tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1271986347351805142024-02-03T00:13:20.360+01:00TheDJ writesTheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-77531839797065235162022-12-19T20:15:00.008+01:002022-12-19T20:31:54.795+01:00A tale of a brand new MacBook Pro Silicon and non-working external screens<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirENBQ0_gXIG68W1FFrLM3JU-JgEMKDra8ylwC7Xx24MpRko4XHG9jCxuE2F7GDfqo9jdKxtGfNdsc6kGugO4rBQjVzhGQyUvc04A5WQLqoTyrpk5GeSRRUCAlO82VS33RVJlLPHxX2yR4fFj0YMtqIXXVa1vk6wiyEeQ8_hLRZuEzNSSDUcGG6sb1/s1516/Screenshot%202022-12-19%20at%2020.18.11.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1516" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirENBQ0_gXIG68W1FFrLM3JU-JgEMKDra8ylwC7Xx24MpRko4XHG9jCxuE2F7GDfqo9jdKxtGfNdsc6kGugO4rBQjVzhGQyUvc04A5WQLqoTyrpk5GeSRRUCAlO82VS33RVJlLPHxX2yR4fFj0YMtqIXXVa1vk6wiyEeQ8_hLRZuEzNSSDUcGG6sb1/s320/Screenshot%202022-12-19%20at%2020.18.11.png" width="320" /></a></div>So I recently bought a new MacBook Pro 14" 2022 with MacOS Ventura. Moved everything over got to work!<p></p><p>Or so I thought. After a couple days I noticed how every time, my external LG displays refused to connect with the Mac. Initially thinking it was a fluke, I messed with some wires and eventually rebooted the MacBook and everything was fine. But the issue returned and it seemed that each time after waking up the Mac, the screens would not come back.</p><p>So last Sunday, I got so annoyed I was determined to figure out what was going on. And this turned into a deep investigation with verifying the functionality of each and every part in the system and lots of Googling. Before each theory and test, I'd reboot to bring both monitors back to life, sleep the system, wait a few minutes and then try to wake up the monitors. </p><p>I started by just plugging and unplugging, as well as restarting hardware. The screens are LG screens which are known to sometimes have time synchronization problems with Macs, and my CalDigit 3+ docking station sits in-between all that, further muddying the waters. Also the dock is Thunderbolt 3, and the Mac is Thunderbolt 4 now and Thunderbolt and DisplayPort via Thunderbolt is notoriously picky, so a likely area to investigate. And so I tested:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li style="text-align: left;">Dock with one monitor</li><li style="text-align: left;">No dock, just one LG monitor</li><li>No dock, just the other LG monitor</li><li>The original LG Thunderbolt cable with one LG screen</li><li>The original CalDigit Thunderbolt cable with one LG screen</li></ul><div>For each of the combinations I used several tests.</div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Replugging the cable after sleep. This should normally trigger display detection.</li><li>Use "detect displays" after sleep. This resends the communication signal for the displayport handshake.</li><li>Restarting the display by physically unplugging it from mains after sleep. Perhaps the display had a chip that would get into a 'bad state' after sleep ?</li></ul><div>All of these tests failed and the only fix, every single time, was a restart of the Mac. Now I got concerned.. was the brand new Mac broken ? Were both LG screens just not compatible with it ? Google time. Google had lots of advise for me of course. Most of it reiterated what I had already tested, and lots of complaints about how shitty LG screens were on Macs these days, firmware updates of the display/dock and how not everything with a USB-C connector is a Thunderbolt cable.</div><div><br /></div><div>So perhaps it was the Mac that was in some sort of weird state. Next steps:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A forced restart</li><li>An <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295">SMC reset</a></li><li>I granted permissions to each and every background task (Login Items section of System Preferences)</li><li>I revoked permission from each background task</li><li>Maybe something about the <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchl768f7291/mac">Startup Security settings</a> ? Didn't even know about this new fangled thing.</li></ul>In the end I did what I should have thought of immediately when determing everything worked on initial boot... Start up in <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh21245/13.0/mac/13.0">Safe mode</a>. NOW the displays worked after waking from sleep. This means it was either a System Extension OR a <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPSystemStartup/Chapters/CreatingLaunchdJobs.html">(background) Login Item</a>. Now to find the culprit !!</div><div><br /></div><div>When I had setup my new Mac, I migrated everything from the old to the new Mac with <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204350">Migration Assistant</a>. I have done this many times before with at least 3 machines in the last 10 years. Generally it works very well, but it also causes all kinds of old crap from years and years ago to move along with you to new hardware and newer versions of the OS. I had the same installed on my older MacBook, but now I had upgraded both to a new processor architecture AND a new version of macOS. Either could have triggered a fault somewhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>I just went with a process of elimination again. Disabling non-Sytem extensions from <span style="font-family: courier;">/Library/Extensions</span> (be careful, this also includes a few system extensions) and cleaning up anything I wasn't using from <span style="font-family: courier;">/Library/LaunchAgents</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><span style="font-family: courier;">Library/LaunchDaemons</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><span style="font-family: courier;">~/LaunchAgents</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><span style="font-family: courier;">~/</span><span style="font-family: courier;">LaunchDaemons</span>. In the end, I'm not entirely sure what fixed it (I tended to disable 2-3 things for each round), but I'm pretty sure it was either removing (old) VirtualBox, OR, and this seems most likely to me, a very old USB extension for communicating with an Arduino.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway. If you have trouble with displays not returning after sleep, Ignore what most of the Internet says. If rebooting with the screens plugged in works, but waking from sleep fails, then you should startup in Safe mode. If that works, you should either begin with a fresh macOS install OR if you are comfortable with digging through your /Library directory, (temporarily) disable extensions and/or startup items until you find a culprit.</div>TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-77461468283187358762016-05-14T23:23:00.001+02:002016-05-14T23:34:27.342+02:00Can I haz appearance:none; for the video element ?I didn't think this was gonna be so hard to make a video NOT have native controls.<br />
<br />
And it's not, at least not for the majority of web developers. You have a nice <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">controls</span> attribute on the video tag. Add it, you have native controls, don't add it and you won't.<br />
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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.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dx_CHURJJrUMz7zMMyidndIABPEKjoJuFuzaBYJy5crSukx623MOrqafFcrB6xTE9gebLq57Ap1J8TOlyHCVg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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.<br />
<br />
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 instead of those of the user-agent.<br />
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Many other solutions have been suggested to me, but all have downsides. Messing with the HTML structure (sorry, don't want that), using inline scripts (want that even less), using iframes (nice, but I shouldn't have to) etc etc.<br />
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Honestly, I see this as a styling problem. I should be able to specify this using CSS in the head element, so that when the first paint of my HTML content occurs (usually well before the JS starts executing), my video already has no controls. The poster remains in a 'non-interactive' state a bit longer, but in general i'm fine with that. People won't watch a video in the first 300ms, but they will notice all those flashes when I have 50 video players on a site and a 3G connection.<br />
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And we used to have this in webkit browsers. Using CSS we could specify something like:<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">video::-webkit-media-controls { display:none !important; }</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">However, that is referring to Shadow DOM and those are supposed to be isolated </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And there never was a Firefox/IE version of this to begin with so :(</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgogtfHHM9SWBywF3TH_4p49fX2EpGz2RnUr4uveOQuahRp3z5smHZW2aMSpnjf07Sah2_Qt5pRxQBy7BIGhFCJKGY9qkivaiLiYrdaSa4fb3oMSQgHQeg1DEsCF3d9eB9L8vH_CbIfbPc/s1600/475-unstyled_forms.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgogtfHHM9SWBywF3TH_4p49fX2EpGz2RnUr4uveOQuahRp3z5smHZW2aMSpnjf07Sah2_Qt5pRxQBy7BIGhFCJKGY9qkivaiLiYrdaSa4fb3oMSQgHQeg1DEsCF3d9eB9L8vH_CbIfbPc/s320/475-unstyled_forms.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image by <a href="https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2609-customizing-web-forms-with-css3-and-webkit" target="_blank">Jason Z</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I figure this really is not much different from <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">type</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> attributes </span>for an input. This is semantic meaning.. It doesn't and shouldn't mean that I want the native controls. And browser vendors have recognized this, because even though it's not part of any standard, they have over the years provided web developers with the <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">appearance</span> CSS property, to give browser developers the option to take over the look of these increasingly specialized input controls.<br />
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What I need is an "appearance: none" for the video element really.<br />
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So why is this not a standard yet, and why couldn't we use the same property for the video tag ?<br />
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TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-46384663400646951102016-05-04T15:24:00.000+02:002016-05-04T15:25:09.609+02:00El Capitan bluetooth woes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic3-adf77LzohbCPKrfaQ50SaZJsHEpiCJTAxAlW0JTj36woCzDRFJFH-Lg_UfQXBpn8qhj8-h4MKJrMwFqvsr0gvJmBJQzldPTsdM871SpfNUVRSurYdDzQr8Zsrhf90f44qQhcFigC4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-10-17+at+1.37.01+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic3-adf77LzohbCPKrfaQ50SaZJsHEpiCJTAxAlW0JTj36woCzDRFJFH-Lg_UfQXBpn8qhj8-h4MKJrMwFqvsr0gvJmBJQzldPTsdM871SpfNUVRSurYdDzQr8Zsrhf90f44qQhcFigC4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-10-17+at+1.37.01+PM.png" /></a></div>
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.<br />
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In the console.app I could find nice informative lines like:<br />
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">IOBluetoothUSBDFUTool[324]: Could not get IOBluetoothUSBDFU service</span><br />
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I went through tonnes of blogposts and forum posts with all kinds of advice. Mostly coming down to:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Unplug all USB devices, shut down and the restart</li>
<li>Reset your SMC</li>
</ul>
<div>
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.</div>
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I have a few elements installed, but I went with my gut feeling.. Logitech. I own a very nice M500 corded mouse, but the Logitech software has given problems with MacOS upgrades etc before and Googling around indicates I'm not the only one with this experience. I downloaded the installer and reinstalled Logitech (even though I already had the latest version installed). And low and behold. One reboot later things work again...</div>
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Not sure if it indeed was Logitech, or that Logitech just triggered a process that kicked the Kernel extension loader in some way to fix my issue, but at least I can use Bluetooth again.</div>
TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-26046961122667600512016-04-25T15:43:00.000+02:002016-05-04T15:25:58.001+02:00Using git svn on El CapitanI 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.<br />
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Short story:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Install <a href="http://brew.sh/" target="_blank">homebrew</a></li>
<li>Install <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">ruby</span> from homebrew</li>
<li>Install <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">svn</span> using homebrew</li>
<li>Install a new version of <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">git</span> using homebrew.</li>
</ol>
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Now you still get an error:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Can't locate SVN/Core.pm in @INC (you may need to install the SVN::Core module)</span></blockquote>
For this, run the following, to create some symlinks that are required for perl.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">
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/</span></blockquote>
Dear Apple... Remember when stuff just worked ? When you cared about developers ? This golden period in the early naughts ? Somewhat alike what Microsoft is beating you at now ? Please bring that back!TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-65750432863620691652012-10-08T22:27:00.002+02:002022-09-30T10:32:08.027+02:005 years of Article message boxes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdpHs3P1j-eDbUnUZNQhb_BbnWiLOZKyK2POPL73XRrA2vQReD5_XeqhE8t4kngwj2cElvNGU2ui9twPcFwDdgKrzBSgDSVmphihGjh7BAQaZEWLxw_Wy8FHer3DsFAHm-iBv87C15i7o/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-10-08+at+21.22.33.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdpHs3P1j-eDbUnUZNQhb_BbnWiLOZKyK2POPL73XRrA2vQReD5_XeqhE8t4kngwj2cElvNGU2ui9twPcFwDdgKrzBSgDSVmphihGjh7BAQaZEWLxw_Wy8FHer3DsFAHm-iBv87C15i7o/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-10-08+at+21.22.33.png" /></a></div>
Do you recognize these boxes ? Most likely you do. These are the very recognizable "amboxes", which is a short for "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Article_message_boxes" target="_blank">Article message boxes</a>". They are often visible at the top of articles in English Wikipedia and one of the most recognizable elements of those articles.<br />
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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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Article_message_boxes&oldid=158226208" target="_blank">September 2007</a>. 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.<br />
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. Please let me know if you find one.]<br />
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It seems just like yesterday that I was one many people participating in their creation. The main design idea of the color bars at the left side seems to have come from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Flamurai/TS/blanca" target="_blank">[[User:Flamurai]]</a>, who already envisioned this in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Flamurai/TS/blanca&oldid=88344515" target="_blank">november 2006 it seems</a>, calling it 'Blanca'. It seems they are no longer editing, but I would still like to thank them for this wonderful simple idea that has been in use seemingly without much opposition for so many years now. Most of the implementation was spear headed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Davidgothberg" target="_blank">David Göthberg</a> if memory serves me well.<br />
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The revamp led to an entire family of templates for notices for different kinds of pages in 2008, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Mbox" target="_blank">{{mbox}}</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cmbox" target="_blank">{{cmbox}}</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Imbox" target="_blank">{{imbox}}</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Tmbox" target="_blank">{{tmbox}}</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Ombox" target="_blank">{{ombox}}</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Asbox" target="_blank">{{asbox}}</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Fmbox" target="_blank">{{fmbox}}</a>. In the end the whole effort was a very collaborative effort in which 3 dozen or so active editors made important contributions, including well known names as MZMcBride, Anomie, Happy-melon, David Levy, Quiddity, RockMFR, Remember the dot, Ilmari Karonen, Father Goose, Ned Scott etc etc. A lot of effort, opinion and testing has gone into these templates back then and in my opinion, that is why they have been so successful for so long.<br />
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So to all those involved over 5 years ago in creating the new article message box styles, congratulations and a big thank you. Especially [[User:Flamurai]] and [[User:David Göthberg]].<br />
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<br />TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-91662906425510374292012-07-29T12:57:00.001+02:002012-07-29T12:57:06.052+02:00Bleeding edge or is it ?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.w3.org/html/logo/downloads/HTML5_Logo_512.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://www.w3.org/html/logo/downloads/HTML5_Logo_512.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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.<div>
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<div>
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.</div>
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So how bleeding edge is bleeding edge? Code is deployed almost every 2 weeks, yet HTML5 has been the default for MediaWiki for <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/53034" target="_blank">over 3 years now</a>, but has still not made it to Wikipedia for all sorts of compatibility reasons and accommodating to the volunteer tech community.</div>
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HTML5 mode is currently <a href="https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27478" target="_blank">scheduled</a> to be deployed this summer.</div>TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-26716057913293526322012-03-31T15:32:00.004+02:002012-03-31T16:15:02.335+02:00MediaWiki; from svn to git & gerrit and a bit of mathBeen a while since I wrote here. I wanted to discuss a great change that has come to <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki">MediaWiki</a>, and it is the adaptation of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)">Git</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_(software)">Gerrit</a> over our old <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion">Subversion</a> 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.<br />
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<b>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.</b><br />
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<h3>Where I'm coming from</h3>First of all, I should clarify that I already used Git quite a bit. We used it within <a href="http://www.videolan.org/">VideoLAN</a> and I use it myself almost on a daily basis as <a href="http://viget.com/extend/effectively-using-git-with-subversion">a wrapper</a> 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control">SCM systems</a>. The only new addition is Gerrit...<br />
<br />
I have little time on my hands to work on Wikimedia and MediaWiki these days. 3 hours total during the weekdays, 4 hours in a weekend and that's about it. Most of that time is spent on reading <a href="http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/">bugzilla</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)">Village Pump</a>, mailing lists, updating my code or other things that are required to 'keep up' with current affairs. The rest of that time I tend to fill with smaller bugfixes, which easily fit within an hour or two of available time. So switching repo systems might seem like a small thing, but if you have 3 installations of MediaWiki and you need to convert them and install some <a href="https://launchpad.net/git-review">additional software</a> on the side to later submit your code, then that basically fills the time of one week that I can put in on the projects. Since I had quite a bit of time last weekend, I figured I'd better jump on the bandwagon right away, in fear of getting too far behind to catch up any time soon.<br />
<br />
<h3>Doing the switch</h3>All in all, the process of actually getting the code was easy for someone familiar with git. The most difficult bit was switching the 3 local installations that I use for testing stuff. I decided to cut down one, so that left 2. But still, switching out all the extensions in two installations with their git variants and finding out that actually some of my installed extensions were NOT switched to git but are still in subversion (after already having deleted them of course) was quite the task. Summary, installing new versions of git, git-review and updating half of my <a href="http://www.macports.org/">macports</a> installed software; 1,5 hour. Switching the repos and their extensions, and migrating any stuff that I had changed locally but not had a chance to commit yet; about 2,5 hours to get everything up and running again and making patches of my local changes.<br />
<br />
<h3>Changing workflow and a bit about math</h3><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieI3F_vv0jKfQDi5NJHHyEPfvZk9C3WROk-qsWsjQ7A8hApsj8T_qQI9cs216S84Ayx8G8t6rOX0rpqATTdwRPel7GOPGxD5dOd083o0Psv6nXd3lkByQO_3UcxoBH8wn2v7Bge9LrlBA/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.42.01.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieI3F_vv0jKfQDi5NJHHyEPfvZk9C3WROk-qsWsjQ7A8hApsj8T_qQI9cs216S84Ayx8G8t6rOX0rpqATTdwRPel7GOPGxD5dOd083o0Psv6nXd3lkByQO_3UcxoBH8wn2v7Bge9LrlBA/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.42.01.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Math in Wikipedia</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Well everything fixed you'd think. Well sort of. The other issue I immediately recognized, was that the more problematic part in the long run, would be the <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Workflow">change in workflow</a>. For someone just doing about 3 hours of coding on average a week on a project as this, anything interrupting your workflow takes huge chunks of time out of those 3 hours. So I decided to better get on with it and learn right now, so I could identify blocking issues and see them solved as soon as possible. Where to start... I always find it best to pick 'small' identifiable chunks of work in these cases, that are somewhat isolated from the regular work flow. I picked the <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Math">Math extension</a>.<br />
<br />
The Math extension is basically a <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics">LaTeX Math parser</a>, that can output math entered in for instance Wikipedia and show it in an article using either HTML or rendered images. This is needed because the original web, really had no way to properly render math. It required too many symbols that were not part of any regular font, and the positioning of those symbols went far beyond what was easily possible with HTML. So the extension interprets the LaTeX code, and if possible uses HTML, but more often actually renders the text using a LaTeX renderer to a PNG image that it then includes in the webpage. There are many downsides to this approach, but for years it was the only way to do it remotely predictable. I'm also a bit familiar with the code as I had applied several patches to it in the past.<br />
<br />
I love keeping an eye on stuff like this, the stuff that sort of limits the quality that Wikipedia can deliver in areas where it really does want to deliver. The same with mobile, video, music scores, text that has a different directionality then Left-to-right or text for which no fonts exist. Those tickets are often on my bugzilla watchlist.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1WnPs0Jy3C5eq2IMmLJEeb37OEz_eDviASzBMrTPx7jJLu0nO1nRy6wrQKunp218KruwOPnDM6USYwFTmazLjvAkXnIdzyfWjVmti3V5yegnQapiTtDDn_Hn1lqMIgx9cALjGm-VUOic/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.44.00.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="81" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1WnPs0Jy3C5eq2IMmLJEeb37OEz_eDviASzBMrTPx7jJLu0nO1nRy6wrQKunp218KruwOPnDM6USYwFTmazLjvAkXnIdzyfWjVmti3V5yegnQapiTtDDn_Hn1lqMIgx9cALjGm-VUOic/s640/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.44.00.png" width="640" /></a></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKwzW-Tgsc89O5hv2T_Qomvp0GOlEK5ZeaWSWi7WHF6AHx8dZ4sjRI7GluHqSFYr3f7YnB6WI4Opy_YESoNVubLAUl4f43jkZP8eX_zyNGGZxNUBT_tW67GFCZTNBdk52xYqUi59EsU50/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.44.06.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKwzW-Tgsc89O5hv2T_Qomvp0GOlEK5ZeaWSWi7WHF6AHx8dZ4sjRI7GluHqSFYr3f7YnB6WI4Opy_YESoNVubLAUl4f43jkZP8eX_zyNGGZxNUBT_tW67GFCZTNBdk52xYqUi59EsU50/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.44.06.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Math using MathJax</td></tr>
</tbody></table>For math, things have finally progressed after 8 years of status-quo. Over the past few years we have seen the maturing of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML">MathML</a>, the standard which is supposed to bring math to the web. We have also seen the coming of Webfont technology, and ever more advanced Javascript. All this has led to the creation of <a href="http://www.mathjax.org/">MathJax</a>, a javascript library that uses what it knows about your browser, to generate readable math equations in HTML or MathML, and provides any reader with the fonts needed to properly represent this in your browser, regardless of how well your browser or OS supports math. It has several downsides as well. It is slow as hell and incredibly complicated, but the big plus is that it actually works without requiring images (unless you are on real ancient stuff like IE6).<br />
<br />
For years math has been a hot debate within Wikimedia, with people desperately desiring higher quality and better reusability. With the advent and maturing of MathJax, that finally seems a possibility and MathJax was an oft requested feature by the Mathematics project on the English Wikipedia. A while ago, User:Nageh developed a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax">MathJax user script</a> to bring MathJax to Wikipedia. When Brion Vibber was looking into how to progress with <a href="https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24207#c9">Bug 24207</a>, he was pointed at Nageh's script and decided to investigate if it was possible to start properly integrating MathJax into the Math extension to finally start to improve Math rendering in Wikipedia. He came back with some <a href="http://www.mail-archive.com/wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg40827.html">preliminary results</a> pretty quickly.<br />
<br />
<h3>Committing patches</h3>Brion did the heavy lifting of making it MediaWiki ready, but as always with conversions such as these, there are always loads of '<a href="https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?title=Special%3ASearch&quicksearch=mathjax&list_id=104097">small things</a>' that need to get done before it can actually be deployed on Wikipedia. That made it a perfect area for me to test the new Git/Gerrit workflow by creating a few patches and submitting them to Gerrit.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgadEn0x44eZW6k46wVhDoOzAsna0poNbs7nY_uCBuYwFCflzAbcURCR1Wb6r2m4kXQT2tgwPvLGwd9_d1kPdd0viFtPeCuoWca4_IQartqOL5qUcxVQusgpgffiPpRRaFC6lbR1fOahN4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.41.09.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgadEn0x44eZW6k46wVhDoOzAsna0poNbs7nY_uCBuYwFCflzAbcURCR1Wb6r2m4kXQT2tgwPvLGwd9_d1kPdd0viFtPeCuoWca4_IQartqOL5qUcxVQusgpgffiPpRRaFC6lbR1fOahN4/s640/Screen+Shot+2012-03-31+at+15.41.09.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My Gerrit dashboard with the changes in question.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<h4>My experience:</h4><ul><li>Gerrit is an awful interface. It's like going back to <a href="http://www.bugzilla.org/">bugzilla</a> if you are used to <a href="http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview">Jira</a>. Much work will be needed there.</li>
<li>One of the downsides I found to Gerrit, is creating permanent links to users or lists of changes. I often want to look into a stream of a user's changes or look at a particular type of changes, and there is no way to do this other then to keep clicking in Gerrit until you find that list. Basically anything but permalinks to patch submissions and individual patches seems to be hard to get your hands on.</li>
<li>Git-review is taking away much of the Gerrit trouble, but still commands like: <code>git fetch ssh://hartman@gerrit.wikimedia.org:29418/mediawiki/extensions/Math refs/changes/71/3771/1 && git checkout FETCH_HEAD</code> tend to be needed in my workflow and that's just unfriendly and difficult to work with.</li>
<li>Gerrit is great for individual patch review.</li>
<li>Gerrit is terrible at "huge rewrite review" at first look.</li>
<li>Gerrit is terrible for "many sequential patches building on each other" review AND workflow. I want to commit often and get small chunks reviewed if they are useful on it self, without squashing them in one huge patch that I then need to spend hours in review limbo over. It's however almost impossibly disruptive on the workflow as soon as something intermediate needs to be adapted half way one of those dependencies.</li>
<li>This will require much getting used to, especially for the newbies. We better set up a system to feed Gerrit with Git patch diffs created using <code>git format-patch</code>, it's much easier for the real n00bies.</li>
<li>We need to do more about the patch changes and how individuals have contributed to making the final patch. It's subpar in Gerrit in my opinion (most of the history is left in Gerrit instead of in the final merge).</li>
<li>I'm not sure yet if my workflow will be faster or slower, just yet, but I suspect slower. On the other hand, I think we will see more submissions for code that we as developers are not really sure about. I have a slew of changes that require further testing and review, but due to lack of setup or feedback from other developers have basically been in limbo since forever. I plan to just submit them and see what happens. They might rot in Gerrit review limbo, but they won't rot on my HDD anymore. Hopefully having them in review will force someone to pick up the pieces.</li>
</ul><h3>A verdict ?</h3>Is it good, or is it bad ? I'm not sure yet. My current guess is that it's a boon for the quality of the sourcecode, and that it will probably speed up the pace of development overall, as well as the workflow of the more experienced developers. I fear however for those still learning. The workflow has become incredibly more convoluted, adding risk of people giving up half way. That's not guaranteed to happen of course and I have hope yet that with improving Gerrit and working on our workflow and tooling documentation that we can stave that off. I know <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sumanah">Sumanah</a>, <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Catrope">Roan</a> and several others have been working tirelessly on just that. But we are not done by a long shot on that front I fear.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>I also fear that MediaWiki is gonna be more like Wikipedia. A gigantic set of rules you need to fulfill before your article change/patch makes the cut, driving up the requirements we put on our editors/committers and widening the gap between those just getting started and the vets. We need to make sure to stay incredibly welcoming and make sure volunteers feel that their changes are accepted as they are, instead of overly reworked and rewritten to make the community cut. There is no feeling so rewarding for those still learning, as seeing your change go straight into a major piece of software. We need to keep a close eye on that as a software development community.<br />
<br />
<h3>Thank you for reading</h3>That's my story of the switch that I had to go trough almost a week ago now. Find more experiences by other developers on the <a href="http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/">Wikitech mailing list</a>. And a shout-out to the Signpost for once again doing proper summarizing of a complicated topic in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-03-26/Technology_report">last week's edition</a>.</div>TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-69777495928397597562011-09-17T12:47:00.002+02:002011-09-17T13:22:39.428+02:002011 and the Y2K bugIt has almost been 12 years since we all had to worry about the Y2K bug right ? Well you'd think. Over the past few weeks I have been bothered by a problem with session management in one of the apps that I'm writing. I couldn't figure out why stuff was behaving so unexpectedly. At some point the hints became clearer and clearer that the dated cookies of the session were for some reason not being expired. The iOS URLConnection and the android http lib seemed to continue to send them along to the server after logging out. This was hard to confirm though, because both platforms hide the Cookie header from you when you make the request, the connection was https and I didn't have physical access to the server.<br />
<br />
It made no sense however that iOS would have a fundamental Cookie management bug. So I build a small server and started testing cookie management on the iPhone. Everything looked just fine. Then I decided that I would copy the actual cookies the server was sending to the clients. I could get these values, because the Set-Cookie headers from the response (unlike the actual Cookie header in the requests) was visible. So I switch the values of my test server to the actual values from the server and suddenly I was able to reproduce the problem. The Set-Cookie that was supposed to expire the cookie seemed to turn the cookie into an undated cookie (so scoped to the session of the client instance).<br />
<br />
I'm switching back to my old values and stuff starts working again. Again I copy the original server values. I select the text and suddenly I notice it.... Expires=Sat, 01-Jan-<b>00</b> 00:00:00 GMT; No... that can't be it. Could it ? I switch my test server to issue the year 1970 instead. Poof, suddenly it works. So first of all, 12 years after 2000 there is still a server sending a broken date format. And two, it seems the Y2K parsing support in iOS is broken. Experimentation shows that iOS can only parse double digit years in cookies between 70 and 99. So any double digit year before 1970 (epoch) cannot be converted into an actual year. And what happens if the date cannot be parsed ? Then the date is removed from the cookie altogether, and your cookie becomes a session cookie :DTheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-64498279474082441222011-05-09T17:15:00.000+02:002011-05-09T17:15:18.045+02:00How IE6 is still causing headaches and bothering the rest of usSo you have this well known security issue called content sniffing in MS IE 6. No one really cares about that anymore right? Unfortunately, when you are a top 5 website, then you kinda have to care, since <a href="http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm">3,46% of the readers</a> of Wikipedia, so a whopping <a href="http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/">13.88 million of the unique monthly visitors</a> still use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.<br />
<br />
You <a href="http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=revision&revision=85844">try</a> <a href="http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=revision&revision=85849">to</a> fix this bug. <a href="http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=revision&revision=86027">Three</a> <a href="http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=revision&revision=87484">times</a>, causing three software releases (<a href="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2011-April/000096.html">1.16.3</a>, <a href="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2011-April/000097.html">1.16.4</a>, <a href="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-announce/2011-May/000098.html">1.16.5</a>) in 4 weeks. And then by accident, it becomes so strict that <a href="https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28840">it breaks many of the requests for all Internet Explorer versions</a>, simply because the url contains a dot. Sigh....<br />
<br />
THIS is why you should <a href="http://www.theie6countdown.com/">help all your friends to get rid of IE6</a>.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-68434925826623805852011-02-17T12:14:00.000+01:002011-02-17T12:14:00.815+01:00kAMDReceiveMessageErrorWe 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-20502059131490478972011-01-16T23:44:00.004+01:002011-01-17T00:21:19.981+01:00Dutch 2011 Hack-a-ton a great success<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpDTAFjUUUpGR08IBK17wHlJEx0Px_-T3xHYN_S8jEwos3chMzCtIoGzWQE7RAYvkuB59dJF8b5CHNPibruTCgDbwNib6FKtDos_bdVJZEDvzUzyhqJ2SwbHSGhvnFXeS21HIMFNjGaYQ/s1600/eziz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpDTAFjUUUpGR08IBK17wHlJEx0Px_-T3xHYN_S8jEwos3chMzCtIoGzWQE7RAYvkuB59dJF8b5CHNPibruTCgDbwNib6FKtDos_bdVJZEDvzUzyhqJ2SwbHSGhvnFXeS21HIMFNjGaYQ/s320/eziz.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wikipedia birthday cakes during the celebrations<br />
in Amsterdam (Derk-Jan Hartman, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/nl/">CC-BY-SA 3.0</a>)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>So here we are... One day after the 10 year anniversary of Wikipedia and I think that I'm not the only Wikipedian who will testify that it has been a great couple of days. Lots of online friends meeting in real life at <a href="http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam">one</a> of the <a href="http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics">450 or so events</a>, lots of very nice <a href="http://news.google.com/news/search?q=wikipedia">press attention</a> for our once so humble project and just all out fun.<br />
<br />
Myself I participated in the first <a href="http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon_2011">Dutch Hackathon</a>. The day kicked of Friday 14th, at 10 in the morning in the offices of <a href="http://www.kennisland.nl/">Kennisland</a> in Amsterdam. Since I was working on friday, I joined in on the fun at around 18:30 during pizza-time. There were about 15 or so developers as well as a dozen or so Wikimedians and people from a Wikipedia editing workshop that took place during the day. They assisted in the brainstorming, provided feedback and were kind enough to drink beers with us :D<br />
<br />
Several projects had been selected in advance and a great deal of work got done. A quick summary:<br />
<br />
<ul><li>Husky and Krinkle created <a href="http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon/Voortgang/Photocommons">PhotoCommons</a>, a plugin for <a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a> that makes it easy to search and embed files from <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/">Wikimedia Commons</a> into your WordPress website.</li>
<li>I myself built <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiSnaps">WikiSnaps</a>, an iPhone application that allows you to upload photographs from your iPhone camera or image library directly to Wikimedia Commons.</li>
<li>Tag-cloud visualizations of the statistics we collect of the usage of the GLAM materials. Making the usage of these GLAM materials in Wikipedia visible to the institutions is very important. (links will follow at a later time)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pywikipediabot">Pywikipediabot</a> and <a href="http://www.europeana.org/">Europeana</a> were added to <a href="http://Translatewiki.net/">Translatewiki.net</a> by siebrand and RobertL.</li>
<li>Bryan built a pywikipediabot named <a href="http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/tools/fancy-uploader/">fancy-uploader</a> to facilitate uploading of large batches of files to Wikimedia Commons.</li>
<li>JanPaul123 presented and further improved his revolutionary <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Sentence-level_editing">Sentence-level editor</a> (<a href="http://janpaulposma.nl/sle/wiki/index.php/Groningen%20(stad)">demo</a>) for wikitext. This shows great promise to improve the editing experience for many Wikipedians.</li>
<li>Groundbreaking work has been done by Roan, Krinkle and Bryan on getting the licenses and attribution information of files into the database. Currently this information is only present in wikitext, which makes it difficult to reuse this information outside of Wikimedia. This will eventually greatly improve the reusability of the Wikimedia Commons materials. </li>
<li>Functionality has been developed for <a href="http://www.openimages.eu/">Open Images</a> that allows their videos to be directly imported to Wikimedia Commons with the click of a button.</li>
</ul><br />
The projects were presented at the <a href="http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=167725456604703&index=1">Amsterdam Museum-event</a> on Saturday and they were enthusiastically greeted by the crowd of some 150 people. We evaluated the event during the <a href="http://yfrog.com/h7jmtvj">reception</a> of the 10 year Wikipedia party and quickly concluded that this is definitely worth repeating. The efficiency of working and thinking together in a single room, with short and dedicated projects was clear to all of us.<br />
<br />
I want to thank all the people of <a href="http://nl.wikimedia.org/">Wikimedia NL</a>, <a href="http://kennisland.nl/">Kennisland</a>, <a href="http://www.ahm.nl/">Amsterdam Museum</a> and <a href="http://beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl/">Beelden voor de toekomst</a>, who sponsored and helped organize the events. You were all terrific and really organized something special.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-70129283520648775562010-11-14T00:09:00.000+01:002010-11-14T00:09:41.316+01:00Media establishment fighting back<div class="thumb" style="float:right; width: 250px; text-indent: 0; font-size: x-small; background:white; padding: 5px; margin: 5px; border: 1px solid black;"><a title='By Nicolás García [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons' href='http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photographer.jpg'><img width='250' alt='Photographer' src='http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Photographer.jpg/250px-Photographer.jpg'/></a><div class="caption">By Nicolás García <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5">[CC-BY-SA-2.5]</a>, from <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photographer.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></div></div>I've become aware of two cases of old media trying to take back from the Free media movement.<br />
<br />
The first is the usage of <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/">Wikimedia Commons</a> images by <a href="http://www.britannica.com/">Encyclopedia Britannica online</a>. We are very diligent about copyright in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Multiple groups of people concern themselves with nothing but assessing images and global copyright laws, to make sure our materials are as legal and as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_content">Free</a> as they can possibly be. Not so much Brittanica it seems. They happily ignore all license and attribution requirements that these images have, often just giving the username in plaintext (Examples <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/169149/114807/Donkey-orchid">image by <br />
Gnangarra</a>, <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/577484/148155/Wesley-College-University-of-Sydney">image by Toby Hudson</a>). For <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons">Creative Commons</a>, a full link to the license is required if in any way possible. And just for kindness, a link back to the Wikimedia Commons description page might be nice/a good idea. The Wikimedia sites do the same for Flickr, it's very easy. Britannica, if you are listening, please read <a href="http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#How_do_I_properly_attribute_a_Creative_Commons_licensed_work.3F">this Creative Commons FAQ</a>.<br />
<br />
Is it really required that our users start sending copyright infringement notices to Britannica in order to get issues like this solved ? I know we don't make it easy atm to reuse our material, but come on, these guys are no amateurs and surely they can do better ?<br />
<br />
Another development that is starting to affect Commons, is the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/help/gettyimages/">partnership</a> of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a> with <a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/">Getty images</a>. Flickr users can <a href="http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/gettyimages/">opt-in</a> to a program whereby people can ask for your image to become part of the Getty images collection. Getty images however only excepts <a href="http://www.flickr.com/help/gettyimages/#425795">exclusive image deals</a> and it seems that when your Creative Commons image is picked up by Getty, it automatically loses its Creative Commons license in Flickr and is switched to an "All rights reserved" status. This is actually allowed, a Creative Commons license is <a href="http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_if_I_change_my_mind.3F">not revocable</a> but you can stop using it on any further distribution. The earlier distributed copies however will remain licensed under the Creative Commons license.<br />
<br />
This is already becoming annoying when we need to check the history of an image that has not been automatically checked by our Flickr bot. The larger danger lies in the possibility that someday Google or another large software company, starts filtering for copyright infringements in image search. Google is already doing this kind of thing for Youtube videos and it is logical that as some point in time image data will follow. With such techniques, it becomes possible that valid distribution of previously Creative Commons licensed material, perhaps hosted on Wikimedia Commons, might be tagged as copyright violations, because at a later time Getty appropriated the rights on an image. It would be wonderful if Flickr could make the "licensing history" of an image visible, that is what we need to defend ourselves against such practices.<br />
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I have to hand it to Getty however; Smart way to reclaim territory on the Free media movement. Using your industry power and monetary payout to force people into dropping a licensing model they voluntarily chose. I guess Creative Commons will have much more work to do in the coming years.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-38045401882248570072010-11-11T23:23:00.003+01:002010-11-12T15:00:52.204+01:00Printing WikipediaLast year saw the launch of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books">book printing</a> for Wikipedia articles. A very nice feature that allows you to create a collection of articles and print them as a book. Since yesterday you can even get <a href="http://blog.pediapress.com/2010/11/wikipedia-books-now-in-color-and_09.html">hardcovers</a>. There is also a wonderful "Print to PDF" feature that piggybacks on the book rendering technology.<br />
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Printing webpages has long intrigued me and the results have always been suboptimal, especially with something as complex as Wikipedia articles. However, the web is moving forward and the printing options for the web are getting better with every browser release. The past few days I was revisiting this issue and I have now <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/76522">added</a> some new CSS to the print stylesheet of MediaWiki which should help browsers detect proper spots to insert pagebreaks and more importantly, where to avoid them.<br />
<table style="clear:both; borders: none; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><tbody>
<tr> <td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO_kgDcUAX3AnZYZVkP4RXiVI89gszO4XcQPJiJ5d3XDVtntjr-xdsUYTVq0j8dCGKsaCVnq2HvskvrXDXnwUjekryEZFrjz0SaNW0ttsMFzW4s2TorDXYZeAzBlS633JwdY5-OHne_0s/s1600/Screen+shot+2010-11-11+at+22.55.06.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO_kgDcUAX3AnZYZVkP4RXiVI89gszO4XcQPJiJ5d3XDVtntjr-xdsUYTVq0j8dCGKsaCVnq2HvskvrXDXnwUjekryEZFrjz0SaNW0ttsMFzW4s2TorDXYZeAzBlS633JwdY5-OHne_0s/s320/Screen+shot+2010-11-11+at+22.55.06.png" /></a></td> <td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirzK6zB4CVOELG4P6xiybq2AK_RAzuk4kqZV_GAtjrZ96TL79OFqLnu-2MZzLrNGXFD3YmZG0rbsO8n3Ddvd4Tvo7UdcNV24AXZcT4eO7HL4Z2JipxnotlWTeaL_WXGkmu5DRmqs1dfOE/s1600/Screen+shot+2010-11-11+at+22.59.02.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirzK6zB4CVOELG4P6xiybq2AK_RAzuk4kqZV_GAtjrZ96TL79OFqLnu-2MZzLrNGXFD3YmZG0rbsO8n3Ddvd4Tvo7UdcNV24AXZcT4eO7HL4Z2JipxnotlWTeaL_WXGkmu5DRmqs1dfOE/s320/Screen+shot+2010-11-11+at+22.59.02.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td>Before pagebreak CSS</td><td>After pagebreak CSS</td> </tr>
</tbody></table>When your browser supports it, it will try to avoid pagebreaks in images, wikitables and right after headers. It will also try to avoid lone sentences of paragraphs at the beginning or end of the page, keeping paragraphs more readable. This CSS is part of the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/page.html">Paged media</a> subset of CSS. It is best supported by Opera and Internet Explorer 8. Actually it's one of the few spots where Webkit and Gecko are really lagging behind a bit. There are many more options in the paged media specification that would help improve printing of pages, but they are part of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-page/">CSS3</a> and only Opera has made some progress on this so far.<br />
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Another thing that I have been working on is a new gadget called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheDJ/Print_dialog">Print dialog</a>. It helps you influence how pages are printed, right from Wikipedia. You can remove backgrounds, images and references, and mark all the text as black. Really very useful for if you intend to do some quick printing and since there is demand (<a href="https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25869">Bugzilla 25869</a>, <a href="https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22256">bugzilla 22256</a>), we might actually see this one day in the MediaWiki software.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh84974dZKrzs2b9GPckBeagrgimrmXg6GiLKmtXXzlpRQinAfN4ZY46BKcH_miAwp_Sbfbx4SSJiI7dacbzHZR7JWHnXaC91eN71w36d-eDPGucBfSS8H6giBZAZyAoajxT2IpDJtcmGU/s1600/Screen+shot+2010-11-11+at+20.47.57.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="117" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh84974dZKrzs2b9GPckBeagrgimrmXg6GiLKmtXXzlpRQinAfN4ZY46BKcH_miAwp_Sbfbx4SSJiI7dacbzHZR7JWHnXaC91eN71w36d-eDPGucBfSS8H6giBZAZyAoajxT2IpDJtcmGU/s320/Screen+shot+2010-11-11+at+20.47.57.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />
The most esoteric function of Print dialog, is an option to actually kill the print styling. Normally when you print Wikipedia pages, you will use a different set of stylesheets that are optimized for printing instead of the screen. These stylesheets hide the interface components and elements that might not be useful in print. Usually this is wonderful, but sometimes I just want it all, and on my browser (Safari), this was not possible (well you could make a screenshot). With this new option you can actually fake the screen media while you print. Currently it works only for Safari. IE is untested, and Firefox/Opera refuse me to give the access I need to adapt the stylesheets, due to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_origin_policy">Same Origin policy</a>, which is violated due to the usage by the Foundation of a separate server for the stylesheets (<a href="https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25886">Bugzilla 25886</a>).<br />
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<table style="clear:both; borders: none; text-align: center; vertical-align: top;"><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ8fVIsT6LKvctL7WrGl0PMec0nUpxn-z50kvGF_d3u8r7EowklNMKi1_jyJQlaa3lfZR1AXTQP9Y58jM6OKHhEaVm_ljY-Ou1cRO9E_uiPFL9J4y3G0zwgsbduhMfByBbcIr6mD7wRe8/s1600/page1-543px-Print_dialog_-_print_in_black_with_no_images.pdf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ8fVIsT6LKvctL7WrGl0PMec0nUpxn-z50kvGF_d3u8r7EowklNMKi1_jyJQlaa3lfZR1AXTQP9Y58jM6OKHhEaVm_ljY-Ou1cRO9E_uiPFL9J4y3G0zwgsbduhMfByBbcIr6mD7wRe8/s320/page1-543px-Print_dialog_-_print_in_black_with_no_images.pdf.jpg" width="226" /></a></td> <td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTcu5taHCEFN9y2_1XfeCxeulpMwUXqUr3v24cVFUiAn-4bWvBpnZQjjqq3RNvhe5CrhZI_GVjn5n70puUyLqED1B7vVrp2XgQCLBDDBr5-fvpKI8RxTO5CP_mFd3n6xEwQxzWkvkk7oo/s1600/page1-543px-Print_dialog_-_print_with_no_references_and_no_backgrounds.pdf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTcu5taHCEFN9y2_1XfeCxeulpMwUXqUr3v24cVFUiAn-4bWvBpnZQjjqq3RNvhe5CrhZI_GVjn5n70puUyLqED1B7vVrp2XgQCLBDDBr5-fvpKI8RxTO5CP_mFd3n6xEwQxzWkvkk7oo/s320/page1-543px-Print_dialog_-_print_with_no_references_and_no_backgrounds.pdf.jpg" width="226" /></a></td> <td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdQwmvmG-HBndYUJOvFsFMN1-kLgfR-9YZtEds-94l2uzEyTWZV2_a_ZcCm2541mjzUCz5XRAmTQL_KG7strcrZ1Yp0B3CVUfLhBVJKM1WTVDbSe163GVCbwfl8QGBeNSDuKj-2zBKZao/s1600/page1-543px-Print_dialog_-_print_with_interface.pdf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdQwmvmG-HBndYUJOvFsFMN1-kLgfR-9YZtEds-94l2uzEyTWZV2_a_ZcCm2541mjzUCz5XRAmTQL_KG7strcrZ1Yp0B3CVUfLhBVJKM1WTVDbSe163GVCbwfl8QGBeNSDuKj-2zBKZao/s320/page1-543px-Print_dialog_-_print_with_interface.pdf.jpg" width="226" /></a></td> </tr>
<tr> <td>Example print output with no images</td> <td>Print output without references and backgrounds</td> <td>Print output with all non-print elements restored</td> </tr>
</table>I think this could be a welcome feature for many, please <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:TheDJ/Print_dialog">let me know</a> what you think !TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-11448785247417222162010-10-27T02:19:00.005+02:002010-10-27T02:51:50.058+02:00How the smallest bugs can take the most time to solveFor the past few weeks, I have been fixing problems that I run into while testing some of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multimedia_beta">new video tools</a> that Michael Dale has been developing for the Wikimedia Foundation. As with any new software, especially Javascript tools, there are plenty of issues and since I can find them, I might as well fix some of them, instead of throwing it all back at Michael.<br />
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This week I ran into one particular annoying issue. For some reason the menu in the new mwEmbed mediaplayer (<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Elephants_Dream.ogg&withJS=MediaWiki:MwEmbed.js">Demo of the player</a>) was flickering under certain conditions on Safari. I created a video that demonstrates the problem.<br />
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<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ws7L4WTHauw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ws7L4WTHauw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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So I was looking trough the code of the player, trying to come up with a reason on why this would behave like this and why only in Safari. I spent a few hours tracking all the events, assuming that some event (like mouseover) for some reason was incorrectly telling the menu to hide itself. I was validated in this line of thought by observing that manipulating some of the Javascript events of the player, would influence the time the menu would reappear. I could however not find something that influenced the hiding of the menu. The fact that jQuery uses anonymous functions everywhere didn't make the debugging process any easier.<br />
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My other idea was that perhaps it was a bug in the HTML5 <video> element of Safari, or in the XiphQT plugins used to decode the video in combination with z-index or relative positioning. I created a few testcases from scratch, but neither proved to be likely. I could not figure out what the problem was.<br />
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After some discussion with a few Webkit people, I decided to reduce the original HTML. The original HTML is a <b>lot</b> of code, which was why I was reluctant at first to take this path, but all other options had run out. After some heavy reducing, I figured out that Javascript was no factor here, pure HTML and CSS showed the same problem. This took me by surprise, since I had earlier observed how certain JS events were causing the menu to reappear. Cutting and weeding some more I finally found the cause. The three elements that are needed to reproduce the problem.<br />
<br />
<ol><li>An HTML5 video element</li>
<li>An overflowing element in scroll mode, on top of the video element</li>
<li>Opacity set on that overflowing element.</li>
</ol><br />
Finally I had traced the issue and it turned out to be a bug in Safari/Webkit. The reason as to why the Javascript event manipulation would influence the problem was easy to understand in retrospect. Such events were triggering redraw events in the browser, which for some unknown reason solves the drawing problem caused by the scrolling event.<br />
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Hours of debugging for a small issue, that had its root cause in a browser bug. A ticket has been filed with the Webkit developers, but it shows how developing for new browser features continues to be a time consuming process. All new code has bugs, and when the new code is relying on other new code, finding those bugs takes quadruple the time.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-42167293707296059312010-06-30T19:46:00.001+02:002010-06-30T19:48:36.400+02:00How copyright threatens DemocracyEveryone should look at this video of a talk by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow">Cory Doctorow</a>.<br />
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<object height="385" width="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bwheX8XAztM&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=600&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bwheX8XAztM&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=600&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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People who know me, are aware that I am very concerned about our rights online. This is because every day we become more reliable on the Internet than ever before, yet our liberties our curtailed ever more. No one speaks more about this topic than Cory and really anyone in policy making or in the arts industry should hear him out. Perhaps not because he is right, but at the very least because he presents incredibly sensible counterarguments for anything that the copyright industry claims.<br />
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Nowhere has the problem of the copyright lobbies, become more clearly than <a href="http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89494/ascap-declares-war-on-free-culture/">in the letter sent by ASCAP last week</a>, in which they try to warn and recruit their members in their fight against the 'copyleft' and 'pirate' movement, which they basically consider equal. However as <a href="http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89532/eff-comments-on-the-ascap-letter/">many</a> have <a href="http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89521/creative-commons-responds-to-ascap/">pointed</a> <a href="http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/what-ascap-doesnt-understand">out</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons">Creative Commons</a> is about freedom of choice for producers and consumers of works alike. What the ASCAP letter shows is that these organizations do not represent the interests of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers">composers, authors and publishers</a> like they claim, they represent one single bussiness model that wants to prevent its members from making the choice for any other business model. (ASCAP was <a href="http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89600/copyright-war-escalates-with-nmpa-joining-ascaps-attack-on-free-culture/">joined by NMPA this week</a>)<br />
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Before we start increasing penalties and agreeing to incredibly hard to recall <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement">ACTA</a>-like agreements, we should carefully consider what effect this can have on our lives. Please listen to Cory.<br />
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When you are as concerned as I am, please consider supporting <a href="http://www.eff.org/">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a> or the Dutch <a href="https://www.bof.nl/">Bits of Freedom</a>.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-33136120895389922802010-05-03T23:27:00.000+02:002010-05-03T23:27:29.597+02:00I am now a MediaWiki developer (and Commons admin)I have been filing and maintaining bug reports in <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki">MediaWiki</a> for a while now, trying to communicate issues found by the editor community back to the developer community. Over time, increasingly I have been submitting patches to fix some of the bugs that I find. I never really had the intention to become a MediaWiki developer to be honest, but I guess I filed enough patches that people suggested to me that I should request commit access myself. So last week I sent off an email to Tim Starling and last night I was <a href="http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-May/047638.html">granted commit access</a> to MediaWiki.<br />
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I'll be taking this slow, because much of what interests me (the media and file repository work) is unfortunately not well tested on a day to day basis by others, while still able to create quite the havoc if you make mistakes.<br />
<br />
In other news, I also recently <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&limit=1&username=TheDJ">became an administrator</a> on <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org">Wikimedia Commons</a>. I'm reasonably active on Commons due to image moves from Wikipedia to Commons and recently I fixed up <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Cat-a-lot.js">Cat-a-lot</a>, which is a very useful Javascript gadget to move multiple files from one category to another, as well as some other userscripts that were having problems with the Vector skin.<br />
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As you can see those are quite a few roles that I am now active in and of course my time is limited. I'll try to do my best to alternate between those roles, so please be patient if you need my attention, but don't hesitate to ask me for help if you need it. You <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:TheDJ">know the way</a>.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-55796093764151656312010-04-01T17:41:00.003+02:002010-04-01T18:00:55.081+02:00April fools' continues to foolWikipedia has developed this nice tradition that on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day">April Fools' Day</a>, content on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Main Page</a> should be TRUE and link to actual encyclopedic articles, instead of being simple jokes. So today's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles">Featured article</a>, is on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_selling">Wife selling</a> and although the practice might come across as unbelievable, awkward and unrealistic, it is all part of our history. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/Headlines">Topics in the news</a> are all recent news events, though not of the usual importance and the wording is more playful than on other days. Similarly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recent_additions">Did you know</a> contains not a single lie. Lastly the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POTD/2010-04-01">Picture of the day</a>, featuring a picture of a "GET FAT" advertisement campaign as a secret to beauty. Unthinkable perhaps in current times, but very real in 1895.<br />
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Just cliches, obfuscation and wordplay are used to trick the reader into making assumptions, that though understandable, are simply incorrect. The page is probably one of the most <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:April_Fool%27s_Main_Page">carefully prepared main pages</a> of the entire year. All selections have to adhere to the same content rules about quality as every other day of the year.<br />
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What is most fun is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page">how people react</a>. Some people are truly upset that an encyclopedia would have material like this on its frontpage. Most of those people do not realize that everything on the page is true. Basically the editors are putting the joke on the "quick critics". The people with an opinion about Wikipedia, without truly knowing what and why they are critiquing. The rest of the people are confused and often enticed into reading. If they persevere, they will have a laugh or two and actually <b>learn </b>something. Journalists don't seem to be the best readers btw. Few seem to have actually clicked beyond the front page. <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/the-best-april-fools-day-jokes-on-the-web-1933414.html">1</a>, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/01/april-fools-2010-the-best_n_521301.html#s77659">2</a>, <a href="http://jacksonville.com/business/2010-04-01/story/april-fools-day-starbucks-introduces-huge-and-tiny-drink-sizes">3</a>, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7543967/April-Fools-Best-jokes-from-the-tech-world.html">4</a> Ah well, deadlines I guess. :D<br />
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I find it a great tradition and hope that it will be continue for years to come.<br />
P.S. Wikipedia April Fools' main pages from: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fool%27s_Main_Page/2006">2006</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fool%27s_Main_Page/2007">2007</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fool%27s_Main_Page/2008_(2)">2008</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fool%27s_Main_Page/2009_(4)">2009</a>.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-68961796009889535822010-03-18T00:35:00.001+01:002010-03-18T00:36:01.085+01:00New Youtube interfaceToday I was greeted with a new interface for Youtube. It seems that there are a lot more collapsible elements now, and the biggest functionality change seems to be a new "like" vs. "dislike" option, where we used to have the "Favorite" button. There are also new Share buttons, and there is a nice toggle for "Autoplay" of your recommendations. I'm not sure yet if I like everything, it seems to require a bit more work to be perfect, but with all the functionality of Youtube, this probably is a good thing.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilOL_UFnCfLFVeODTiCVqCV7-tcQ3IU4OZxVhQv-A96TPGoxhKZU8KML39eglCbS3z5Vqj-sDU1lCKFxjVhKzc45e5htAUIVEtLmgZRmb80h2GhlQbx2Ehv2PzVTcYPE3vb_5e1fPanFM/s1600-h/YouTube+-+Ilse+DeLange+en+Paul+Rabbering+gaan+los+op+Pauls+eigen+Hakkuhmix+(3FM+Serious+Request+2008).png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilOL_UFnCfLFVeODTiCVqCV7-tcQ3IU4OZxVhQv-A96TPGoxhKZU8KML39eglCbS3z5Vqj-sDU1lCKFxjVhKzc45e5htAUIVEtLmgZRmb80h2GhlQbx2Ehv2PzVTcYPE3vb_5e1fPanFM/s640/YouTube+-+Ilse+DeLange+en+Paul+Rabbering+gaan+los+op+Pauls+eigen+Hakkuhmix+(3FM+Serious+Request+2008).png" width="451" /></a></div>TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-91098891000044170372010-03-17T14:56:00.012+01:002010-03-17T17:36:41.462+01:00Template editorThe<a href="http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Usability_Initiative"> Wikipedia Usability Initiative</a> is finally making good progress on their template folding and template editor. Much of what the project has been doing with the edit screen has been in preparation of this work. The editor now folds complicated templates into a small block. One of the<a href="http://prototype.wikimedia.org/s-6/index.php?title=San_Francisco&action=edit"> sandboxes</a> the project uses now has the code deployed and it seems to be working quite well. Be aware that this is a development platform, and that browser peculiarities might not be fully dealt with yet. It is also NOT final.<br /><br /><center><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsbT0-tREA36vl-4GiZo-BEzPdOr7qzFcwVmIujf4y2FHTXqzjFEQAVf4nzxugxoRtrB-fWvYk4l6IspaUsD5WHTtP-egYeMUbYziiYwhHmrKXUuVprxvpb741FiA8oTvWSUIjGZnTq2A/s1600-h/Screen+shot+2010-03-17+at+14.51.26.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 189px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsbT0-tREA36vl-4GiZo-BEzPdOr7qzFcwVmIujf4y2FHTXqzjFEQAVf4nzxugxoRtrB-fWvYk4l6IspaUsD5WHTtP-egYeMUbYziiYwhHmrKXUuVprxvpb741FiA8oTvWSUIjGZnTq2A/s400/Screen+shot+2010-03-17+at+14.51.26.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449601423376168402" border="0" /></a><br />The wiki editor with folded templates.</center><br /><br />You can unfold the block, by clicking on the arrow to show the template code, or you can click the block and you are presented with a template editor that makes it easier to change the values of the template. This should be very helpful, because <a href="http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability_and_Experience_Study#Feeling_Stupid">research</a> <a href="http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Study">showed</a> that much of the trouble people had with editing Wikipedia, was the complex code on the edit pages. The template code is by far the most obscure and complicated code of all our wiki markup in my opinion. I suspect we will see more of these kinds of additional markup in the editor in the future (headers and links seem like a logical next step).<br /><br /><center><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5wYfr54sXTIGEydF3P512j78ltyfvGf_rrD5pLmazRMJdCzUivk-5kWdHgowHvwifrVGp7yJw2-CidqYPKjgo8I2eLYOn2xI-3GDMgHurh-8iWXCcY987b5vMZUNGJTIsXZwQDZZEPgU/s1600-h/Screen+shot+2010-03-17+at+14.51.48.png"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 283px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5wYfr54sXTIGEydF3P512j78ltyfvGf_rrD5pLmazRMJdCzUivk-5kWdHgowHvwifrVGp7yJw2-CidqYPKjgo8I2eLYOn2xI-3GDMgHurh-8iWXCcY987b5vMZUNGJTIsXZwQDZZEPgU/s400/Screen+shot+2010-03-17+at+14.51.48.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449601517756947538" border="0" /></a><br />By clicking the folded Infobox template, you get this template editor.</center><br /><br />You might be interested in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdKhmn4NriE">this video</a> that shows the experience some of the <a href="http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability_and_Experience_Study">Usability Study subjects</a> were having on the edit page a year ago.<br /><br /><object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EdKhmn4NriE&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EdKhmn4NriE&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-67568296432909586872010-03-17T14:53:00.013+01:002010-03-18T13:07:23.705+01:00Video On WikipediaThis week at <a href="http://sxsw.com/">SXSW</a> (South by Southwest Conferences & Festivals), the Open Video Alliance presented a new campaign and portal for video on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>. The project is called "Let's get video on Wikipedia" and available at <a href="http://www.videoonwikipedia.org/">http://www.videoonwikipedia.org</a>. The goal is to make it easier and more understandable how to upload video for usage in Wikipedia and is made possible by the <a href="http://openvideolliance.org/">Open Video Alliance</a>, the <a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/">Wikimedia Foundation</a>, <a href="http://kaltura.com/">Kaltura</a>, <a href="http://getmiro.com/">Miro</a> and <a href="http://mozilla.org/drumbeat">Mozilla Drumbeat</a>. (Blog and press releases:<a href="http://openvideoalliance.org/2010/03/lets-get-video-on-wikipedia/?l=en"> Open Video Alliance</a>, <a href="http://www.getmiro.com/blog/2010/03/launching-video-on-wikipedia-fighting-back-for-open-codecs/">Miro</a>, <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/18/open-video-alliance-launches-video-on-wikipedia-campaign/">Wikimedia Foundation</a>)<br />
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In some ways this project resembles a bit <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiportrait">Wikiportrait</a>, a project to help people upload their own portrait photo for usage in Wikipedia articles. Video On Wikipedia tells you <a href="http://videoonwikipedia.org/howto.html">what steps</a> you need to take in order to create and upload a video for usage on Wikipedia. It also attempts to explain why uploading video for Wikipedia is different from uploading to most other places, a good bit of evangelism for Free and Open formats for information.<br />
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It helps people use the latest upload and display tools that have been developed by Michael Dale as part of the effort to improve video for Wikipedia. Not only that, but it also has a <a href="http://videos.videoonwikipedia.org/">portal</a>, that presents the latest uploads, editor's pick and most watched videos. The player of the portal uses the new HTML5 player that <a href="http://thedjwrites.blogspot.com/2010/03/html-5-video-player-for-mediawiki-now.html">I recently blogged</a> about, and you can comment on videos.<br />
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This is a great new development and hopefully it will continue to be developed and improved upon. The image on the left shows the welcome page of Video On Wikipedia and the image to the right the portal for recent uploads etc.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJo_iGAf3zaW684NjBwBXaqf1KnQOomuQZhfbRmHpwu8z1SNt6QT4apKUHq_uwkcc_sXx-gW3l8HWk2R_CfBWdLEjBxO_TpSuB_Ap4Fs8mxzmqOWRT3QFjn1FnyIS5mpoJp7KAuE-V7fc/s1600-h/Let's+Get+Video+on+Wikipedia+home.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449601052603496498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJo_iGAf3zaW684NjBwBXaqf1KnQOomuQZhfbRmHpwu8z1SNt6QT4apKUHq_uwkcc_sXx-gW3l8HWk2R_CfBWdLEjBxO_TpSuB_Ap4Fs8mxzmqOWRT3QFjn1FnyIS5mpoJp7KAuE-V7fc/s400/Let's+Get+Video+on+Wikipedia+home.png" style="cursor: pointer; height: 400px; width: 283px;" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5qOAZpkdEQ81FNqaq3ViiXUSuuQbmNXrmekVN9aUbs4YJDFbebhXAJVnSSTG1eKqO_AK92AoQ8s4I55mDtW0HiSlEXPMI8u0F62OykmQEMu87eh6PYlSva3GdnHX-PJCrYV3ao5e8aTg/s1600-h/Let's+Video+on+Wikipedia+%7C+Submissions+Gallery.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449601194456510626" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5qOAZpkdEQ81FNqaq3ViiXUSuuQbmNXrmekVN9aUbs4YJDFbebhXAJVnSSTG1eKqO_AK92AoQ8s4I55mDtW0HiSlEXPMI8u0F62OykmQEMu87eh6PYlSva3GdnHX-PJCrYV3ao5e8aTg/s400/Let's+Video+on+Wikipedia+%7C+Submissions+Gallery.png" style="cursor: pointer; height: 400px; width: 283px;" /></a>TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-69535007027846592032010-03-01T21:10:00.006+01:002010-03-03T13:28:53.183+01:00HTML 5 video player for mediawiki now with fullscreen support<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmXv_A7xCvqwPIpZGjER4wbvu_K_6lLakJt1uhDSxuCplvKpDgwvDI-gdUIkXTISNMX1aQw19p4NQMPCj2uX3y_RoFJRtiX654Iq_yQMSs08elXAMIt1QEgRJbP9HjoOSZr-vF3E6LX-8/s1600-h/Screen+shot+2010-02-28+at+23.31.57.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 310px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmXv_A7xCvqwPIpZGjER4wbvu_K_6lLakJt1uhDSxuCplvKpDgwvDI-gdUIkXTISNMX1aQw19p4NQMPCj2uX3y_RoFJRtiX654Iq_yQMSs08elXAMIt1QEgRJbP9HjoOSZr-vF3E6LX-8/s320/Screen+shot+2010-02-28+at+23.31.57.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443427491742259362" /></a>Michael Dale has been working hard on a new media player for the mediawiki projects. This media player is based on the <a href="http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html">HTML 5</a> <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_audio_and_video_in_Firefox"><video> tag</a>. You can compare it to the demo players of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/html5">Youtube</a> and Vimeo and <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo">DailyMotion</a>. It should support Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3, Opera 10.5 and if you install the<a href="http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/"> Xiph QuickTime components</a> it works with Safari 4 for the Mac. If your browser doesn't support HTML5, the player will use the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortado_(software)">JAVA cortado player</a>, like it does in the old version of the Ogg player.<div><br /></div><div>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.</div><br /><h3>How do I test it ?</h3><div><br />It is rather easy, you go to <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Elephants_Dream.ogg&withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-mwEmbed.js">this example video</a>. If you want to enable it for all videos, you need to be registered on <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikimedia Commons</a> or the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">English Wikipedia</a>. You go to your preferences. Then select the "Gadgets" section. Now enable <b>mwEmbed</b> and Save.<br /></div><br /><h3>Screenshots</h3><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn5_7pwMDIfWr51lAHA9CosW0l8oka8n50H0tTDCh61YbSWRVU7RwkA8shyA97qlmIOae8vq9azMhMspy52hEMlLanFec-JaTSGWSZvt8RtIoMi9fppk3-CRSDvP0fj_BSWN7zxJYd-VU/s1600-h/Screen+shot+2010-02-28+at+23.37.57.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 183px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn5_7pwMDIfWr51lAHA9CosW0l8oka8n50H0tTDCh61YbSWRVU7RwkA8shyA97qlmIOae8vq9azMhMspy52hEMlLanFec-JaTSGWSZvt8RtIoMi9fppk3-CRSDvP0fj_BSWN7zxJYd-VU/s320/Screen+shot+2010-02-28+at+23.37.57.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443427614685151714" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg94f0d6TnyW43mJSb2_5XCaGkTeS18Wu-148LBpzXcl79gvTUZG8LnhSTqAK-65C6aycUMPf2XwZnnWzvfSBXS2iTK7A985DKL0SnutNDK0W72CoqgWCEC6kBqh5OnMhIT2jj45Fb-dTg/s1600-h/Screen+shot+2010-03-01+at+20.45.11.png"><img style="clear:right; float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 231px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg94f0d6TnyW43mJSb2_5XCaGkTeS18Wu-148LBpzXcl79gvTUZG8LnhSTqAK-65C6aycUMPf2XwZnnWzvfSBXS2iTK7A985DKL0SnutNDK0W72CoqgWCEC6kBqh5OnMhIT2jj45Fb-dTg/s320/Screen+shot+2010-03-01+at+20.45.11.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443758294687792306" /></a>The first image shows the player after the page has loaded. The second image shows the options for selecting and authoring subtitles. The third image is a movie with subtitles enabled. There are two modes for subtitles, either underneath the video, or drawn on top of the video.<br /></div><br /><h3>Development</h3><div><br />This kind of work is exactly what was needed for Wikimedia. Focused development of advanced features. As a former <a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/">VLC media player</a> developer I follow the work with great interest, and occasionally report some problems that I encounter. It may seem easy to develop something like this, but I know how difficult it is and how much issues you need to take into account. This project started in January 2008 and really got going in August 2008. A lot of that time was spent preparing the MediaWiki software for the more advanced, dare I say, Web 2.0 type of functionality. Much of this mostly Javascript related work has gone parallel with the <a href="http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Usability project</a>. Truly a big thank you to the developer Michael Dale and to <a href="http://corp.kaltura.com/">Kaltura</a>, which is sponsoring this development.</div><br /><br />P.S. The work is far from finished of course. I'm sure more refinement is coming, and the authoring of subtitles is only just getting started. Still I find that having it enabled on a daily basis is a positive experience, even with the occasional glitch.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-63357767033466667992010-03-01T14:20:00.000+01:002010-03-01T14:20:31.725+01:00Community documentation for Wikimedia MobileAs some may know, I have been working a lot on <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/">Wikimedia Mobile</a> as of late. It's interesting to work on this software, because it has to support so many devices, languages and wiki's. So far the project hasn't been to good at informing the various Wikipedia communities, on how they can participate in making the mobile version of their community's Wikipedia. I have now started a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheDJ/Mobile_howto">draft</a> of how to translate the software, create a mobile home page and how to do the redirects for supported mobile devices. When I have refined the information, I will probably move it to <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/">meta</a>. If you have a better idea, please let me know.<div><br /></div><div>Also, take a look at the documentation for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mobile_access">readers</a>.</div>TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127198634735180514.post-19359207041557601232010-03-01T14:00:00.000+01:002010-03-01T14:20:09.395+01:00Starting once moreI 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. <a href="http://twitter.com/dj_hartman">Twitter</a> 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.TheDJhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06834374324637343429noreply@blogger.com0