Sam Wilson's Website

June 2022

  2. Census release

    Today is “Christmas for Data Nerds” says Dr David Gruen AO, Australian Statistician. (That’s a quote via the Statistical Society of Australia, and I haven’t seen the original.)

  3. It looks like they had to demolish the end wall of the power station for some reason:

    I guess to get equipment in or something? But it seems like rather a large oversight when it’s a brand new building!

  4. Restore it All Podcast (W. Curtis Preston)

    Is M-Disc the ultimate archive medium for SMBs and home users?

    This week we talk about this exciting “new” medium for archiving data that is especially attractive to SMBs and home users. It’s an optical disc that looks like a DVD and is readable in all Blu-Ray drives, but underneath it’s something very different. If you haven’t heard of it, then you’re in luck! Thanks to Daniel Rosehill, backup anorak and friend of the show, we’re going to talk about it – and its competitors on this week’s episode! We discuss the good and bad about using all of the following for archiving: paper, SSD, disk, tape, DVD, Blu-Ray, ending with M-Disc. Learn what’s wrong with these other mediums, and what’s so great about this one in another fun episode of Restore it All!

    https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/ab0332f9-1e1a-4aba-902d-55d4aaafead4/M-disc-20Main.mp3

  5. Well, I’ve managed to confuse myself no end (as usual), this time with the question of many small websites versus centralisation in Wikimedia. Mastodon seems like a much better model, in which the protocols and software are the widely-used bits and the content is all over the place and under the control of many different orgsanisations.

  6. samwilson.id.au

  8. MediaWiki things

    It’s only 10 o’clock on Monday morning, and I’m already three bugs deep in a queue of “oh, I’ll just have a quick look at why that thing isn’t working.” I wanted to confirm the way in which WikiEditor loads the CSS that disables the resize: none on the main edit form textarea. But of course I’m doing so with PHP 8.1 (for a laugh) and so hit a deprecation notice, so fixed that, and now am getting Error: Class "FormatJson" not found… everywhere. I think it’s a weirdness with LocalisationCache. The question is whether I’ll remember what I was trying to do an hour ago, after I’ve figured this one out. Probably not, but a feint feeling of enqueued context will persist for the rest of the day, making sure I keep feeling worried. Oh well.

  9. I have updated the MediaWiki Diagrams extension to support Mermaid diagrams. Actually I wrote the code a while ago, but today got around to merging and releasing it.