Thank you Thunderbird
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
Thank you #Thunderbird.
The importance of Artemis Fowl
Nearly two decades later, the Artemis Fowl movie is finally happening. It's hard for me to overstate how important Artemis Fowl has been to me. One of my friends asked me if I saw the trailer today and I pretty ecstatically said yes. Artemis Fowl Confidential, a website I registered with back in 2008, sent me an email as soon as it was released. Immediate nostalgia.
I read the original Artemis Fowl sometime in elementary school, by the time the final book, Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian, was released, I had already graduated high school.
Sometime in eighth grade I joined the Wikipedia WikiProject Artemis Fowl - a group of editors dedicated to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Artemis Fowl related articles. I went through the archives and even found the original post, welcoming me to the project. Those were my first friends on Wikipedia...Calvin, Icy, Laptopdude. Miss y'all.
And at some point I learned templates, creating Template:AF Cite Book. Then that turned into the first ever bug I would file in Wikimedia Bugzilla (I still have bug 2700 memorized for some reason).
And then that Wikipedia thing spiraled out of control, and somehow I ended up with an actual, real, job. Definitely due to other things, but just a little bit thanks to Artemis Fowl.
Thanks Eoin, and here's to the next twenty years of Artemis Fowl!
PHP 7 vs HHVM
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
First performance production testing of PHP 7 vs HHVM: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206341#4750994
Looking good so far!
#MediaWiki #HHVM #PHP
Improving quality and maintenance of election result boxes on Wikipedia
I've spent a decent amount of time reading Wikipedia articles about Senate, House, and state races this week. And...there were inconsistencies. Specifically in the election box result templates:
That's what it looked like before I updated the article to use my template instead. There are a few different issues. First, Mike Thompson isn't marked as the incumbent. And second, the total number of votes is wrong - if you do the math, it adds up to 292,091. There are two more cosmetic issues: 1) the % column should go to one decimal point, and 2) the empty turnout field should be hidden since we don't have that data available.
That's the fixed version, that's using my template. So what's different? The main thing that most editors will notice is the amount of wikitext it took to generate my version: {{election box US auto|California|2016|United States Representative District 5|Mike Thompson link=Mike Thompson (California politician)}}. Compare that to what was needed previously. I think it's a pretty big improvement. Oh, and if you set the year to a comma separated list, like "2012,2014,2016", it'll generate all three boxes at once, so it becomes even easier to use.
This will also reduce the maintenance burden significantly. These boxes are copied to other articles, including Mike Thompson (California politician), which is using the wrong styles and missing the 2016 general election entirely, and on United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2016, which actually looks correct!
This is all being generated by a single Lua module called Module:Election box US auto, and a tabular data spreadsheet that's available on Commons. The Lua code isn't the cleanest, but it proves that we can replace things that were manually maintained with smarter templates that do most of the heavy lifting. To the best of my knowledge, this appears to be the first usage of the new tabular data system in English Wikipedia articles. I've updated the California's 1st congressional district through 8th district articles to use the "auto" template so far.
What's next? I'm going to import the MIT Election Data for the US House dataset to Commons so we can start using this in more articles outside of California soon (waiting on bot approval). The only thing that's missing from that dataset is incumbency data - it doesn't indicate whether the candidate was running as an incumbent (so if you know of incumbency data, please let me know!). And once we get the House in good shape, we can move onto the Senate and then state races. Aaaand I've even had someone ask me about expanding this to other countries, which should totally be doable! Anything is possible with Lua+tabular data.
On Jim Acosta
Two weeks ago, CNN Chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta came to my university and received the 2018 William Randolph Hearst Award for his work. I'm not really the biggest fan of CNN, but I've been impressed with Acosta's work, and getting to hear him speak was a real treat. He talked about what he endured at Trump rallies, and after hearing that, learning that his press pass was revoked honestly wasn't that surprising. The only way freedom of the press works is if journalists like Acosta ask the tough questions, and hold those in power responsible.
Here's my favorite clips of the student interviews of Acosta, which happened the day after pipe bombs were sent to CNN headquarters:
I also uploaded a full copy of the student interview, and a full copy of Acosta's speech (which I haven't had time to cut into smaller segments yet).
P.S.: If you ever get the chance to meet him, ask to see his socks, they're great.
New php-excimer profiler
Originally posted on mastodon.technology.
Tim is working on a new profiler for PHP, since there are issues with xhprof/tideways that really aren't worth dealing with...and that we can do better in profiling. He's written up some details on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205059, and there's some initial code in our Gerrit.
I've done the initial Debian packaging at https://salsa.debian.org/mediawiki-team/php-excimer - my goal will be to have it in NEW by the end of the month.
#MediaWiki #profiling #PHP