Starting once more

I have tried it many times before, but I guess you have to persist. I find blogging difficult. I often spend too long on writing it and don't post often enough. Twitter is more my thing, because it is just short blurps. Still lately I have found that Twitter is not enough. I have ideas and comments that I feel I need to write down in more than 140 characters and many of them have to do with Wikipedia. So I'll attempt it one more time. Topics will mostly be Wikipedia, online rights and software development, but other issues might come up. Welcome everyone.

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kAMDReceiveMessageError

We kept running into a kAMDReceiveMessageError in our company, when trying to install adHoc iPhone apps with the iPhone Configuration Utility for Windows. Everything was fine if people tried to install using Windows iTunes. After much time it was tracked to the addition of UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities to the Info.plist. For some very strange reason it seems that the Windows ICU doesn't like that property at all and fails to install any app that carries it. Not sure if this will affect AppStore submission, iTunes handles it and so does the Mac version of ICU it seems, but it is at the very least mildly annoying that testers can't install our application using Windows ICU.

5 years of Article message boxes

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.

HTML 5 video player for mediawiki now with fullscreen support

Michael Dale has been working hard on a new media player for the mediawiki projects. This media player is based on the HTML 5 <video> tag . You can compare it to the demo players of Youtube and Vimeo and DailyMotion . It should support Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3, Opera 10.5 and if you install the Xiph QuickTime components it works with Safari 4 for the Mac. If your browser doesn't support HTML5, the player will use the JAVA cortado player , like it does in the old version of the Ogg player. Recently both Apple and Firefox introduced Fullscreen support for the <video> tag in their development versions of the browsers, and these features can now be used with the new player for Wikimedia. The controls automatically show and hide, and you can even add and display subtitles with it. How do I test it ? It is rather easy, you go to this example video . If you want to enable it for all videos, you need to be registered on Wikimedia Commons or the English Wikipedia . You

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