IRC office hours/2010-02-03

Philippe|Wiki: evening folks

[8:01pm] Philippe|Wiki: how are ya'll tonight?

[8:02pm] eekim joined the chat room.

[8:02pm] eekim: hi everyone

[8:02pm] Philippe|Wiki: hey eekim

[8:02pm] eekim: sorry i'm late

[8:02pm] Philippe|Wiki: so far it's just you and me Everyone else is asleep, I believe

[8:02pm] eekim: ah, excellent

[8:03pm] Philippe|Wiki: so im going to take half a second and pour myself a drink. brb

[8:03pm] eekim: another one?!

[8:04pm] Philippe|Wiki: hey, the ones at the place were very little

[8:04pm] Philippe|Wiki: and i really only had one of them plus a beer.

[8:05pm] eekim: i'm looking forward to seeing you drink when we don't need to be at office hours

[8:06pm] Philippe|Wiki: i'm not sure you're old enough.

[8:06pm] eekim: possibly not

[8:06pm] Philippe|Wiki: or that your heart can handle it.

[8:06pm] eekim: almost certainly not

[8:07pm] Philippe|Wiki: lol

[8:07pm] eekim: so there's been lots of great discussion on strategy

[8:07pm] eekim: and we're in the process of forming a strategy task force

[8:07pm] eekim: would love to hear what people think

[8:07pm] • Philippe|Wiki nods. i haven't looked at that strategy task force page today. i should do that.

[8:09pm] • Jamesofur looks around to see if anything is happening

[8:09pm] eekim: hi Jamesofur

[8:09pm] • Jamesofur waves

[8:09pm] Jamesofur: howdy

[8:09pm] eekim: have you been following strategy wiki?

[8:10pm] Jamesofur: a bit, not as much as I would like

[8:10pm] Jamesofur: I keep getting sidetracked when I go there and not seeing everything I went to see

[8:10pm] Philippe|Wiki: hey Jamesofur

[8:10pm] Philippe|Wiki: there's a lot to it

[8:10pm] Jamesofur: aye there is

[8:10pm] eekim: best starting point is the recommendations: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Recommendations

[8:10pm] Jamesofur: some that looks very interesting and some that makes me cringe

[8:11pm] eekim: what makes you cringe?

[8:11pm] Philippe|Wiki: ...other than my sentence structure? My mother tried to look at the wiki and was horrified at my writing.

[8:11pm] eekim: i won't let my mom near the wiki

[8:11pm] Jamesofur: Mentifisto keeps yelling at me for my writing....

[8:12pm] Philippe|Wiki: Yell back.

[8:12pm] Philippe|Wiki: it works with eekim

[8:12pm] Philippe|Wiki: but what made you cringe?

[8:12pm] Jamesofur: I can't remember exactly what it was... I like some of the more "community" oriented ideas but I kept running into what I would consider a bit TO much "turn wikipedia into myspace"

[8:12pm] eekim: lol

[8:12pm] eekim: ah, the social features

[8:13pm] Jamesofur: liquid threads is...... I am still reserving judgment on Liquid Threads, and I hate vector with a passion

[8:13pm] eekim: liquid threads has been controversial, but i'm surprised to hear about vector

[8:13pm] Philippe|Wiki: really? I rather like vector.

[8:13pm] eekim: that's been relatively uncontroversial on strategy

[8:14pm] Philippe|Wiki: what about it do you hate? I know it breaks the sysop tool scripts...

[8:15pm] Philippe|Wiki: i had to disable it on en so i could use twinkle. god knows i can't admin without twinkle

[8:15pm] Jamesofur: yea it does which is annoying but I can always switch back (which is what I tend to do when I'm not trying to test things). To be honest? It is hard to explain, there is the fact that I seem to get random errors on Chrome but they tend to be VERY random. Alot of it is it just tends to bother me

[8:15pm] Jamesofur: I think part of it is actually it is almost TOO clean

[8:15pm] Jamesofur: it always makes me think I am missing things

[8:15pm] Philippe|Wiki: yeah, you know, i've heard that.

[8:16pm] Jamesofur: like there are buttons that I should have but can't find?

[8:16pm] Philippe|Wiki: people think it looks too slick, and that there must be "hidden" stuff

[8:16pm] eekim: would be interesting to hear if you feel that way in six weeks

[8:16pm] Philippe|Wiki: do you think that's just an acculturation issue?

[8:16pm] Jamesofur: It looks almost like it is the "clean" version with all the advanced stuff removed (even when the advanced features aren't removed)

[8:17pm] Jamesofur: that is my question, I don't know for sure I've asked myself the same question

[8:17pm] Jamesofur: though I've gone back and tried it a couple times I always end up going back

[8:17pm] Mike_lifeguard: Jamesofur, eekim: Actually, I agree with eekim here. I hate LQT too, but vector is much better than monobook, and I look forward to porting my scripts to that skin in the future.

[8:17pm] Philippe|Wiki: when twinkle works there, i'll be a happy guy

[8:18pm] eekim: hi mike_lifeguard

[8:18pm] Jamesofur: Mike_lifeguard: what is your concern with mono?

[8:18pm] Jamesofur: *issue

[8:18pm] Mike_lifeguard: monobook is a relic of 2002 and should die a horrible horrible death

[8:19pm] Mike_lifeguard: it's ugly, it's bloated, the code is a mess, it doesn't make sense as an interface

[8:19pm] Mike_lifeguard: sadly, it is the least bad skin we have (until vector gets out of beta)

[8:20pm] Mike_lifeguard: it's fairly appalling how terrible MW skins are (at least the included ones)

[8:20pm] Mike_lifeguard: Why aren't we including skins written by third parties? There've been some great ones

[8:20pm] eekim: we definitely lack good designers in our community

[8:20pm] eekim: although to be fair, it's also hard to skin MW

[8:21pm] Mike_lifeguard: That's very true. I'm *hoping* the usability initiative sets up a better base to work from for future skins

[8:21pm] Mike_lifeguard: instead of forking Skin.php each time (I gather that's how it has been done up to now)

[8:21pm] werdna: oh, an office hours.

[8:21pm] eekim: hey werdna

[8:21pm] werdna: Or is it just a regular discussion?

[8:22pm] eekim: office hours. and a regular discussion.

[8:22pm] Mike_lifeguard: werdna: when are you doing office hours?

[8:22pm] werdna: I'm always on IRC

[8:23pm] werdna: "always"?

[8:23pm] Jamesofur: even when he isn't actually on IRC

[8:23pm] eekim: do y'all know if using a stock templating system for MW has ever been considered?

[8:23pm] Jamesofur: not that I know of..

[8:24pm] Mike_lifeguard: I'm not sure what you mean... including stock templates in the wiki so you don't have to grab them from enwiki or whatever?

[8:24pm] Mike_lifeguard: or are we still talking about skins

[8:24pm] eekim: talking about templating engines (such as Smarty)

[8:24pm] eekim: for skins

[8:24pm] • Mike_lifeguard looks to werdna

[8:24pm] werdna: Templating would be much nicer than our existing skin system

[8:25pm] werdna: that's for sure.

[8:25pm] werdna: The resources have never been allocated to reinvent our skin system

[8:25pm] eekim: wondering whether there are scaling issues with using something out-of-the-box (such as Smarty or whatever WordPress uses)

[8:26pm] eekim: or perhaps no one's had the time to explore this?

[8:26pm] Philippe|Wiki: this conversation is so far over my head that it's not even funny

[8:27pm] werdna: nobody's ever been assigned to the project, nor gone ahead and done it voluntarily

[8:27pm] werdna: I think it's just never been considered high-priority

[8:27pm] werdna: It's more a matter of internal cleanliness and openness to extensions than one of functionality

[8:27pm] Mike_lifeguard: Brianna once blogged about an all-SVG interface that made calls to the API

[8:27pm] eekim: thx, werdna

[8:28pm] Mike_lifeguard: I always thought that was sexy

[8:28pm] eekim: Philippe|Wiki, MediaWiki is hard to skin

[8:28pm] • Mike_lifeguard searches her blog...

[8:28pm] Philippe|Wiki: that part i got

[8:28pm] • Philippe|Wiki thought mike.lifeguard said "BRION" blogged, and got srsly concerned when he searched "her" blog

[8:28pm] eekim: the skin interface needs to be rewritten, and we could potentially use an open source templating engine to do that

[8:28pm] eekim: which would potentially make it easier

[8:29pm] Mike_lifeguard: no, Brianna, the *other* one all Wikimedians love

[8:29pm] eekim: not certain; I looked closely at the skin interface a few years ago. it's hairy.

[8:29pm] Mike_lifeguard: http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/135/the-prettiest-mediawiki-youve-ever-seen !!

[8:30pm] Mike_lifeguard: DO WANT! Using the API is an interesting step (forward?) in “skinning” the wiki. I’d love to see this method developed further and deployed on Wikijunior in particular. The monobook skin (and indeed all the other skins we currently have) are simply not suitable for presenting kid’s books; we need a more versatile method of presentation – perhaps this is it.

[8:30pm] Mike_lifeguard: — Mike.lifeguard · 1. September 2008, 12:36

[8:30pm] eekim: wow, that SVG interface is pretty cool!

[8:31pm] eekim: Mike_lifeguard, i think you're right. Socialtext has done something similar with its API to make some of its wikis more accessible to targeted groups

[8:31pm] Jamesofur: Mike_lifeguard: wow hmm interesting

[8:32pm] eekim: in fact, one of the Perl sites was actually pulling all of its content from a Socialtext wiki through their API and was using a Perl MVC framework to display the content

[8:32pm] Brian_S joined the chat room.

[8:32pm] Brian_S:

[8:33pm] werdna: eekim: Perl's MVC stuff is nice, but Perl applications are a pain in the ass to deploy.

[8:33pm] eekim: werdna, definitely

[8:33pm] werdna: Perl insists on rejecting the idea of putting scripts in a directory as the sole deployment step.

[8:34pm] eekim: hmm, is that different from the various Ruby and Python frameworks?

[8:34pm] eekim: seems like PHP is the only language that subscribes to scripts in directory as the sole deployment step

[8:36pm] eekim: we're getting a bit sidetracked from strategy

[8:37pm] eekim: any thoughts on the discussion/content on strategy?

[8:37pm] werdna: yes, perhaps for another time.

[8:37pm] Philippe|Wiki: i'm not so sure... deployment is strategy, right?

[8:37pm] Philippe|Wiki: maybe not for the foundation, but for the movement

[8:37pm] eekim: have people seen the proposal for a strategy task force? http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Strategy

[8:39pm] werdna: Does the Strategic planning task force have its own strategic planning process? Does that process have its own task forces?

[8:39pm] Jamesofur: so basically a task force to summarize the task forces?

[8:39pm] eekim: Jamesofur, that's definitely one role

[8:39pm] Philippe|Wiki: More than just summarizing, though that will be a start...

[8:40pm] eekim: filling in the gaps and writing the draft plan are the other roles

[8:40pm] Philippe|Wiki: but also in writing the plan for the movement as a whole

[8:40pm] eekim: werdna, it's a bit meta, yes

[8:40pm] eekim: in all seriousness, the strategy task force would largely follow a process that previous task forces followed

[8:40pm] eekim: there would be some changes

[8:40pm] eekim: improvements based on our experience

[8:41pm] eekim: for example: more members

[8:41pm] eekim: also: totally self-selecting (i.e. no selection committee)

[8:42pm] Philippe|Wiki: and, of course, the mandatory beatings.

[8:42pm] eekim: that's philippe's job

[8:43pm] Philippe|Wiki: finally, a task i'm suited to

[8:43pm] Philippe|Wiki: werdna's first.

[8:44pm] eekim: better to deliver than receive

[8:45pm] Philippe|Wiki: hey, what's the ustream everyone's watching?

[8:45pm] Philippe|Wiki: ooooh, it's the new facebook thingy

[8:45pm] Jamesofur: sorry slightly distracted with a proxy attack

[8:45pm] Philippe|Wiki: the C++ thing?

[8:45pm] Jamesofur: that looks cool!

[8:46pm] Philippe|Wiki: it's over my ehad too

[8:46pm] Philippe|Wiki: head*

[8:47pm] werdna left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 245 seconds)

[8:48pm] Mike_lifeguard: What is the big hassle with deploying perl applications?

[8:49pm] eekim: unlike php, the perl, python, ruby, and java frameworks generally require significantly more configuration to deploy

[8:49pm] eekim: it's not that big of a deal (imo), but it's definitely not drag-and-drop like MediaWiki or WordPress installations

[8:50pm] Philippe|Wiki: ahem, mediawiki isn't exactly drag and drop

[8:50pm] Philippe|Wiki: it was a PITA for me.

[8:50pm] Philippe|Wiki: But i didn't have MySQL or anything

[8:50pm] eekim: the installation?

[8:50pm] eekim: ah, right

[8:51pm] Philippe|Wiki: I did it mainly as an academic exercise to see how hard it really was.

[8:51pm] Philippe|Wiki: In the end, I then did one of the "hosted" MW things, and figured out how much easier that was

[8:51pm] eekim: MediaWiki has gotten much better over the years

[8:51pm] eekim: MediaWiki installation I meant to say

[8:51pm] eekim: (although MediaWiki too )

[8:51pm] Mike_lifeguard: Philippe|Wiki: I was about to rave about how easy MW is to setup

[8:52pm] Jamesofur: aye, it is actually very easy now

[8:52pm] Philippe|Wiki: My final conclusion was: it's POSSIBLE for a moron like me to do it, but it involves cussing, gummy bears, and a fifth of vodka.

[8:52pm] Mike_lifeguard: "It truly is drag-and-drop"

[8:52pm] Philippe|Wiki: in fairness, the vodka would have been consumed anyway.

[8:52pm] Mike_lifeguard:

[8:52pm] Jamesofur: Philippe|Wiki: everything is better with candy and liquor though so that isn't a fair statement

[8:52pm] Mike_lifeguard: svn checkout is definitely the best way to deploy it though

[8:52pm] Jamesofur: exactly

[8:52pm] Mike_lifeguard: I loathe packaged MW

[8:52pm] Philippe|Wiki: fair point, Jamesofur

[8:53pm] Mike_lifeguard: ubuntu manages to mess things up so badly

[8:53pm] Mike_lifeguard: they mess up lots of other web apps too... bugzilla for example

[8:53pm] eekim: i avoid packaged web apps when i can

[8:53pm] • Mike_lifeguard stab stab stab

[8:54pm] Philippe|Wiki: Mike_lifeguard: what do you think of the new bugzilla?

[8:54pm] Mike_lifeguard: love it

[8:54pm] Mike_lifeguard: want the skin badly

[8:54pm] Philippe|Wiki: I've been hearing that a lot.

[8:54pm] Mike_lifeguard: my bugzilla is so fugly :S

[8:54pm] Philippe|Wiki: I think pdhanda struck a home run with that

[8:54pm] werdna joined the chat room.

[8:54pm] werdna left the chat room. (Client Quit)

[8:56pm] eekim: few more minutes until office hours are over

[8:56pm] eekim: any final thoughts?

[8:58pm] Mike_lifeguard: oh, this was actually office hours?

[8:58pm] • Mike_lifeguard stumbled on it by accident

[8:58pm] Philippe|Wiki: <grin> 'twas

[8:58pm] eekim: 's okay. was quieter than usual.

[8:58pm] Philippe|Wiki: evening office hours are often a little slow

[8:58pm] Mike_lifeguard: When I aim to come, I can't, but when I'm just idling...

[8:58pm] Philippe|Wiki: Mike_lifeguard: you've made the last three or four :)]

[8:59pm] eekim: okay, time to call it a night

[8:59pm] Mike_lifeguard: yeah, but I didn't mean to! honest!

[8:59pm] eekim: Mike_lifeguard lol

[8:59pm] Philippe|Wiki: well, keep not meaning to

[8:59pm] Mike_lifeguard: eekim: past my bedtime too

[8:59pm] eekim: thanks for coming, everybody!

[8:59pm] eekim: have a good night!

[8:59pm] • Mike_lifeguard sleeps

[8:59pm] Philippe|Wiki: someday, Mike_lifeguard, you'll skip one... if you put your shoulder into it and really try

[8:59pm] Philippe|Wiki: see you tomorrow, eekim

[8:59pm] eekim: see ya Philippe

[9:00pm] Philippe|Wiki: nite Mike_lifeguard, Jamesofur, werdna

[9:00pm] Jamesofur: nighty