mediawiki (FOSS.IN miniconf)

Today I attended a miniconf on mediawiki that took place on the sidelines of FOSS.IN. It was a very interesting talk by Erik Moeller. During the talk Erik kept making notes using etherpad (http://eiximenis.wikimedia.org/MediaWikiNotes). I have copied them below. It was really amazing to know about the kind of effort that goes into making these things happen (which sadly the user community, that includes me, takes for granted). It was also nice to know about a bunch of allied technologies and a number of new enhancements that are coming to mediawiki. I was really fascinated by the new enhanced editor and I downloaded and installed the svn trunk when the talk was on to get a feel of the interface. I will be soon upgrading the wiki at office.

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Mediawiki Workshop 2010                                     

Erik Moeller           

FOSS.IN 2010             

[Miniconf]

Mailing list for developers: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Manual about how to write a MediaWiki extension: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Extensions

Subversion check-out instructions: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversion

Get commit access: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_accesss

Wikimedia configuration files for MediaWiki: http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/ 

Wikipedia's configurations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version  

IRC: irc.freenode.net #mediawiki #wikimedia-tech

http://dbpedia.org DBPedia - extract info from Wikipedia

SPARQL - RDF extraction for DBPedia

http://semantic-mediawiki.org Semantic Media Wiki - semantic storage for MediaWiki

example:bases wiki http://baseswiki.org

http://baseswiki.org  Info about non-judicial grievance mechanisms

http://svn.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia Subversion  Repository

how to enable the new toolbar of wikipedia in my mediawiki? WikiEditor extension is the answer and it works if we change the user preference.

browser toolbar: Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/6401 click add to Firefox and then after 5 secs.addon is installed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page/?useskin=monobook   : old theme of wikipedia (new version: Vector)

http://www.wikia.com -wysiwyg ediing   

http://www.wikia.com/Special:LandingPage?uselang=

http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.org   : the sarcastic wikipedia

http://svn.wikia-code.com/

http://www.dbpedia.org/UseCases

http://atlas.gnowledge.org

View Your Mind - a better alternative for mind mapping than freemind perhaps

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal/Opentask   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Screencast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP  -- Biographies Guidelines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Twinkle - tool for friendly reverts

http://grouplens.org/ conducts research on user interaction 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org  - Mobile version

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard - do login first!

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Media_review

http://wikibhasha.com/ a conversion utility where articles may be easily converted into indic languages

http://www.openstreetmap.org/ an open source map( edit and contribute :) )

http://liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:LiquidThreads_testing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes

http://translatewiki.net - localizatioin translation communities, language communities, and free and open source projects.

http://stats.wikimedia.org   --

http://download.wikipedia.org

http://www.openwebanalytics.com/  alternate to google analytics

Flash plugin on 64 bit Chome OS running on Fedora 13 64 bit

I installed chrome and youtube.com told me that I don't have flash installed
On going to adobe flash page, they told me that it has to be there as I am using chrome and I just need to enable it
about:plugins on chrome told me that it is not there :(
Now, what do I do? The answer follows

1. Download the 64 bit flash plugin preview from adobe (See my previous post)
2. Copy libflashplayer.so to a preferred location (I copied it to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins)
3. Edit ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences file and add the section shown in reverse video

 
4. Restart chrome and don't mind about it complaining about issues with config getting corrupted. You will see new entry for flash when you do about:plugins

5. Just go to youtube and start watching your favourite videos :)

64 bit flash preview

Adobe is back with 64 bit flash for Linux. This is a preview and grab it before they close it again. Last time when they had tried this, there were a number of security issues and preview was pulled down soon.

Installation:

1. Download the preview version from Adobe labs site
2. Untar the downloaded plugin 
3. Copy the resulting plugin to your firefox plugin folder
1. I had to first create this: mkdir /usr/lib64/firefox-3.6/plugins
2. Copy libflashplayer.so to that folder
4. Just re-start firefox and you are ready to browse the flash sites :)

Download link
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_square.html

(Its not easy to find the link. It took me 10 minutes to find this. Though there is a get beta note on the download page, it does not take you directly here)

Silence the console

Well, at times, its very much annoying to hear the console beep from a Linux terminal. Sometimes, it is very untimely. For example, you might be stuck at some command and might press a tab. If there is no possible completion, terminal beeps. Its more like your leg is stuck between tracks when the train is approaching and you are desperately trying to escape. Then the guard standing near you blows his whistle and asks you to get of from the track fast, without trying to help you. Anyway, Here is how you disable it

For text terminals

setterm -blength 0

For graphical terminals

xset b off

And u have peace....

Chrome with built-in support for pdf

http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/11/pdf-goodness-in-chrome.html
Well, I can see cloud printing really picking up. PDF is the only supported mime type for cloud printing via Google cloud. Google had earlier mentioned that it expects pdf to be De facto standard for printing documents over cloud. With their Chrome OS release expected only a few days from now, I could not see much movement in this front. But, I guess, Google's plans are very clear now. With this beta release of Chrome, others will have no way other than support pdf extensively on web. I like Google's way of doing things :)