Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki). In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle). I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
I'm currently reading the following books: Canadian Short Stories (Robert Weaver, 1960), and Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollop), and England, Their England (A. G. Macdonell, 1933), and The Ante-Room (Lovat Dickson, 1959), and The Countryside Companion (Tom Stephenson), and The Factory Floor (Carolyn Polizzotto), and The Oatmeal Ark (Rory Maclean), and Vesper Flights (Anon).
To contact me, you can email me, find me on Matrix as '@samwilson:matrix.org' or Telegram as @freosam.
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Below are my recent blog posts, and you can jump to the bottom to navigate to other posts from earlier times.
WA Military Digital Library
Fremantle
· MediaWiki · military · history ·
I'm glad that the WA Military Digital Library (wamdl.com.au) uses MediaWiki. For example, a recently modified page of theirs is for Leslie Harry Hoddy (aka John Leslie Harris) who enlisted aged only 16, in 1916. I wonder what their backup regime is, and how they plan for the future running of the site. I always imagine that military history types are good at planning.
Brad's barber, or the Princess Hairdressing Salon
Fremantle
· Fremantle ·
"Brad's Barber'" is the new name of what was Princess Hairdressing Salon, on the corner of Leake and Market streets (part of Princess Chambers).
Buffalo speakers, they fell off the wall
Fremantle
· Buffalo Club · Fremantle ·
The speakers for the upstairs stage fell off the wall. (Well, that's the story.) They're being reattached with much longer anchors:
CircusWA gone
Fremantle
· Fremantle ·
The circus tent (CircusWA) has gone, leaving only the frame of the old outdoor cinema (Bohemia Outdoor Cinema). The circus hasn't gone far, just around the corner.
West Australian article dates
Fremantle
· newspapers · Freopedia · Fremantle ·
It seems that The West Australian has been doing something weird with its article dates and times. This article says it was published at 5:59AM on 23 January, but it was archived on 6 December 2025 and at that time it said it was published at 9:59PM on 22 January.
Those times are 8 hours apart, and so it would seem that they are storing the times in local Perth time (UTC+8) and they used to know this and displayed them correctly, but sometime recently they've starting assuming that their stored times are UTC and so are adding 8 hours when they display them.
Or some other timezone stupidity or other, of course (there are many ways to stuff it all up). But yeah, I'm not going to trust the dates on their articles any more!
Mediawiki-feeds revisited
Murdoch
· mediawiki-feeds · RSS · Toolforge · Wikimedia ·
Yesterday someone messaged me about an issue with a wonky little tool I wrote ten years ago. I actually the thing, because it creates feeds for a couple of things I follow on wikis, but as is often the way with RSS-related code I'd forgotten all about it — it just keeps working and doesn't need any changes.
But I fixed it up a bit to sort out their issue, and in doing so also upgraded a few bits of it and moved the code to GitLab. It also seems that on 22 March this year it got popular for some reason: twenty-two thousand hits in a day. I guess it was stupid scrapers, but I'll look a bit closer and also try to sort out some more aggressive caching.
The Most Predictable Edit in History
Fremantle
Another article from Jake Orlowitz, this time about the Wikimedia Foundation "owning the ground" on which the Wikimedia movement is built.
The Most Predictable Edit in History:
The keeper, the Wikimedia Foundation, is a cathedral. It has officers and budgets and quarterly plans, and must make decisions that look defensible to donors and boards. It is built to coordinate and move with one voice. The tension between the bazaar that does the work and the cathedral that keeps the ground is perpetual, the condition of an institution that stewards a community it did not create and cannot replace.
Digitising the Langley Collection
Fremantle
· FamilyHistoryWA · genealogy · archiving · digitisation ·
Interesting article in the most recent Western Ancestor (the magazine of FamilyHistoryWA), about a project to get the Langley Collection digitized and stored in the FHWA's Electronic Document Depository.
Each file was labelled, and there was so much material. Letters by researchers from decades ago, photos, certificates, death notices, newspaper clippings and more. All well arranged.
Finally, I wrote a cover page to the whole project, saying who had compiled the research, permissions, copyright details and other information. John was then given a USB with the scanned files.
At this point we had learnt a lot about how to prepare for scanning, the process, and bookmarking, but we had another learning curve when it came to file sizes. Neil has a computer with so much power that he could probably run NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre. John couldn’t open the files! His computer didn’t have the power to manage such a big searchable PDF. Neil divided the whole database into smaller sections and John was then able to access the files. This is something we will have to bear in mind for future digitisation projects.
The final version of the project ended up with two files of 1,534 MB (2,352 pages) and 637 MB (914 pages) which John was able to read on his computer. We didn’t record how much time was spent preparing the files to scan but it was substantial. The actual scanning and file preparation took 27 hours.
I'm not quite sure that massive individual PDFs would be my first choice for this sort of thing.
Jetlang and Apache conf
Fremantle
Jetlag has been battering me around a bit these last few days. I wake up at pretty much random times, and feel tired at random other times (or actually, come to think of it, the same times). So debugging Apache is not feeling like a simple thing to be doing. But the stupid web server does seem to have ten minutes of struggle every day or so (not predictably of course), when nothing is responding, and I'd like to get to the bottom of why.
OCR tool 1.10.0
Fremantle
· Wikimedia · OCR · Toolforge ·
The Wikimedia OCR tool now supports rotating the image, thanks to mw:User:Okerekechinweotito.
S1451
Fremantle
I wonder if I should give up on this blog. I don't really put much effort into it, because of the usual programmers' problem of spending too much time trying to figure out how to blog and what software to use.
Frankfurt to Perth
Perth
· travel ·
The weather in Frankfurt was finally cooling down a bit, and on the last night there was a bit of wind and rain. But the morning was nice, and despite the massive crowds at Frankfurt Airport I seemed to manage to get shunted to the various empty check in desks and security check points and empty corridors. I'm not sure I've ever walked as much at any airport.
Thai Airways Boeing 777-3AL(ER), HS-TKK:
Arriving in Perth was fine, despite the heavy rain and strong winds, and I was greeted with a nice rainbow (annoyingly I was too tired to notice the dirty window I was photographing through).
S1450
Frankfurt
· RedirectManager · MediaWiki · identifiers ·
I've been working on adding a system of redirect 'patterns' to RedirectManager. (I'm not quite sure 'pattern' is the right name, but they've got to be called something.) The main thing I want at the moment is a way to create a redirect to a page that I'm currently editing, with an incrementing ID value suffixed with a letter or three. So, this blog post for example is S1450 because that's the next available ID here, but actually it's not the next ID because that number just comes from counting all blog posts (and adding 1). It'd be neater to be able to just increment from the last S-prefixed title.
The patch I've got also adds dates and times, and a random string generator.
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