Anyone Can Edit

T-Mobile has recently released a new version of their customer site. At a first glance, it looks like a vast improvement over the old one. The interface is much more friendly and slick, just for starters.

I own a G1. Today, I logged into the customer site and was doing a bit of tweaking on my services. I change my plan just fine, then proceed to the services section. Apparently, my “G1 Plus Service” (unlimited mail, messaging, web, etc) is no longer offered, and I’ll have to select the “T-Mobile G1 Unlimited Web + Unlimited Messages” service. Same price, so no big deal. This is where their UI fails.

I can’t seem to select the “Unlimited Web + Unlimited Messages” service by itself, it wants to select both that and the “Unlimited Web” service automatically. The point in this was to reduce my monthly bill, not raise it over redundant services…

I think the article pretty much speaks for itself: “Coming Soon: Adobe Flash on Android, WinMo and WebOS“.

All I can say is: about time! We’ve been dealing with rumors about flash on Android since the G1 launch. Nobody has given us anything concrete until now. Granted, I’m not a huge fan of using flash, but it will certainly make the browsing experience even more rich.

I was just doing some housecleaning over at enwiki; deleting some old subpages, etc. Turns out someone welcomed my former bot back in March (shows how often I take notice of enwiki).

Ended up being a sockpuppeteer, but whatever. Looking back, I don’t think anyone slapped a {{welcome}} template on me back in ‘05 :) The history indicates the template has been around since July 11, 2004. Funny, a lot of the original wording has survived to this day:

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

Those words have pretty much remained unchanged since the first revision. And hell, “How to edit a page”, “How to write a great article” and the monolithic “Manual of Style” have been included links since the first version. Some things on Wikipedia never change.

Anyone who has worked with MediaWiki can tell you that the maintenance scripts are not the most-maintained bits of code. Most of them still work, at least to some degree, but there are certainly bugs that need fixing, and the code is rather outdated and certainly not flexible to improvements. I decided to embark on this with the filing of bug 19133. The following bit is copied from the project page on MediaWiki.org:

The overall goal of this project is to improve the overall situation of the maintenance directory. Right now, things are unorganized, undocumented and do not follow any real standard. As a result, scripts are hard to maintain and support. The maintenance-work branch aims to fill the following goals:

• Standardize – All supported maintenance scripts should follow the standards outlined in the official docs. In addition, scripts should follow MW coding conventions with variable naming
• Documentation – All maintenance scripts should have a proper description, as well as documentation of all parameters. In addition, appropriate code documentation needs to exist for the auto-generated code docs.
• Cleanup – Some scripts are outdated, these need to be clearly marked as such or removed.
• Bugfixing – There’s a short list of filed bugs for maintenance scripts. Some of these can be easily fixed while we’re already under the hood.

It would be nice at some point to have all of this clean & standardized to a point where an extension like Maintenance can work without major drawbacks. In addition, the rewrite is not looking to work with any of the following:

• The update/install process. Tim was looking at a rewrite/cleanup here eventually, and I’m not looking to step on toes.
• Database abstraction. Where quick fixes can be done, they will be integrated. However, the maintainers of the different database ports should be on top of fixing broken SQL for their interfaces.

So that’s that. I’ve got a decent number of things done so far (commits), and I hope to be finishing this sometime in the coming weeks. I linked the page above (and here it is again) where all the information about the branch and transition process can be found. I would love to get some solid input from fellow developers and third-party users about likes/dislikes of the new plan, things that can be improved or fixed, et cetera.

On a completely unrelated note: I had Unix training at work today. The training consisted of an hour discussion about vi and a handout of the entire vi man pages. Great tips, but hardly relevant to my job’s usage of Unix.