Archiving Game of Life News under conwaylife.com/ref

[GUYTU6J]

(Following Book's habit of making new threads for every bit of LifeWiki-editting matter: )
Heinrich Koenig's Game of Life News under http://pentadecathlon.com/lifeNews is a great public source for GoL development in the 2000's, and have been cited on many LifeWiki articles. However, the server and weblog software are outdated and unstable, as noted previously. Today I am getting a 503 Service Unavailable from the site, which prompted this proposal of archiving the site under conwaylife.com/ref like what have been done for Mark Niemiec's and Paul Callahan's pages to secure accessibility.

Besides archiving, there is another related job: create a template:citepdnews (or something similar) for citing a Game of Life News post, and replace the relevant instances of template:cite web with this new template. The articles using template:cite web is collected in Category:Pages citing websites.

[dvgrn]

Today I am getting a 503 Service Unavailable from the site, which prompted this proposal of archiving the site under conwaylife.com/ref like what have been done for Mark Niemiec's and Paul Callahan's pages to secure accessibility.

This is a bit trickier than any previous transfer to conwaylife.com/ref, unfortunately. The server generates the annotated images based on pentadecathlon.com-specific comments -- pretty much a predecessor of LifeViewer scripting commands, but specific to that server.

If we're lucky we can get cached images produced by the server, for most or all of the patterns out there. If not, some of the images might have to be rebuilt by hand.

(And if someone really wanted to go through the LifeNews postings and redo them for a new content system, I can help by providing the raw content, images and database entries.)

I'll email HK and see if it's possible to get a ZIP file of the raw content added to this thread. And once those files are converted to -- let's say -- plain HTML, it would be easy enough to check them in to the relevant GitHub repo and move them to conwaylife.com/ref. But there's quite a large amount of review and editing to do between those two steps, so it would be great to have someone who can take that on as a project.

[GUYTU6J]

Let me see... As a starting example, I have downloaded a sidewinder synthesis pattern sometime ago.

Code: Select all

#C 2007-10-06-construct-32P20H10V0-1.rle
#C 11 Gliders -> 32P20H10V0.1
#C By J.Summers
x=41, y=39, color=(64,0,0)
3bobo$4b2o$4bo5$7bo$8b2o28bobo$7b2o11bo17b2o$21bo17bo$19b3o7$17bobo$18b2o$18b
o2$19bo$18bo$5bo7bo4b3o$5b2o4bobo$4bobo5b2o24b3o$38bo$3o36bo$2bo$bo6$31b3o$31b
o$32bo!
x=18, y=13, h=15, v=7, gen=55 ,color=(0,224,0), alpha=196
bo13bo$3o11b3o$ob2o4bo5bob2o$b3o3b3o5b3o$b2o3b2o2bo4b2o$8b3o5$8b2o$7b2o$9b
o!
x=41, y=38, color=(0,0,0), alpha=48
4bo$3bo2bo$5b3o$5b4o$6b4o$7b4o$8b4o$8b5o$7bo2b4o25bo$9b6obo11bobo6bo2bo$8b
8o3b2o7b2o6b3o$9b7o2bo4b2o3b2o2bo2b4o$10b9ob3o5b5ob4o$11b8o2b5o2b9o$12b7ob
6o2b8o$13b6ob7ob7o$12bob3o2b15o$11b5o4b3o2b9o$10b5o3bob2o2b11o$9b5o3bo2b4ob
9o$8b5o6b8ob7o$7b5o7b9o2b6o$6b5o5b3ob8o5b4o$5b5o5b3ob8o7b4o$4bob3o3bo2b3o3b
5o9b4o$3b2o2bo4bob11o11b4o$2b2obo8b2ob7o13bo$b4o8b6o2b4o14b2o$3bo9b2ob3o3b
4o$2o21b4o$24b4o$25b4o$26b4o$27b4o$28b4o$29b4o$30bo$32b2o!
CB 2,2,2,2
GP F SE x=-6,y=-10,len=11,color=(255,0,0)
GP F SE x=-12,y=-12,len=21,color=(255,0,0)
GP F SW x=49,y=-1,len=11,color=(255,0,0)
GP F SE x=0,y=-10,len=21,color=(255,0,0)
GP F SE x=8,y=8,len=11,color=(255,0,0)
GP F SE x=-7,y=5,len=21,color=(255,0,0)
GP F NE x=-5,y=35,len=11,color=(255,0,0)
GP F NW x=49,y=37,len=11,color=(255,0,0)
GP F NE x=-9,y=38,len=11,color=(255,0,0)
GP F NW x=42,y=47,len=11,color=(255,0,0)
GP F SW x=49,y=-6,len=31,color=(255,0,0)
GP F N x=16, y=8,,len=11,color=(0,255,0)
GP F N x=30,y=8,len=11,color=(0,255,0)

The corresponding multicolor image retrieved by Wayback Machine, when manually saved as .png, is shown below.

2007-10-06-32P20H10V0-1.rle.png (4.55 KiB) Viewed 2420 times

There are initial gliders in black, product sidewinder at generation 55 in green, reaction envelope in black (adjusted to gray via alpha channel), input lanes in light red and output lanes in light green. Reproduce it interactively in LifeViewer feels possible with custom LifeHistory themes, paste commands and filled polygons, but this may be somewhat overkill.

[hkoenig]

Sorry to hear the server is acting flakey.

As mentioned elsewhere, all the software running this site is "legacy"-- not supported or maintained. Not sure why the 503 errors, other than it might be because of the forwarding needed from my actual webserver to the old PowerPC Mac that can actually run the site. I dont see anything obviously not behaving properly.

I'm open to getting this archived in some fashion, but not sure how best to do it. The LifeNews portion of the site uses/used MoveableType, which generates lots of static pages. An archive of that is easy to do, and should be fairly complete.

As for the rest of the server, the databases were written using FileMaker, and exporting from that isn't always the most useful or easy (if I can even remember where to find out how to do it.) Object files are simply text files with one SOF encoding per line. If someone wants to put the effort into converting my attempts at image annotation, I can work with them to figure out and document what is going on.

Contact me now and we can at least start to think about what to do. Right now I'm busy with too many other things, but should have some time starting in mid-June until the end of July to put some effort into salvaging this.

[Book]

I'll email HK and see if it's possible to get a ZIP file of the raw content added to this thread. And once those files are converted to -- let's say -- plain HTML, it would be easy enough to check them in to the relevant GitHub repo and move them to conwaylife.com/ref. But there's quite a large amount of review and editing to do between those two steps, so it would be great to have someone who can take that on as a project.

Any forward motion?

I agree that getting a raw dump is an important first step so that the content isn't simply lost. Then we could see what we have and develop a plan of attack.

[dvgrn]

I did send out an email as promised, back at the end of May, and got a quick response back, along the same lines as hkoenig's response above.

... willing to work to get this exported, but not now. Too much going on right now ..."

This is probably one of those cases where a quarterly check-in isn't so frequent as to be terribly annoying, so maybe I'll try another email somewhere toward the end of August.