Hello world, and welcome to my corner of the web. This is where I write words about what I'm working on, and post photographs of things I've seen.
I'm a Software Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation,
and so of course my personal website is a wiki (running on MediaWiki).
In my spare time I volunteer with WikiClubWest to work on Wikimedia projects, mostly around my family's genealogy and local Western Australian history (especially to do with Fremantle).
I try to keep up with issues on all the things I maintain (but usually fail), as well as listing the software that I use.
I try to find time to work in my workshop on various woodworking projects. Recently, that's been focused on building a metalworking bench, and will soon be about a set campaign-style drawers that's in the works. I've a good-sized workshop because I don't have a car.
Travel features in my life, not because I really hugely want to go elsewhere but because I just do — and also because then I can do some interesting mapping on OpenStreetMap, and take photos for Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes I ride my bike to get there, or walk, but more often it's planes, trains and ferries.
Today we added a map to to the Gawler history wiki, using Cargo. So far it's been a good way to find places that have been given quite incorrect coordinates (usually from dodgy address geocoding I think).
A big thing that keeps me from enjoying Flickr more is the inability to find duplicate files. The API doesn't support any sort of checksum, so for years people have tried to get around it by adding 'machine tags' of the form checksum:md5=1ed002a1483f4ae019470e3c3ffbfc7e. This sort of works, but there's no telling how long the tag search index takes to update — so if you upload a new file, it may or may not appear in search results for days, so any search for it will fail.
I started surveying the America's Cup Walk plaques along Mews Road. There are fewer than I'd thought (ten so far), although I've not yet found a source that says how many there were originally (or when they were installed; I'm assuming it wasn't actually 1987, but maybe just a few years later?).
I've started the process of moving mwcli off GitHub. There are plenty of reasons for not liking GitHub, but really I'm just keen to keep wiki things together on Wikimedia's GitLab (and Phabricator for issue tracking). I figured it's better to move it before I keep working on improving the tool
I’ve been on a bit of a kick lately replacing MySQL (and equivalents) with Postgres. I harbour this dream of only maintaining a single database stack, silly as that sounds.
Normally I’m pretty conservative with what I run, jog, and sit on, but I cloned Clara’s and my other wiki and did a database migration to PostgreSQL over the long weekend, and it… worked? We run MediaWiki stock without extra plugins, but I’m still impressed how there’s been no appreciable difference in functionality or performance. I can now also use my little library of Postgres scripts for backups, and only have one DB on our jailed FreeBSD environment.
It will a tough time for pedestrians and cyclists until the new traffic bridge is finished in just under 2 years time – but if you doubt it will be worthwhile, just have a look at the third picture below and couple that with the bridge shuddering every time a vehicle goes past!
And this last pic is just to prove that I was there on the last day.
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