Contact outside the wiki?

In particular, do you have an instant messenger account, or do you hang out regularly on any IRC channels? Real-time communication could be useful. --Random832 03:25, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't generally use any real-time stuff right now. Email contact is likely to be only slightly faster than by wiki, since I tend to keep an eye on wiki changes. --Netocrat 03:34, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Standard Library namespace

Would you be willing to move all the standard function/header pages to Standard Library/NAME (where NAME is, of course, the name of the existing page)? Since you're an admin, you're better equipped than I am --Random832 03:36, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Hold off on that for the moment - see the comment I've just left at Talk:Standard Library. --Netocrat 03:42, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

If a consensus is arrived at in this direction, would you do the moves? User "moves" should in general be avoided [what happened with NULL was that I wrote it without checking to see if there was a NULL article first] --Random832 03:46, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Case Sensitivity

Can you turn off case sensitivity? I would like to have the article title Null Pointer Constant but be able to have null pointer constant link to it. I see no reason for this wiki to be case-sensitive. --Random832 03:59, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

You can write that as [[Null Pointer Constant|null pointer constant]] which results in this: null pointer constant. MediaWiki has built-in case sensitivity and it's not simple to get around that. --Netocrat 04:22, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I thought that it was an option that could be turned off, but apparently I misremembered. Would you be willing to look into using a wiki solution other than mediawiki? I don't think that this wiki is large enough that it's too late to migrate. --Random832 04:36, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

FlashGordon's running the server and that request would to have his go-ahead (along with general consensus). Personally I'd probably say "let's do it" if:

• you could demonstrate genuine benefits that MediaWiki even with its active developer community is unlikely to catch up to in a reasonable time frame
• you wrote or otherwise provided all export/import scripts to migrate all data, without significant loss (i.e. edit history and comments included)
• you made any modifications that needed to be made to the in-progress voting extension that I'm working on (see my user page), or demonstrated that the features of the new wiki obviate its need

and I'd at least consider it if all that wasn't true. Btw, if you haven't done checked them out yet, have a look through the links in the navigation sidebar, esp. the overview leading to site config.

--Netocrat 04:53, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Eh, forget it. However, a hack to allow case-insensitive lookup and a default theme other than Monobook (that's what _really_ marks it as YAMW) would be nice. --Random832 (forgot to sign)

Right, I've listed the desirability of a custom skin in the roadmap. No one's yet expressed interest in working on it. I'm not convinced that case-insensitivity would be useful. C is a case-sensitive language. We have a somewhat-ignored convention on capitalisation. Comments? --Netocrat 05:29, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Yes, C is a case-sensitive language, but other than identifier names, article titles should probably be in title case and be linked in proper sentence case. --Random832 05:44, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

This was (or at least very similar issues were) discussed in a recent thread on the Wikipedia technical mailing list. Along with automatic resolution of double-redirects (and even any level of chained redirection), better handling of different casing of article titles seems like a pretty good idea and if nothing comes of the discussions on the mailing list I might see about writing a hack - it might be possible to avoid a lot of core-code changes. --Netocrat 10:46, 1 July 2006 (BST)

FAQ references

Also, I've been using c-faq.com for the C FAQ's url - that's the site Steve Summit maintains it at. Let's stick to a convention that we reference it in the form:

• question 17.12 in the FAQ

--Netocrat 04:22, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

The mandragor.org says that it's his homepage, but that seems to be the result of a messed-up mirroring script. Sorry. --Random832 04:36, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to include the title of the question when referencing the FAQ - How about this:

• FAQ question 17.12 Which is correct, char *p or char* p?

--Random832

Works for me, except for long questions like 17.11. I've documented it on the policies and conventions page. --Netocrat 05:29, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Linking from C code

It should be possible to link from within <c></c> tags. Given that [[ is meaningless in C, this shouldn't cause any problem. --Random832 22:07, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Great, so download the software the wiki's running on, come up with a patch for this feature and send it on as Flash has requested. If you have no idea how to do any of that, please do a bit more reading through the links in the navigation sidebar. An alternative to your suggestion is to add the word that you want linked-to to the keywords of the syntax highlighter. --Netocrat 22:30, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Where can the syntax hilighter be found? Overview doesn't provide any link, and I can't find it if i look for "mediawiki c syntax hilighting" on google --Random832 22:44, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Is it not clear from the "Configuration" item in the "About this Wiki" section on that page where to find the site's software/config? If not, how would you suggest we make it clearer? (serious question, not a snipe) --Netocrat 22:55, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I guess I expected to find a link in the "Cross-Referencing and Syntax Highlighting" section. Maybe a link from there to Planning:Wiki customisation#Syntax Highlighting would be helpful --Random832 00:35, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Good one, I've added that link. Btw, there are other issues with the highlighter, such as lack of support for preprocessor directives and inability to link to standard headers following a #define - or even to link the #define token itself. Apparently this will be partially supported in the 1.2 release, but if we want complete support we may need to hack it in ourselves (or write our own more complete C parser and highlighter/linker - if we go that route, for purity let's write the whole thing in portable C and post the code as an example on the wiki). --Netocrat 20:49, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Spammer to block

195.175.37.71 has spammed us 4 times; you might wish to block that IP addr, and save us the hassle. -- JesseW 01:42, 5 July 2007 (BST)

Thanks, I've just done that. By the way, welcome to the wiki - as you can probably tell things are pretty static around here for the moment and have been for a long time, but your intention to flesh out the K&R2 solutions is very welcome. --Netocrat 07:46, 6 July 2007 (BST)

Thanks! It looks like no-one has actually done any code reviews (or at least, not using the templates (they arn't linked anywhere). I'd be interested, but as I'm certainly not a C expert (yet), I'm a little leery of being the first... Also, are posts asking for comments on unusual solutions to K&R exercises topical for c.l.c? JesseW 20:05, 6 July 2007 (BST)

Yes, those sort of posts are topical. Yes, I think that you are right that you would be the first reviewer - don't let that hold you back though! Jump right in and get your hands dirty. :-P --Netocrat 08:50, 10 July 2007 (BST)

Great, thanks. I've posted the alternative solution you commented on. I'll look into doing some code reviews now. JesseW 20:41, 10 July 2007 (BST)