I failed.

After talking with Jesus M. Rodriguez for an hour or so, we both determined that FUSE is not the right way to go about this for what I want to accomplish. The only thing we were planning to use FUSE for so far was downloading the wiki pages; everything else would be done with helper scripts.

We discussed things like “pull” and “commit”. It started to sound like a bastardized VCS. So we wrote a bastardized VCS. :)

Introducing mw: a command-line program with subcommands like “fetch” and “commit” to work with MediaWiki installations. I spent all day creating the framework for commands and all sorts of things, and ended up creating the init and fetch commands to start a mw repo and fetch some pages.

Currently: useless. Future: promising. I’m hoping that I can get the committing portion ready to roll within the week, and have fetch get all the pages of wikis and categories soonish.

Some key awesomeness: attempts to merge instead of just giving up (haha, you suck, MediaWiki), unified diffs, logs, and anything you really feel like doing.

Clone it now and read the README and HACKING:

git clone git://github.com/ianweller/mw.git

Edit: If you want to discuss this with me at FUDCon tomorrow, by all means do. Ping me on IRC to see where I’m at. :)

After three days of FUDCon, and two-and-a-half full days of travel, I’m bushed. Yesterday I spent the day at my grandparents’ house where my parents were also staying for the weekend.

I want to thank Max Spevack again for sponsoring my travel and expenses. I had a wonderful time. :)

Unfortunately, I did not get any pictures. Oh well…

I’m staying in the Anachronistic Hotel (read: Sheraton) where there’s no wireless Internet, and the wired Internet is $10 for 24 hours. However there’s a Starbucks on the first floor. Madness!

Met Max Spevack, Paul Frields, Karsten Wade (I think… I’m horrible with names) and quite a few others and went to go get food at a seafood place. (Another name I can’t remember. Damn, damn, damn!)

For the record: airplanes aren’t my thing.

Other than that, FUDCon starts tomorrow. I plan to work the Fedora booth and maybe talk some things over with Máirín about the usability testing stuff, and then do some massive amounts of user testing on Friday. I think our main subjects will be people who come by the Fedora booth — although don’t let that scare you away! We have a USB Key Creation Station. Because we can.

So, my idea is to have some random users/developers at FUDCon do some random usability tests based on what they are in the Fedora Community — a more seasoned user, a kernel developer, or just someone thinking about getting Fedora — and at the same time probably pull over some random people in #fedora and ask them to do the same thing, and report results on Saturday.

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? I’d love to hear what you think — and if you want to help out, that’s even better. :)

Tomorrow I’m going to pick up a good laptop from one of my friends. It’s a Pentium 4, as opposed to my eight-year-old Pentium 2 HP OmniBook 900. He says he doesn’t use it because it’s bulky. He’s silly. I’ll be taking my other laptop for fun, too.

Other than that, I’m just packing clothes, money, and necessities. Any other recommendations from those of you who have gone?