leŭksman

I’m generally appalled at the state of compound documents…

In the Apple world, Mac apps like Keynote love to use bundled directories which look like flat files at the UI level. Cute, but Thunderbird gleefully destroys them as attachments… Apple’s Mail.app transparently packages them into .zip archives for you, but Thunderbird just gives you a file with a directory listing, which naturally enough fails to open when you download it. Nice!

OpenOffice and the latest greatest MS Office stick their XML documents into a .zip archive and package image files, etc into that archive. These actually do act like flat files, so attachments and uploads work. But it makes file type detection and validation a little harder; verifying which file type your zip thingy is and whether it contains extra files slipped in…

And then you get fun packages like Scribus, which just give you an XML file referencing all your external image files by path, leaving no way to transfer your entire document without manually managing a directory structure and sending around or archiving multiple files manually.

We had a request for allowing Scribus uploads to Wikimedia sites for things like PR materials… sounds great, except for how any actually relevant document will need image files packed into the same directory which you can’t do. D’oh!

I’m putting together a talk proposal for SVG Open 2009, which will be in early October at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA.

I’ve got plenty of background I can pull in on the challenges and benefits of SVG on the web and the tradeoffs we’ve made in our usage and implementation, but I know lots of you folks out there have been more active on the ‘content-generation’ end of things and can point out some things I wouldn’t think of.

If anybody’s got any particularly interesting issues, examples, problems, or idea prototypes relating to usage of SVG on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites, I’d love to see how much I can pack in.

Pointers to cool feature proposals like Nikola’s localization presentation at Wikimania last year, or bulk anaylsis like benchmarks and compatibility tests on images in actual use would be of particular interest.

Blogging and microblogging tend to get disrespect from folks who “just don’t get” the purpose for them and consider them at best mindless entertainment and at worst an attention-sapping pest.

As a second-generation programmer, I found that I “got” them pretty quickly.

My dad programs for embedded and industrial-control systems; I grew up watching him bring home stacks of trade magazines — not to read every article in detail, but to skim through as an environmental scan, updating his awareness of the state of the art. If anything the ads and editorials were far more useful to him than the articles!

As a web developer in the 2000s, I started to use blogs and microblogs much the same way: little bits of information here and there which fill in my background map of what’s current among my peers (say, everything awesome in web browser work).

Just a quick shout-out to my post on the tech blog until I figure out how to aggregate my posts there back into my own log.

MediaWiki devs — Wikimedia needs you!

I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m a big fan of Yojimbo for note-taking, collecting web receipts, storing encrypted passwords, etc.

The biggest two failings of Yojimbo for me are:

• Mac-only — no Linux or Windows client
• No native web client; WebJimbo is more or less functional but very awkward
• Sync is tied to MobileMe, and gets increasingly fragile as your library grows

I finally reached the point where I couldn’t sync between my iMac at work and my laptop for home & travel, so out went the iMac.

I’ve become quite enamored of my Linux netbook for travel, but limited access to my notes and password store makes it limited for me. I’ve just gotta replace Yojimbo…

There are some other apps in the note space which I haven’t been too happy with:

• Tomboy — Mono/GNOME-ey note taker. Decent for quick notes, but sync is hard to set up, the Mac/Windows ports are immature, and no support for images or encrypted passwords.
• BasKet Notes — a KDE app. I find its interface confusing, and it’s insanely slow on my netbook. Doesn’t satisfy my syncing, web, or transfer requirements.
• Evernote — this comes close… online syncing, nice web and Windows clients as well as Mac. No Linux client, no encrypted notes/password store, and transfer from Yojimbo loses metadata like dates and tags.

It’s beginning to look like I’ve just got to write my own.

I spent a couple hours tonight whipping up a UI mockup of Notarista using jQuery and CKEditor:

Initially it looks pretty much just like Yojimbo without the sidebar. I’ll play with some alternate layouts that work better on a small netbook-size screen though; I think the note list can probably be hidden when not actively searching, for instance.

Update: I’m loooooooving jQuery! My UI mockup is now pulling sample data out of wikitech.wikimedia.org — search works and it’ll pull up actual page text you can pull into the editor. Of course it doesn’t save back…

Was transferring some screen shots from my iPhone with Mac OS X’s “Image Capture” app when I discovered that the sort-by-date seems to have some problems:

Yes, it’s sorting by ASCII string value of the formatted date. 3/4 comes after 3/22, and 3/22/08 comes after 3/20/09. How’d Steve Jobs let this one out the door? I can only assume nobody had a memory card or camera with old photos on it when they tested…

An update to the Universal Edit Button Firefox extension is in the works, with better compatibility and a spiffy new icon:

A public release should come soon…

Note that MediaWiki 1.14 and later have native support for the Universal Edit Button by specifying the <link rel=”edit”> it detects; older versions of MediaWiki can add it by installing the UniversalEditButton extension.

Last week was busy — we had our Wikimedia Foundation all-staff meeting here in San Francisco, so some of our out-of-towners were in for planning and wackiness.

Plenty of new stuff to come over the next while…

This week so far:

• We’re starting up techblog.wikimedia.org as a more focused place for Wikimedia tech staff and other MediaWiki core contributors to give updates on what’s going on. It’s still fresh and will receive some visual style lovin’ soon.
• Uploads of TIFF files are now enabled (with limitations; so far no thumbnailing) on test and Commons by request of folks doing image restoration work. Improved support for TIFF and other work formats (like XCF) is being investigated.
• Image file renaming is now enabled for sysops on Wikimedia wikis.

Coming soon…

• A big code review update and bump to the live sites will come in the next couple days. Yeah, yeah.
• Drafts extension will go live.
• Fixes for video on Firefox 3.1beta…
• Hopefully, more support for large file uploads — we’ll try some experimentation with upload-by-URL.
• Tomasz will be summarizing architecture work on the data dump design.

And I’ll have plenty more to blog about…

I’ve just put in Wikimedia’s org application for Google Summer of Code 2009… Hopefully we’ll get in.

We’ve had mixed luck in previous years with GSoC, but I think we’ve got enough internal bandwidth this year that we can make sure there’s enough effort put into interacting with the student candidates ahead of time to pick the coolest and most go-get-em self-starter awesome projects and then support them through the project term.

I’ve tossed up a student application template if you want to get started early.

Update 2009-03-18: We’re in!

Part of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative’s work plan is to do some genuine real end-user testing — this’ll give us a more solid idea of a) what problems to prioritize and b) a solid measure of progress as improvements get made.

An initial test run is starting now: a banner is running for a small percentage of English Wikipedia anonymous page views inviting folks to participate in the study:

This leads to an online survey thingy which the testing firm we’ve contracted uses to pick out candidates for remote or in-person testing:

A subset of the respondants will get a callback from the testing firm, and in a couple weeks we’ll get folks in a lab and smack ourselves with how confusing our site is while we tape them.

Currently we’re mostly targeting San Francisco Bay Area locals; next time we think we can trim down the notice a little better to ensure it’s not showing to non-local visitors.