leŭksman

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!

Poking around Google Earth to optimize a hypothetical bicycle commute to the office, I noticed an unusual diagonal strip of alleys and divided lots running through San Francisco’s Mission District from about 22nd & Harrison to around Cesar Chavez & Guerrero:

I figured it had to be an old rail right-of-way, but wasn’t sure what for. At first I thought it might be BART-related, since it runs right by the 24th & Mission station, but BART runs underground straight north-south to the 16th St & Mission station.

A little Googling on a portion of the strip cryptically labeled “Juri Cmns” turned up a page about the Juri Commons park which explained that the strip was originally part of the San Francisco and San Jose Rail Road. After the 1906 earthquake, the portions running through the Mission were torn up replaced with a line running nearer the bay — the same route today’s Caltrain operates on.

[Side note: I composed this post offline in Yojimbo's rich text editor and tried to copy-paste it to WordPress's WYSIWYG editor in Firefox. Total paste fail when including the picture; links stripped when pasting paragraphs only. Tried it again in Safari -- all links came through intact, just missing the image.]

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.

Just a quick test of Ogg-friendly video embedding with mv_embed in my WordPress blog…

Here’s Elephant Mud Bath.ogg from Wikimedia Commons:

Good:

• Seems to work nice in Firefox 3.0 with Java
• Seems to sort of work in Safari 3.2 with Xiph Quicktime components (have to play, then pause, then play again

Haven’t tested other browsers or FF 3.1 yet.

Bad:

• Still have to edit some settings in mv_embed.js manually to make it work (fix path, disable MediaWiki-dependent script loader)
• Currently have to manually make/pick a thumbnail image
• Seeking doesn’t currently seem to work (needs server support for oggz_chop?)
• WordPress’s wysiwyg editor eats the entire <video> tag if I switch out of HTML mode! It leaves the <script> at least.
• Integrating support into the upload/insert tool would be awesome of course, beating manual writing of the HTML.

We had a “dent event” meetup of open microblogging fans the other day here in San Francisco, as identi.ca’s Evan Prodromou is wandering about after the recent RecentChangesCamp in Portland.

There was wacky fun! Beers were drunk, fish and chips were eaten, netbooks were compared, and there was a nice little turnout of Wikimedians and Creative Commoners in the group.

There was talk about some of the various ways in which microblogging feeds are being used in the Wikimedia world (there are Twitter and Identica feeds of Wikinews updates, as well as a feed we set up recently with server administration log updates [and at Twitter]) and some talk of possible set up of localization work for the Laconica software at Betawiki where most of MediaWiki’s localizations are maintained.

We also discussed the necessity of setting firmer plans ahead of time for our next San Francisco Wikimedia meetups.

Also of note — there’s a Laconica hackfest planned in Berkeley tomorrow (Saturday, February 28), which may be of interest to some Bay Area coders.