User talk:Bryan Derksen

Just added a new graphic to the Clan McDuck. Also, I have the following tree for the Duck clan:

Thanks for your help on the Beryllium article! I've never hand-coded a table this detailed in HTML before; the table was consequently a nasty reverse hack of several different examples I looked at (needess to say, I am also impatient and you might even say a bit lazy -- otherwise I would have looked this stuff up before I started the table). The weird thing is, I haven't got a clue (no, seriously) why the table decided to render correctly one day in 6 different browsers on two separate platforms and then go totally wack the next without any changes to the HTML code (sloppy as it was). Can only guess that the wiki software was covering for my sloppiness up until today, and then stopped doing so because of some evil alterier motive. >;-}<
Cheers, and happy hacking! --maveric149

Heh. It didn't look all that bad, those tweaks I made were fairly insignificant bits of tidying. I think when all is said and done the real hero of the hour will be the brave maniac who actually does all the hard work copying this format 108 times over and filling in all the details for each of the other elements. :)

Oh, and regarding the periodic table, there was no particular reason why I picked the colors I used for the various element groups other than that they looked reasonably good and were distinguishable; if you can think of a better color scheme I'd love to see it.

PS You might have already noticed this, but about 70% of the text in the Beryllium article is a quick and dirty rewrite of the linked Los Alamos National Lab text on Be. I say, since the American public has already paid for this stuff, we have every right to rearrange the text in the sentences and use a good thesaurus to swap words where needed (Obviously, I still haven't heard from LANL yet on the issue of permission -- so I say we just go for a light rewrite of their text). --maveric149

Alright, I'll do Strontium sometime tomorrow since I'm the one that copied LANL stuff into it previously.

Hello Bryan,

I see you are the table expert.Thank you so much for installing it, it sure looks a whole lot better.H. Jonat

From Talk:Periodic table:
I like fiddling with tables. :) Bryan Derksen

Well, you asked for it. :) Given your above statement, I was wondering if you might want to take a look at the "Isotopic" section of the Properties table in the Beryllium article. I think that it is important to display the info in the table, but the way I have it now is just plain ugly. Is there a way to make a 5 column table sit right below a two colum table and make both tables the same total width? (so that the two tables look like they are one) Or is it possible to have multiple columns under dual columns and not have the first two cells in the multiple column part of the table the same width as the corresponding cells in the dual column part of the table? I have been racking my brain over this, and this has delayed progress on putting a template together for the other perio articles. Any help would be much appreciated. maveric149

Heh. Guess I did ask for it. I'll take a shot at it; a couple of ideas come to mind but I'm not sure if either of them are good. I'll try to have something for you later tonight. :) Bryan Derksen

I like the nested table! So that is what is was supposed to look like. The Isotopic part is really set off as being different -- which it is. I especially like how simple and elegant it now looks in raw HTML -- This will improve the chances of getting people to continually update the table in the future. Go ahead and copy it into the article (so long as it is based on the most recent table -- I made some minor changes yesturday). maveric149

Yup, it's from the most recent version of the actual table. Moving it over now.

Looks like user:Trelvis answered your half-life question that you posted on talk:Beryllium. --maveric149

I noticed. I think I'm going to take his advice of not adding those highly unstable elements to the main element table; that equation looks scary and I'm out of my depth in that field. :) Bryan Derksen

I also agree; the properties table in the main elements articles needs to only have the most stable and useful isotopes (as Trelvis said). Of course, the Isotopes articles will have more complete info on those plus info on the the real unstable ones (at least in table form). But making 109+ "Isotopes of [insert element name here]" will take some time. One step at a time though.... --maveric149

Thanks for working on flagellum. I started it by coping an flagellum feature list from an Intelligent Design website [1] -- Ed Poor

No problem. I'm going from memory on stuff I took in a course several years back, though, so I'm going to need to doublecheck some of it later. If nobody beats me to it I'll probably eventually "finish" the article myself. Bryan Derksen

Thanks muchly for having decoupled the transvestite article - do you think you could get your friends to cover transsexual and similar topics as well? I put a few words under transgender but I really don't feel qualified to comment beyond basic definitions. -- April

No problem. I passed along a whole bundle of links to transgender-related articles to them (it's a transgender fiction writers' mailing list - yes, I have some odd literary interests :), so hopefully there will be a bunch of new stuff showing up shortly. I know for a fact that some of the list's subscribers are highly qualified. :) Bryan Derksen

The weirdness on the Mars probe program was already there--I did all the changes by hand. I don't know what caused it, but thamks for fixing it. --LDC

Ah, I see. It was probably my fault, then, since I'm the one who created that article. Sorry, I just assumed I was perfect and therefore it must have happened when you edited it. :) Bryan Derksen

Way to go Bryan! Thanks for fixing the table -- I already know it looks fine in Konqueror, I will test several other browsers to make sure. maveric149

Cool, I've got a User talk: subspace now! :)

On Mozilla with an 800X600 resolution monitor, the table got slightly wider due to the inflexibility introduced by those extra columns. Ideally, the wiki software people will be able to fix the nested table bug; that way the two-column section and the six-column sections could resize their columns independantly and make things a little more efficient.

I would ordinarily consider this to be "good enough," but considering that this table design will be laboriously replicated over 106 or so articles I want to make absolutely sure I haven't done anything that will be hard to fix later on. Bryan Derksen

Alas, I will hold off on making the template until the wiki software stabilizes. -- I agree that it would be a terrible waste of time to populate 109 tables with info, just to find out that the new software renders the tables incorectly. BTW, what do you think of my deletion of the non-SI units? Was this a wise thing to do in order to save space and de-clutter the table? Could we just as easily add another column for the cgs units now? (dare I say) maveric149

The removal of the non-SI units works very well, I think the table is physically thinner now than it was before I pulled that 6-column trick. I could add another column for other units easily enough, but then the table starts getting fat again and I'm not sure if that's a good idea. It already occupies about half the width of my browser already, and with conversion formulas easily available there doesn't seem to be a pressing need.

The 6-column table will, I suspect, render much the same way as it does now under different software; it doesn't use any fancy HTML features that aren't already used by dozens of other tables on Wikipedia. I guess my opinion depends on the response to the nested-table bug report; if nobody seems to be put out by it, it might not get fixed any time soon and it might be simplest just to go ahead with what works now.

Maybe I should finally bite the bullet and join the wikipedia mailing list. :) Bryan Derksen

I wish you would. I don't have time to fix the "user interface capital letters added everywhere" bug, or the option to colorize different users and their contributions in the diff, both of which I think would help very much. - 24

Your contributions are radically appreciated - this thankless cleanup work is not too popular. Give yourself a break at some point and add in your two cents in the new files linked from meta that ask for your visions, threats, best cases, worst cases, and whatever else you are concerned about. Regards, 24