Older blog entries for ianweller (starting at number 66)

New awesomeness: mw

During an extremely long hackfest today at FUDCon Toronto 2009, I planned to work on resurrecting fuse-mediawiki from its 15-month slumber.

I failed.

After talking with Jesus M. Rodriguez for an hour or so, we both determined that FUSE is not the right way to go about this for what I want to accomplish. The only thing we were planning to use FUSE for so far was downloading the wiki pages; everything else would be done with helper scripts.

We discussed things like “pull” and “commit”. It started to sound like a bastardized VCS. So we wrote a bastardized VCS. :)

Introducing mw: a command-line program with subcommands like “fetch” and “commit” to work with MediaWiki installations. I spent all day creating the framework for commands and all sorts of things, and ended up creating the init and fetch commands to start a mw repo and fetch some pages.

Currently: useless. Future: promising. I’m hoping that I can get the committing portion ready to roll within the week, and have fetch get all the pages of wikis and categories soonish.

Some key awesomeness: attempts to merge instead of just giving up (haha, you suck, MediaWiki), unified diffs, logs, and anything you really feel like doing.

Clone it now and read the README and HACKING:

git clone git://github.com/ianweller/mw.git

Edit: If you want to discuss this with me at FUDCon tomorrow, by all means do. Ping me on IRC to see where I’m at. :)

Syndicated 2009-12-07 03:56:05 from Ian Weller's blog » Advogato

Gwibber 2.0 in Fedora testing

Huge interface rework. A lot nicer looking. Go test it—F11 and F12 are in Bodhi.

gwibber

Syndicated 2009-11-21 02:36:28 from Ian Weller's blog » Advogato

Long overdue screenshot

Down at FAD Fedora Talk 2009, I spent most of my time working on a mockup for how we could create a new interface to control Fedora Talk in Fedora Community. Here’s a screenshot of what I ended up committing to a new talk branch:

Fedora Talk integration with Fedora Community mockup

The hope for this interface is to provide a drop-dead simple way of starting a conference and selecting whether to stream and record it or not.

Syndicated 2009-11-02 04:41:50 from Ian Weller's blog » Advogato

Community statistics in Fedora and beyond — and where it’s going from here

During my summer internship with Red Hat’s Community Architecture team, my main assignment was to build an automated platform (which eventually was built into Fedora Community) for generating and displaying statistics within our community.

Needless to say, it didn’t get done. :) But it did get a healthy start, and even though the last couple of months I haven’t been extremely active in Fedora, it’s still alive and well.

This week, I started working on a research paper for my independent study at my high school. This independent study just happens to be continuing work on the project that I started a couple of months ago. The paper will include mostly primary sources of what people have said on Stats 2.0’s discussion page on the wiki, but I would love to talk with people on IRC about what they think is important to track so we can analyze not only the growth of the Fedora, but the growth of the community.

It doesn’t end with the one-semester independent study. I am presenting on this subject at UTOSC 2009. In this presentation I will discuss many of the variables of a free software community that can be tracked, and even provide example code and where to get started on automatically tracking them.

So, there’s the state of the Stats 2.0. Would you like to speak with me on IRC sometime about what you think is important to be tracked?

Syndicated 2009-09-10 16:40:04 from Ian Weller's blog » Advogato

Yay Ricky!

Here’s a pretty solid interview with Ricky Zhou on “How Software is Built”, which has interviewed the likes of Mike Shaver (VP of Engineering at Mozilla) and Dries Buytaert (guy who made the Drupal CMS). Go read it.

Syndicated 2009-04-23 00:01:02 from ian weller » Advogato

My hobby:

Using negatively connotative adverbs with positively connotative adjectives.

  • “That lasagna smells horribly delicious.”
  • “This paper is disparagingly awesome.”

Syndicated 2009-03-22 22:13:14 from ian weller » Advogato

Books and statistics

First things first — and a very exciting thing indeed — we’re finally opening up submissions for the Fedora Picture Book! The instructions for submitting photos are available at [[Submitting images for the picture book]] on the wiki!

And now for something funny brought to you by Facebook’s “Lexicon” application, which charts words based on the amount those words get posted on people’s walls. First, we chart the word “hate”.

fblexicon-hate

As you can notice, hate decreases dramatically on Christmas and New Year’s. But what’s that huge spike from?

fblexicon-newfacebook

Well. :)

Syndicated 2009-03-16 16:35:27 from ian weller » Advogato

A few short statements

  • A community television station must only air locally produced programming, seeing how that’s the definition of “public-access television”. Programs not produced within the community need to have a community producer to put that program on cablecast.
  • Production quality is no excuse for limiting First Amendment rights.
  • The mission of giving a medium for members in a community with a public-access television station to express their First Amendment rights must be held higher than any other.

Syndicated 2009-03-03 18:57:44 from ian weller » Advogato

Somebody fix this.

My sister came up to me with a Fedora predicament™ today. She was attempting to play this file (a .asx file) in a media player.

It wouldn’t work. What a surprise!

Since it looked like it might be something that would actually refer to another file, I threw it in curl just to see what would happen.

[ianweller@kupenblagster ~]$ curl http://realvideo.acinet.org/asxgen/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv.asx
<ASX Version = "3.0">
   <ENTRY>
      <REF HREF = "mms://64.94.25.81:1755/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv"/>
      <REF HREF = "http://64.94.25.81:80/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv"/>
   </ENTRY>
</ASX>

Also interesting: what happens when you try and curl the http:// url? You get a 404 not found error. However, when playing the file with MPlayer, the video plays. Hmm.

So, I decided I should run -dumpstream from MPlayer on my slice and allow her to download and watch the video from there. We click on the .wmv link, and a dialog asks us to search for some plugins to play this file. Hmm, OK, we find the plugins, it installs relatively quickly. How nice!

Totem’s Firefox plugin tells us that it can’t play the file. I don’t remember the error off-hand, but an updated install of Fedora 10 on that same file should yield the same error.

So I ask: why doesn’t this work, and what can I do (that’s within my realm of ability—read: not much) to help make this work?

Syndicated 2009-02-10 03:46:56 from ian weller » Advogato

Dear lazyweb…

What calendaring applications do you use when trying to organize what events are happening when?

Syndicated 2009-01-30 21:59:16 from ian weller » Advogato

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