That's the sort of pure research that is still going on in some quarters. Yeah, it's being done under the banner of the Vs. Debate, but it's the sort of thing that one might've expected to find here.
Or here's a post of mine about "The Passenger"[DS9]
I pulled up the episode on StarTrek.com and checked for the context . . . boom, done. Turns out there really wasn't any context except for Icheb just going nuts multitasking with all kinds of screens going in Astrometrics. So, the fact that Jouret IV was shown in an image near Rigel and Vega means nothing.
But out of curiosity (since the real Rigel is like 3000 LY away as I recall whereas Vega is nextdoor), I went ahead and looked around further.
Vega is "west-northwest" of us and about ten light-years "higher", at a distance of about 25 light-years. Rigel is listed at that site as 770 LY distant (Wikipedia, more recently, gives it 860). But so near as I can tell from http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/5000lys.html Rigel ought to be basically in the complete opposite direction from Vega.
That suggests that Icheb's star chart was not a "top down" map, but a projection from some location that is not Earth.
However, ignoring the multitude of Rigels, this could imply that, projected two-dimensionally, Jourey IV (which I'm going to spell that way because I keep typing a Y there so dammit) lies along a line that includes Rigel and Vega.
Of course, then there's Pollux IV on that map, too, at which point the whole plan goes to poo. Pollux is almost due "south" of us and rather higher, which just kills the angles. It's 34 light-years away per the Atlas site.
This is actually interesting, though, because if we ditch the Rigel and keep a line from Pollux to Vega, we still sort of basically end up pointing roughly 45 degrees west, or toward the northwest. (We could also go southeast, in principle, but I like that less.)
That would put Joureydammit IV off to the northwest, instead of the north-northeast as commonly assumed. (Well, I say "commonly" . . . this guy puts it in weirdville in the F/K/R triangle region, about 75 LY from Sol to the ESE: http://www.sttff.net/AST_MAP.html )
The westerly positioning could actually dovetail pretty nicely with my recent ruminations on the Borg which featured the "Borg in the Northwest" hypothesis.
JouretokayfineIbackspacedthistime IV being toward the northwest, in other words, actually fits that, and we could even go further and suggest the presence of a transwarp doomaflotchy there. (The one a light-year from Earth in the Voyager finale would just be a new thing or fluke).
See? Boom. New material, slackers. ;-)
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
We all knew this board was dying but I think I finally killed it. I had a request to open registrations so someone could join. I had to manually approve the registration and delete all the spam bots. However, I forgot about the spam bots for a while and now there are over 12 000 registrations in the queue. It has essentially shut down and can't be pruned; the forum software pukes trying to open it up.
-------------------- I haul cardboard and cardboard accessories
Registered: Mar 1999
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-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
Somewhat. Although apparently Charles has been researching alternate forum software for Flare. He is just rather busy these days.
-------------------- I haul cardboard and cardboard accessories
Registered: Mar 1999
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Saltah'na
Chinese Canadian, or 75% Commie Bastard.
Member # 33
posted
He'll probably need to nuke the entire registration backlog and start from scratch. Also, if he can get capcha in there, I think at a minimum, will solve most of our issues here.
-------------------- "And slowly, you come to realize, it's all as it should be, you can only do so much. If you're game enough, you could place your trust in me. For the love of life, there's a tradeoff, we could lose it all but we'll go down fighting...." - David Sylvian FreeSpace 2, the greatest space sim of all time, now remastered!
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
So I'm all like "alright, forum software's old, but maybe there's some helpful info online I can provide for that problem" . . . and I get to Googlin', and about six seconds later come across the Wikipedia page, which spake thus:
quote:UBB.classic (formerly Ultimate Bulletin Board or UBB) was an Internet forum software package originally written by Ted O'Neill of Social Strata, Inc. in 1996. It was written in Perl and used a flat file database. The last version of the software was 6.7.3, and was maintained by Charles Capps until he left Social Strata (then known as Groupee) in early 2006.
And then I'm all like "okay, nevermind then."
I never realized the maestro was among us.
And it's a flat file database! I much prefer that anyway. SQL gives me a headache.
But, just to be over-simple and hopeful, I would presume a suitably talented person (i.e. someone who knew what the devil they were looking at if they opened it up in Notepad++ or something) might have a chance at pruning the last 12,000 registrations manually (i.e. everybody since 137th Gebirg (Member # 2692))? Or is the flat file in some magic chronological format with no timestamping?
I know nothing of the database itself (and next to nothing about Perl), but if it features something like (registration)so-and-so(/registration)(approval)nein-verboten(/approval) or something, couldn't a regex be built, even if it came down to building an expression that included not killing all the names in the 18 pages of members?
Feel free to pooh-pooh my poo-poo, here. But, if it's plausible, I might volunteer.
Whatever the case, the absolute last thing I would ever want to see happen is for the information contained in all the many posts to just poof into dust. Somewhere there's a dork who's researching things and you just know they're gonna come across this site over and over, even if they can't participate.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Saltah'na
Chinese Canadian, or 75% Commie Bastard.
Member # 33
posted
If you want to take this on, by all means, contact Charles.
Don't know if you have realized but the stalwarts of this forum have been around since 1998 when many of us were teenagers or in our early 20s. And most of us who are now in our 30s have gone on to do typical things that people do in their 30s. Like have kids. Charles has 2 himself, so you can imagine the amount of free time he has dealing with those rugrats.
-------------------- "And slowly, you come to realize, it's all as it should be, you can only do so much. If you're game enough, you could place your trust in me. For the love of life, there's a tradeoff, we could lose it all but we'll go down fighting...." - David Sylvian FreeSpace 2, the greatest space sim of all time, now remastered!
Registered: Mar 1999
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
TLDR: everybody became old fat fucks.
A webservice tied to a flat-file DB (probably a binary format given that UBB is ancient proprietary code, but who knows) backend in 2014, awesome. No wonder the perl interpreter chokes on it. This might just be the last UBB.classic board in existence, a relic in more ways than one. Maybe we should arrange for it to be protected as a historical site.
I'm guessing the only DB admin tool is the forum software itself and the DB format is either undocumented or lost to history. That would make low-level cleanup or importing to SQL (with associated migration to phpBB or w/e) rather hard, although apparently not impossible. How big is Flare's DB anyway? Is there an automated backup policy? Does anyone besides Charles even have remote server access or is this *still* a one-man show?
-------------------- ".mirrorS arE morE fuN thaN televisioN" - TEH PNIK FLAMIGNO
Registered: Nov 1999
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I love that I'm part of something like this that is essentially still going, coming up on nearly 20 years.
That is unheard of in the world of the internet!
There might be a "Living Witness" [VOY] type situation where this board is used archaelogically in the future!!
However, in reality it's all not quite correct - and Charles (yes now I hear Sir Ian's voice NOW!!) wears black gloves a la Janeway.
*leave it alone*.
Still love this place.
I also think there is the 'facebook' effect - unfortunately apart for work I do rarely venture away from looking at Facebook. It does keep you constantly... 'entertained' if you subscribe to enough non-friend sites. I know this isn't a good thing really.
I don't even really go to Youtube as much. Hmmm.
True it could also just be 'life' getting in the way.
It might also be the fact that Star Trek has such a wonderful tapestry of information, that other 'universes' except for Tolkien's universe (maybe a few others) have.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
What is this mysterious "life" thing of which you speak? And children… does that not require sex? I read about the topic once. Are you saying you guys have been having sex? Like with real girls? What's that even like?
;-)
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Orion Syndicate
He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!
Member # 25
posted
I still pop in every once in a while to have a look around. Those of us who were around in the early days had the time to post; I remember hours spent on here every day, between lectures at university. :-)
The torch has to be passed on. Sorting out registrations, and allowing new people to come in who have the time and passion that we had, to bring life back to the forums, would be the way forward.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
So I've been getting requests from multiple people over at the TrekBBS asking if they can join Flare, since I'm apparently some sort of bigwig concerning this place While I share Shik's attitude about this place being selective, I also think that new blood would be great for Flare. There is interest, and it sounds like all that needs to be done is a board upgrade and some sort of captcha put in place for spam. Could this realistically happen, or should I just tell these people that they're just not going to be able to join?
-------------------- "A film made in 2008 isn't going to look like a TV series from 1966 if it wants to make any money. As long as the characters act the same way, and the spirit of the story remains the same then it's "real" Star Trek. Everything else is window dressing." -StCoop
Registered: Jun 2000
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Explain to them about The Trials.
New meat—er, blood might be nice, if only to get YTA moving again.
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
Well, surprisingly I managed to clear out the registration queue so we can open up the board for registrations again. But, given the flood of spam-bots that flow through our non-CAPTCHA registration system, I think what might be the best way to do this is open registrations for a 24 hour period and get everyone to register during that window. That way, I have a better chance of approving genuine registrations.
Mark, do you have a thread going on TrekBBS about this? I have no idea if this sort of thing would be permitted by the staff there as we are essentially encouraging folks to go to a "competitor" as it were...
-------------------- I haul cardboard and cardboard accessories
Registered: Mar 1999
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While I share Shik's attitude about this place being selective, I also think that new blood would be great for Flare. There is interest, and it sounds like all that needs to be done is a board upgrade and some sort of captcha put in place for spam. Could this realistically happen, or should I just tell these people that they're just not going to be able to join?
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