Wikitech-l June 2015

wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

110 participants
99 discussions

Using "," as decimal separator in #expr
by Jeroen De Dauw 14 Jun '15

14 Jun '15

Hey, I'm using the #expr parser function provided by the Parser Functions extension. I'd like it to use "," as decimal separator, and it currently uses ".". Is there a way to change this nicer than installing String Functions and doing a replace? Cheers -- Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com Software craftsmanship advocate Developer at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3

3 2

Read the VisualEditor process review
by Neil P. Quinn 13 Jun '15

13 Jun '15

Hello everybody! For the past couple months, Joel Aufrecht and I have been working on a project to document and improve the VisualEditor team's processes; we just published a draft of our report <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/2015_Process_Review> on mediawiki.org. If you're interested, please read it over and, of course, shout at us on the talk page if we wrote anything stupid. In addition to the team's significant strengths, we identified three major challenges we'd like to work on: - Consulting stakeholders like Analytics and Design Research often have trouble engaging with VE’s development. - The process for early-stage requirements and design decision-making is informal and incomplete. - The team has a high reporting load which may no longer be justified. Next week, we'll start to expand the report with some proposed solutions (suggestions welcome!) Have a good weekend! ————— Neil P. Quinn <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Neil_P._Quinn-WMF>, product analyst Wikimedia Foundation +1 (202) 656 3457

8 8

Is non-SSL request still allowed?
by Max Vlasov 13 Jun '15

13 Jun '15

Hi, I have a software using mediawiki api with Wikipedia. It uses general http requests. Suddenly it stopped working several days ago (maybe a week, I can't recall exactly). When I query a test query in a browsers, it redirects to https, I see also that at the side sites that there's also 301 redirects. But I can not find any official information that http requests no long work. Please, let me know whether I have an option to continue work with http requests or SSL now is mandatory Thanks Max Vlasov

2 2

Facebook's HHVM performance sprint retrospective highlights MediaWiki gains
by Ori Livneh 13 Jun '15

13 Jun '15

Facebook's HHVM team just completed their first performance lockdown, which they spent focusing on the performance of open-source PHP frameworks under HHVM. The achievement which they chose to highlight in their blog posts is a gain of 19% in their MediaWiki performance benchmark, which is – you guessed it – a parse of the Barack Obama article. https://code.facebook.com/posts/902199373155728/-inside-the-hhvm-lockdown/ http://hhvm.com/blog/9293/lockdown-results-and-hhvm-performance

6 7

Fwd: Labs bastions ssh key changes (affects all non-toollabs users)
by Yuvi Panda 12 Jun '15

12 Jun '15

Fyi ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Yuvi Panda" <yuvipanda(a)gmail.com> Date: Jun 12, 2015 6:05 PM Subject: Labs bastions ssh key changes (affects all non-toollabs users) To: <labs-announce(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Hello! In the ongoing effort to make labs more reliable, we're upgrading Labs' bastion hosts to Debian Jessie, and disabling NFS on them all. This means two things: 1. On Monday June 15th 12:00 UTC, the ssh fingerprint of the labs bastion (bastion.wmflabs.org) will change, and all active connections via it will drop momentarily. The new keys are available at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:SSH_Fingerprints/bastion.wmflabs.o… 2. Other bastion domains (bastion2.wmflabs.org, bastion3.wmflabs.org) will stop working then. I've been privately emailing people who have been using those, and I'm pretty sure I got them all. 3. No more NFS on the bastion hosts, which means your current home directory contents there will be 'missing'. They can be recovered for you by a labs admin, but you shouldn't be having things in there anyway... https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T95924 is the underlying task for this. Thanks -- Yuvi Panda T http://yuvi.in/blog

1 0

Search and accents
by Lars Aronsson 12 Jun '15

12 Jun '15

This is a suggestion to change search, so it ignores postfix accents. Russian dictionaries (including Wiktionary) use accents to indicate stress on syllables, but these accents are never seen in plain text. In Russian Wiktionary, the verb бороться has the inflected form боритесь (imperative, plural), which does not have an entry of its own, but appears in a fact box (table) of inflected forms. However, since this is a dictionary, the word in the box is written with an accent: бори́тесь https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/бороться (I do realize that it would be possible to add redirect entries for all such inflected forms, but this has not been done in ru.wiktionary.) Searching for бори́тесь (which nobody would do) finds the relevant page, https://ru.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=бори́тесь but searching for боритесь (the normal thing) does not find the relevant page, https://ru.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=боритесь Note that Unicode doesn't contain accented versions of Cyrillic letters. Instead, the accent is made by suffixing a separate accent sign. $ echo "и" | od -c 0000000 320 270 \n $ echo "и́" | od -c 0000000 320 270 314 201 \n -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

2 1

etherpad.wikimedia.org upgrade on Monday 2015-06-15
by Alexandros Kosiaris 12 Jun '15

12 Jun '15

Hello everyone, On Monday UTC morning, the software powering etherpad.wikimedia.org, etherpad-lite, will be upgraded to version 1.5.6-2 from 1.4.1-3. This upgrade sets us back on track with etherpad-lite releases. Changelogs for the interested are here: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/blob/develop/CHANGELOG.md The reason for this heads up is that after the upgrade, users will have to force a full refresh in old pads they revisit in order to clear the browser cache. Otherwise in some revisited pads, a corrupted interface will show up with a message about a missing Cookie. The sequence for this is highly dependent on the browser. Ctrl+F5, F5, Command+R depending on browser/OS does the trick most times. Refer to your browser documentation for an accurate shortcut if you don't already know it. Regards, -- Alexandros Kosiaris <akosiaris(a)wikimedia.org>

1 0

Selecting a preview slide for a PDF
by Pine W 12 Jun '15

12 Jun '15

When creating thumbnails I've been successful at selecting the particular frame of a video to be shown as the thumbnail. Is there a way to do something similar, to show a particular page of a PDF as the thumbnail in an article? Thanks, Pine

2 2

Audio/video updates: TimedMediaHandler, ogv.js, and mobile
by Brion Vibber 11 Jun '15

11 Jun '15

I've been passing the last few days feverishly working on audio/video stuff, cause it's been driving me nuts that it's not quite in working shape. TL;DR: Major fixes in the works for Android, Safari (iOS and Mac), and IE/Edge (Windows). Need testers and patch reviewers. *== ogv.js for Safari/IE/Edge ==* In recent versions of Safari, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft's upcoming Edge browser, there's still no default Ogg or WebM support *but* JavaScript has gotten fast enough to run an Ogg Theora/Vorbis decoder with CPU to spare for drawing and outputting sound in real time. The ogv.js decoder/player has been one of my fun projects for some time, and I think I'm finally happy with my TimedMediaHandler/MwEmbedPlayer integration patch <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/165478/> for the desktop MediaWiki interface. I'll want to update it to work with Video.js later, but I'd love to get this version reviewed and deployed in the meantime. Please head over to https://ogvjs-testing.wmflabs.org/ in Safari 6.1+ or IE 10+ (or 'Project Spartan' on Windows 10 preview) and try it out! Particularly interested in cases where it doesn't work or messes up. *== Non-JavaScript fallback for iOS ==* I've found that Safari on iOS supports QuickTime movies with Motion-JPEG video and mu-law PCM audio <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/217295/>. JPEG and PCM are, as it happens, old and not so much patented. \o/ As such this should work as a fallback for basic audio and video on older iPhones and iPads that can't run ogv.js well, or in web views in apps that use Apple's older web embedding APIs where JavaScript is slow (for example, Chrome for iOS). However these get really bad compression ratios, so to keep bandwidth down similar to the 360p Ogg and WebM versions I had to reduce quality and resolution significantly. Hold an iPhone at arm's length and it's maybe ok, but zoom full-screen on your iPad and you'll hate the giant blurry pixels! This should also provide a working basic audio/video experience in our Wikipedia iOS app, until such time as we integrate Ogg or WebM decoding natively into the app. Note that it seems tricky to bulk-run new transcodes on old files with TimedMediaHandler. I assume there's a convenient way to do it that I just haven't found in the extension maint scripts... *== In progress: mobile video fixes ==* Audio has worked on Android for a while -- the .ogg files show up in native <audio> elements and Just Work. But video has been often broken, with TimedMediaHandler's "popup transforms" reducing most video embeds into a thumbnail and a link to the original file -- which might play if WebM (not if Ogg Theora) but it might also be a 1080p original which you don't want to pull down on 3G! And neither audio nor video has worked on iOS. This patch <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/217485/> adds a simple mobile target for TMH, which fixes the popup transforms to look better and actually work by loading up an embedded-size player with the appropriately playable transcodes (WebM, Ogg, and the MJPEG last-ditch fallback). ogv.js is used if available and necessary, for instance in iOS Safari when the CPU is fast enough. (Known to work only on 64-bit models.) *== Future: codec.js and WebM and OGVKit ==* For the future, I'm also working on extending ogv.js to support WebM <https://brionv.com/log/2015/06/07/im-in-ur-javascript-decoding-ur-webm/> for better quality (especially in high-motion scenes) -- once that stabilizes I'll rename the combined package codec.js. Performance of WebM is not yet good enough to deploy, and some features like seeking are still missing, but breaking out the codec modules means I can develop the codecs in parallel and keep the high-level player logic in common. Browser infrastructure improvements like SIMD, threading, and more GPU access should continue to make WebM decoding faster in the future as well. I'd also like to finish up my OGVKit package <https://github.com/brion/OGVKit> for iOS, so we can embed a basic audio/video player at full quality into the Wikipedia iOS app. This needs some more cleanup work still. Phew! Ok that's about it. -- brion

3 2

Please help a patch not to become two years old
by Ricordisamoa 11 Jun '15

11 Jun '15

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/67588 needs love. Less than 2 days left! Thanks in advance.

9 11

← Newer
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Older →

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

Wikitech-l June 2015