Forum: Ask Questions of the Moderators Here XI

Continued from here

New thread, new start.

Let’s see if we do better this time. :-)

anon_22 – at 21:55 --- BB, Don’t wrap all the wine glasses yet. You gotta leave them out till the last minute! :-)

Not to worry…I’m keeping one until the last minute…heck, it may just travel with me! ;-) I think I’ll call it…Wilson!

BB rewinds his tape of Castaway…

BB:

Thought of you yesterday and how you love food and drink. I was sitting outside in the first lovely weather (below 90 degrees) since May, eating marinated blue crabs and drinking cold, cold beer.

2beans – at 22:40 --- I am soooo jealous. We haven’t seen “below 90″ temps since about the beginning of June, but today was nice… a balmy 98. Blue crab and beer…I can picture myself sitting at the beach near my new house now…watching the sun set and enjoying real food again! Thanks for that vision…! ;-)

It’s been a tough week here with all the “Katrina - one year later” stuff everywhere. I had been to New Orleans a couple of times last year but avoided the blitzed sections. After reading a couple weeks ago one more iteration of “you can’t understand if you haven’t seen it”, decided it was time. “They” were so right. I’m holding my breath for the next one. Gotta get more solar lanterns.

Mods - he’s at it again - BB is trying desperate measures to get his top 100 count up :-)

Sincerely, thanks BB for taking the time to keep the forum tidy and operating well - we all love ya.

Bronco Bill looks for the nearest cave to hide in, so he doesn’t get smacked again ;-)

Good morning

FrenchieGirl – at 07:43 yesterday on previous thread.

Mods please. I was re-reading Monotreme’s story of Pete Prepper and Louie Lucky when one sentence lit a bulb in my head: “These supplies were quickly deployed in the key cities once sattelites showed villages going dark in China.”.

Question 1 — Yes, of course, if China gets hit with pandemic flu, they also will have energy problems. And the whole of the Western world has satellites snooping on them, among which satellites which are capable of showing light pollution maps of said country… I have roamed the Internet and found this site, but I don’t know if it’s real time: night time earth view from satellites. Do we have any FWikian who seems to know a lot about such subjects: astronomy, satellites, energy, who could have a look at these (or other sites) and perhaps undertake a surveillance of night lights in China/Indonesia/…? Of course, in case of a pandemic, the authorities would be loathe to protect energy sources, but they could be taken by surprise and not react fast enough, so our satellites might actually see “the lights going off” and if it’s not because of weather or earthquakes, we might get advance warning.

Question 2 — Along the same ideas, how about computers/servers electricity. Of course, one priority of any government would be to keep government electronics working, but not necessarily those of ordinary citizens. Could someone knowledgeable in computer programming make a program that sends repeated ping requests to yet-to-be-identified web sites that are likely to go down in case of government clamp down and report in case of ping failure of a number of them several days running? We’d get advance warning with something like this, no?

Thank you

FrenchieGirl – at 01:22 --- In answer to question #1: witht the screcy curtain that China now has around it’s borders, including the sky, it would be hard to tell what might cause the power to go out in cities in that country.

I would also watch for quarantining activities, cancellations of flights or trains, sudden activities in companies producing protective equipment and increasing prices thereof. Local pig prices were mentioned here:
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?p=28924#post28924
maybe there are also pages for local poultry-prices

What exactly is the question for the mods? Can we test and fix the world wide web?

No.

I think the level of sophistication required to do those things is beyond my capabilities, all kidding aside. Interesting idea.

You know, my two cents worth, by the time we see lights going out in China, the bug will have already spread here. The lights going out in China would mean that their illness ben around awhile and has spread so much among themselves, so widely that they can’t keep things up and running, bless their hearts. We might still be well enough for the time being to be interested in what’s going on in China, but probably the illness will have already been spreading among us here & we’ll be hearing a lot more about us on the news, than China.

Maybe the Government of China will strategically shut off their lights if things get bad.

Tom, please come over to FT an Mingus for the Chinese pig-problem, which is worrying me. Aren’t you also worried a bit ? Million pigs ! Have you ever seen such ?

anonymous. Thanks. I am worried about a lot of things at the moment…and yes, I have and am very concerned about pigs and I am not buying this strept suis argument.

Here’s how a regulator handles a Streptococcus suis problem…

 We have had a disease outbreak killing approx. one million pigs in **** area of our country…we were notified a week ago…preliminary postmortems indicated a pathogen mediated pneumonia and repeated post mortems indicated similarities indicating the same pathogen was causing the problem. Histological sections have been studied and we believe we have cultured the causative organism as Streptococcus suis.

Unfortunately, this historically stable bacteria seems to have mutated to gain the ability to infect humans and like SARS and H5N1, the Case Fatality Rates are high but the transmissibility coefficient appears to be low.

We have notified and are collaborating with world wide bodies. We continue to recheck our preliminary findings and we are encouraged that the epidemic does not appear to be spreading geographically at this time.

Compare that to what has been going on in China this summer. I have been scrutinizing China and food quality and animal disease and ethics for almost eight years now.

I know something is up…but this time they even have me confused…I don’t have enough information to tell whats up yet but I will figure it out eventually.

Thank you for your kind invitation to discuss this at Flu Trackers. Unfortunately, I know little about computers and don’t have a lot of time at the moment (and I don’t think Snowy Owl is one of my greatest supporters…just joking).

Thanks again, I am glad you are here with us.

Bronco Bill started a new “Indonesia Oubreak Case Summaries NOCOMMENTARYPLEASE 2″ thread.

Can the map be moved?

sure.

Bronco Bill – at 00:25

Bronco Bill looks for the nearest cave to hide in, so he doesn’t get smacked again ;-)

Don’t worry. They hide in caves too :-)

Uhm…thanks. I think… ;-)

Hello Mods! Perhaps I should address my question to Pogge. Have you done something to change the address bar? This afternoon when I logged on to Fluwiki, I noticed something strange. In the address bar there appeared before “http”, instead of the blue “e”, a black square with “FW” in white letters. Ah, I really don’t know much about computers and I’m a bit oversensitive today so I shut down the computer and started it up again. As I closed it down, I saw this black square also on the Fluwiki shortcut icon on the desktop. My DH just came home and looked at it but despite his greater computer knowledge he doesn’t know what it is. As I copied this into the mod’s thread I saw that the “e” is back in its place. But when I went back to the desktop it’s still there. Can you give me an idea what it may be?

I was wondering if someone had the ability to update the logo from PFAW 2005 to reflect the 2006 dates and get it on the new page? Thanks!

For pogge - is there an automated way to generate a table of contents for a wiki page or group of pages? I’ve been moving the recipes to the main wiki, and it would be useful to have a table of contents either for the whole “cookbook” or for separate sections (e.g., Breads). Also, is there an automated way to generate an index if I add certain tags to each recipe in the wiki markup?

Ocean2:

The most frequent entry on the error logs was a “file missing” error on favicon.ico. That’s a file that a lot of browsers look for every time a page is loaded. So I made up a quick and dirty favicon.ico to clean up the clutter on the logs. It’s legitimate. Nothing’s wrong. It’s supposed to appear in the address bar as well as being associated with bookmarks (or in Internet Explorer jargon: Favorites).

Mari:

I’ll get back to you. I don’t know of any solution for either problem offhand, but I should check the user group and see if someone’s gotten creative.

Pogge, Thanks for checking for me!

pogge - I tried the code (:toc:) listed at PmWiki Cookbook in the sandbox, but it didn’t appear to work.

That markup requires an add-on script that isn’t installed. And that add-on script requires a later version of PmWiki than the one we’re currently running. And to further complicate matters, it relies on headings, i.e. the kind of headings that are created using one or more exclamation marks at the beginning of the line. I’ve checked a couple of the pages you’ve been working on and you aren’t using that type of heading so as it stands, that markup wouldn’t do anything for you anyway.

Lauralou – at 11:28

I’ll address that in the next few days, thanks!!

Anon 22 i have left a link for you on the thread you came on re Barracades.It is a scotland nhs link preparing for emergencies re pandemic flu i hope you can get the jist from that re police guarding gp surgeries and hospitals it was the same story for England i am sorry if i keep putting things in the wrong places

pogge – at 14:48 - Not a big deal to change the recipe titles to headings, if that will allow a TOC to be generated.

But it might be a big deal to upgrade to the required version of PmWiki and then get that script working along with the add-ons we’re already using. So don’t do anything yet.

pogge – at 18:26 - Thanks for checking, anyway.

DennisC – at 23:01 ---

just testing a “back door”.

Bronco Bill this is what I had mentioned earlier in the Q’s for mods a few days ago. If this shows up, you will know how some are getting to our site

Dennis --- I think I know what you did. But what pogge explained to me is that the spammers are using the direct code of the thread to drop new posts into old threads that are already closed. I’ve done what I think you did, and it does work, but it’s not practical. It eats up local machine resources…but thanks, it’s another option to look at.

Just thought you would want to know.

DennisC --- I appreciate it…you confirmed my suspicions, thanks.

Help Please - I’ve messed up the Director General thread with my link - side scroll. I think because my printer window came up. So Sorry. Thank you.

Fixed. If you want a horizontal rule, just use four dashes like so: ----

Thanks pogge. I linked to some sort of print url on the article. My printer comes up with the article at my end. Does that happen to everyone and should I provide a clean link? I am really sorry for this problem and appreciate your help.

Yes, the print dialog comes up when I follow the link. Is there an alternative?

Yes, do I post it here and can you delete that one? Or do I post it on the thread?

http://tinyurl.com/nng2r

I decided I better post it here first.

I edited your original link. All is well.

You are so wonderful, pogge. Thank you so much, and I do apologize for causing you this hassle.

Good Morning and HELP. I sent a quote I read yesterday about the WHO sying it was only a matter of time before the flu made the big jump. Since I have never seen anything so absolute mentioned by WHO I thought it might be of interest. Did I send it to the wrong place or catagory? if anyone saw it could you tell me what I should have done or what i did wrong. Also if some one could enlighten me about the “tiny url” . I have the url where I read it if thats what I need. I know you all are busy w/ important things but I would like to be able to contribute once in awhile. I am slow but not stupid. Thanx

I sent a quote I read yesterday…

I don’t know what you mean by this. Did you email it to someone? Or did you post it somewhere in the forum?

TinyURL is here. If you paste the link address into that field and click the button, the site will provide you with a short link which you can then copy and paste. But if you master the first option in the instructions at the bottom of each thread, you don’t need TinyURL. As an example, the code for the link in the first sentence in this paragraph is:

[[http://tinyurl.com/|here]]

The thread Libby in Atlanta is looking for is this one. She opened a new thread with the news she heard.

Libby, click on the link I just provided…that will take you directly to your thread.

Mods,

Yesterday on the news thread Bluetide posted the following link. If you have not already taken a looksee at it, could you do so? I have only read a portion of the report, but I think it is the sort of thing that deserves posting on the FluWiki opening page (right hand bar) and inside the wiki itself. Please take a look at this, I believe it is outstanding material for local governments. History is the best teacher.

http://www.med.umich.edu/medschool/chm/influenza/index.htm

Okieman – at 18:19

Thanks! It looks like important stuff. Why don’t you start a new thread and let everyone read and discuss it first.

You can add it to anywhere in the wiki that you feel is appropriate. We can decide whether to put it on the front page after we’ve had time to read it. The first link that I opened up had 275 pages. :-)

It would be great also if someone can summarize something like this.

Hint, hint… LOL

we are realy gambling when using the tiny url service.. its only one company, and if they go down, all our links may as well, forewer..

try to use the method I described at the bottom instead..

pogge: any chance of seeing the logo soon? :)

method i (one) not me…

the U Mich site presented by okieman should be on our 1918 page, so I’ll add it.

DemFromCT – at 21:14

Thanks.

Hey mods---What happened to Mel----I hope it is vacation or a new job. Tell her we miss her ----a lot!!!

I hear she’s a bit under the weather and should return fairly soon.

BB keeps his fingers crossed and wishes Melanie weil…

Wow! First Melanie’s cat, now Melanie, not to mention Tom DVM’s medical problems! This is depressing above and beyond AI! :(

Bronco Bill. It would really cheer Many Cats and me up if you would just get into it again with gs. I saw one of his posts on flu wiki today…Yahoooooooooooooo

Bronco Bill—here ya go!

[—handing BB my freshly sharpened troll hooks—)

Tom DVM – at 00:57 --- Y’know, I’ve had a couple of others say the same thing, but I’ve got to be a good boy. I heard he was back on one of the threads. I made a promise not to go off the deep end, and I was really chomping at the bit the other night! I tend to have a short fuse, and I need to learn to keep my mouth shut. He and the other “anonymouses” from that little joust really had it in for me, but ce’ la vie. What’re ya gonna do, ya know? I think I may have decided that you just can’t with with “nobody”. He has an argument for everything, and as anonymous, he really got Niman’s goat. I’ve decided to take the upper road and not get into it with him anymore. Unless, of course, he and his cohorts use my name in vain! :-)

BTW---my best wishes and prayers go out to you and yours tonight…

Bronco Bill Thanks. I’m not sure he was in on that thing the other night. We’ll have to ask him…he does have that one little quirk that I won’t mention that gives him away…but I’ve got to admit, there are a few anonymouses that are like him.

anyway gs…it’s not the same without you and Bronco Bill is getting away with way too much without you here to keep him in line. /:0)

Honestly, you two going at it that night made me laugh more than I have laughed in probably years.

Bronco Bill. Do you know which thread that was and can I read it again…serious question.

YOWS !!

Those things are SHARP!!

Tom DVM — I found it!! Ask The Mods X. The thread right before this one…I’m thinking that maybe that entire exchange should be condensed and put out on the Humor thread!! ;-)

Bronco Bill.

Definitely…you two really should have sold tickets…really…I’m almost laughing just thinking about it.

Just like your fine wine…Thanks!!

Spam thread “Ive stopped my prepping”

mods, what do you think about the idea to join threads here with similar threads of other forums ?
It’s tedious to switch from one forum to another.

mods, what do you think about the idea to invite officials or scientists to the forum so to answer questions ? They should get an extra thread each, so they needn’t read the whole board. Questions should be pre-selected,pre-edited to avoid doublettes.


I would particularly appreciate some Chinese official. They should be happy to present their view here and we want to know more about the situation in China - even if it is censored.

Can a mod please edit my post of 11:42 in the new “Phamaceuticals” thead, and put a hard line feed between “12 hours” and “ADVERSE REACTIONS”?

Thanks,

Dennis: done.

Anonymous at 02:35:

I think it’s completely impractical for technical reasons among others. If you’re looking for some kind of one-stop shopping perhaps you should check out the various methods of aggregating RSS feeds. There are both applications you can download for the purpose and online services such as Bloglines that are free. The link to the RSS feed for this forum is at the bottom of the main forum page.

Mods, side-scroll on Pigs II thread. Could you fix, please? Thanks.

RSS Rocks.

I aggregate most of my information feeds into a dashboard, then go to that particular forum if there is an interest.

Not all that difficult actually.

Try Pluck.

where is DemfromCT ? I noticed a dramatic decline in contributions from our top-poster since the niman-ban.

what’s RSS ? What’s Pluck ? What’s dashboard ? Does it work with Windows XP, Internet explorer ? How much time is needed to get it properly working ? When it can be done on my PC then why can’t it be done on the fluwikie-computer ?

Wikipedia on RSS. Google is your friend.

Bird Guano – at 15:28 anonymous – at 02:30 anonymous – at 02:33

I can’t answer the IT questions, but the mods have lives. We don’t necessarily post all the time, especially if the forum is running well. We lurk, check in from time to time, and just leave y’all to get on with it. :-)

You can be certain that if something is going on, then we’ll turn up.

anonymous – at 02:39 “mods, what do you think about the idea to invite officials or scientists to the forum so to answer questions ? They should get an extra thread each, so they needn’t read the whole board. Questions should be pre-selected,pre-edited to avoid doublettes.

They would certainly be welcome. And if you can invite a specific person, email one of us to discuss how it might work. In the meantime, I’m interviewing Taubenberger (on virology) and Inglesby (on policy) after next week.

But, it would work better if more people go out and make those contacts. And persuade them to talk to us.

It’s a lot of work, networking. On top of everything else.

I would particularly appreciate some Chinese official. They should be happy to present their view here and we want to know more about the situation in China - even if it is censored.”

Well, they would certainly be welcome here, just make the contacts, and if you get someone who agrees to talk to us on the fluwikie, then email one of us. Or if they preferred to be interviewed, by yourself or us, we can do that too and post.

But, someone needs to go out and make the contacts. That’s all I’m saying.

it’s better to have the link to a special thread, being pre-edited as suggested above, _before_ the invitation. The invitation usually comes spontaneously, I can’t well email you and await the response before the invitation. I’m thinking whether to invite them to post to fluwiki or to other forums. I should know in advance. Andrew Jeremijenko came here on my invitation, recently I linked him to curevents instead, but it seems he’s not very active recently. I suggested to some others to post here but most didn’t. As I wrote above, I think there should be a special thread then which is filtered from double-questions. Do you think fluwikie is suitable for this ?

Any Mod-When will our new panflu-hardened bunker of a fluwikie be launched? I get tired of seeing us dissed on the other panflu sites-“Fluwikie will crash before it even gets going, etc.”. They are very generous with praise otherwise.

I would like for us to at least be able to take the first week of panflu before the lights go out in the second or third week.

And some possible goodbyes would be nice.

This is what I understand, and it may not be entirely accurate, cos these things go way over my head. Melanie has someone working on a custom more robust version that is fairly similar to the current format but with enhanced features. Last couple of times she checked, progress was being made ie the project was NOT being put on someone’s back-burner. However, with the summer vacations and Melanie having to take time out, we will need to check back for exactly how that’s going.

As I said, that’s just how I understand it.

I’m kinda IT-retard so this may have been discussed before but I missed it. Apologies if that’s the case. What does it take to have mirror sites, and do those-who-know-these-things think that’s a good idea?

<anon to self “we’re going to get dissed some more for having clueless mods…ouch!”>

anon_22

for the amount of money we’re paying you, we really expect better service…. (-:

I….need….a…..raise……

LOL

How’s about we DOUBLE yer salary? Would that work? ;-)

2 x $0 = ?

No, wait,

2 x -$x = -$2x

HELP!

anon_22, the Global Pandemic Awareness thread may need your attention regarding data gathering. Thanks.

done.

See, what would I do without all these good folks here, keeping me on the straight and narrow… :-)

From MaMa – at 18:43

anon_22 at 17:56, okay the post was deleted- my question is, do you still want help with finding out the info?

MaMa:

If you’re discussing what I think you’re discussing, I’ve just gotten caught up on all this (‘cos I can read deleted threads). Drop the entire matter or at least get it entirely away from this website and from me. It was a very bad idea.

No problem pogge. It was not my intention to cause any problems whatsoever, only to lend a hand with research if needed. Consider the matter dropped.

MaMa, thanks. same answer as pogge.

anon_22, you’re welcome. Understood.

yeah, sorry to weigh in late, but I agree. Dropped is good.

Well, I’ve done it again. This time with side scroll on the Chinese Communication thread. I think it is when I made a line with the shift and long dash keys. I apologize again. How do I make a line to separate an article from comments please? Thank you.

You create a horizontal rule with this: ----

Hi pogge - Oops, I realize you are telling me that for a second time! Thank you.

:-)

Evenin! I just made some edits to the PanFlu Awareness press release, and posted an update on that thread (please read and respond when you can).

I then tried to contribute a few edits to the new PanFlu Awareness page. Looks like the edits to the release stuck, but not the ones to the other page. I would be happy to take a healthy stab at shaping that page up with some meat but didn’t want to do so if someone else is tackling that. And if I do, just wanted to make sure to show where the changes/additions were so someone can review. Can you guide me here???

Is it possible to “close and continue” on the Indonesia Oubreak thread - the current one is getting very long

Cheers and thanks

I seem to be showing up here a lot lately (she says sheepishly), but an anonymous poster has seriously gone over the edge on the Chinese Communication thread. I will probably be next on the poster’s attack list for alerting you, but the post is beyond the pale in its mean-spiritedness.

Spam thread alert, “Cooperative Summary for Action”

Mods. I am concerned by a remark made by another poster with regard to tiny urls. The poster mentioned that in case the tiny url site was to go down for some reason, all our links would be inoperable. I looked at their site but could not find a “reverse” long url to convert back the small to the big - I was thinking we could have set up a database of our tiny urls links and their corresponding long urls. Is there any solution to this? Thank you.

The real solution is to use the wikitext markup as described in the blue shaded area at the bottom of every thread. If you master that, you don’t need TinyURL.

That said, TinyURL has been operating continuously for four years that I’m aware of.

frenchie, I did mention that about tinyurl a while back.

You can certainly do that as a wiki page, for existing url’s of valuable information that you don’t want to lose.

I personally would much rather we don’t use them.

Just use the [[ put your url here | put what you want people to see here ]]

AnnieB – at 02:25 --- Done.

Oh dear…another long thread that needs to be continued. We’ll do that here