My issues with the MediaFire desktop app

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MediaFire LogoMediaFire (read about me on wikipedia) is a file hosting, file synchronization, and cloud storage service. MediaFire was first founded in 2006 but in 2014 it did something that really caught my eye. They increased their baseline storage service from 100GB to 1TB and reduced the price down to just $2.50 a month.

With the price beating every other easy to use cloud storage service out there I jumped on the deal (which was even cheaper when committing to a whole year) and started using it for my backups and data archives.

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Quick overview of Orain

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Orain is a community-driven, not-for-profit wiki network that I help to maintain.

It runs Mediawiki and has been around for the past couple of years. Over the years it has been hosted on VPSs from multiple different providers and its technical layout has changed massively from each provider. Below I will try to summaries it’s current layout! This will include:

  • The machines / VPSs – ( how many there are, what they are doing and why )
  • The management of these – ( using ansible )
  • The configuration of Mediawiki – ( how Orain is running the ‘wikifarm’ )

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Github release download count – Chrome Extension

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The Github IconGitHub tracks the number of downloads for all assets (files) that are attached to a release, but GitHub currently makes it very hard for users to get at this information. The number of downloads is currently only accessible through the API.

I noticed this many months ago when wondering how many people were downloading the new C++ version of Huggle. At the time I started coming up with some odd little script that I could set running somewhere checking the download counts and updating a static list, I even thought about just uploading the build files to some other site that tracked this information.

A few days ago I took my first look at developing chrome extensions for a referencing tool for Wikidata, and thus today I thought, why not just make an extension for chrome that adds the download counts to the GitHub releases page!

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The importance of a strict comparison

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A cloudNow if you have ever come across issues caused by non strict comparisons before then this is going to seem like a piece of cake, but remember, everyone makes mistakes.

Strict equality compares two values for equality where the values must also be the same type. Non strict or loose equality compares values while not caring about their type. Strict equality is almost always the correct comparison to use, and if it is not used when it should be many unexpected things can happen.

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Mediawiki Developer Summit 2015

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The MediaWiki Developer Summit is an invitation-only event with an emphasis on the evolution of the MediaWiki architecture and the Wikimedia Engineering goals for 2015.

It took place on Monday, January 26 and Tuesday, January 27, 2015 in the Mission Bay Center, San Francisco, California.

Overall it was very interesting and a lot of good discussion happened. Again I am writing this post months after the event so sorry for the lack of content.

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Wikimania

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Wikimania 2014 was a 2000+ person conference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and celebration, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. Wikimania is the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where one can discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well … Read more

Wikimania Open Data Weekend

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Wikimania 2014 logoThe Open Data Weekend was fringe event to the Wikimania conference this year. It took place in Frobisher Room One at The Barbican Centre in London on the 5 & 6th of July and was well attended.

The weekend included:

  • Discussion about how open data, specifically Wikidata, is helping the Wikimedia movement as a whole covering its current integration with sister projects such as Wikipedia and Wikisource as well as future integration with these as well as Wikimedia Commons.
  • A general discussion on open data and the philosophy and the Semantic Web technologies.
  • Exploring various tools and applications that run and depend on the data stored within Wikidata and Wikimedia projects.

Unfortunately I am writing this post in 2015  and various details have fallen out of my mind… Luckily there is an EtherPad that contains lots of notes!

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Zürich Wikimedia Hackathon

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This year the Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Zürich, Switzerland from the 9th to 11th May 2014. The organization of the event was great, from lanyards and badges that included a USB memory stick to a city map and a ticket for public transport, Wikimedia Switzerland had prepared fantastic hackathon. More than 150 developers, engineers, sysadmins, … Read more

Spaghetti Open Data

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Spaghetti Open Data is made up of a group of Italian citizens interested in the release of public data in open formats, in order to make it easy to access and reuse. Starting in 2010 they have had yearly conferences. I was lucky enough to be invited to their conference this year (SOD14) as the keynote speaker … Read more

Media Hack Day 2014

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The Media Hack Day is an annual event held at Axel Springer | Plug & Play Accelerator in Berlin. The event for March 2014 can be found on hackerleague.org. I attended representing the Wikidata API. Also in attendance were Axel Springer, storyful, Der Spiegel, sanoma, watchmi, Getty Images and embed.ly. It was in a great location, the food and rinks were … Read more