previous sporadic problems with image uploads; I've been so far unsuccessful at identifying the problem, but after a while the problem seems to go away. Let me know if it happens again and I'll dig some more. David Applegate 01:32, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Account

Thank you again helping me to create the account. --Zoltán Lőrincz 15:18, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

suggestion

Hello,

I have a technical suggestion.

One lovely thing in wiki is the link "What links here" on the left column, which gives all pages pointing to the current page. It would be great to have this at our disposal in the OEIS interface, so that we could know which sequences link to this one (some kind of list of backward links). Do you think this is possible ?

Yours,

F.C.

I think you can get that by just searching for the sequence's A-number (i.e., "A157904"). That will return all sequences which refer to the specific sequence. Is that what you meant, or something else? David Applegate 03:48, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, indeed, the result is similar. But one difference is that we do not want to see the sequence itself. The idea would be to be able to navigate backwards in the huge graph of sequences. Maybe one could just add a link "look up for this sequence in other sequences". But I would prefer to have as a result a simple list of A numbers. Yours, F. Chapoton 13:17, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi,

The user Charles R Greathouse IV has created the template

{{backlinks|A186927}}

which gives

Backlinks to A186927

This indeed essentially does what I was hoping for. What about incorporating this somewhere in every sequence page ? This would lead to an easy and quick backwards navigation, instead of having to copy and paste the sequence number in the search field. For me, this would be a real improvement of the encyclopedia.

Yours, F. Chapoton 11:41, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks to Russ Cox, this is now an OEIS feature. In the list of links at the end of the sequence data, there is now "refs". Thanks for the suggestion. David Applegate 18:31, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Great ! Many thanks for this nice work ! F. Chapoton 09:15, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Blog spam?

I noticed that some of the new users

have bios that appear to be bot-generated blog comment spam mistakenly finding its way here. Thoughts?

I also gave Russ a heads-up.

Charles R Greathouse IV 05:11, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Another: User:Stephen Spach, using the same name as one of the above but a new spam message [5]. Charles R Greathouse IV 07:10, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. David Applegate 14:29, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Template:Oeis bulk removal

Hi, the bot run to clean up Template:Oeis somehow created new pages, e.g., Ukasiewicz words. In theory this template can have an optional 3rd parameter to inject a fragment (for #-links). Presumably nobody ever used this feature outside of Template:Oeis/doc, but otherwise it could confuse your bot. –Frank Ellermann 13:14, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll have to do some cleanup. The problem wasn't extra template arguments, but rather an error in unicode handling and subseqeuent error handling. David Applegate 13:34, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Honorifics

I saw that you moved User:Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. I was thinking about suggesting that, actually. My reasoning was that others have and (presumably) will hold this title, so it doesn't uniquely identify the person.

Of course we'll run into issues (if we haven't already!) of multiple users with the same name; I'm less sure of how to handle that. Any thoughts?

Charles R Greathouse IV 22:04, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

After some consideration, we concluded that titles and honorifics were inappropriate for OEIS usernames, so made the change.

For multiple users with the same name, we will try to find some acceptable variation to distinguish the users, on a case by case basis. David Applegate 22:44, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Blanks in sequence entries

FYI: A181776 has blanks for certain fields (a few spaces, I guess, rather than an omitted line in the internal format or the usual tilde placeholder in the editable form). For some reason this caused it to be uneditable except in internal mode.

I don't think this causes any immediate problems (possible a few other sequences are like this, with somewhat funny appearance and editing difficulty, but surely not many). But this is a heads-up[ in case there's deeper significance for some reason.

I left a note for User:Russ Cox as well.

Charles R Greathouse IV 19:05, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Issue logging in

User:Johan de Ruiter asks (on his Talk page; he's new):

I can log in to the wiki, but when I try to log in to OEIS, it tells me "An unexpected error happened while authenticating. Sorry." I have cookies enabled.

Any suggestions for him? Or should I ask Russ?

Charles R Greathouse IV 02:45, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Charles. I've followed up on Johan's talk page.

David Applegate 16:03, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi David and Charles, Thanks for your help. I found the issue: I was under the impression that my username contained underscores, and the wiki allowed me to log in with those, but the databse did not. Johan de Ruiter 04:31, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Integer compositions need to be deleted so that we can move Integer Compositions to Integer compositions

Please David, could you delete the page Integer compositions so that the current Integer Compositions can be redirected to it? See Talk:Integer_Compositions -- Yours, Antti Karttunen 10:10, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

I modified the title: so that we can move Integer Compositions to Integer compositions. — Daniel Forgues 10:47, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Deleted. 12:00, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Rename user

No hurry, of course, but I think User:Peter J. C. Moses. should be moved to User:Peter J. C. Moses (removing the trailing dot).

Charles R Greathouse IV 07:02, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for catching that. I finally got around to doing the rename. David Applegate 22:44, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Spammer

It looks like User:Jack Chance is a spammer, judging from his Talk page.

Is this our first bona fide spammer? I know we had a few spambots register accounts before but they didn't manage to actually post any spam. Good times.

The account seems to have been registered some time ago, being approved on Feb 13 but not actually spamming until today. I've seen the 'lay dormant' tactic before on messageboards, I guess it was inevitable that we'd see it here.

Charles R Greathouse IV 04:18, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting it. It appears that, so far, he had only put spam on User:Jack Chance and User Talk:Jack Chance. I've cleaned those up, and blocked the user. David Applegate 12:10, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Plot timeout problem

So that's why I couldn't access Omega(n), number of prime factors of n (with multiplicity)! Thank you very much for fixing that problem. Alonso del Arte 03:31, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Update MRB constant?

Mathworld has added some sums and integrals for the MRB constant that might be useful, or proofs of which would also be great, on the OEIS wiki page: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MRBConstant.html. Proofs in some form are found in my post at https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/366628?p_p_auth=SlzqS8Nx.

Bug reports

Hi, various bug reports and other issues ended up in limbo on OeisWiki talk:Community Portal, broken SVGs on the Wiki side, two OEIS proper nits, and various issues requiring elevated rights in three maintenance categories: Items pending approval, Protected items with edit request, and Discarded items. I need a clue where + how to report bugs, posting on user talk pages for 4 of 6 admins is ~~spam~~just wrong. –Frank Ellermann (talk) 08:01, 14 March 2020 (EDT)

Improve the search a bit.

I'd like to make the search a little bit smarter: also match with one or two less initial elements. Is there a repo with the code, so I can "create a pull request", or similar?