I had a blast attending DebConf '17 in Montreal, and presented about my efforts to bring back MediaWiki into Debian. The talks I went to were all fantastic, and got to meet some amazing people. But the best parts about the conference was the laid-back atmosphere and the food. I've never been to another conference that had food that comes even close to DebConf.
The following is a letter I just mailed to the Boy Scouts of America, following President Donald Trump's speech at the National Jamboree. I implore my fellow scouts to also contact the BSA to express their feelings.
25 July 2017
Boy Scouts of America
PO Box 152079
Irving, TX
75015-2079
Dear Boy Scouts of America,
Like many others I was extremely disappointed and disgusted to hear about the contents of President Donald Trump’s speech to the National Jamboree. Politics aside, I have no qualms with inviting the president, or having him speak to scouts. I was glad that some of the Eagle Scouts currently serving at high levels of our government were recognized for their accomplishments.
However above all, the Boy Scouts of America must adhere to the values of the Scout Law, and it was plainly obvious that the president’s speech did not. Insulting opponents is not “kindness”. Threatening to fire a colleague is not “loyal”. Encouraging boos of a former President is not “courteous”. Talking about fake news and media is not “trustworthy”. At the end of the day, the values of the Scout Law are the most important lesson we must instill in our youth – and President Trump showed the opposite.
The Boy Scouts of America must send a strong message to the public, and most importantly the young scouts that were present, that the president’s speech was not acceptable and does not embody the principles of the Boy Scouts of America.
I will continue to speak well of scouting and the program to all, but incidents like this will only harm future boys who will be dissuaded from joining the organization in the first place.
Sincerely,
Kunal Mehta
Eagle Scout, 2012
Troop 294
San Jose, CA
On this day 48 years ago, three astronauts landed on the moon after flying there in a Saturn V rocket.
Today I spent four hours building the Lego Saturn V rocket - the largest Lego model I've ever built. Throughout the process I was constantly impressed with the design of the rocket, and how it all came together. The attention paid to the little details is outstanding, and made it such a rewarding experience. If you can find a place that has them in stock, get one. It's entirely worth it.
The rocket is designed to be separated into the individual stages, and the lander actually fits inside the rocket. Vertically, it's 3ft, and comes with three stands so you can show it off horizontally.
As a side project, I also created a timelapse of the entire build, using some pretty cool tools. After searching online how to have my DSLR take photos on a set interval and being frustrated with all the examples that used a TI-84 calculator, I stumbled upon gphoto2, which lets you control digital cameras. I ended up using a command as simple as gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download -I 30 to have it take and save photos every 30 seconds. The only negative part is that it absolutely killed the camera's battery, and within an hour I needed to switch the battery.
To stitch the photos together (after renaming them a bit), ffmpeg came to the rescue: ffmpeg -r 20 -i "%04d.jpg" -s hd1080 -vcodec libx264 time-lapse.mp4. Pretty simple in the end!
This is the second year I haven't been able to attend the Wikimedia Hackathon due to conflicts with my school schedule (I finish at the end of June). So instead I decided I would try and accomplish a large-ish project that same weekend, but at home. I'm probably more likely to get stuff done while at home because I'm not chatting up everyone in person!
Last year I converted OOjs-UI to use PHP 5.5's traits instead of a custom mixin system. That was a fun project for me since I got to learn about traits and do some non-MediaWiki coding, while still reducing our technical debt.
This year we had some momentum on MediaWiki-Codesniffer changes, so I picked up one of our largest tasks which had been waiting - to upgrade to the 3.0 upstream PHP_CodeSniffer release. Being a new major release there were breaking changes, including a huge change to the naming and namespacing of classes. My current diffstat on the open patch is +301, -229, so it is roughly the same size as last year. The conversion of our custom sniffs wasn't too hard, the biggest issue was actually updating our test suite.
We run PHPCS against test PHP files and verify the output matches the sniffs that we expect. Then we run PHPCBF, the auto-fixer, and check that the resulting "fixed" file is what we expect. The first wasn't too bad, it just calls the relevant internal functions to run PHPCS, but the latter would have PHPBCF output in a virtual filesystem, shells out to create a diff, and then tries to put it back together. Now, we just get the output from the relevant PHPCS class, and compare it to the expected test output.
This change was included in the 0.9.0 release of MediaWiki-Codesniffer and is in use by many MediaWiki extensions.
The City of San Jose recently approved a proposal to put surveillance cameras on street lights. The proposal is extremely vague, and concerning for those fighting to defend our civil liberties.
Similarly, there has been much recent discussion about adding surveillance cameras to De Anza College’s parking lots. One petition currently circulating has accumulated over 700 signatures. The benefits of being able to track down bad drivers who commit hit and runs, or provide comfort for those walking alone late at night seem beneficial, but come at a steep, Orwellian, cost.
I don’t like writing…or at least I didn’t a year ago. I had heard so much about how “good journalism is more important now than ever” and decided to try it myself.
I’ve been on the La Voz team for two quarters now, and can tell you that statement is patently false: we always need good journalism.
Even at a small place like De Anza College, there’s plenty of events going on that need increased transparency and exposure, whether student government or police actions on campus. Or students that deserve recognition for outstanding academics or athletics.
