h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's still wouldn't be against the new version of the House Rules, but they are refusing to reply to me. Something may happen in the not too distant future...

Well house rules are being played rediculously hard at the moment, it's like living in a dictatorship. You been keeping up with the latest converstaions? 'This post is queued for moderation.....' absolutely everywhere.

"What ever you do, don't mention the war!" - Basil Fawlty

A very good morning, oops, just gone afternoon, to you SEF. Just thought I'd let you know that both VB and MO theory have been picked and are off for subbing. Thanks for the help

I hope they don't do anything too terrible to them then.

Hopefully not, the only thing I'm expecting is they'll remove a couple of the links but other than that having looked at some of the other scientific ones there hopefully won't be too much else

RhoMuNuQ subbing them both so I'm confident

Rho!

Hello SEF haven't spoken to you in a while, thought I'd pop round for some How's you? I'm now counting down the 2 and a hlf days until the project students leave for easter... and for good actually, and so won't be using and breaking our stuff. Sam managed to break my vacuum pump, big heavy expensive one too but has been fixed (I hope). You doing anything special for the coming holiday? Anyway, Rho's finished with my entries now and has done a stirling job Lets just hope the final editing by the italics doesn't mess things up. Anyway, off for lunch, speak to you soon

The Annals of Improbable Research reported someone's work on the half-life of glassware using various mathematical/scientific models.

I try to avoid holidays but my mother seems to be demanding that I visit (the excuse/reason being that my younger brother + family will be there).

Rho's definitely in my "cute and adorable" (sight-unseen of course since this is a personality thing), reliable/trustworthy and smart categories. If he's lurking again, I hope he has the decency to blush and leave quietly.

Had a thought... Dr Justin has made some diagrams to replace the table art in my entries which frankly are a lot more effective and was wondering; Sometimes when doing simple molecular diagrams, tags work quite well and look nice but I can't do complicated things with them. I was wondering whether it is possible to draw diagrams, save as gifs, put on web and then enlist the assistance of a nice community artist to blobenise them for 'legal' use... Was wondering whether, hypoethically speaking of course, if something like that was possible (?)

I hope Dr.J has done a good job then since his are often a bit fuzzy as a result of using JPEG based graphics software.

It is something with which I strenuously disagree but you are not allowed to do your own graphics the way you suggest either. CAs don't create blobs we just submit GIFs/JPGs from a list we are asked to do. The BBC staff then turn these into blobs on the database (and sometimes break them in the process). If the article had been put up for CA illustration and I had bagged it from the list you could have snuck them to me instead of me doing my own but that would be naughty.

For some reason (eg being historically part of the in-crowd) Dr.J is allowed to flout the normal rules and do illustrations for articles which are never offered up to the rest of the CAs. These then often break the h2g2 graphics guidelines. I wasn't aware this was going on when I joined the CAs since it is not admitted on site. It was partly these technical graphics which I thought I could do better. The exchange obviously takes place in an underhand manner behind the scenes somewhere.

to clariffy, my reasoning being that, in this case, someone, me, has made some diagrams using available coding technique and a community artist has been asked to make some nice shiny ones to replace them and are entered into the guides arsenal of pictures, surely it should be possible for the writer to draw them for the artist for inclusion seeing as they know what it's meant to look like (??)

Ah, you posted while I was writing. Yes, I've seen the trig pictures of his before which made me wonder about the possibility

I've found the subbing thread and therefore the diagrams. They are fuzzy with too thick borders again. It is better than TABLEs but not as good as properly constructed GIFs would have been.

Perhaps it's a suggestion for a future version of the giude (that I've seen vague mentions of here and there but seen sod all progress ). Have an attachments box in the edit window to attach gifs, put suitable embed tags in guideML and then they can be dealt with properly under a set of rules (file size, suitability etc) during the editorial process once submitted?

As a slight turn-around I did get to illustrate one of Dr.Justin's articles properly - A1004400.

Very nice picture too, what do you use to draw them, not one of the standard art programs you get with your pc I'm guessing. Got my nice picture back, my conference poster's just been done by the uni printing dept. It seems rediculously large but is roughly the size set in the guidelines. Oh well, looks good anyway though I won't have a chance in hell of winning a prize for it, my industrial supervisor will be on the judging panel, d'oh. Oh well, I'm demonstrating all today so I'd best get back to teaching labs. I'm sure I'll have a queue of people wanting to know how to make up IR spec samples... Spaek to you later

Can you have a look at this for me A1013239, I really can't find the problem with it, it doesn't like any tag what so ever that's in the main body of the text and when I try and put in tags it says are needed but aren't another error pops up somewhere else saying 'white space not allowed here" (????*%&%&^%&$%$ )

As manda pointed out the other day, the most common white space error is demanding some (between the quotes at the end of one argument and the name of the next within a tag). I can't immediately see the error but remember that the parser typically points about 3 lines down from where the error actually occurred.

Meanwhile here are some general tips. It is better to stick to all capitals for tags, eg , . Links can be self-closing if they already have the right title, eg . You seem to have generated ’ for the simple apostrophe ' for some reason. If you are editing in Word or some other package you are turning into a penguin and should stop it right now. Use a decent text editor such as Notepad and some problems may go away on their own.

Seems to have sorted itself out now after ooooh an hour. I'm not going to touch it again just in case Thanks for having a look anyway