User talk:Marc Kupper

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Notice - Limited time on ISFDB - At times I may go a few days without checking ISFDB but usually do so at least every two to three weeks. Please go ahead and leave messages but don't take it personally if I seem to ignore the message for a few days to weeks.

A note to new ISFDB Editors: Click here or the "+" tab at the top of this page to send a message to me. You sign the note with ~~~~ (four tidles) which the wiki system will translate into your logged in name plus the date/time. Thank you. ~Marc

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Contents 1 Archives of this talk page 2 Explorers and horizons 3 Agatha Christie 4 Bradbury's A Medicine for Melancholy 5 Sand Wars #6 Challenge Met - added cover image/notation on artist 6 Logan's World 7 Farmer in the Sky -- adds 8 Touch of Strange 9 The Light that Never Was 10 As the Curtain Falls 11 Castaways of Tanagar 12 Bodelan Way 13 City Machine 14 cover for Daughter of Regals 15 Karel Čapek 16 image tweak on Exiles 1: The Ruins of Ambrai 17 Door Through Space/Rendezvous on a Lost World 18 Islands 19 Camelot in Orbit 20 Ole Doc Methuselah 21 Traitor cover credit 22 Bow Down to Nul/The Dark Destroyers 23 Brain wave 24 The dark side of the Earth 25 The star dwellers 26 The Hounds of Skaith 27 The dreaming earth 28 On the symb_socket circuit 29 Mars 30 Star Gate 31 Wheel of Stars

Archives of this talk page

Open items, March 2008, October 2008, February 2009, August 2009

Explorers and horizons

From Ommadawndk 20:12, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Can there be created a connection between these 2:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?183042

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?36444

I don't see how to do it. -- Thank you for your message, I can see the connection now, as I know where to look.

Agatha Christie

There seems to be duplicate entries for 2 Agatha Christie short stories:

The Last Séance (1926) and The Last Seance (1971)

The Lamp (1933) and The Lamp (1976)

(I hope this is the right way to draw it to the right persons attention.)

Bradbury's A Medicine for Melancholy

Can you recheck the title of a story in your verified copy of this title? I believe "The Sunset Harp" should be "The Shore Line at Sunset" as it appears in other editions of this title. Thanks. MHHutchins 06:32, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

LOL - what happened there is I started to verify and in the middle of doing that started to read the book and got distracted... I fixed it to use The Shore Line at Sunset. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:42, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Sand Wars #6 Challenge Met - added cover image/notation on artist

Afternoon! This. [1]. I added a cover image, [2], and notation on cover artist. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 21:34, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Logan's World

Identified the cover artist (Mitchell Hooks) and added a note to this verified pub. Thanks, Willem H. 19:26, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Farmer in the Sky -- adds

Morning! Apologies. This. [3]. I corrected the date to show the same date as the notes, then did a mind blitch and added the same cover as the seventh printing which is supposed to be the same also adding the artist as noted in notation. Please check and correct my presumptions. I know I could cancel, but I know the date is correct. What a Yetch. Thanks, Harry. --Dragoondelight 12:47, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Touch of Strange

Scanned in a new image and added a couple of notes to [this] The copy I just bought had two dustjackets, the top one a little sun-faded. Does yours have a jacket? ~Bill, --Bluesman 15:00, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

The Light that Never Was

Added some notes to [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 21:12, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

As the Curtain Falls

Scanned in an image and added interior art with note to [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 04:30, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Castaways of Tanagar

Just entered the CDN edition of [this] and assume the interior art is the same (cover is the same). About an inch+ up from the bottom left corner are Gaughan's "JG" initials. Cheers! ~Bill, --Bluesman 21:28, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Bodelan Way

Scanned an image, added the interior art with notes to [[4]] ~Bill, --Bluesman 01:20, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

City Machine

New image, interior art and notes for [this] ~Bill, --Bluesman 01:31, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

cover for Daughter of Regals

I added this image to your verified Daughter of Regals and Other Tales. --MartyD 12:29, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Karel Čapek

I am trying to recreate Bug 2938454, "Unicode in author names", and I am not having much luck. There is no canonical name for "Karel Čapek", only a legal name for "Čapek, Karel". I wonder if the spelling of the canonical name may have been changed since the bug report was created?

On a more elevated plane, I was surprised that Advanced Search worked since the database is currently Latin-1 encoded and Unicode won't work reliably until we upgrade to UTF-8. Unfortunately, it's apparently easier said than done... Ahasuerus 00:36, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree - easier said than done to fix this one. However, I believe the quick fix is only in one spot. At se.py line 282 you pick up AUTHOR_CANONICAL, translate space to _, and then just write it out. The 'author' variable contains "Karel_Čapek". It turns out that you we get away with encoding Unicode as HTML on the URL as that's how we encode these in the database. This it's just a straight mapping of things like & # ; etc. into their % codes. Click on http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Karel_%26%23268%3Bapek.

That'll fix searching for Karel Čapek but we should do a better job in ae.cgi. Specifically, the UTF-8 encoding of pure 21-bit Unicode values should work too. At present http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Karel_%C4%8Capek fails. We will get this encoding when sites such as Wikipedia link to us. To handle this we will need to scan AUTHOR_CANONICAL and if we come across a %xx series that is valid UTF-8 then decode the resulting Unicode character and look to see if it's valid ISO-8859-1. If so we use the 8-bit value literally. If not, then re-encode that as an HTML escaped character. The Unicode code point for Č is 268 meaning we convert that to Č. If someone put %C3%A9 in an author name on the URL then we decode that to 233, see that it's valid ISO-8859-1, and will have an "é" in our author name.

Do you have a UTF-8 validator coded in Python? If not, I can likely write up the code in C with enough comments that you'll see what I'm doing. If you hit %xx values that turn out to not be valid UTF-8 then interpret them as ISO-8859-1 values. You already do the ISO-8859-1 interpretation by doing nothing. :-)

I added War With the Newts for testing Bug 2938454 which is why Karel Čapek is in the database now. Once support for Č works I was planning to notify the verifiers for the publications listed on Author:Karel Capek. I believe all of Karel Čapek's books used "Čapek" except for the Bantam edition of War With the Newts which uses Capek and an Albanian short story collection, Tregime të zgjedhura, which uses Çapek. (My fingers would hurt if I try to type in the title and so see this). FWIW, I'm certain that all of Josef Capek's books use Čapek (he's Karel's brother). --Marc Kupper|talk 07:28, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Update - I just realized that another reason for adding the UTF-8 support is that it will allow Karel Čapek to work. Note that at present the template {{a}} is coded using anchorencode which converts to Karel_.C4.8Capek. That was the wrong string function. anchorencode allows people to construct URLs to mediawiki sites and where the link URL is to a section of a page. You 'anchorencode' the section name. I don't know if the anchorencode in {{a}} was by design but once UTF-8 support is added to ae.cgi we can change it to 'urlencode' and that'll generate Karel_%C4%8Capek. --Marc Kupper|talk 08:34, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

If my understanding is correct, the core problem is that our MySQl tables are using Latin-1 and the standard Swedish (sic) collation sequence instead of UTF-8. We will need to convert all tables to UTF-8 before we can address any other problems and that, as experience shows, is not easy. Besides, we would need to run it by Al and see what he says first. He spent a fair amount of time fighting Unicode in 2005-2008 and he may have valuable ideas to share. Ahasuerus 03:37, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

We should be fine with Latin-1. Unicode data is already in the database using Ӓ encoding. As long as we are consistent with that we're ok other than the collation sequence. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:57, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks -- I saw Al doing something funky with Unicode at one point, but I haven't looked into the details, so I don't fully understand what our limitations are. Ahasuerus 19:52, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

The O'Reilly guy did the conversion all at once and that was painful. I'm more a fan of incremental changes. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:57, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

I am all for incremental changes, I just need to understand what the limitations of the current design are :) Ahasuerus 19:52, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

The quick-search issue should get fixed anyway as we are not url-encoding the author name at all. I also realized that rather than a UTF-validator it'll be easier to code a decoder as long as it's one that just passes invalid data "as-is".

An upcoming mini project is to to come playing around with UTF-8 and iso-8859-1 pages as I want to better understand how FireFox and IE process input data and send it to the server during a POST. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:57, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

image tweak on Exiles 1: The Ruins of Ambrai

I removed the SITB wrapper on the image on your verified Exiles 1: The Ruins of Ambrai, going from this adorned image to this unadorned one. The result uses the same underlying cover image used before. --MartyD 11:25, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you Marty. It's a bit of a puzzle for me as I normally remove the SITB wrapper. As it is, I no longer have the publication and so changed it to a transient verification. --Marc Kupper|talk 17:39, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Door Through Space/Rendezvous on a Lost World

Found "EMSH" on the cover of the Bradley side of [this] on the bracelet. Adjusted the notes. ~Bill, --Bluesman 03:13, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Islands

Found Vincent Di Fate's signature on the cover of this verified pub. Submitted the edit and adapted the notes. Thanks, Willem H. 20:17, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Camelot in Orbit

Added cover and notes to Camelot in Orbit. BLongley 19:48, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Ole Doc Methuselah

Added page numbers, Intro, Foreword and cover to Ole Doc Methuselah Dana Carson 21:32, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Traitor cover credit

"You had the note "Cover art is credited to Stevenson on the back cover" for Traitor by Matthew Stover. I have a copy that says "Cover art by / Steven D. / Anderson" in the lower right corner of the back cover. I went ahead with changing the publication record but if your copy says "Stevenson" then please drop a note on my talk page and we'll fix the record and clone it. I've also added the Canadian price and that the artwork is signed to the notes. --Marc Kupper|talk 07:02, 19 February 2010 (UTC)"

Total misread on my part. Good catch! ~Bill, --Bluesman 03:56, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Bow Down to Nul/The Dark Destroyers

Found EMSH on the Aldiss cover of [this], amended the notes and scanned in cover images. ~Bill, --Bluesman 04:34, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Brain wave

Added cover to Brain waveHauck 15:57, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

The dark side of the Earth

Added cover to your verified here. Hauck 17:34, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

The star dwellers

Replaced amazon cover on your verified here. Hauck 13:21, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

The Hounds of Skaith

Added a cover scan for your verified here. Hauck 18:37, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

The dreaming earth

Replaced amazon cover scan for your verified here. Hauck 20:20, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

On the symb_socket circuit

Replaced amazon cover scan for your verified here, to me it seems also typical Freas artwork. Hauck 14:19, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

Mars

Uploaded scan on your verified here. Hauck 17:40, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

Star Gate

Found a very good image for [this] and the site I purloined it from has Gaughan as the artist. I'm wondering if there was interior art the site might be referring to? The cover doesn't really look like Gaughan's style. ~Bill, --Bluesman 03:06, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

There is no interior art. this mentions John Schoenherr and so I e-mailed him. --Marc Kupper|talk 19:45, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Wheel of Stars

Think the artist's name in [this] record is a mutilation of Victoria Poyser?? I don't have the pub to check. I can see the stylish "Victoria" on the image, which is consistent with Ms Poyser. ~Bill, --Bluesman 16:02, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Harry checked Jane Frank and she credits Poyser. Record updated. ~Bill, --Bluesman 19:57, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

That was a flub on my part. Even today the fingers seem unwilling to type that particular letter combination and so I need to look sternly at them. :-) I uploaded the cover image plus signature Author:Victoria Poyser. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:14, 18 March 2010 (UTC)