ConwayLife.com

I think it would be a good idea if I shut down the original Bellman site at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bellman/. It shows up at the top of a Google search for "conway's life bellman", but this is just confusing; Michael Simkin's improved Bellman is the one everyone should be running.

The problem with this idea is finding somewhere to host the documentation. It's linked to from https://github.com/conwaylife/BellmanWin, and possibly other places too. Uploading it to the wiki seems sensible, but I can't see an upload link; is this something an administrator has to do?

MikeP wrote:I think it would be a good idea if I shut down the original Bellman site at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bellman/. It shows up at the top of a Google search for "conway's life bellman", but this is just confusing; Michael Simkin's improved Bellman is the one everyone should be running.

Simon Ekstr\"{o}m produced an even-more-improved version: https://github.com/simeksgol/BellmanWin_szlim

MikeP wrote:I think it would be a good idea if I shut down the original Bellman site at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bellman/... The problem with this idea is finding somewhere to host the documentation. It's linked to from https://github.com/conwaylife/BellmanWin, and possibly other places too. Uploading it to the wiki seems sensible, but I can't see an upload link; is this something an administrator has to do?

Yeah, the LifeWiki doesn't really have a place for people to upload arbitrary files. It's locked down to specific file types and sizes, mostly -- though of course Nathaniel could put those PDFs anywhere he might choose.

I've gone ahead and made a parallel folder in the 'lifecontent' umbrella project containing the Life Lexicon along with Mark Niemiec's and Paul Callahan's and Dean Hickerson's Life web pages. So for the time being, those documentation PDFs can be accessed from the 'bellman' folder on GitHub.

Whenever Nathaniel mirrors the 'lifecontent' project, copies should also become available at

http://conwaylife.com/ref/bellman/bellm ... -04-27.pdf
http://conwaylife.com/ref/bellman/bellm ... -08-02.pdf

dvgrn wrote:Yeah, the LifeWiki doesn't really have a place for people to upload arbitrary files. It's locked down to specific file types and sizes, mostly -- though of course Nathaniel could put those PDFs anywhere he might choose.

FWIW, MediaWiki can easily be extended to support PDF uploads -- if you use the PdfHandler extension, you'll get various nice features like previews for each individual page. You still have to allow PDF uploads in the first place, but that's as easy as tweaking $wgFileExtensions.

In the meantime, I've added links to Simon Ekström's version and the mirrored documentation to the external links section of the Bellman article.

MikeP wrote:The problem with this idea is finding somewhere to host the documentation. It's linked to from https://github.com/conwaylife/BellmanWin, and possibly other places too. Uploading it to the wiki seems sensible, but I can't see an upload link; is this something an administrator has to do?

Marginally related -- if you're not seeing an upload link, that means you're either not logged in, or do not have the "trusted" flag (which is unfortunately necessary for editing these days, after a massive spam attack a year or so ago where spammers managed to create ~5000 pages in a short amount of time). I've given the "trusted" flag to User:MikeP, on the assumption that that's most likely you.

The newer Bellman versions seem to be missing makefile and makegif.o (and makegif.c, but I'm not sure if that's necessary).

calcyman wrote:Simon Ekstr\"{o}m produced an even-more-improved version: https://github.com/simeksgol/BellmanWin_szlim

Wow. It's evolved a lot further than I realised. It's also amusing to see that the tile wrap thing still hasn't annoyed anyone to the point of fixing it!

dvgrn wrote:So for the time being, those documentation PDFs can be accessed from the 'bellman' folder on GitHub.

That's great - thanks. I'll see if I can set up some kind of redirect so the old URLs continue to work.

Apple Bottom wrote:I've given the "trusted" flag to User:MikeP, on the assumption that that's most likely you.

Yes, that's me - thank you! I can see the "Upload file" link now.