Ian Weller’s free software blog » Teaching Open Source

max paid me $1 USD to do this

Ian Weller — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:12:38 +0000

mongoDB: whoa.

Ian Weller — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:21:34 +0000

Yesterday, I timed inserting metadata about 172,201 wiki edits from the Fedora Project wiki into a local SQLite database with SQLAlchemy and Python. The process took about 8 minutes, and used up over 600 MB of RAM and did not stop using the disk the entire time.

Obviously not the sort of database engine we want running datanommer, which will have that many rows in the MediaWiki table alone.

So I set up a mongoDB locally. Rebuilt the RPM that’s available in this review request, packaged up pymongo, and rewrote my Python script to use mongoDB.

Not only can the process of inserting my JSON dump of wiki edits be written in 10 lines of code, but it took less than 6 seconds to do.

Wow.

What I want for my 18th birthday

Ian Weller — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:07:11 +0000

~~Somebody to implement a “mw status” command in mw so I don’t have to think about it~~
Somebody to fix this dastardly python-mwlib bug once and for all
Somebody to try and reproduce this lordsawar bug
(oh, and a pony :) )

Edit: I did the first one myself :)

Community statistics in Fedora and beyond — and where it’s going from here

Ian Weller — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:40:04 +0000

During my summer internship with Red Hat’s Community Architecture team, my main assignment was to build an automated platform (which eventually was built into Fedora Community) for generating and displaying statistics within our community.

Needless to say, it didn’t get done. :) But it did get a healthy start, and even though the last couple of months I haven’t been extremely active in Fedora, it’s still alive and well.

This week, I started working on a research paper for my independent study at my high school. This independent study just happens to be continuing work on the project that I started a couple of months ago. The paper will include mostly primary sources of what people have said on Stats 2.0’s discussion page on the wiki, but I would love to talk with people on IRC about what they think is important to track so we can analyze not only the growth of the Fedora, but the growth of the community.

It doesn’t end with the one-semester independent study. I am presenting on this subject at UTOSC 2009. In this presentation I will discuss many of the variables of a free software community that can be tracked, and even provide example code and where to get started on automatically tracking them.

So, there’s the state of the Stats 2.0. Would you like to speak with me on IRC sometime about what you think is important to be tracked?

WordPress upgrade

Ian Weller — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:51:50 +0000

Just performed a clean upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4 since I badly needed one. Let me know if anything’s broken.

Blog post to come later today on Fedora’s Statistics 2.0, my upcoming UTOSC speaking role about it, and my independent study revolving around it as well.

POSSE, day 1 (evening)

Ian Weller — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:52:41 +0000

Got a temporary badge for the Red Hat offices. I can open doors!
Participated in discussions on the history of free software/open source/good stuff and the sort of “network(ing) operations” of free software hacking
Ate lunch (om nom nom)
Pestered people massively over IRC
Ran a camera (video and still)
Triaged email and sat on my butt, as well as floors and desks
Ate a damn good pizza

POSSE, day 1 (afternoon)

Ian Weller — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:23:15 +0000

I’m really only writing this to see if it gets up on the planet in time before we go on to the next subject ;)

Hello, POSSE! :D

POSSE, day 1 (morning)

Ian Weller — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:53:29 +0000

no sleep is CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL >:(

In other news, Delta messed up my flights but they fixed it all without any hitches other than my parents getting worried, and I met Mel. All’s cool! :)