User talk:Johan G

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Revision as of 15:24, 19 May 2018 by Johan G (talk | contribs) (→‎Progress bar and icons: I am a bit skeptical to the usefulness of vertical ones sized for running text. Nearly unreadable in smaller steps than 3rds.)
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Swedish

Hi Johan,

thanks for starting translating articles to Swedish! Unfortunately, the wiki admin has to "add" this language to the system (therefore adding sv:Article does not work as of now). I've immediately asked him to do so, but it might take a while. In the meantime you can continue translating articles, it's just the linking that doesn't work.

Cheers, Gijs 08:36, 3 July 2011 (EDT)

Ah, that explains why the language link doesn't seem to work. Thank you! I sent him a mail as well. Well, at least I can continue (in a slow pace). Johan G 08:43, 3 July 2011 (EDT)

Don't be a stranger.

Jag hoppas att du kommer tillbaka snart. This unsigned comment was added by PH-JBO (Talk | contribs) 11:45, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for hoping for my return. Den som väntar på något gott... In other words, I'm back. Johan G 09:59, 5 December 2011 (EST)
Du är inte ensam. Välkommen tillbaka! PH-JBO 07:28, 6 December 2011 (EST)

Test

A short thest to see if a new section added with the "+" tab is appended to the bottom of the page. Johan G 07:32, 9 February 2012 (EST)

Discussing new main page/portals

Hi,

would be nice if you could come on IRC this week. I'd like to discuss the new main page/portals that I've been working on ;) You'll find me in #wiki@irc.flightgear.org

Cheers, Gijs 12:27, 19 March 2012 (EDT)

Hi, I should be in #wiki now as Johan_G. This will bee interesting. I have not used IRC before, and last time I watched it over someones shoulder was in 1999 1998!
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 14:52, 19 March 2012 (EDT)

Infobox aircraft changes

I thought, I'd better get in touch with the only wikimedia template guru that I know :-) I just added a handful of meta categories (inspired by [1]), and now want to extend the infobox accordingly, including images for each supported features, see: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Template_talk:Infobox_aircraft Any ideas/preference how to implement this best? Images will probably be contributed by Michat. Thanks --Hooray (talk) 18:33, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

It is low on my to-do list, but see my answer at Template talk:Infobox aircraft.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 18:08, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes/no template

Hi Johan,

the yes/no template doesn't seem to work well on Photoscenery, everything says "yes" now. Another issue is that the 1m/pixel text is no longer centered, as if it only applies to "texture materials", while it's supposed to cover "3D model" as well. And to be honest, I prefer the more pronounced colours that we had before... I'm all in for a yes/no template though, don't get me wrong ;-)

Cheers, Gijs (talk) 11:43, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Oops. I was updating the templates to be able to handle adding xhtml attributes and one the edits accidentally had "Yes instead of "No". Should already work as expected by now.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:51, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
Made the colours quite a bit stronger, but black text should still be readable in the cells.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 12:20, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for appreciating

Hi, thanks for appreciating Howto:Convert objects with ModelConverterX. I recently posted a howto on georeferencing OSM in WED, let me know if that could be added somewhere in the wiki, I'd be glad to, but I'm not sure if it's useful outside of Italy.--Bigstones (talk) 22:38, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

You are very welcome. :-)
About the howto, it could probably fit really well as an article on the wiki. My only concern there is using Google to check the taxiways. I am not sure or not that it is relevant, but Google's terms of use do not allow derivative works. Licenses can be a problem sometimes, and I am completely ignorant when it comes to Italian legislation on intellectual property, but I assume that most sources are copyrighted more or less automatically, but that there might be a few sources with less restrictive licenses.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 19:30, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
I see. Well, in Italy (see elgaton's answer) we're allowed to trace over some nice aerial images in OSM, but that's all, so we have to go through OSM and its limitations (i.e. no Bezier). I can substitute that part with just a warning to check by other means what angles should be rounded, or suggest to make rounded corners stand out in OSM with more points. However blurry is the border with Google, I guess it could be considered as "getting the coordinates"* of rounded corners (*I've read it's considered ok here).
It jumps to my mind that Bing has allowed use of its aerial images for OSM tracing - worldwide. They have a good detail but are not very precise, yet that's something a mapper can fix. I guess this changes the usefulness of the howto :D Let me know if there's a particular page/category where I can put this. --Bigstones (talk) 13:43, 28 April 2014 (UTC)
The juridical stuff can be a problematic at times. ;-)
A fitting category would be Category:Scenery enhancement I think.
(On a side note that category page have turned into an article over time, which looks messy and wont turn up in a regular wiki search using the search box.)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 14:03, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

A FlightGear help category

Today Unexpected Crashes with Scenery ver.2 was added to Category:Help. There's lack indeed of a FlightGear help category (into FlightGear of course). That sounds like a good name (place), but I won't add it until I know your opinion. --Bigstones (talk) 13:49, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for asking. There is indeed lack of a FlightGear help category, but I'll get to that. The help category seem to only have contained pages in the help namespace, i.e. articles with help about using the wiki (i think that category page even states that).
As for the FlightGear help pages, I have actually never really figured out if there originally was some kind of thought through structure there or if the whole thing was a bit haphazard turned into ad hoc. I.e. I have never really grasped how to use them in an intuitive way (for both me, other editors and the readers). There is a lot of categories that slightly overlap or are slightly vague, which does not help when trying to find articles or even categories. I think a lot of that mess should be discussed on the village pump.
In addition there are lots of annoying little technicalities, like that the search box auto-complete function is case sensitive and that some editors are very much into Camel Case Titles, something for example Wikipedia is recommending their editors to avoid. Speaking of that, the wiki could need a style guide, but that would take some extra maintenance to enforce.
To be honest have been secretly wishing that you might be into trying to figure out a better structure and better category names, specially for the FlightGear related stuff. I have thought about it and figured that I would wish it would be better... but doesn't feel up to it. I spent most of my categorisation efforts on templates and images, unless pages was uncategorised.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 19:30, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
Heh, and you picked your "dupe" very wisely. Your last phrase in parentheses, in the above topic, is the main reason for me being here. I'll definitely try that when I get more confidence. However there's a lot of automatable stuff, some of which should be done before to ease that part. Some I pointed out in the other discussion, one is that of recategorizing other languages, one is fixing camel case (like for spaces with Howto). Much more might come out.
--Bigstones (talk) 00:49, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
edit -- see FlightGear wiki:Village pump#Category:Support --Bigstones (talk) 14:48, 11 May 2014 (UTC)
Good move. The more eyes, the better. :-)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 21:10, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Updated compile guide

User:Daemonburrito/Building FlightGear - Linux

Hello, Johan. As promised, a completely reworked compile guide. It makes a nice, clean, and safe environment. And it works!

But it is a pretty big change to drop in there, so I'm leaving it on my user page for comments for a bit. Let me know what you think. Daemonburrito (talk) 17:06, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

I am not really the right person to review it, except for copy editing (i.e. style/wiki markup) if that would be needed. In this case I think it might be better to mention it on the forum. I have very little experience with Linux, and on top of that it was quite some time ago (Red hat Linux, kernel 2.2 etc. on a way to weak box).
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 19:40, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
Will do. Thanks! Daemonburrito (talk) 23:04, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

On reorganization of Category:Troubleshooting

Hi Johan, I hope I was not too messy yesterday. I'm sure I never broke a link, and neither lost any information (a huge amount was duplicated), although I also rewrote some parts. Actually, 2-3 redirects are still around only because I couldn't edit some Japanese/Chinese pages. The two deletions you postponed:

  • Howto:Improve framerates - I didn't delete the content just to save one edit, but I did actually already move everything.
  • Intel GMA cards - I've found that page by chance, and it wasn't referenced anywhere. The information it contains is already in the same place where I moved the forum ref.

I hope this can help for a future review. Also, in case you want to review my future plans, I wrote them in my user page.

--Bigstones (talk) 10:43, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

I think I may have been messier. In retrospect I might should have left the redirects for those that by habit look for those article titles when troubleshooting. Also a lot of posts on the forum point to those. I will probably restore those and try point them towards suitable pages.
That said, I think you have done a great job separating the information aimed at developers from the one aimed at users. It kind of makes me wonder why no one thought of that before.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 23:59, 18 May 2014 (UTC)
Let me know if I can help with redirects...
--Bigstones (talk) 19:54, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

DDS article moved ...

Not sure if you have been followin the discussion on the devel list or if I misunderstood something, but I don't think it's necessarily specific to just terrain textures ? Anyway, please keep the redirect either way because Thorsten already posted a link using the old name. So while the current name is definitely better, we should probably ensure that all links keep on working, while the website/forum can be updated, the devel archives cannot ... --Hooray (talk) 23:28, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Ah, my misunderstanding. Terrain textures was specifically mentioned in one of the sections/quotes so I thought it was about that specifically. I will move it to Switching default texture format to DDS instead.
As for keeping the redirect, I am more cautious about deleting them due to some to eager deletions I have done in the past...
Thanks for the heads up.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 23:40, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Improvements and cleaning of Wiki pages

Hi Johan_G! You seem to be very popular and loved. I'm here to thank you for your work on cleaning the article about the Mulhouse airport. I really like how it's cleaner and the templates, you seem to be good at it. I really don't have that much of an idea. Also cool that you're an admin. I may not be very popular and appear irregularly, but I do my best to help the wiki (also notice the problems I have with Flightgear in my User page, you may pass by and leave a message, it's so empty :'( ). I guess that's all for now

Thefan630 (talk) 10:00, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

As for the Mulhouse airport article, you are very welcome. Thanks also for the kind words.
Making articles easier to read is one of my longterm goals on the wiki, but I am usually spending most of my time on improving stuff that would help other do the work, in essence structure and documentation on how to use the wiki. Have a look at the help pages and the templates and their documentation, though there is still a lot of undocumented templates, including some important ones. The style guides are still in their infancy (and at the moment I feel the article style guide is a bit convoluted, but it can be improved).
The templates I added, and most of the so called messagebox templates can be found at Help:Gallery of messagebox templates. Links to them can be found on Help:Templates. However, the quick way to find links to templates is by looking at the bottom of a page you are editing. Just click the text "Templates used on this page:" and you will see a list of links to the templates (and hopefully their documentation).
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:13, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
Hey! Sorry for spamming your talk page. Just wanted to let you know that I'm running FlightGear again, and hell yeah is it smooth
Thefan630 (talk) 12:40, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
Welcome back! :-)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 23:48, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

A300-600

Hi thanks for doing that to my A300-600 page, it looks a lot more professional. I tried changing the name as well but couldn't figure out how :-) Airbus330 (talk) 22:24, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

You are very welcome. :-)
You can change the name of a page by "moving" the page using the small menu accessible through the small down arrow to the left of the search box.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:05, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

$FG_ROOT vs $FG_DATA

Hi Johan,

I think you missed my message (I agree it was somewhat hidden in an edit summary) about $FG_ROOT/$FG_DATA. $FG_ROOT is what we commonly refer to as the data directory/fgdata. There is no such thing as $FG_DATA. See the explanation at $FG_ROOT.

Cheers, Gijs (talk) 16:04, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. I hope these two edits diff and diff will make it more clear. I will hunt down individual links to $FG_DATA shortly.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 12:45, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
Done DoneJohan G (Talk | contribs) 19:03, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


Space Shuttle designation

Hi Johan,

I'm actually not comfortable with a label like 'Thorsten's Space Shuttle' - AW isn't called 'Thorsten's Weather System' either, and ALS isn't called 'Thorsten's Rendering framework' - it's not mine in the first place, there are others contributing, and even if I would be the only contributor, I don't want to contribute this so blatantly linked to my name.

Could we find a different solution please?

  • Thorsten
Honestly neither was I (as well as 'HerbyW's Space Shuttle'), I just wanted to link between the two and had to differentiate them.
I am a little out of good ideas at the moment though, so I will just use the page names for now.
P.S. Please sign with four tilde characters (~~~~) on discussion pages.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 12:21, 19 May 2015 (EDT)
I have now moved around the Space Shuttle articles and edited some links here and there so they link to one or the other of them depending on context.
See also FlightGear wiki:Village pump#Disambiguating the two Space Shuttle pages (perm)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 08:21, 16 August 2015 (EDT)

Names

Hi Johan, Do you know if and how to edit wiki article names? The reason I ask is because Saitek in Using Saitec AV8R second throttle as view pan speed control is misspelled. Thanks. There's a mig29 pilot on the loose! 12:12, 14 July 2015 (EDT)


Oops. My mistake.
You can change it right now. Look at FlightGear wiki:Village pump#Rename Template (permalink) to see how to do it. Please leave a short explanation in the edit summary
A tip on leaving a redirect behind:
As that title only have been used less than a day, you probably will not break links if you do not leave a redirect behind, but in other cases you should really do that even if article names are misspelled.
While you can look at what wiki pages link to a certain page (for example Special:WhatLinksHere/User talk:Johan G list links to this page), there are other pages on the web that might be affected. I broke some links on the forum early on by not leaving redirects (thankfully someone noticed).
By the way I noted the way you linked to the article. You do not need to do it like this [[Using Saitec AV8R second throttle as view pan speed control|Using Saitec AV8R second throttle as view pan speed control]], it is sufficient to only use [[Using Saitec AV8R second throttle as view pan speed control]]. ;-)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:32, 14 July 2015 (EDT)
Thanks also for keeping an eye on things. The more eyeballs, the better. :-)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 17:40, 14 July 2015 (EDT)


Ok, did it. Also redid the ORIGINAL page's redirect to the new page (saitek instead of saitec)
There's a mig29 pilot on the loose! 13:11, 15 July 2015 (EDT)


Great! Thanks! :-)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 19:42, 15 July 2015 (EDT)

Shuttle Ambiguity

Hi Johan, Is there anything that can be done about the current state of the names of the SpaceShuttle - Project Overview and Space Shuttle pages? Problem is, if you search for "Space Shuttle, you get HerbyW's shuttle. To get the article about Thorsten's, Richard's, wlbragg's & japreja's shuttle you need to type in "SpaceShuttle-project overview" Thanks, Adam (talk) 14:35, 21 July 2015 (EDT)

Thanks for bringing that up again.
Seeing your comment I took a second look at a discussion at the village pump again. See FlightGear wiki:Village pump#Disambiguating the two Space Shuttle pages (perm) for my current thoughts on this.
Please reply and leave feedback on the village pump.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 18:15, 21 July 2015 (EDT)

Using the messagebox templates for an external project

Hi Johan,

I was wondering if you would mind if I used your awesome messagebox templates of {{tip}}, {{note}}, {{caution}}, and {{warning}} in an external project? And maybe {{LangSwitch}}, {{WIP}} and a few of the others as well? This would be for my own GPLv3+ software relax, specifically for use on the GPLv3+ licensed relax wiki. I tried it out with Template:Tip, Template:Note Template:Caution, and Template:Warning, and used it on http://wiki.nmr-relax.com/Hidden_radian_units, but then I looked at the licensing at FlightGear_wiki:Copyrights and FlightGear_wiki:Terms_of_use and realised that the wiki content is GPLv2-only and not GPLv2+. I cannot find the GPL clause of "or (at your option) any later version" (from the "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs" section of the licence), making all FG wiki content GPLv2-only. So I am not legally allowed to copy the content without consent from the original authors. Would you mind allowing these templates to be dual-licensed as GPLv2+, so it can be shared as GPLv3+ content elsewhere? Otherwise I'll delete it from the relax wiki and design a new template. Cheers!

Bugman (talk) 10:57, 15 October 2015 (EDT)

Well... ;-) the usual way to handle copyright is pretty much always to copy and rephrase/modify (before saving). In essence doing a non verbatim "copy". What I would do is to copy them and modify them for example using different styling and maybe change a few other things.
Something I would recommend, that I have not done here (yet) is to have a meta-template used by the messagebox templates for the common elements, and probably also styling through a parameter. Something that would save you from extra key presses is to use lowercase only template names (if you have that kind of control).
Trivia: Note, Caution and Warning are words I borrowed from typical flight manual/pilot operating handbook and cockpit indicator use, all sometimes defined by regulation to be used for notes of importance, cations about risk of damaging equipment or minor physical injuries and warnings about major damage to equipment, major physical injuries or death. When used in cockpit indicators and displays, again sometimes by regulation, colors often associated with caution are yellow or amber, warning with red and systems not normally running with cyan.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:57, 15 October 2015 (EDT)
The meta-template is a great idea. That would remove the GPLv2-only issue, as all content would then be different ;) I'll test it out on the my wiki, then see what it takes to use the same idea to unify and simplify the different messagebox templates here.
Bugman (talk) 12:31, 15 October 2015 (EDT)
That was quite easy! I have created a series of templates using a meta-template on the relax wiki, and thanked you for the suggestions. The meta-template is Template:MessageBox. I also have created Template:MessageBox/doc_inform_series to reuse the same documentation text for this series. It is all visible on these template pages: Template:Tip, Template:Note Template:Caution, and Template:Warning. I couldn't change the text style to small-caps within the meta-template, so this is unfortunately still performed in the individual templates. Have a look at these for how clean the templates become! Anyway, now the only thing in common between the relax and FG templates is your choice of colours, so no copyright issues there ;) If you think this would help the FlightGear wiki, what would you suggest for a FlightGear meta-template name? It will be quick to convert {{tip}}, {{note}}, {{caution}}, and {{warning}} and clean these up. I think a common template for documentation, including the 'known issues' and 'related templates' sections would also be a good idea for these. Feel free to shift this to the Village pump if you think there is a general interest.
Bugman (talk) 15:43, 15 October 2015 (EDT)

Removing a section from Make nice screenshots howto

Topic was moved to the FlightGear wiki:Village Pump#Removing a section from the Make nice screenshots howto (perm)

Forum is down

Hi Funny this, I'm usually writing, Wiki is down!" on the Forum, rather than vice versa. Anyway, when I try to load the page, I get: "General Error

SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111) [2002]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists." Do you get this? I posted this on the bugs mailing list. Adam (else MIG29pilot) (talk) 15:51, 3 November 2015 (EST)

I noticed that it is down again. I have emailed Curt (the maintainer) and Gijs (who can do much, much more than me).
Tip You can usually find the email addresses to the maintainers of the various FlightGear infrastructure, though it is not easy (and should not be). It can be good to have in situations like these. For example neither of them have given me their email address.  ;-)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 21:36, 16 November 2015 (EST)

Newsletter drafts

Hi Johan. Would it be possible for you to create the "draft" newsletters up to December? Not sure of the exact format, don't want to mess things up ;) Legoboyvdlp (talk) 08:22, 25 October 2017 (EDT)

With a bit of luck I could give it a try tomorrow.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 12:36, 28 October 2017 (EDT)
Sorry for my delays. At some point (probably some weekend) I aim to implement what have been discussed at the Village Pump recently regarding using preloaded pages. In essence making a single click link to create a draft of the next newsletter. (Unless someone is quicker on that than me...)
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 16:40, 5 November 2017 (EST)
An early newsletter template draft is now available in my sandbox.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 07:08, 11 November 2017 (EST)

Progress bar and icons

Hi Johan. I was wondering if you could upload a new set of progress bar icons? Half of the current set have been lost from the wiki backend, so scaled icons are broken. See {{progressbar}} where a number of these graphics are shown as the text: Error creating thumbnail: File missing. For two of these, I have manually recreated bitmap versions. Maybe it would be good to upload the SVG originals? I have been using scaled versions of these via the {{progressbar}} template for the current version of the translation requests page. For better table packing, I am wondering if we should introduce a vertical parameter for this template and have a full set of vertical icons, as a copy of your progress icons rotated 90 degrees.

Bugman (talk) 12:02, 29 December 2017 (EST)


I feel I need to apologize for not doing this literally years ago. I have finally gotten around to reupload these particular missing files. It seems likely that they have been missing ever since the wiki crashed when the ISP migrated the wiki's virtual server to new hardware back in late January 2015 (see the forum topic wiki.flightgear.org scheduled downtime for the details.)
As for vertical ones, I am not there yet, but I think just turning them vertical would make them nearly unreadable. I have some ideas, but is as often slow to implement them.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 09:27, 19 May 2018 (EDT)


Have done a test with vertical ones. Even reading out 20% steps is hard in normal running text. 1/3rds maybe are possible. Could probably be better to have a compact 20%-step version of the horizontal one instead.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 11:24, 19 May 2018 (EDT)