User talk:Bear

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Revision as of 16:37, 29 June 2006 by Bear (talk | contribs) (Welcome to OpenTutorial: insert sec header)
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Pentagon and Math

Thanks for writing such an in depth tutorial on How to Construct a pentagon!

You obviously know what you're doing, but if for any reason you need anything please feel free to drop me a message on my talk page. --Hapa 07:29, 23 June 2006 (MST) Talk

Well no, I'm floundering a little. For instance, I seem to have created a Step 0 in the construction; that's after a preliminary, unnumbered step. Right now I'm working on the proof -- I've already written it out in Word but I need to translate that into wikimarkup and LaTeX. And I seem to have made a few minor mistakes.
I do hope to complete the whole thing. Thanks for dropping in. Bear 13:45, 23 June 2006 (MST)

I checked into installing the math module. With my current hosting setup I don't have acces to compile texvc, one of the binaries used. I'll look into it further and see if I can come up with a solution that can work. It may take a while.--Hapa 09:51, 26 June 2006 (MST)

Well, you see my clever workaround. I open a page on Wikipedia and type in the math markup; then hit preview. I can click the resulting image and save it to my own hard drive without ever actually saving the page; I just preview over and over. Once I'm done and close the window on the never-created page, the little formula PNGs go to Bit Heaven on WP, but I have the whole stash to do with as I please.
In some ways this is better than math markup itself on a wiki. If somebody fiddles with markup it can be hard to track down the diff, to see exactly what was changed and when, and to figure out if the change is for good or bad. The equation-as-image is a single unit. Also, this approach lends itself to pages such as Construct a pentagon/equations and templates like {{:Construct a pentagon/eq|11}} which gives:

Anyway, the work is about done now. I have another page to write and then it's time to fill in the standard sections with references to lead the student forward from here. Then it's done. (!) Thanks for your help. Bear 03:51, 28 June 2006 (MST)

That is a very clever work around! I like it. It also frees up server processing which is my current bottleneck, along with MySQL. When OpenTutorial is slow it's usually beacuse of MySQL. I must research better hosting.--Hapa 12:20, 28 June 2006 (MST)

Policies

Your page OpenTutorial:Wikipedia is very well put together. You seem to have some insight to what policies should be for a Wiki. Your post inspired me to write an Ultimate Vision statement for OpenTutorial. I welcome any and all ideas you have for building a proper community of happy contributors.

You mention Wikipedia's lack of desire to implement a formal structure. Do you have any ideas for a formal structure for OpenTutorial?

Thanks for contributing --Hapa 12:20, 28 June 2006 (MST)