Entries in Life

This week we did our first roll out of MediaWiki 1.19 on some of the smaller project sites. This staged roll out is a great way to find out how you are using the software in ways we didn’t expect and to give you a warning: “Beware! This thing you are doing is going to break!” Of course, I would prefer to avoid that wherever possible, but there are things I can’t control.

So now, I get to say “Beware!”:

Beware!

If are using document.write() in some javascript, whether in a gadget, in your common.js, vector.js, monobook.js or even global.js, you need to change it. In the cases that I saw, people had used a code fragment like the following:

function importAnyScript(lang,family,script) {
document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="' + 'http://'
        + lang + '.'
        + family + '.org/w/index.php?title='
        + script + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"></script>');

This has to be changed to something like the following:

function importAnyScript(lang,family,script) {
mw.loader.load('//' + lang + '.' + family
        + '.org/w/index.php?title='
        + script + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
}

Just to prove that I actually do work at the Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve gone and posted a a blog post to Wikimedia’s blog.

Today, I’m in New Orleans for the NOLA Hackathon for MediaWiki. As I walked through Lafayette Square where the Blues and BBQ festival was setting up. I thought, wistfully for a bit, about how much I love New Orleans and how much I miss leaving here.

Scandals, page 1

That lasted until I sat down in PJsand looked at the front page. The top three headlines each reminded me of the corruption and cronyism that Louisiana and New Orleans are known for: Public defenders are ambulance chasing, an audit of a 13 year old construction project reveals invoice padding, and a local businessman pleads guilty to bribing the sheriff.

So, I’ll visit, I’ll enjoy hacking MediaWiki with my friends, staying with my sponsors (who live next door to my old home here), enjoy the food, and then, when it is all over, I’ll enjoy returning home to the quiet Lancaster County, PA.

Of scripting languages used for web applications, PHP is pretty lightweight and fast. It is built to execute quickly and with little overhead, making it easy to scale.

Still, there are places where it could be better. Engineers at Facebook took this challenge and created HipHop. We at the Wikimedia Foundation would love to have HipHop packaged so that we can deploy it on our cluster. And, ultimately, while we realize we might need to do the initial work of packaging HipHop, we don’t want to be the ones responsible for keeping the package up-to-date.

Since I have some experience with packaging PHP applications and am a sometimes-active member of Debian’s PHP maintainers team, I felt this was a natural place for me to jump in.

And, because I’m lazy, the first thing I did was look for any other work on packaging HipHop that had been done. I found James DuPont’s work and built on it. Now it comes time to move this forward.

I’ve already taken his ITP for HipHop.

You’ll note that it depends on two other bugs to get the HipHop patches for curl and libevent included. These were essentially dismissed by both maintainers.

The curl maintainer pointed out that it that patch was un-needed or, at least, needed better a better defense. I can’t really provide that. I’m not sure that I can adapt the HipHop code to the suggested APIs, but I’m willing to try if the HipHop developers aren’t.

The libevent developer pointed out (in response to the Debian bug), that the patch was against an old, unmaintained version of libevent. Newer versions evidently make half of the patch un-needed and the other half needs to be adapted to the newer version of libevent.

I really want to make this happen. I really want Debian (and Debian derivatives like Ubuntu) to have HipHop packages. But I’m not sure how much time I can give to this right now since we’re in the middle of pushing out a new release of MediaWiki. If you can help solve any of the packaging problems mentioned above, please dive in!

The longer I am the bugmeister at Wikimedia, the deeper I get into the bugosphere, the social network that is the WMF’s Bugzilla. This has led to a marked decrease in blogging and status updates in other places. Today (a Saturday!) has been slow for me, so you get a blog post.

Over ten years ago, someone coined the word “blogosphere” to describe the culture and interactions that formed around weblogs. Today, I feel the need to adapt that word to describe the microcosm that evolves around a particular instance of Bugzilla (or any other public bug reporting database, I’m sure): bugosphere.

As the bugmeister, I’m sure my experience should not be considered normative — you shouldn’t expect to jump into a bug reporting tool and find any sort of community. Still, I’m sure other bugmeisters (I only know a couple) and other committed bug reporters experience their own version of the bugosphere.

This past week, the bugosphere really came into focus for me. During the preparation for this week’s collection triage, Tomasz and I found a bug reporter (Helder.wiki or mybugs on bugzilla) who had reported numerous Collection bugs) and asked xyr to join the bug triage this past week.

It was through Bugzilla that Helder.wiki and I connected. Through that connection and xyr participation in last week’s triage, I decided to have a Wikibooks triage on the 14th.

I had a hint of the social aspects of working on bugs before this week (six months ago I said “Bugzilla is my social website”), but this week the bugosphere really came into focus. These are my people, they’re not bound by any one organization, like the WMF, but they’re interested in problems we experience with this software. Social bonds, social “networks”, have been forged over less, but the goal we share, sharing the sum of human knowledge, is an especially powerful one.

Bugzilla captures our struggles to make Wikipedia (and Wikibooks, and Wikisource, etc.) better. The bugosphere is a great place.

Our Deputy Director, Erik Möller, has posted a list of the open Engineering positions at the WMF that we’re hiring for right now.

If you’ve ever wanted your work to matter, to mean something more than a paycheck and the 9-5 grind, and you have the skill and aptitude for software engineering, product management, or QA, then I don’t know of a place that you can work that a bigger impact than the only non-profit with a website listed in the top 10 websites — an organisation that is dedicated to a bigger vision that we are really trying to achieve instead of something we tell you to get more eyeballs for our ad banners.

Check out our job openings — we even have some non-engineering positions. Unlike the other top web properties, Wikimedia is never going to make you rich with stock options, or a signing bonus, but we’re still small enough where your own work can make a big difference.

I’m in the Wikimedia Offices this week in San Francisco, so when we had a one-hour A/B test where we showed banners to 100% of users who weren’t logged in, I got to see something I don’t usually get to witness: Brandon Harris, whose personal appeal was being tested, let us know how awesome it was that he was mildly kicking Jimmy Wales butt at fund raising. That, in itself, is good news. For too long, Wikimedia’s fund-raising efforts have relied too heavily on Jimmy Wales. Even though it only ran for an hour, people noticed. Which is weird.

But in a good way. I love that I can be a part of an organisation that is so influential that when we’re just doing a quick test, people notice.

Among MediaWiki developers, there has been some discussion about which extensions should be bundled with the MediaWiki tarball. But, up till now, no one has really done anything about it.

In order to get the ball rolling, I posted a request for an idea of extensions that people would like to see bundled with MediaWiki. There is even the possibility of (eventually) different bundling options or a “MediaWiki lite” that has just the bare bones.

Chime in and let us know how you think this should look.

So, I decided to try out the new PhotoCommons. As you can see, it looks pretty nice. I did manage to find a bug. But, hey, alpha software. Good work, guys! (Of course, then, I had to check out their inspiration, WordPress Media Flickr.

Wikimedia has gotten some complaints because we don’t listen to users.  As part of an effort to be more responsive to users’ problem reports, I’m now in the role of Bugmeister,

You can see from the chart of activity on wikibugs-l that activity on Bugzilla has really shot up.  This is a direct result of the Foundation paying closer attention to its users.

I can’t guarantee that everyone will be happy, but what I am trying to do is make sure everyone has a chance to be heard, and that they aren’t ignored.