User:Dbenbenn

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For your tireless supervision and gracious mediation on the Village Pump, I hereby award you the Working Man's Barnstar. --Tysto 18:55, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm David Benbennick. I transwikied from en:User:Dbenbenn. See /gallery for images I made myself, and /gallery2 for images made by others that I uploaded.

I am user number 1209. I've been contributing here since December 2004. I was made an administrator in April 2005, and became a bureaucrat on April 1, 2006.

I wrote an explanation of the pros and cons of categories versus gallery pages here.

[edit] Upload tips

• Always upload the highest resolution available. Don't settle for thumbnails.
• If you're uploading a modified version of an image, upload the original first. Someone else might want to see how you changed the image, or improve on your modifications. The same goes, of course, for panorama shots. See Image:Cape Cove, Oregon.jpg for example.
• Pick a good file name. Don't use CamelCase or meaningless names. Use article capitalization conventions: lowercase except proper names, unless it's a proper title.
  • Don't be too specific. The Mona Lisa probably should be called "Mona Lisa.jpg", not "Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) - Mona Lisa (1503-1507).jpg".
  • Don't be too general. Image:Volcano.jpeg ought to be called "Mount St. Helens erupting.jpg".
  • Don't put the image size in the title. There's really no need for that.
• For PNG images, pngrewrite and advpng -z4 are useful.
• When modifying a JPEG image
  • Don't settle for lossy cropping or rotation. Use jpegtran or some other tool to losslessly perform these operations.
• When uploading a new revision of an image, use a good upload summary! The upload summary is more important than the edit summary, since it's hard to compare two images. Say how you changed the image in your summary, with as much detail as possible.

[edit] Copyright

Recently I've decided that ShareAlike is evil. If you combine a GFDL picture with a cc-by-sa-2.5 picture, the result is a copyright violation. I'm considering releasing all my stuff under cc-by-2.5.

For the time being, all of my own work is multi-licensed, GFDL and all versions of cc-by-sa (2.5, 2.0, and 1.0), though most of my pictures aren't yet tagged with Template:Cc-by-sa-2.5,2.0,1.0. I'm happy to license my work under other free licenses. Just ask!

I intend all of my copyrights to expire after 28 years, as in the Copyright Act of 1790. Presumably I'll have to go through and add {{PD-self}} at that point.

[edit] Notes

A lot of flags have regular pentagrams. If you just need to fill a pentagram, you can do it exactly. See Image:Flag of Texas.svg, for example. But if you need to stroke the shape, it apparently can't be done exactly. Here is SVG code to make a regular pentagram with radius 1, centered at (0,0), aligned vertically. Now I'll never have to calculate the vertices ever again.

<polygon id="pentagram" transform="translate(xpos,ypos) scale(radius) rotate(orientation)" points="0,-1
       0.224513988289792686220972575898763393789606,-0.309016994374947424102293417182819058860155
       0.951056516295153572116439333379382143405699,-0.309016994374947424102293417182819058860155
       0.363271264002680442947733378740309374808046,0.118033988749894848204586834365638117720309
       0.587785252292473129168705954639072768597652,0.809016994374947424102293417182819058860155
       0,0.381966011250105151795413165634361882279691
       -0.587785252292473129168705954639072768597652,0.809016994374947424102293417182819058860155
       -0.363271264002680442947733378740309374808046,0.118033988749894848204586834365638117720309
       -0.951056516295153572116439333379382143405699,-0.309016994374947424102293417182819058860155
       -0.224513988289792686220972575898763393789606,-0.309016994374947424102293417182819058860155" />

There are 42 decimal places, which is enough so that if you scale the pentagram up to the size of the observable universe (about 10²⁴ km, according to w:Universe), the error is about the size of the classical electron radius.

I calculated the vertices with the following bc script.

scale=100
x=(cosd(72)-1)*sind(144)/(cosd(144)-1)
r=sqrt(x^2+cosd(72)^2)                  (the inner radius)
for(i=0; i<5; ++i) {phi=72*i; sind(phi); -cosd(phi); r*sind(phi+36); -r*cosd(phi+36)}

[edit] To do

• Categories starting with "Images of" is a common mistake. One can get a list at Special:Categories.
• Make sure to check on Template:Changing username/Current requests periodically!
• Check on Special:Contributions/Borislav on June 28.