User talk:Martin Kraus

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Good luck! --Panic (talk) 17:41, 16 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you! I'm really curious to see how things work here. Well, I started working on a wikibook, which I called Spanish by Choice. I just started it today; thus, there isn't much to see yet. Could you have a look nonetheless? I think this project fits best in wikibooks but other people might think differently; thus, I'm curious to get your opinion about it. Thanks again! --Martin Kraus (talk) 18:00, 16 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I've been patrolling some pages of the book it seems ok (still much work to be done yet but going along great and at a very high speed), one can even use the layout you adopted to create similar books for other languages.
 * I really liked you forethought on adding...

License
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.


 * to the exercises pages, that enables the printing out of the pages and provide a license indication at the same time, you can even add the URL of the book if you like (so people would contribute or get the latest version).
 * I realized that this link is included automatically on the final printable page; thus, I thought this was not necessary. --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
 * You can chose to create a template on the book to include into those pages in place of adding all the text. (see about templates here, that page makes it a bit more confusing than it is make a try and see if you like it, at a basic level it is like a macro that can be used to replace repetitive texts or structures), if you have any problem talk to me and I will attempt to help you.
 * Thanks for the hint! The layout is still not fixed (for example the section "exercises" should but currently isn't included in the stubs), but I will take a look into templates once I'm happy with the layout.--Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Since you have invested much energy and effort in the structuring and layout, you should document some of the options and why you have taken then on the main talk (or a similar arrangement) so to avoid any edit conflicts if some other editor decides to rework it, for instance take a look on the book conventions adopted on the C++ Programming. --Panic (talk) 04:02, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'll do that. But right now, everything is still quite unclear... for example I just changed the overall structure from a level-based to a podcast-based hierarchy (because this way there are no broken links on the top level and the number of lessons on the second level is limited to the number of lessons in each podcast). --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
 * On the page Spanish by Choice/Lessons of level A1 the table lists source and ID but the last items seem to have some ids missing 9,12,14,15 did you name the pages in error? if so you can move them to the right location and tag them with the template, if they are still to be done you probably should add a place holder so to inform others that you are still working on them...
 * The IDs were defined by SpanishPod.com and are included to identify the original SpanishPod lessons more easily; I don't know why they don't use a continuous sequence. (Well, I accidentally created one page for A0009, but this should be deleted. I set a rederict to A0010 for now.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
 * If you need advertisement or help with the book make a post into the some of the Reading room sub pages, it still wont guarantee high visibility but you would find some people working on similar projects or without an active project . For publicity the best option is making posts on other sites specially forums or blogs that deal with the book subject, other interesting sites are newsgroups or url sharing services like http://delicious.com (example using C++ Programming). --Panic (talk) 04:23, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestions. Right now I'll try to include some more lessons and to fix the layout before advertising the book. --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Re: Template:Print version change
Hello Martin, how are you doing?

The template uses CSS classes to change the text that's displayed on different display media, like print and on screen. To see the difference, you actually need to print the page, or click "Print Preview" in your browser. The changes should be apparent when you do that. Unfortunately, there isn't a good way to show text that only appears on the printable version page here on the wiki.

Let me know if you have any other questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:03, 13 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Aha! Thanks, I missed that. --Martin Kraus (talk) 20:19, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Spanish by Choice Forums
In case you don't mind, I just wanna ask u. What are these forums all about? And why forums for each and every chapter? A single forum would be enough, wouldn't it - Ravichandar My coffee shop 16:19, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * These forums are for discussions of the lesson content of each lesson. If there was only one forum for all lessons then readers would have to always specify, which lesson they refer to. Also, readers who are studying a certain lesson are probably only interested in the discussions about this lesson. I consider it a service to the reader to offer one forum for each lesson. (Note that there is also a talk/discussion page for each page/module of a wikibook, not just one for the whole book!) Thus, no, one forum wouldn't be enough.--Martin Kraus (talk) 18:33, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism fixing
Keep up the nice work on the Spanish book and such. I just though you might want to check out Reverting. It showa how you don't have to undo each edit one by one, you can clean up the whole page all at once. - Taxman (talk) 13:23, 5 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Funny, I read this before but didn't really understand it, I guess. Also I realized that I put the warning on the user page instead of the talk page. Well, I guess that user doesn't really care. :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 13:45, 5 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Yeah, they don't care for sure. Undo is great for past edits in the middle and sometimes you need to do both. It was a pain before the undo feature was available, since everything that couldn't be simply reverted had to be fixed manually. - Taxman (talk) 14:00, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Discussions and contributing
Discussions don't mean that people must stop contributing. Discussion and contributing can go on simultaneously. In fact a few pages recently discussed on votes for deletion that was initially for deletion ended up closing as keep due to substantial changes having been made. Sometimes people may find solutions other than through discussion, and sometimes people may decide changes were not enough or things need to go in a different direction. I think when conflict arises than having people stop contributing might make sense in order to reduce conflict and help prevent things from becoming heated, but even than other people who were not involved in the conflict might find solutions by continuing to contribute. As Decision making says: Wikibookians are encouraged to be bold, and there is no single "right way" to achieve community consensus. I'm posting this here rather than in VFD, because I think its a bit off topic. --dark lama  22:21, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification.--Martin Kraus (talk) 09:25, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Your welcome. --dark lama  16:38, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Help pages
I noticed some of your changed in the help namespace. I was actually hoping to remove dependency on Help:Introduction 2 completely, and to eventually merge pages which just list other pages in the help namespace together into Help:Contents, so that there would be one table of contents. I hadn't done so yet because I was trying to weed out duplicates and the like first, and have been taking things one step at a time on and off. I was hoping to eventually have a table of contents for the Help namespace similar to Cookbook's or Community Portal at some point, with other help pages being formatted more like most pages in books on Wikibooks are. Maybe even eventually create a printable version.

What do you think? Do you have any objections to that? Do you mind if I remove inclusion of Help:Introduction 2 from pages you added it to? --dark lama  16:38, 19 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, I was just playing around to make the design of the most important help pages more consistent using Help:Introduction 2 as a common navigational element. If you want to replace it by another navigational element to browse through the help pages just go ahead. Also, just go ahead and change Help:Contents if you want to. (But I don't see why you would want to remove the navigational element from pages that you want to delete anyways once Help:Contents contains all the links.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 16:56, 19 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Well I'm not sure what is left to delete. Like recipes in the cookbook, I don't think the help namespace is really meant to be read in a certain reading order. I think the navigational aids of going from one page to the next hinders more than it helps. Most help pages don't even bother with navigational aids and I think for now at least that is a good thing. I've mostly been using some of the pages that just list help pages to aid in a clean up effort with the intentions to eventually use them as a bases for how to list things on Help:Contents. However with recent renewed interest in the help namespace, I might need to rethink some of my approach and go ahead and change Help:Contents like you said. I've probably been taking lack of interest in the help namespace for granted and relying on it too much. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  17:46, 19 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree that the linear order doesn't make much sense, I just added the links to the "next" page because it was included in some pages and needed to be fixed anyways. I guess my main motivation for all this was that I was annoyed by the different designs of the help pages. The main benefit of the topmost navigational element is probably to provide a link back to Help:Contents; thus, new users can more easily search for something on the pages named introduction, browsing, account settings, and contributing if they are not sure where to look for it. --Martin Kraus (talk) 18:56, 19 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I edited Help:Contents a bit and added a temporary warning to make the transition to the new design as painless as possible. Some users (like myself) might want to have links to the old help pages until all the important links have been included in the Help:Contents page. --Martin Kraus (talk) 20:58, 19 December 2008 (UTC)


 * That's fine. I think I did add all the important links to Help:Contents, but other people may disagree with what is important. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  01:26, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello gentlemen,

I noticed Martin Kraus' edits on a few help pages. I've been looking into the available content in the help namespace myself. I pasted a list on User:Swift/Help pages and have been sorting through it. Would you be interested in collaborating on a help-page-cleanup project? I'll be pretty busy and might not be able to contribute much in about a week or so, but am very interested in bringing about some order to the mess.

Cheers, --Swift (talk) 10:34, 2 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I don't have the time to contribute to a systematic help clean up; however, I've decided to clean up help pages when I discover missing links, out-dated or inconsistent help pages, etc. Thus, I guess I will contribute in an unsystematic way. :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 11:05, 2 January 2009 (UTC)


 * No worries! Thanks for your efforts and Happy Editing. :-) --Swift (talk) 12:46, 2 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Ya I've been operating mostly in an unsystematic way too. My only real vision has been to treat the namespace more like a single book with similar basic style guide as used with others books on Wikibooks, to try to get pages to use a consistent style like with other books, to add illustrations, diagrams and other images to pages to make understanding concepts covered easier, and to try to shift the reading level and audience to a more general one. Ambiguous, just not well organized or systematic. I don't expect anything to change overnight, and I'm a bit surprised that anyone has retained an interest in the help namespace. I've been merging, deleting, renaming, changing, etc. pages in the help namespace mostly alone for awhile now, sometimes there has been talk of doing something, but people seem to not have been motivated to really do anything. Disagreement of where to go or what to do with the help namespace hasn't really helped either. I'd be willing to try to collaborate. We probably need to discuss stuff so we're working together instead of against each other. Maybe on Help talk:Contents --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  04:09, 3 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Great, I'll take whatever comments I have there. --Swift (talk) 04:26, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Re:dynamicpagelist
The version of DPL we use here at Wikibooks is very limited. I don't know all the exact restrictions, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that only 5 notcategories could be used with it. Unfortunately, this is the best we can get. More recent versions of DPL are too resource-intensive to be used by the WMF projects because of our high traffic volume. We've asked in the past to have it upgraded and all requests have been denied.

Fortunately, even in this state DPL is a very useful tool for us, and it has helped us to generate some very helpful and informative pages. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:19, 7 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I noticed that Subject:Languages suffers strongly from these limitations as almost all of the books in the "Languages Books" column are actually in one of the "Subtopics". It's just a question of which subtopics were not included the list of "notcategory"s in the employed dynamicpagelist command. Thus, the selection of "Languages Books" shown on Subject:Languages is more or less random (in addition it is not sorted alphabetically). All this could be fixed manually, if you wouldn't overwrite manual changes of the page Subject:Languages using your template for generating subject pages. Thus, I actually don't know how to help improving Subject:Languages since any of my changes might be lost the next time you recreate the whole page using your template. I wouldn't be worried about all this if I hadn't learned that Subject:Languages is supposed to replace Languages bookshelf sooner or later. But I probably shouldn't worry anyways. :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 16:40, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Is there a reason you moved things from Visual languages to Sign languages? &mdash; <b style="color:#309;">Mike.lifeguard</b> &#124; talk 23:29, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I think that the term "sign languages" is more common in everyday language and therefore more appropriate for a categorization in Wikibooks, even if the term "visual languages" is more precise. (Personally, I associate "visual languages" with the use of icons and symbols for communication, e.g. the icons in graphical user interfaces of computers or in airports etc., compare "visual programming", but that might be because I'm working in the field of computer visualization.) Moreover, I didn't like the idea of a whole category for a single book. On second thoughts, I guess no harm is done by the additional category and, in fact, my strategy is to keep all categories (unless I rename them); thus, I've now undone my changes to the category "visual languages". However, I insist that the book is easier to find for many users if it is also categorized under "sign languages". I hope you agree. --Martin Kraus (talk) 00:15, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * On third thoughts I realize that "sign languages" should be a subcategory of "visual languages", but I think that it would be rather hard to find if it is there. What do you think? Also: should the book "American Sign Language" also be categorized under "visual languages"? --Martin Kraus (talk) 00:19, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, it was me who removed the category "visual languages" from the "American Sign Language" book. :) I've inserted it again. Well, what do you think about redirecting the category "sign languages" to "visual languages" in order to get rid of one of the two? --Martin Kraus (talk) 00:26, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh, it was also me who introduced the category "sign languages". I've removed it. :) Thus, we are back at the beginning. Well, apart from my renaming of "Visual Languages" to "Visual languages". --Martin Kraus (talk) 04:20, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I have no opinion on capitalization. Was there another question? &mdash; <b style="color:#309;">Mike.lifeguard</b> &#124; talk 07:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * No. --Martin Kraus (talk) 07:14, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Some people have been moving non-book category names to all lowercase, so that there is less of a possibility for conflict between book names and book categories. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  13:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I wasn't aware of this. I solved the conflicts by using "Category:X language" if there are multiple books for language X (usually one of them is named X) where X is Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish, etc. --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:30, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh, I guess since the first character is case-insensitive I was more or less following the all-lowercase style without knowing about it (apart from continent and country names, which I still put in uppercase, e.g. Category:Languages of Asia). --Martin Kraus (talk) 12:12, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

User:Whiteknight/Simple Subject
I've seen in the RC list that you've been using my template. As you can probably tell, I'm no artist: It's a no-nonsense basic template that tries to cram lots of information into a little space. If you have any suggestions for how to make the template better, or nicer-looking or whatever, I would love to hear them. Thanks! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:36, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, first of all: User:Webaware mentioned here that he had written a Javascript class to sort dynamicpagelists and also a gadget. Does that actually work or could it be used in the template for sorting? --Martin Kraus (talk) 02:42, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * More suggestions: an additional parameter for the list of supersubjects, an additional parameter for the list of notcategory's, an additional parameter for "see also" links (or any other text), maybe additional parameters to deactivate certain sections of the design (if they are known to be empty), a additional section for "Stubs" (maybe by default collapsed such that most users are not bothered with them). Well, but the highest priority has the problem of sorting! ;) --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:19, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Brazilian Portuguese
In a reply to what you said:

["I'm looking very much forward to your fully-featured Brazilian Portuguese course!"]

The Brazilian Portuguese course is already up and running, with one completed lesson already!

Theunixgeek (talk) 14:44, 24 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Good luck with finding someone to do the audio recordings! For the exercises: it might be a good idea to use templates like Question-answer such that users don't need to scroll back and forth to check their answers. --Martin Kraus (talk) 14:57, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Subject work
Just noticed your hard work on the subjects and wanted to leave a note of appreciation! --Swift (talk) 17:14, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks! :) Actually, it's a bit frustrating. Bookshelves have their weaknesses but since there is no way to alphabetically sort the items in the "automatically" generated subject pages, we should definitely not have switched to the new subject pages. IMHO the "unsorted" (i.e. not alphabetically sorted) lists on the subject pages look like crap: like random, incomplete sets of links. Another point is that IMHO featured books (and books with PDF versions, etc) should appear in the top level subject pages, even if they are categorized in a subtopic. The term "featured" implies this almost by definition. I'm currently using a hack for the language subject pages which requires manual editing, which violates the very idea of automatically generated subjet pages. Thus, from my point of view the step from bookshelves to the new subject pages was a step backwards. --Martin Kraus (talk) 11:20, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * That's a real pity. Would it be possible to merge the benefits of the bookshelves with the subject pages? As far as I know, subject pages weren't thought of as automatic bookshelves, but rather a category-like organisation structure where a book can belong to multiple subjects. There is no reason why there couldn't be a part of the subject page for a manually updated list of alphabetically ordered books.


 * Well, books can belong to multiple bookshelves and at least the language bookshelves are already organized hierarchically. The only new thing about subject pages, as far as I understand it, are that they are automatically generated from the categories set on each book. (Which has benefits for new books but makes changes to the categorization a pain.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Furthermore, subject pages don't seem to have been intended as a replacement for bookshelves. The latter were simply seen as redundant once subject pages were starting to get implemented.


 * OK. For some reason I thought that the main page no longer links to the bookshelves. But this isn't the case. --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I haven't looked at the templates that are used to generate the automatic lists on the subject pages. We might be able to work on a feature to allow alphabetic ordering (we already have sortable tables). A (temporary) alternative would be to simply refer to the subject category for an alphabetical index.


 * Well, the subject category will usually include categories, which make it more difficult to browse the books. For example, language books are categorized by continents as well as by their difficulty for native English speakers and then there are additional linguistic categories and further technical categories (e.g. the category for all book categories). --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm currently a bit busy with travels so I won't be able to spend much time on this, but I'd love to be kept informed and I'll see if I have some time next month. --Swift (talk) 16:24, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I would really appreciate it if you could look into the sorting problem.--Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

German Wikibook
Thanks for responding, and now I'm a little embarrassed for labeling you as 'inactive' in the German/About page, I just couldn't trace any activity since a few months back. You're free to come back and contribute any time, and I'll just be taking the format of the first lessons, and try to come up with some sort of completion. Thanks for responding and good luck with your projects!--Danthemango (discuss • contribs) 05:39, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

OpenGL wikibooks
Following our discussion, I found myself confused about what level of portability EGL, GLUT, etc. provide, so I wrote OpenGL_Programming/Technologies. Maybe you'll have some comments :) I also thought some more about the Modern OpenGL tutorials and GLSL books: I think I'm likely to cover topics that GLSL programmers are not interested with, such as texture loading. As a result I see the Modern OpenGL tutorials as a prequel to the GLSL book. At that point, we might want to think how to factor out identical sections in the GLSL book :) (I see that the Blender chapter is a copy/paste of Unity chapter and vice-versa, or isn't it?)Beuc (discuss • contribs) 18:15, 13 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll have a look at OpenGL_Programming/Technologies.
 * In a way I agree that texture and mesh loading, state setting etc. is not of much interest to GLSL programmers. However, I think this makes it even more important to have tutorials that show how to painlessly load meshes and textures! I think the best would be to actually include some open-source code in the tutorial (maybe in expandable boxes, see the JavaScript code here: GLSL_Programming/Unity/Many_Light_Sources). The second best solution would be to link to open-source code that can be easily downloaded and integrated. I think the lack of import functionality is a major problem of OpenGL (ES) and even more of WebGL (compare with OpenAL which has at least basic support for importing audio files). At some point, tutorials for OpenGL (ES) and WebGL probably have to show how to deal with these challenges. I think that would be really useful for many users - regardless of whether the tutorial is only about OpenGL or about OpenGL+GLSL.
 * I did factor out some identical sections (the last block "OpenGL (ES) Topics" in the table of contents at GLSL_Programming). In fact, those sections are probably known to readers of your tutorials. (Thinking about it, one might also factor out - or summarize - the Phong lighting model ... oops, I actually have a stub for that already. :) And I really wish the Blender chapters were copy&paste versions of the Unity chapters! :) Actually, some of it is (images, most section titles, introductions), but then the details and the code are very different: in Blender you have to write a Python script to specify GLSL shaders, in Unity you have to write "ShaderLab" code to specify OpenGL states and GLSL shaders for various passes. In Blender you do all the lighting computations in view space (because you are given positions of light sources in view space and by default there is no way to transform to world space), in Unity you do all the lighting computations in world space because you are given the positions of light sources in world space and the transformations to and from world space are given by built-in uniforms. Blender supports only single-pass shaders and provides all light sources in the array gl_LightSource[] (of the OpenGL compatibility profile); Unity handles each of the important lights by a single pass; thus, you have to write one shader for the first light source and ambient light, and a second shader to additively blend additional light sources onto the image. In Blender, deactivation of back-face culling is ridiculously difficult, in Unity you just write "Cull Off" ... I could continue the list. The point is: I'm happy if I can just copy&paste since the common parts of the tutorials are in fact relatively small. Also, I don't expect many readers to read more than one part of the GLSL wikibook (i.e. either Blender or Unity or ...). Even if readers do read more than one part, they might actually appreciate that the structure is the same because then it is easier for them to find their way around.
 * So, I guess it all comes down to my original motivation for the structure of the GLSL book: in order to actually apply GLSL, you have to know a lot about the specific framework you are in, whether it is how to specify OpenGL states in Unity or in Blender or whether it is how to load textures from image files in OpenGL+GLUT or to load them via an URL in WebGL. Addressing these practical issues is really important for "modern" learners who will be reluctant to learn from books that try to convey important concepts (e.g. the Phong reflection model and the vertex transformation pipeline) but are missing a lot of relevant practical information and therefore cannot be put into practice without additional significant effort. Moreover, there aren't many tutorials that address all these practical issues; thus, our tutorials could really fill a gap and thereby help a lot of people to get started with OpenGL/GLSL. --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 20:24, 13 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I thought that the "Minimal Shader" chapters covered the initial Blender/Unity setup, and then everything was identical except for some code snippets - apparently I was wrong :)
 * By "factor out", I mean trying to include the same bits of text in both Blender and Unity parts somehow automatically, but it's just an idea.
 * I believe that as WebGL, etc., matures, there will be more libraries to do basic jobs like texture loading, so the code provided in tutorials should tend to shrink. But you're right, there's still the need to explain coding tricks.
 * By the way, I believe we need to clarify the license of code snippets, since placing them under the CC-BY-SA or GFDL is inconvenient (incompatibility with other free licenses, etc.). I place the first snippets in the public domain, though I may use an actual license if the code becomes more complex. Beuc (discuss • contribs) 07:50, 14 August 2011 (UTC)


 * In principle, this "factor out" idea is nice. One would use templates to do it. For example, instead of including the same image directly in multiple pages, one could write a template that includes the image. And then include the same template in multiple pages. The advantage would be that it is easier to change an image in all versions. (Which sometimes is necessary when an image is removed from Wikimedia Commons or when a better alternative becomes available.) The disadvantage is that it requires more work when writing the first page. ;) Also, it makes the wiki code more difficult to read (at least if you start to take the idea seriously and include many templates). So far, I tried to keep it as simple as possible by trying to avoid templates except the footer template. (Also, I realized that I start wasting a lot of time trying to format the layout when I introduce my own templates.) It might make sense to avoid templates when writing the initial version and introduce specific templates later whenever systematic changes (i.e. the same change in multiple pages) become necessary. I.e. instead of just changing each page, one would define a template with the correction and include it in all pages that need to be changed. In this way, one can be sure to include templates only where they are actually needed and it isn't much more effort than without templates at all.
 * Yes, I think I have read that Google already offers a math library in JavaScript for matrix computations for WebGL. It would be nice to show how to use this kind of common utilities libraries.
 * The licensing is a good point. I think I'll use public domain by default and mention in the introduction of the book and in the footer template that all code is released to the public domain unless stated otherwise such that I don't have to include a separate note in each code block. What would be the advantage of an actual license (in comparison to public domain and CC-BY-SA)? The problem I see is that another license might be incompatible with wikibooks and it might be difficult to defend it because by using another license you are basically admitting that you violate the no original research guideline. --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 08:37, 14 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I think manipulating templates will quickly become difficult to maintain as well. There could be another way, based on programmatically grabbing a version, look for markers (such as HTML comments) for sections, grab those sections, and replace the matching sections in another wiki page. Again, just a wild idea.
 * Licensing: an actual license this would require attribution/credit and would flatter my ego ;) A copyleft license would make users contribute back their own improvements.  I believe one can use any license to describe existing research - I mean, most OpenGL introductory books are under a clear, non-permissive copyright license, without being original research.  However, adding a license to the sample code is not what readers intuitively expect, and I'll probably not write anything really useful that is not already present in the free / open source 3D engines out there, so I guess we can stick with public domain :)
 * Btw, I opened a project at https://gitorious.org/wikibooks-opengl/ to store the code. If you're interested I can give you access to create another repository there. Beuc (discuss • contribs) 12:41, 15 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks but right now I prefer to keep the code only on wikibooks such that I can fix errors more easily. (In the long run, it might make sense to offer complete Unity or Blender files with the examples.) --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 12:59, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Hello again,

I'm now at a point where readers would benefit from your lightning tutorials, and it seems appropriate that I start "porting" them to bare C/C++.

The tutorials I wrote so far will allow readers to meet the GLSL book right after the Basics section; then after discussing lightning I'll probably split again from the GLSL book to discuss non-GLSL topics.

Do you have recommendations on how to proceed? Should I start copy/pasting/editing each Blender page to the 'GLUT' chapter? Or do you see other ways to organize this?

Regards. Beuc (discuss • contribs) 13:18, 29 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Copy&paste might be a good idea for consistency and to spare you some time. Note that I'm taking a rather uncommon approach by introducing diffuse reflection first, then different light sources, and then the Phong reflection model. Usually, one would introduce the Phong reflection model first and then the different light sources. The motivation for my approach was that a shader for diffuse reflection is potentially useful for Lambertian surfaces provided that it is be able to deal with different light sources. On the other hand, a shader for the Phong reflection model that is limited to directional light sources is more or less useless since non-programmers would be very confused why the shader works only with directional light sources. (The principle is that each tutorial should be as close to an actually useful shader as possible.) The most important concern for you might be how to deal with the "compatibility profile"? All the information about light sources (gl_LightSource[] etc.) should only be available if the compatibility profile is used. But you probably don't want to do that. Thus, it might be best to link to the legacy code for how to set the parameters of the fixed-function lighting and to the appendix about the compatibility profile" in the OpenGL specification for how to access these parameters in a shader. --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 13:47, 29 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I like the approach with the diffuse reflection model first, because it makes the learning more progressive (learning all the Phong + matrix transformations at once is quite tedious).
 * Indeed I plan to skip the compatibility profile, so the code can be used in OpenGL ES 2.0 as well. I plan to pass uniforms similar to the ones in the compatibility profile, created manually in the C++ code.  This will make it easier for readers familiar with OpenGL 1.x to understand how to upgrade.
 * Are some chapters in progress, or subject to change soon? I can avoid them for a while if you plan to make non-trivial changes to them. Beuc (discuss • contribs) 14:15, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
 * No, it should be rather stable unless readers point out problems. I don't plan to work on the wikibook for a while since I'm busy with other things. :) --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 15:52, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing the lightNing->lighting typo! I missed it in the watchlist because mediawiki only shows the latest change for each page - until today :) And now I eventually understand this comment after carefully re-reading it ;) Beuc (discuss • contribs) 19:49, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
 * :) --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 06:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Quadrics
Hello,

I'm searching how to draw Quadrics in OpenGL ES 2.0 (so at first glance, without GLU), and I found this page which uses a piece of software by a certain Martin Kraus -- small world :)

Do you happen to know about papers or webpages that describe how to draw Quadrics? Beuc (discuss • contribs) 22:19, 6 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Beuc, I'm not aware of particular solutions for quadrics. In the more general case of algebraic surfaces (or even more general: isosurfaces), the standard approach would be to use the "marching cubes" algorithm. (Easier to implement is the "marching tetrahedra" algorithm.) Wikipedia has reasonable descriptions and you probably find code on the internet. --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 15:36, 7 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I'll have a look. Beuc (discuss • contribs) 18:34, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Help with translucent body shader
Hallo Herr Kraus, für ein Studienprojekt benötige ich bitte Ihre Hilfe bei der Erstellung eines Shaders für transluzente Objekte. Ihr ShaderCode auf der Seite - http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GLSL_Programming/Unity/Translucent_Bodies - war schon sehr hilfreich. Jedoch habe ich noch Probleme. Wäre es ev. möglich noch Bilder von den einzelnen Render passes von Ihnen zu bekommen, damit ich meine Ergebnisse vergleichen kann und Fehlerquellen ausschließen kann.

Könnten Sie ev noch einmal kurz beschreiben, was Sie in den jeweiligen Renderpasses machen, dass ist mir noch ziemlich unklar.

LG TO81


 * Hallo TO81, ich habe leider im Moment nicht viel Zeit. Die Bilder von den einzelnen Render passes kannst du wahrscheinlich relativ leicht selbst machen, indem du (von hinten anfangend) einen Pass nach dem anderen entfernst. Es hilft auch mit nur einer direktionalen Lichtquelle zu arbeiten. Bilder fuer den Alpha-Buffer sind etwas schwerer zu erzeugen. Da hilft es wohl, sich aufzuschreiben wann, welche Pixel eine 0 oder eine 1 im Alpha-Buffer haben. Das ist wohl auch die beste Strategie, um die Renderpasses zu verstehen. Viele Gruesse --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 11:57, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

German/Level I/Wie heißt du?"
You can´t say in Germany "Ich bin Franz". It is grammatically incorrect. You have to use an article. For a male you use "der" for a female you use "die". Fore exampel: Ich bin der Franz. Ich bin die Sara. The expression "Ich bin Franz" is incomplete. It would be like "I Franz". In Bavaria You raly say "Mahlzeit" around 12:00 am. If you are at work in bavaria peopel say Mahlzeit if they have lunch brake at about 12:00 or see each other on the street at 12:00.

188.192.42.147 (discuss) 14:27, 17 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Hi, I'm a native German speaker and I think it depends on the part of Germany which version is more common. "Ich bin der Franz." might be slightly more common in the south, but standard German is "Ich bin Franz." meaning the same as "Ich heiße Franz." See also here: http://www.canoo.net/services/OnlineGrammar/Wort/Artikel/Gebrauch/Namen.html?lang=en . In any case, you shouldn't change the dialogue without changing the audio file. With respect to "Mahlzeit": I think you didn't put it in the correct column of the table, that's why I undid your change. --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 18:43, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Proposal to implement metadata on Wikibooks
Hi Martin, I wanted to give you an update on the previously discussed implementation of LRMI metatags on Wikibooks. There is no longer the need to use the html tag extension as was discussed in the previous proposal, because it is now supported by core mediawiki. In addition, these changes sanction all mediawiki installations by default and increase the assurance of LRMI as a long-term standard. If you're not familiar with Schema.org, it is a shared collection of standard schemas that was developed by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex to allow webmasters to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. This page demonstrates these features in the context of wikisource and can demonstrate the optimization within a Google search engine here. With this said, let me know if you think it would be worthwhile to implement these metatags now that it will be done via Schema.org, or if you have further questions. The tagging scheme isn't intended to be a way to be "clever" or to mislead people, but instead have them be able to find more accurate and specific information (in both popular and lesser-known spheres), especially in the context of educational materials. Especially now as a part of Schema.org, it has great potential to increase the findability of materials in Wikibooks that could potentially be very valuable for those searching the Web. Maximilian.Klein.LRMI (discuss • contribs) 05:44, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Useful tricks page for language authors
Hi I have talked to some of you about the need to better pool our resources and ideas about writing good foreign language wikibooks. I noticed that some information was available under Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks, but not so much on what kind of tricks you can use to make your boom more interactive. So I added a page "Useful tricks to it and gave a description of some of the tricks I am using @ Dutch. Hopefully we can use the Useful tricks page and its discussion page for a better exchange of ideas. I still think we need a better venue for that, but it's a start. Jcwf (discuss • contribs) 00:47, 18 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi, that page looks very useful! I wish I had something like this when I started writing wikibooks. :) --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 13:18, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

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