Ian Weller’s free software blog » 2009

Archive for February, 2009

A status update on the Fedora wiki

February 25th, 2009

First, props to Infrastructure for making an important change to the MySQL database running our Fedora Project wiki. We needed to reconfigure the database to index shorter terms (like ‘F11′ and ‘git’), and we got that done recently. Thanks to all involved!

Second, if you’re interested at all in our efforts for reorganizing the wiki, read this post by Susan Lauber, one of our most active gardeners.

Springboarding off of her paragraph on moving user pages, I’ve had to protect [[Template:Userpage]] from editing by other people. I don’t like to do this in the least—what I want to be able to do is to leave the page open for editing so that people can improve it. However, people have apparently not been reading the directions well enough and they’re putting their own user page content at that page instead of putting it on their own user page. Those who want to see improvements to that template should discuss them on its talk page.

The only times I’ll protect a page on the wiki is that if it is edited incorrectly so many times that it becomes tiring to revert it and correct the user. We don’t protect even the Main Page from editing unlike websites such as Wikipedia and many others because we just don’t have issues with vandalism due to requiring a user with a signed CLA.

I want to recognize all the people from #fedora-docs who have helped others and all of those who are double checking other wiki edits in their spare time. Keep in mind that if you have any questions relating to the wiki, #fedora-docs and fedora-wiki@lists.fedoraproject.org are always willing to give suggestions. Carefully consider asking for suggestions when creating new pages or new sections of the wiki. The main effort of wiki gardening is to make the wiki a place where people can actually find useful information in a sane way.

(And I’ve realized I haven’t been keeping up with writing the wiki tip of the week. I need to do that.)

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List of colleges

February 11th, 2009

Current list of colleges I’m very interested in:

Boston University
Oregon State University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Kansas

Recommendations?

Tags: college, education, ohgodfourmoreyears | 13 Comments »

Somebody fix this.

February 10th, 2009

My sister came up to me with a Fedora predicament™ today. She was attempting to play this file (a .asx file) in a media player.

It wouldn’t work. What a surprise!

Since it looked like it might be something that would actually refer to another file, I threw it in curl just to see what would happen.

[ianweller@kupenblagster ~]$ curl http://realvideo.acinet.org/asxgen/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv.asx
<ASX Version = "3.0">
   <ENTRY>
      <REF HREF = "mms://64.94.25.81:1755/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv"/>
      <REF HREF = "http://64.94.25.81:80/Eng/27-1021.00.wmv"/>
   </ENTRY>
</ASX>

Also interesting: what happens when you try and curl the http:// url? You get a 404 not found error. However, when playing the file with MPlayer, the video plays. Hmm.

So, I decided I should run -dumpstream from MPlayer on my slice and allow her to download and watch the video from there. We click on the .wmv link, and a dialog asks us to search for some plugins to play this file. Hmm, OK, we find the plugins, it installs relatively quickly. How nice!

Totem’s Firefox plugin tells us that it can’t play the file. I don’t remember the error off-hand, but an updated install of Fedora 10 on that same file should yield the same error.

So I ask: why doesn’t this work, and what can I do (that’s within my realm of ability—read: not much) to help make this work?

Tags: closedsourcenonstandardjunk, fedora, video | 5 Comments »