TheDJ writes

I didn't think this was gonna be so hard to make a video NOT have native controls. And it's not, at least not for the majority of web developers. You have a nice controls attribute on the video tag. Add it, you have native controls, don't add it and you won't. The thing is however that many sites for many different reasons specify their own controls using Javascript. And I'd like to continue doing the same for Wikipedia. And here is my problem pictured above. I call it the 'Flash of Native Controls'. Something like this is extremely distracting for visitors of the webcontent. The solution seems simple. Just remove that controls attribute from your HTML. But I'd rather not do that.. And the reason is because at Wikipedia, we have many re-users of our generated HTML content. But most of those re-users don't use the same JS stack. Removing the controls attribute means they won't have videocontrols. I want controls, I just want MY controls

I got a new iMac recently and after transferring my account using Migration Assistant I rebooted the Mac. After this moment, for the life of me I could not get Bluetooth working anymore. In the menubar I had a nice icon with a squiggly line through it. In the console.app I could find nice informative lines like: IOBluetoothUSBDFUTool[324]: Could not get IOBluetoothUSBDFU service I went through tonnes of blogposts and forum posts with all kinds of advice. Mostly coming down to: Unplug all USB devices, shut down and the restart Reset your SMC None of this really worked. I then started the Mac in Safe mode by keeping the shift key pressed. Now I was able to use Bluetooth. Of course, you can't boot your Mac in Safe mode all the time..... But still this indicates that some 3rd party component was messing up. Possibly a kernel extension, or at least a preference connected to a kernel extension. I have a few elements installed, but I went with my gut feeling.. Logitech.

I needed to use git svn to do a svn migration, and it was a very painful experience to figure out how to get that working again after I upgraded to El Capitan. It seems that with Apple's system integrity, Apple has broken both ruby and perl setups to some degree, and it's taking a while to catch up with that. Short story: Install homebrew Install ruby from homebrew Install svn using homebrew Install a new version of git using homebrew. Now you still get an error: Can't locate SVN/Core.pm in @INC (you may need to install the SVN::Core module) For this, run the following, to create some symlinks that are required for perl. sudo mkdir /Library/Perl/5.18/auto sudo ln -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Library/Perl/5.18/darwin-thread-multi‌-2level/SVN /Library/Perl/5.18/darwin-thread-multi-2level sudo ln -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Library/Perl/5.18/darwin-thread-multi‌-2level/auto/SVN /Library/Perl/5.18/auto/ Dear Apple... Reme

Do you recognize these boxes ? Most likely you do. These are the very recognizable "amboxes", which is a short for " Article message boxes ". They are often visible at the top of articles in English Wikipedia and one of the most recognizable elements of those articles. Today I noticed that these boxes are now just over 5 years (and a month) old. They were first introduced to the general public starting from September 2007 . Their features are in short; a single consistent design, color coded for severity and purpose, dynamic but consistent in width (stackable), IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 compatible and a consistent parameter setup for its content. And that is a big deal, because I still remember what it looked like before when it had none of that. There were dozens of templates with different widths, different colors, different spacing and they all had different parameters. [I've been trying to find an image from back then, but I haven't been able to find one.

As most people know, Wikipedia usually runs the bleeding edge code of MediaWiki. Currently new versions are deployed every 2 weeks. This is great, necessary and sometimes annoying for Wikipedians. There is a common complaint that MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's experimentation grounds. On the other hand MediaWiki is overly focused on Wikipedia. Without Wikipedia, I think that the default MediaWiki would look a lot more like Wikia than like Wikipedia. In my opinion, if MediaWiki treats Wikipedia as it's sandbox then it does so because the only sandbox that compares to Wikipedia is Wikipedia itself. There ARE no other viable experimentation grounds that compare to the distorted reality of Wikipedia. So how bleeding edge is bleeding edge? Code is deployed almost every 2 weeks, yet HTML5 has been the default for MediaWiki for over 3 years now , but has still not made it to Wikipedia for all sorts of compatibility reasons and accommodating to the volunteer tech community

Been a while since I wrote here. I wanted to discuss a great change that has come to MediaWiki , and it is the adaptation of  Git  and Gerrit  over our old Subversion system. It has been discussed at length already, but I wanted to discuss the actual switch process and what it meant for me as an individual. TLDR version: Little time, big switch, Gerrit needs lots of work, more coherent documentation needed and stay vigilant. Bad or Good cannot be stated yet. Where I'm coming from First of all, I should clarify that I already used Git quite a bit. We used it within  VideoLAN  and I use it myself almost on a daily basis as a wrapper around some of the Subversion repositories I use. So you could say that using it should not be too troublesome to me. I already know the commands and the principle ideas behind git and how they differ from other SCM systems . The only new addition is Gerrit... I have little time on my hands to work on Wikimedia and MediaWiki these days. 3 hours to