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.

Well, these images are getting the better of me, eh? Seems I made an (idiotic, now I look on it) assumption about the “timestamp-like” part of file archive names when I wrote the FileRevertForm and the FileDeleteForm, and thus extracted the wrong timestamp for presentation in the UI. Good job nothing in the backend relied upon this.

In similar news, it seems MediaWiki’s inconsistent image markup tripped me up, too; RandomImage’s “size” parameter was being ignored for goodness knows how long.

Anyway, all fixed now. There’s some talk of parser functions for extracting metadata (EXIF, etc.) from files, which I might poke if Magnus doesn’t implement this as he seems to want to do. I also plan to poke the existing MediaFunctions extension a bit.

There’s an interesting gem on the wikien-l mailing list:

This is one of the older ideas that’s been drifting around WP for years. Trouble is, we don’t have the developers to work on this problem. This isn’t like policy; we can’t be bold and write it. Oh, technically we can, except most of us lack the technical prowess to do it, and those who have it are already working on MediaWiki

This is in response to a suggestion to create “a new kind of block”, or some other option, which would keep users out of the main namespace.

I don’t recall a recent feature request or discussion on wikitech-l about whether or not this is feasible (it is, and quite straightfoward) or a request to have it done.

We (the development team) do not have the mind-reading capabilities some users would like us to have, and cannot respond to queries we’ve never been asked.

In idle browsing of MeatballWiki, which is something I never do often, I came across an interesting statement on http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiCreole:

Several wiki engines have agreed to jump on board (including MediaWiki and the Ward’s original WikiWikiWeb).

This is news to me, I have to admit; from what I can recall, in a mailing list thread sparked off with an announcement that WikiCreole was ready, I’m pretty sure several developers expressed doubt as to whether or not it was worthwhile implementing.

WikiCreole is dumbed-down and doesn’t support quite a lot of what MediaWiki’s native parser does. The WikiCreole people have so far failed to see the light in defining the parser behaviour, which is one of the biggest mistakes made in the history of MediaWiki development.

It’d be interesting to know whether or not I’m on crack, and if it has been agreed that we’ll implement this, why we felt it was appropriate, and who’s doing it.

Update: Following some comments from Brion, it seems that someone got the wrong impression after he expressed some initial support and made a tentative offer to experiment with an “alternative editing mode” supporting WikiCreole. On the whole, it’s not something we have a roadmap to support. 

As of around 2:00 PM (BST) today, the Queen will formally offer the position of Prime Minister to Gordon Brown.

I can’t really say I’m sorry to see Tony Blair go, but at the same time, I wonder if Brown’s really the most effective Labour leader for the present situation. He’s got about as much charisma as a damp sponge,  although I do pity the difficult situation he now has; the appalling state of the NHS, the Iraq war, a fairly splintered political canvas, problems in the Middle East, difficult relations with Iran and Russia…

With Gordon Brown’s imminent coronation as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a lot of people are demanding that he promise to withdraw our troops from Iraq.

The problem is, he can’t, and neither could another leader, in good conscience, do that. Iraq (and Afghanistan) has an unstable and vulnerable government, and we’re going to be stuck in there with the Americans for quite some time sorting out our mess.

We had a choice about going in, and our leaders took the wrong one. We have a moral choice about leaving, but let’s hope our leaders do the right thing for a change. The US and UK have made beds for themselves, and now we must lie in them.

“You’re trying to stir up trouble with practically every single e-mail you send.”

This little gem was on the English Wikipedia mailing list. The hypocrisy of some of their users is simultaneously hilarious and atrocious.

So, the United States has joined the rest of the world in dealing with climate change. I suppose there’ll be a lot of sniping and accusations of hypocrisy and so forth over the next few weeks.

Why bother? The fact is that, now the US recognises that, whether or not we caused it - and while we might not have caused all of it, we certainly haven’t been helping the situation - climate change is going to affect us in an adverse fashion…now we have another collaborator that’s going to help us work towards a sensible resolution that benefits the ecosystem we all live in.

That is, the 27th of June; for that is the date upon which Tony Blair will stand down as Labour leader, and with it, relinquish the position of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, with a lack of any significant opposition candidates, now that John Reid has announced he’ll be stepping down from the Home Office, this means Gordon Brown will basically ascend to the throne in a glorified coronation.