Anyone Can Edit

I’ll be attending the Developer’s Workshop in Berlin next month. I’m looking forward to meeting some new faces and spending a few days neck deep in MediaWiki internals. I’ve got a couple of things I’m planning to bring with me that I think people will like.

IdeaTorrent

People keep kicking around the idea of using IdeaTorrent for tracking enhancements to MediaWiki. I’d like to give it a shot so I’m in the process of setting up an instance of it for the Wikimedia community to play with. Hoping to have this ready by Berlin (if their website will stop going down!).

New-installer

In whatever shape it’s in, I plan to show off the new-installer branch to MediaWiki. This is a huge overhaul of not only the installation process itself, but the backend supporting it. I’ve also managed to sneak a long-overdue schema abstraction in, which should help with database maintenance in the future. I would like to have this in a slightly more workable state by Berlin, but I’ll be showcasing what I have nonetheless.

Git Transition/Code Review/Bug Tracking

People like Git. Some people think we should move to Git and rid ourselves of Subversion. I’m of mixed opinions, but I’m always open to trying new things. I’ve been working with Ævar to get a working Git copy of our Subversion repository with all of the metadata intact (or as much as we can preserve). People also are looking at alternatives to using CodeReview/Bugzilla for our tracking systems for code and bugs/enhancements. I’m hoping to have an instance of Gerrit up and running by Berlin as well, so people can toy with that and see what they think.

Wow, I cannot honestly believe I am writing this post today. Who’d have thought I would ever write a post about Magic Jack. For those of you who don’t know, Magic Jack is a VoIP product in the US. Known for their bad commercials and customer complaints, they’re a joke.

In any case, one of their commercials came on a few minutes ago. For some odd reason, I decided to look at their website. It’s actually not half bad. I took a look at their HTML and it’s pretty simple and straightforward. On their homepage, you’ll notice their banner:

Taking a look at their HTML, it would seem this banner isn’t what it seems:

And some of their JS would seem to back that up. Now, page counters are a bit outdated these days. But if you’re going to use a page counter, don’t lie about it. Don’t pretend it’s some indication of how many customers you’ve gained today.

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.