Mediawiki gets reviewed

Posted on November 30th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Wikimedia’s new biggest fan is named Sean Michael Kerner, and he’s
published about it in NewsForge, an online OS journal.

http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/04/11/22/1750202.shtml?tid=137

Kerner is dutifully critical, calling the documentation “somwhat
‘dispersed’,” that tweaking skins “involves a bit of effort,” and wishes
for an interface for automatic backups of the database, and “more granular
control of users and permissions in one master dashboard”.  But he ends
with embarrassingly high praise:

“Downloading, installing, and running MediaWiki for my own purposes has
only enhanced my admiration for both the wiki and the WikiMedia
Foundation. It’s not only easy to use, it’s also easy to install and
deploy. In the true spirit of the open source community MediaWiki is a
shining example of what open content collaboration is all about.”

I guess he read [[m:Things we wish people would say about us]] before
sitting down at his keyboard.  Oh, he also offered to help with the
documentation.  Whatta guy.

Mediawiki gets reviewed …

0 comments.

The Last Days of History

Posted on November 29th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

“Most works of contemporary history do not  last long… for the material available to the writer is seldom complete.” — Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his introduction to The Last Days of Hitler

The amount and breadth of material immediately available to the historian is increasing with leaps and bounds.  Soon it will outstrip the single writer’s capacity to process it — once biofeeds and realtime audio and vide of events, from a variety of angles and perspectives, becomes commonplace material for same-day news reports, we will have a very different problem on our hands.

History has traditionally benefitted from the bottleneck Mr. Trevor-Roper acknowledges in the quote above, despite his apparent lament.  The benefit has been, that when only one or two people sit down with a limited quantity of material, they of necessity must fill in the gaps and construct a storyline out of the fabric at hand.  The result puts the story into history, providing a narrative that others can parse, learn from, remember and pass on.  It may not be perfectly true, but it is useful.  Writers from different schools consciously present different versions of what might have happened; students learn that multiple views of history exist, but these differences are presented via a finite number of distinct views, each with well-defined supporters and detractors.

When the bottleneck becomes a firehose, chaos threatens instead — thousands of writers with shared access to 15 hours of live footage and 50 pages of written/spoken testimonials of a 10-minute scene (from the personal recorders of a hundred passers-by).  Each writer extracts a different story and tone from the available material, and passes that on. 

Perhaps more interesting, is that historians will be in a position to write seminal works of history — presumably lasting fixtures of historical analysis — the very year a major event takes place.  Then only lack of perspective will keep works of history from its dustbin..


And in time there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free from taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.   – E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

0 comments.

Jihadist rants, uncensored and in English

Posted on November 28th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: null.

If you want to see the world through some disturbing and deeply tinted glasses, there’s always Jihad Unspun, a flashy site featuring columns by proudly pro-terrorist journalists, and others by Americans (like Steven Backus, professor of English at a university in Minnesota).


Here’s an exceprt from an article explaining how recent beheadings of captives by terror groups in the middle east jibes with the dictates of the Koran.  There are some one-liners in here that would have seemed like hilarious MadLibs five years ago.



Seymour Hersh revealed that young Iraqi boys were sodomized and shrieking while… being filmed as souvenirs for the friends and relatives back at home. When the Pentagon showed the pictures and videos, implicit references were made to executions and Necrophilia… If this were not an American phenomenon, why else did Arnold Schwarzenegger recently abolish Necrophilia in California?  The abuse is not confined to Abu-Ghraib [1]. 


Beheading a handful of captives is far less painful than being tortured to death as acknowledged by Nick Berg’s father. Even… degrading sexual torture can be worse than beheading. However, that only applies to those who have some degree of self-respect and honor. Sexual abuse inflicted on Lyndie England is unlikely to constitute punishment but rather a kind of titillation… Islam is indeed very different from the secular fanaticism of ‘freedom’!


Phew. Maybe someone can market this site as a diet drug.

0 comments.

Sorry about your missing posts. Manila sometimes gets hungry like that.

Posted on November 26th, 2004 by metasj.
Categories: %a la mod.

In Frassle, reload works, but that may not work in Manila. I haven’t
tried it recently enough to know. If content editors don’t click
release, they can get back in to edit the post. [Wow. I can’t get to
the text box in Netscape 7. Forgot about that bug with the
special text area & Netscape. You wouldn’t consider turning that
off, would you? It’s one of the features somewhere in one of the
editor’s menus.]  –RCE [rogue content editor]

Would that mean turning off the special text area for all
browsers?   It works fine for Firefox, I think.  The
trouble with turning /off/ that feature is that it is the one reason I
started using Manila in the first place - relatively simple
size-changes, table-insertion, etc.  As long as I’m giving that
up, I may as well switch to a more stable platform.  –SJ

0 comments.

CrimeThought SingleSpeak

Posted on November 25th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Cameo writes about Understanding and InterCapping ThoughtCrime.  I wonder if my cap is inter enough to keep me safe?  I only want to live free for another twenty years; after that my dynasty will be safely ensconced in the hills and the System can have my drained post-upload corpse.  Here you can see it being modelled by my midwestern Middle Eastern friend Ayman.


Protecting thoughtcriminals since 1999

“>


 

0 comments.

Wikitools for fun and excitement

Posted on November 25th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: chain-gang.

There are some delightful new tools for wikipedaholics, though full-scale social tools are still nowhere to be seen.  Six degrees of Wikipedia is cool, and the live RC is a real joy.  What I want to see now is a Wikiclippings service that shows me all recent changes that match a certain string.  What do you want to see? 

Wikitools for fun and excitement …

0 comments.

Contrib Eds can’t edit posts

Posted on November 24th, 2004 by .
Categories: %a la mod.

Not even their own. Wah! –j

This seems to be the case… how odd! Maybe it’s just an interface bug, and if you could hack the URL appropriately, you could edit your own posts. In any case, content-editors can edit all existing news items. –sj

what about now? –guest

0 comments.

What Contributing Editors have Access to

Posted on November 24th, 2004 by .
Categories: popular demand.

It looks like all we can do is log in and create posts. I don’t see editorial links on older posts and most of the editors menu is missing. I’ll bet I can’t knock this post live. Contributing editors have the power to assign categories, so perhaps you should let us know what they mean…



Choose the category that you think is most appropriate.  Just don’t use the awful “Mr. Ed” category which I can’t find a way to expunge.  +sj


Apparently, contributing editors can’t edit their own posts, either, but content editors can. As for bylines… all contributing editors seem to have the same byline, so please add your byline by hand at the end of your posts.  –j + sj

0 comments.

Edit this blog!

Posted on November 24th, 2004 by .
Categories: metrics.

Now you can sign into my blog as a guest editor, and create your own posts. Sign in like so:



email:  guest  [@t]  googlish  d|o|t  com
pwd:    guest


Now you should be able to create news items (though they won’t immediately be live; bear with me here).  Sforza!

0 comments.

Visitor tracking via Google tools

Posted on November 24th, 2004 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Though I’m panning Manila these days and planning to switch asap, one neat thing about it is the ease of setting up separate main-page and other-page skins, so it is easy to add a counter to everything but the main page to see how many visitors click through at least once.  Right now I’m using g-ads stats to check that (the most useful aspect of those dang unreliably-matching buggy ads). 

Visitor tracking via Google tools …

0 comments.

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