When I'm editing items on ArchivesWiki I often want to leave notes about things that need to be followed up, and for a while have been using a simple {{todo}} template for this purpose. It just displayed a simple [TODO] superscript that linked to a category of pages. Its source was just:
<sup>''<nowiki>[</nowiki>[[:Category:To be done|TODO]]{{#if:{{{1|}}}| – {{{1|}}}}}]''</sup>{{#ifeq: {{NAMESPACE}} | Template | |[[Category:to be done]] }}
Which, as usual for anything using ParserFunctions conditionals, isn't very readable. It also didn't let me easily see a list of the pages along with what needed to be done with them. So I decided to add a 'comment' field to the template, and add a Cargo table so that the page name and comment could be displayed together on a todo overview page.
The template:
<noinclude>
{{#cargo_declare: _table = todos | comment = String }}
</noinclude><includeonly>
{{#cargo_store: _table = todos | comment = {{{1|}}} }}
</includeonly>{{#invoke: todo | main | comment={{{1|}}} }}<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>
The module:
local p = {}
p.main = function ( frame )
local args = frame.args
local sup = mw.html.create( 'sup' )
sup:attr( 'class', 'todo' )
local em = sup:tag( 'em' )
em:wikitext( mw.text.nowiki( '[' ), '[[Project:To be done|TODO]]' )
if args.comment ~= nil and args.comment ~= '' then
em:wikitext( ' – ' .. args.comment )
end
em:wikitext( mw.text.nowiki( ']' ) )
return tostring( sup )
end
return p
The summary table:
{{#cargo_query: tables = todos
| fields = _pageName=Page, comment=Comment
| format = table
}}
I've made a page for my new MediaWiki Diagrams extension, even though I'm not really done with the proof-of-concept yet. Seemed like it was working enough to put something up as a placeholder.
There's lots of crap news out there in the world, again. I am trying to avoid the news (Twitter, Guardian, ABC mainly) in the mornings, because I find that I just get depressed. Not that it's not all depressing — Australia is burning and the government seems to actively not care — but there's not that much that I can do, and it's making it hard to get any work done.
Is it bad to give up like this though? I feel like I should be doing more. But also that, soon enough, we're probably all going to be forced into doing more! So for now, I'm enjoying tinkering on the wikis and feeling the sea breeze blow through my house.
The MsUpload extension (which has nothing to do with more well-known MSs, Microsoft or multiple sclerosis) is a good extension, one I use quite a bit on some wikis. It has a slightly clunky interface, and every time I try to fix something in it I wish it's Javascript was slightly neater. So as a first step to that, I've set up eslint [1]. Maybe I'll lose interest now, and not come back and fix the actual errors... but at least it's a step towards something cleaner.
It's hot again! The last week or so in Perth has been amazing in its lack of the horrible heat that's been inflicted in the rest of Austrlia. It's feeling like summer again today though.
I'm at a climate rally in Perth, in a crowd of about 400. I've given up sitting in the corner editing Wikisource (for the time being) because I thought I'd better do something. So I'm standing around quietly, sending bad vibes at the scumbo prime minister and all the pollies who think it's okay to do stuff all.
It's a morning in South Fremantle. Just a morning. I was going to write 'lovely' or 'rubble' or 'viewish', but actually I'm too tired for adjectives. The main thing I noticed is that walking down Martha Street is nicer than walking down Lefroy Road, although both give views to the ocean. Crossing Hampton Road is harder there though.
I have never yet gotten tired of walking over the brow of the hill (is this whole limestone ridge called Booyeembara?) and seeing the sea.
It's a sunny cool Sunday morning at Perth airport. I'm trying to make a MediaWiki extension work for MediaWiki 1.31. I got thinking about it because of the recent email about 1.32 being EOL (while 1.31 is LTS and will be around till June 2021). I usually try to support all current versions, even LTS ones. Mostly it's easy enough to do, although I also combine it with only supporting active versions of PHP, so I get to ignore some of the things that only apply to PHP 5.6 (which ended a year ago).
So like you said, commenting is pretty much just editing the post, right? Or did I misunderstand how to leave a comment? Definitely want to do some digging and see if there's a way for someone to leave a comment on an entry without having access to edit my entry. Hrm... Shawndouglas (talk) 01:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
@Shawndouglas: Not quite: the {{blog post comments}} template is just editing the talk page, which is then transcluded to the bottom of the main page. I'm not convinced it's the best way to do it thought! Sam (talk) 01:39, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
Restart to make sure everything comes back up as it should (this isn't an elegant way to do this—but I'm lazy, not many people use this server, and this definately tests what I want it to).
Today is a painful day. No more than yesterday, and enough to be annoying. It's the typing that does it! Of course. So I'm typing this... hmm. I guess I don't learn.
Well, anyway: mostly I'm excited about EMWCon in April (there's lots of discussion about it going on in the #emwcon:matrix.org room. And also general wiki stuff, like getting on top of a few sysadmin tasks on my own server and that of WMAU. Good to feel like things are organised; that's the fundamental idea of wikis I think. Not that blathering on a blog is much 'organisation'. Someone was asking on Reddit the other day about using MediaWiki for blogs, and it got me thinking again about what's missing here.
The biggest thing is commenting, of course, but I don't know if that really matters... I never get any comments anyway (I mean I didn't when I used WordPress and had them enabled). I think mostly I'd like a webmention system that could list at the bottom of a wiki page all incoming links from out on the wide web. Surely that's possible? When I've sorted out the twenty things on my todo list I might look into that...
I am in a café in Perth where for the first time I've heard a flat white called a 'flatie'. I guess that's a thing.
I'm heading to the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute's National Bushfire Recovery Map-a-thon. This is a national event that's happening today, at a bunch of office locations in cities around Australia and with lots of other people taking part distributedly. I'm looking forward to it, especially if the waiver comes through soon to enable the use of new Nearmap imagery for OpenStreetMap tracing. I've not looked at it yet, but I've heard that it's really high resolution.
There's been a bit of discussion about how SSSI have handled this thing though: it sounds like they originally thought they could use OSM tools but not contribute the data back to OSM. (I mean, that's quite possible, but not without hosting the tools yourself; to use them as found on the web, all the data needs to be open.) This is such a common thing — not just with OSM, but also the Wikimedia universe. It sounds like there are lots of great people on the case (on both sides) and I'm so grateful for the people who do this sort of work. I love contributing, but I've no head for the interminable discussions that are such a crucial part of shaping the direction of things.
I've switched to msmtp from ssmtp. It's actually maintained; that seems good. With somehelp, I've got a super simple setup to get it working with Gmail:
In /etc/msmtprc:
defaults
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
account default
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
auth on
user serveraccount@gmail.com
password foobar123
from serveraccount@gmail.com
aliases /etc/aliases
And /etc/aliases (with my own email address):
default: admin@example.org
Set it up as the default sendmail:
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/msmtp /usr/sbin/sendmail
And lastly, test it with something like echo 'test'|sudo sendmail -d -t www-data
It's Friday afternoon (nearly beer o'clock) at the end of this first week of everyone working from home and all the events being postponed. It's strange, but not that strange from the point of view of someone (me) who already works from home and doesn't really go to many things in person. I am missing the Riff coworking space and Thursday night meetups in Perth, but there's something nice about having an empty calendar. Actually, my calendar is more full than ever, with lots of new online meetings; which is great.
Anyway, the point of this post is that I'm pondering how a MediaWiki installation can reinforce the self-contained nature of a website. Because it doesn't support hotlinking images or embedding off-site things like Twitter cards, it means that all text and resources required are kept in the wiki. This means nothing gets lost as a result of other people changing their sites (or, rather, everything or nothing gets lost, because wikis do go off the air often enough). I like this attribute of MediaWiki. It's super annoying sometimes, but it makes for more robust websites, that can be archived wholesale and restored down the track in their entirety.
One key way that self-containment is broken is with InstantCommons, because files included from Commons can be deleted there and the local wiki would never know. There are some ways around that, and I've been meaning to see what it'd take to get the Commons Deletion Notification Bot working on 3rd party wikis, but it is at least a single point of failure. One workaround is to make sure every Commons file used on a wiki is on ones watchlist on Commons. On my own wiki, I have InstantCommons turned off — because I used to use it a fair bit, but then something happened and I got grumpy about it and turned it off. Now I copy some things across (with appropriate attribution and linking, of course), and am generally happier knowing that the pages here are not going to be broken when other people change things elsewhere.
I have lately been attempting to move some of the stuff that I host on my VPS to a more long-term, cheaper, and 'archival' platform.
For this, I figure a static HTML website combined with hosting images on Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, and Flickr, is the way to go.
The source text is kept on Github, and rendered to HTML that's uploaded to Netlify.
This all works (although I've still got lots of file-shuffling to do),
and means that the only part that I still pay for (and therefore will disappear when I stop doing that)
is the domain name. I figure that's okay, because
a) it is not too expensive;
b) the content is still available on other sites (albeit not in a nice all-in-one website);
c) Netlify provide *.netlify.com subdomains; and
d) the site could be rebuilt and moved to a new domain if need be.
I don't know if this is the optimal set-up,
but it feels a bit more resilient than what I've been doing for the last ten years or so.
And interestingly, it makes me feel more able to walk away from these projects (while being happy that they're still online)
and not have them taking up so my space in my brain.
EMWCon has finished for this year. It's all been online, but still run in UTC-4 (it was going to be held in Ohio, USA), so unfortunately I've only been able to attend a couple of sessions at the start and end of the days.
Luckily, all talks were recorded and are now on Youtube.
not use _pageName unless it's to actually get the page name; don't use it as a primary key (instead add a separate field to use as a PK, one that doesn't change ever); and
not to output wikitext in Lua (but use mw.html instead).
I have ordered some cube-shaped plastic boxes from Albox in Adelaide. This seems to be the product that they named their company after. These boxes are made of polypropylene (I think) and fit a range of Albox folders and other boxes in them. I'm planning on storing my family history documents and photos in them.
Consider the concept of a "like", for example. On a site like Twitter, a like is an action you perform against another person's content; you click the heart icon next to someone's tweet, and the like counter for that tweet goes up. It's an implicit connection between two people - the one who did the liking and the one who received it.
An IndieWeb "like", on the other hand, is not an action you perform on someone's content, but rather a standalone post that you own and publish to your site. It's a reversal of the way people usually think about the transaction, and it reflects the premium IndieWeb members place on controlling their own content.
Notably, in the simplest version of this scheme, the person who's post was liked - the likee, I guess? - might not even be aware that anything has happened at all. I mean, how would they? The entire interaction was wholly contained on another site.
There's a recent thread on Hacker News about an article about some slight annoyances in Markdown syntax. Lots of it is about the loss of functionality when going to HTML, and it even suggests including HTML in Markdown documents. It's true that Markdown is usually rendered to HTML, but it's not that hard to go to other formats (such as LaTeX), and it's that use case that I really like with Markdown. MediaWiki markup fails this pretty badly, and is almost always strongly tied to HTML.
First Roel and then the mayor have posted about the new TOGETHER artwork that's been installed on the side of the Queensgate carpark in Fremantle. I'd go and have a look at it, but it's probably better to stay home and make some pun about being too socially distant to see TOGETHER. Or not. Anyway, I have created Morag Myerscough's item on Wikidata.
As social isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic continues, our daily travails become ever more mundane. But to writers, historians and researchers 20, 50, 100 years hence, the records of them will be priceless – the voices that will drive narratives examining this remarkable time.
As you constantly move closer to death – the time you have is decreasing, but, your backlog is increasing, often exponentially. This is not sustainable!
So what are we supposed to do? Prune? Prioritize? Panic? I’ve been practicing an unhealthy balance of these three for a while and am increasingly getting comfortable with its constant hum bothering me.
…
My answer, when feeling positive, is just to carry on regardless, and to think as little as possible about the bigger picture. Especially at the moment. Do the next thing that feels like a good thing, and repeat. But I totally concur with "getting comfortable with constant bothering"!
I'm excited, there's a new RFC being proposed that'll solidify MediaWiki's support for installing extensions and skins with Composer:
T250406 RFC: Hybrid extension management.
Luckily, I think the second one is actually aiming to get rid of the possibility of extensions specifying MediaWiki itself as a Composer requirement, and so there is actually no conflict.
All a bit confusing, but a step forward hopefully for casual sysadmins who want to maintain a MediaWiki installation and easily keep all its extensions and skins up to date.
Maybe it'll also mean that extension authors actually tag their extensions with SemVer version numbers, which would be brill and make it easy for sysadmins to control what sort of upgrade they're doing.
It's a Friday in April. Which doesn't really mean anything, other than that it's slightly chillier than it was a couple of weeks ago, and I get to ponder what I will do on the weekend. I have some obvious next steps to take on my garden bench project, but I have to tackle them without getting sidetracked by any of the other interesting things I want to do as well. Why are there so many fun things to do? I usually manage to fail to do any of them.
I've been uploading some files to ArchivesWiki, and catching up with some proofreading. It's all been on hold for a month or so because of some ideas I had around file storage, copyright, Commons, Flickr, and the price of storage on Digital Ocean. I think ultimately, moving to DO Spaces has made the last of these make the decision about the rest — it's now cheap enough to keep hosting everything myself, and I'll carry on copying some of the more interesting items to Commons when appropriate. I've had good luck copying some things to Flickr too, because then more people see them and tell me what info I've gotten wrong. But perhaps all that's needed is a better notification system from ArchivesWiki itself?
A new work recently added to Wikisource is the Wonderful account of Mr. George Spearing, in which George recounts the week he spent stuck at the bottom of a coal pit in Scotland. He ends with the ghastly:
I was conveyed home, and every mean used for strengthening my limbs, which were much benumbed with the damp and coldness of the pit; but, thro' the ignorance of my physicians, a mortification seized both my feet, by which the skin and all the nails of my left foot, and three from my right foot, came off like a glove. The flesh at the bottom of my foot being separated from the bones, I had it cut off; and it was 9 months after before I recovered.— I have since been the father of 9 children.
It's Saturday and raining. It's raining, and Saturday. Two good things. I'm a bit wonky in the brain, but that's ok, there's nice code to write today. I'm trying to add icalendar (.ics) exporting to the WMAU wiki, for easier subscribing to coming events' lists.
There's a discussion happening on wikimedia-l; I had no idea of the "highest ideal of the Prussian civil servant", but it sounds sensible. Ziko van Dijk writes:
It seems to me that many Wikipedians or Wikimedians think of themselves as being progressive and modern. Our wikis are a tribute to science and enlightenment. Spontaneity and a laissez-faire-attitude are held in high regard; "productive chaos" and "anarchy" are typical for wikis.
When I had a closer look at our values and ideas, I got the impression that the opposite is true. Many attitudes and ideals sound to me more like bureaucracy and traditionalism:
being thorough, with regard to content and writing about it
community spirit
treating everyone equally without regard of the person (the highest ideal of the Prussian civil servant)
I probably do stuff around with my website too much (I have again today nuked it and rebuilt it), but what's the point of having a personal site if you can't hack on it?
Update: I broke it more than I thought, and have now maybe unbroken it. Who knows.
I might be breaking everything in my own websites, but I'm also trying to fix various things elsewhere. There's a patch I've had in for ages for displaying Discourse content in a MediaWiki wiki, and although it's now not going to be used on Wikimedia wikis, it seems like it might be a good thing to get merged at some point. Probably I should post about it on the Discourse Discourse.
I've reached the end of another archive folder: filled it up progressively over the last few months of scanning and describing.
Now I'm going back through, double-checking the catalogue records and making sure everything's in order and recorded correctly.
It's a nice process, because the first time round, when scanning the photos and letters,
I don't actually pay all that much attention to them other than to figure out a reasonable title and a few initial tags.
In this second run through I pad things out where they need to be, adding extra tags and descriptions,
and sometimes creating additional cropped versions of interesting parts of images.
This time I'm also taking it a step further, and adding all of the items to Wikimedia Commons.
I'm not yet completely convinced that this is the best place to host them all
(well… I am convinced, but am still very slightly worried that others won't agree with me)
but there are have been many occasions in the past when I've been adding these items to my own websites
and I've also wanted to upload them to Commons.
It is much easier to first upload to Commons and then reuse on my sites.
However, the biggest thing that's prompting me to do this is probably the fact that I'm scanning larger and larger resolutions,
and my cheapskate hosting setup keeps running out of RAM and failing to resize them.
Commons never fails me like this!
So hopefully, all of these scans are now going to be safely housed on Wikimedia Commons forevermore,
and I'll be able to do things like improve.
I've been helping my dad to scan some slides of his from 1975. It's great fun, seeing these old photos merge from the scanner, and slightly strange seeing my parents as young people.
My grandfather did not take well to people putting up "no trespassing" signs:
It's rare that online events are at reasonable times for me in UTC+8; usually they're aimed at UTC+1ish or UTC-5ish. Today is the Homebrew Website Club West Coast online meetup, which is named after the US west coast but I figure I can pretend it means all west coasts.
It's starting with an hour of quiet writing time. That feels like a strange but wonderful thing to have on a conference call.
The idea of the indieweb has been coming up a bit lately in my life, and I've got a tiny side project to attempt to create mw:Extension:Webmentions — given that I've resigned myself to using MediaWiki for blogging!
I don't know if it'll work, because there are a few things that don't really gel well with the unstructured-pages-of-text approach of wikis. Sending webmentions should be straight forward, because on any link it's possible to send something to the target and it's not necessary to know anything about the structure of the wiki page that the link is on. Receiving them on the other hand might be trickier. All I'm working on at the moment is adding a generic notice on the talk page; I guess it wouldn't be too hard to extend it to pulling in some common post types from the sending page. Some of the stuff I'd love to get working is around events and RSVPs, but maybe the unstructured wiki way will not handle that very well.
I don't really understand how one should write an indieweb:post that belongs in another time other than the one in which one is writing. I mean, to fill in the blanks of the past, and explain what happened or was thought. I'd love to write them with a date property of the correct time — but what is that time? Is it the date of an event? The day after? And what does it mean for feeds, do they stick to chronological, and so probably not show anachronistic posts? It's all a bit confusing.
Bald Hill is not at all bald. I assume at some point it was, but it now has head-height acacias growing all over it, and from the direction of approach of the old access track it's nearly impossible to get through. I later figured out that the opposite slope is much clearer, but I was following the track and wondering why it was strewn with lumps of grey concrete so I pushed on through the scrub.
It turns out there's a very sizable concrete footing extant there, with massive reinforcing sticking out of it. There's a water tank further up the hill, and lots of red brick rubble about. I have no idea what it was all for, but I presume WWII stuff (it looks similar to other brick and concrete ruins I've come across on the island). The size of the footings certainly makes it seem likely.
I'll upload more photos here later; the only ones I have on my phone are crappy due to a scratch on the lens (which, I've just read, might be fixable). My camera works well, and I had my GPX turned on so shall have coordinates for all this too — when I'm back at the computer.
The wet weather has finally actually arrived, so rather than tramping out across the heath like I'd planned, I'm sitting in Dôme with a coffee waiting for the early ferry. It's actually quite nice weather, sort of warm, but the later ferry is likely to be pretty rough. I want to head home and get a bit more work done on an idea I've got for a MediaWiki-as-blog feature.
I don't quite know what's going wrong yet, but with two wikis now I've had the following error when trying to log in after upgrading to 1.34: "Auto-creation of a local account failed: Username entered already in use. Please choose a different name."
The error seems to go away after the session expires, and the user is logged in correctly (sometimes after a subsequent error of "Auto-creation of a local account failed: You have not specified a valid username.").
I don't want it to have to serve up map files for mscgen images (Mscgen only generates imap files, rather than the more modern map HTML that Graphviz's cmapx produces).
I've merged the first part of the locally-rendered stuff for the Diagrams extension. There are still a bunch of things that don't work quite as they should (like captions) but for Graphviz and Mscgen things are nearly done. I'll get it deployed on toolforge:genealogy and experiment a bit.
I've been for a walk around the streets this afternoon, looking at the various diggings that are going on. There's some massive moving of limestone going on down at High Street, and some lesser but perhaps more delicate horizontal boring of new power lines near Swanbourne Street. The rain came at some point, and I hid under a tree on the edge of Stevens Reserve. I'd upload some photos, but they're stuck on my camera because I don't have an SD card reader to hand.
Anyone would think I'm obsessed with holes being dug in Freo streets, but really most of this week I've been squarely concerned with MediaWiki stuff. It's just that in moments of walking time I find myself near these places. This afternoon it was Phillimore Street where they say they've uncovered old wooden aquaducts or something. Unfortunately they're all covered up.
Mostly I'm now trying to get away from all the hosted services and build things myself. To that end I'm attempting a better system of photo metadata management based on 3 wikis and a wmcli script to read exif data. Will see where it gets to.
I need to set up IndieAuth. I’ve been struggling to understand the value of using my own website to log in to other websites, an IndieWeb principle, but finally had an aha! moment when reading through the IndieWeb wiki. I have been trying to wean myself from Google services little by little, but I’ve used the same Gmail account to sign up for services over the past ten years, and it hasn’t seemed worth the effort to switch all those logins to another email address just because – especially since I’m currently using Gmail to serve my emails to my personal domains. But using my own website to log in, I think, opens up a new avenue for easing my dependence on Gmail. For me, this feels like a tool that will make the switch more feasible.
I'm wondering at the moment if it's possible to avoid Twitter etc. and just use my RSS feed reader for everything. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to do indieweb reposts, with the {{repost}} template. It's not working well so far. I probably need to go back to some ideas I had about an easier way to import parts of posts to this site (e.g. a button that creates the page prefilled with all metadata etc.).
At least I can muck around here and no one will see. Or at least, because I keep no logs, I won't know that anyone's seen.
I've been working in various fronts lately, none of which have been my own website. This place feels like a complete mess, but I do have plans for it. I've been making some slight progress towards having all my photos here (or at least spread over my three personal wikis), and I also need to sort out the RSS feed situation (which is currently based on a fairly annoying and slow system). The indieweb HWC meetup was this morning but I wasn't awake enough for it, unfortunately.
Of course, the main point of a blog is to write, and I'm terrible at that at the moment. There's too much to write, and not enough time. Or at least, the time for writing exists quite separate to the time when the inspiration comes – at some point I'd like to sit quietly of a morning, explaining what I'm trying to do. But instead, I'm too busy banging my head against what I'm doing to relax enough to do that! Oh well. Another day.
Welcome to the world of “digital gardens.” These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.
…
Tom Critchlow, a consultant who has been cultivating his digital garden for years, spells out the main difference between old-school blogging and digital gardening. “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” he says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”
…
“The stream has dominated our lives since the mid-2000s,” Caulfield says. But it means people are either posting content or consuming it. And, Caulfield says, the internet as it stands rewards shock value and dumbing things down. “By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance,” he says. “What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.” In an age of doom-scrolling and Zoom fatigue, some digital-garden enthusiasts say the internet they live in is, as Caulfield puts it, “optimistically hopeful.”
I went up to the Men's Shed this morning, to finally re-grind a plane blade. Over the last couple of years I've been sharpening it solely by hand on the whetstones, and this had brought it out of square by about 1.5 mm. The lateral adjustment of the plane handles that, but it's at its limit and anyway it looks bad having it so wonky. The Shed has a nice sharpening grinder with a water bath and a reasonable tool rest and jig. It's got a little bit of play in it, but not enough to worry about so long as the jig is kept pressed firm in one way or the other while in use. I got it square and good, and will now finish it off on the stones.
I've just released version 0.6.1 of the Diagrams extension. It makes it possible to use formats other than PNG when using the external web service to render graphs.
I'm not really sure there's a point to having the external service — it does make things harder for sysadmins, and now there's local rendering that works with the AWS extension, perhaps it should be retired. Then again, there's something nice about not filling a wiki's file storage with re-renderable image files. Anyway, I don't have that much time to work on this so it'll probably stay.
The main thing that the local rendering is now missing is support for PlantUML.
I make great use of DuckDuckGo's bang feature, with which you can change your search target by typing <search term> !<bang code>, where bang code is any of the defined codes. For example, I saw a map just now of a place called 'Erdalen' and didn't know where it was, so I pressed ctrl-L to enter Firefox's address/search bar, and typed !osm erdalen and it took me straight to this place south of Bergen in Norway.
Other bangs that I use a lot along with !osm are !w for Wikipedia, !wd for Wikidata, and !r for Reddit.
Later today, at 8:26:40PM Perth time, the unix timestamp will be the nice round number of 1600,000,000. I don't know if this is called a centimillenium, I suspect not because 'millenium' is a count of years and not seconds, but it feels like a good word for a thing that's not a millenium nor a billenium (which I guess is also not a word). Anyway, happy 1.6 gigaseconds everyone!
The Wikimedia Australia AGM was yesterday, and I'm signed up for another 12 months of being the tech nerd on the Committee, running the wikis and whatnot. I quite like doing it, although I'm not always very good at keeping up to date with everything — it's nice to run a MediaWiki installation outside of the WMF world, just to have a feel of what it's like and what annoyances are felt. I'm going to try to improve things this year (better mobile view; stats reporting maybe; and generally keeping everyone up to date with things).
People often write about the value of owning your own place on the web—the control, the ownership, and the avoidance of lock-in—but today I'm feelong another advantage: the sense of having a place on the web in which you can behave as though you're home. It means relaxing, and not having to worry so much about what other people think. The indieweb is a relief.
Australia’s proposed changes to the citizenship test has raised questions about whether you can really evaluate someone’s “Australian values” via a set of exam questions.
But here’s another question not even considered by the test: should Australian citizenship entail a knowledge and appreciation of Australia’s unique wildlife and natural history?
At its heart, this is a question about what it truly means to be an Australian. Some would argue I’m not qualified even to ask it. My ancestors arrived in Perth in 1830 from England and unloaded plenty of inappropriate cultural baggage, including cats, onto the shores of Australia.
Modern Australia is both an ancient land of hundreds of different languages and cultures, and a creation of transplanted Europeans who have sought to establish Western democratic ideals such as freedom of speech. There have also been many waves of economic migrants or those fleeing persecution and violence in their homelands.
With democratic ideals attacked or disregarded in many parts of the world, Australia’s citizenship test aims to ensure new citizens have a shared knowledge of these values and responsibilities. The current test puts a lot of emphasis on knowing about free speech, the constitution, and how parliaments are organised.
There’s more to being Australian than knowing how Canberra works. Mick Tsikas/AAP Image
But being Australian shouldn’t just mean agreeing with the principles of free speech and deliberative democracy. In 2006, the Australian author William J. Lines published Patriots: Defending Australia’s Natural Heritage. The title presupposes that being Australian is bound up with knowing and appreciating at least a little of Australia’s heritage of unique lifeforms and ecosystems.
My own book, Stepping Off: Rewilding and Belonging in the South West, published in 2017, also champions the idea of embracing the natural environment as part of one’s identity, with a particular focus on Perth and Australia’s southwest corner, an internationally recognised hotspot for unique plants and animals.
An appreciation of Australia
In my book I lament some aspects of the “Britanisation” of this country by my forebears. I also decry the smooth surface that corporate globalisation has more recently smeared over our modern cities.
As a counterbalance to these forces, I suggest other ways of “becoming Australian” that might help us live more gracefully and sustainably on this landscape.
What if we asked prospective Australian citizens to know and value the land on which we live, and the living things with which we share it? This might involve knowing facts such as:
much of southern Australia is geologically ancient, and broke from Antarctica around 40 million years ago before drifting north alone, evolving thousands of unique species
a eucalyptus leaf contains oils that can cause massive explosions in the forest canopy when fires tear through the environment, but which can also be used in kitchen detergents
Australia has about 70 species of macropod, of which kangaroos and wallabies are just two examples, and kangaroo meat is more sustainable than beef or lamb because of its low carbon footprint and its softer impact on the landscape compared with hoofed animals
a chuditch (or a quoll on the eastern side of the country), is a small carnivorous marsupial that is very friendly, although it’s (sadly) illegal to keep one as a pet.
Do you know a chuditch when you see one? SJ Bennett/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
I’m not suggesting throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I appreciate many of the legacies of Western civilisation, including freedom of speech, deliberative democracy, and the rule of law by an independent judiciary. Of course being Australian should mean accepting these central tenets.
But we should expect new arrivals to our shores — including those whose ancestors have been here for a couple of centuries — to supplement this culture with an understanding and appreciation of land and ecosystem we live in. These values are also more aligned with those of Indigenous Australian cultures.
Being Australian shouldn’t just mean knowing about federation and the ANZACs, mateship and Vegemite. It should also mean knowing at least a little of the plants and animals, stones and clouds, smells and sights, of our wide shared land.
I've dressed the legs, and the jarrah has come up pretty poorly. It's full of nail holes and knots and crappy bits. Hopefully when it's all together and polished they'll all just look like 'character'!
I'm thinking of switching my website to a new system. I'm giving it a go now, but am not really sure if I'll stick with it.
The new system is called Twyne, after Brian Twyne (I think). It's fully of rough edges and missing features, but that's okay. This is about the indieweb, after all.
(I'd link to these things, above, but Twyne doesn't yet support links! It's idea of Markdown is pretty dodgy… it'll improve though.)
I've upgraded my main laptop to the latest Ubuntu, as a complete fresh install. I try to always do this with every LTS release, because the two-year cadence of those are a good interval for doing a full test of my recovery regime. Everything went according to plan this time (as it normally has in the past), and I was back working within a couple of hours. There's a heap of messy things that I have to clean up, and reinstall, and generally tweak, but I feel like this is just forcing me to attend to housekeeping that I've put off, and not really a downside of a non-full-system restore like this.
[…] as soon as you're helping somebody solving an interesting issue, summarize your experiences with something or write anything that might be cool to be around in a couple of years as well, you do provide potential high-value content. My message to all those authors is: don't use web-based forums.
TL;DR: all of the content of closed, centralized services will be lost in the long run. Choose the platform you contribute to wisely now instead of learning through more large data loss events later-on.
I've fixed up the firmer chisel I bought at the Men's Shed open day a couple of weeks ago. It turns out it's a Titan (Australian firm from Tassie), and probably made between 1945 and 1960. Someone's written a book on the company, but I can't find a copy anywhere.
I'm adding a new url field to Twyne's posts. The idea is that even though a post already has its own URL, oftentimes it's useful to include posts from other websites, and the canonical URL should be used where appropriate. I'm experimenting with making the URL the actual link: so that, for example, a posts' link in on the homepage post-list will go directly to the other site, even though there's a sort-of equivalent local URL for it. Also, in the RSS feed, the `link` will point to the external URL. Whether this is a good idea I'm not sure, but it does feel like it'll deflect attention from the local site for posts that are really just "retweets" or placeholders for reposts.
It's Monday arvo, the beer is good, and a general feeling prevails that the internet is what it was in 2002. At least so far as it's possible to write code that makes stuff from databases. It's the most fun.
No more walled gardens, no more chains of complexity.
Today I declare what once was, is again. Never again will I run another
invocation of a static site generator or document renderer. 80 to 100 characters
per line is and will continue to be maximum width of English documents. No
longer do I pull from social networks, but they will pull from me.
This is MY writing platform. Mine. Me. There is no way to censor or revoke my
power. The Internet does not forget one byte, or one bit.
It's the middle of the morning here, but that doesn't matter. I'm attempting to add tags to Twyne (I'd link that, but still haven't implemented hyperlinks in my Sam-flavoured Markdown). It's going fine, it's not a complicated thing to do really, but I'm bumping skulls with Doctrine ORM. I've used it before for a couple of projects, but not for a while, and I'd forgotten how frustrating it is to be poking at DQL or a query builder and trying to make it work — when the equivalent SQL is simple and easy! I wouldn't mind if this was something complicated, but ordering by the count of a joined table shouldn't take an hour to figure out.
Can I sort by a function (for example ORDER BY RAND()) in DQL?
No, it is not supported to sort by function in DQL. If you need this functionality you should either use a native-query or come up with another solution. As a side note: Sorting with ORDER BY RAND() is painfully slow starting with 1000 rows.
So Twyne now supports tags. That's good. Bit by bit this is is becoming enough indiewebish for me to actually be able to use it. Can't log in on the phone yet, nor upload photos and have their EXIF data read. But I think possibly I want to add a feed-reader before doing those things, and perhaps geotagging. I dare say it'd be easy to also now add some better POSH/microformats, but actually until I need to consume other sites' HTML I don't feel motivated to improve my own. Certainly higher on the todo list than that is a way to track old URLs (most of which currently lie broken, notably the feed ones which is pretty poor form on my part).
It's a rainy Monday morning in Yallingup, but not so rainy that it's not wonderful walking along the coastal paths. I've been here a few times before but there are still bits left to map in OSM (even some named paths that can end up on waymarkedtrails; those always feel worth capturing). There's also a boardwalk and steps that I'd not noticed before, so I'll try to get them done. Mostly it's just nice exploring in the wind and the rain. Supposedly it'll clear in a day or so, so I shall enjoy it till then.
The rain continues, even back in Perth. It's good coding weather.
I'm trying to upload photos from Yallingup, but predictably feel like fixing some of the metadata handling first, and so might not get anything uploaded today. I do like the new system though, and am looking forward to having a better way to copy select photos to Commons.
I have returned to using KDE, and it's wonderful! I can't remember why I switched to Ubuntu, but this is reminding me of my first years with Linux and it's terrific. (I was prompted to switch today because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to properly remap keys and have the config stick – this bug: https://askubuntu.com/q/1284219/68491 – and everything is just so much more configurable in KDE.)
The new version of Wikisource Export has been released. The main user-facing improvement is a wider selection of fonts, but there's been lots of work done on the back end (we migrated it to Symfony).
There are currently 285 proposals in this year's Wishlist Survey: https://w.wiki/oB7
This is more than ever before! Which is great, but there's lots to get through (I'm reading all of them).
Some are terrific, some are huge, some are simple, and they're all a fascinating insight into how people work with Wikimedia wikis and what difficulties they feel.
I'm really happy to be working on this.
We've been out cutting karri hazle (or djop born, in Nyungar) this morning, for the second day in a row. We're building a hurdle, and it's proving to be trickier than the books about UK hurdle-making would have us believe. It's got 'hazle' in the name, but it's not really like the stuff that they have over there that you can twist and bend in a tight radius around the end posts. It is working pretty well though, and we'll have something finished today I think.
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