fruit ratings

[[Wikipedia:Apricot|Apricots]]: YUMMMMMMM! Easy to slice in half and remove the pit, and verrrry delicious. Dried apricots are also nice and last longer in the cupboard.

[[Wikipedia:Peach|Peaches]]: Similar to its smaller cousin the apricot, but IMHO they’re harder to work with. The pitting vs deliciousness ratio is unfavorable.

[[Wikipedia:Blueberry|Blueberries]]: Pretty awesome when you pick them yourself in the forest. Prepackaged, though, I find them kinda… boring and tasteless. Maybe I just got boring mass-produced Chilean blueberries, though.

[[Wikipedia:Blackberry|Blackberries]]: Upside: yum! Downside: full of little crunchy seeds.

Denied

Every once in a while we get a rash of complaints about how Wikipedia renders on somebody’s mobile phone or PDA web browser.

Unfortunately we don’t seem to have a lot of such devices ourselves to test with, and they all behave differently, so we haven’t really had the resources to seriously work on testing tweaks for better phone/handheld support.

My crappy little phone just has some kind of WAP browser, I think, which I’ve never really been able to get to do anything productive. For kicks I took a peek to see if Opera Mini would run on my phone, since I *think* it has some kind of Java… alas, once I finally got connected to the site it claimed my phone isn’t supported.

Opera Mini actually handles Wikipedia pretty decently. The really cool thing is that since the client side is Java, they have an applet version so you can test the actual Opera Mini rendering in any desktop web browser. I LOVE YOU OPERA! YOU MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO TEST MY WEB SITE IN YOUR PRODUCT!!!! IIII LLLLLOOOOVVEEE YYOOOUUUUU!!!!!!!ONE

Of course currently our fundraising drive notice covers the entire screen, but… hey… ;)

Update 2007-01-07: I’m collecting links to mobile testing resources at [[mw:Mobile browser testing]].

bloggy blog

I tossed together a silly WordPress plugin to special-case links into [[leuksman|my wiki pages]] such as my [[gimp mac helper]] tools, as well as to MediaWiki’s bug tracker (eg, bug 1) and SVN repository (r12345 was nice).

SVN anonymous checkout: http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/silly-regex-linker/

Only useful if you’re me at the moment, but maybe I’ll generalize it for fun.

SSHKeychain

For a long time I’ve found SSHKeychain an invaluable little app on my Macs, making remote logins with keys relatively painless.

When I upgraded to an Intel-based MacBook last month, I was saddened to find that there wasn’t a Universal release; the last PPC release didn’t run on Intel; and development seems to have stopped altogether. :(

The good news is that it’s open source, and further one of the last code checkins, early in 2006, had been to add Universal binary build support. So I went ahead and built the thing for my own use.

I did though find that it crashed intermittently when waking from sleep. After a little debugging I found the problem; some variables were initialized badly so if all your keychains were locked it would crash. Fun! Easy to fix, though.

I mailed the patch to the dormant developers mailing list and the author, hopefully it’ll get rolled in and other people will get to use it…

There is no Brion, only SUL

In the run-up to Wikimania, I plan to get the single-user-login code base sufficiently up to stuff to at least demo it at the conference, and to be able to snap it into action probably shortly after.

Milestones:

1) logging in on local DBs
2) new account creation on local DBs
3) migration-on-first-login of matching local accounts on local DBs
4) migration-on-first-login of non-matching local accounts on local DBs
5) renaming-on-first-login of non-matching local accounts on local DBs
6) provision for forced rename on local DBs
7) basic login for remote DBs
8) new account for remote DBs
9) migration for remote DBs
10) profit!

additional goodies:
11) secure login form
12) multiple-domain cookies to allow site-hopping