The Jackal Rants

I dislike moving.

Well, I’m back in Bristol again, and another…interesting year it no doubt will be. The house itself is all right – pretty typical student property, if in need of quite a bit of TLC. The good news is that we’ve got cable up and running, although we plan to upgrade to a faster package, so we’re in and going straight off the bat. The bad news is that when I connected to the router, about 10 people were connected to it wirelessly – the guy who set it up didn’t secure it. I wonder if anyone was actually using it, or if it was due to an unfortunate tendency of Windows to connect to anything it possibly can? Regardless, they’d have got a nasty shock about two minutes after I realised…

MediaWiki work’s slowed to a crawl for the present time – quite a few bits and pieces to do – but I hope to get the log formatting stuff committed next week. Next week, rather than this week, because I forgot to copy most of my uncommitted working copies and various other personal projects onto my laptop before I left.

I’m also wondering…what’s happening with CentralAuth now? Frankly, the workload the Wikimedia Foundation have placed their CTO under is astronomical – they need to allocate budget for projects such as this, so that the CTO can request additional manpower with things.

At long last, following the Wikimania conference in Taipei, and a spate of various problems, Brion’s been able to sort out the 1.11.0rc1 release candidate (announcement, download links etc.) which means 1.11.0 is on the horizon.

It was decided in July this year that the release would be held back at least until after Wikimania, since a lot of changes happen, and don’t get a chance to get tested live and initial regressions identified and resolved, which makes for very sucky releases.

As usual, we’ve got the upgrade documentation for 1.11 prepared.

At some point in the next week (read: when I can be bothered), I’ll commit the long-awaited log formatting changes, which look pretty nifty in my opinion, along with complementary changes to the RenameUser, Newuserlog, MakeBot and Makesysop extensions, so all our log entries will start to look less dumb, and extension and core developers can create log entries which contain useful tools that just make sense.

As a final thing; one quick moan. There’s a committer who’s continuing to spread FUD and misinformation about MediaWiki and Wikimedia operations in general in various fora, but in particular, on IRC, and on the English Wikipedia Technical Village Pump. It’s getting damn irritating to read, and I wish he’d stop doing it.