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How can I get data on all the dams in the world? Use Wikidata

September 1, 2020 / / 1 Comment

During my first week at Newspeak house while explaining Wikidata and Wikibase to some folks on the terrace the topic of Dams came up while discussing an old project that someone had worked on. Back in the day collecting information about Dams would have been quite an effort, compiling a bunch of different data from different sources to try to get a complete worldwide view on the topic. Perhaps it is easier with Wikidata now?

Below is a very brief walkthrough of topic discovery and exploration using various Wikidata features and the SPARQL query service.

A typical known Dam

In order to get an idea of the data space for the topic within Wikidata I start with a Dam that I know about already, the Three Gorges Dam (Q12514). Using this example I can see how Dams are typically described.

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Creating new Wikidata items with OpenRefine and Quickstatements

July 8, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Following on from my blog post using OpenRefine for the first time, I continued my journey to fill Wikidata with all of the Tors on Dartmoor.

This post assumes you already have some knowledge of Wikidata, Quickstatements, and have OpenRefine setup.

Getting some data

I searched around for a while looking at various lists of tors on Dartmoor. Slowly I compiled a list that seemed to be quite complete from a variety of sources into a Google Sheet. This list included some initial names and rough OS Map grid coordinates(P613).

In order to load the data into OpenRefine I exported the sheet as a CSV and dragged it into OpenRefine using the same process as detailed in my previous post.

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Using OpenRefine with Wikidata for the first time

July 7, 2020 / / 2 Comments

I have long known about OpenRefine (previously Google Refine) which is a tool for working with data, manipulating and cleaning it. As of version 3.0 (May 2018), OpenRefine included a Wikidata extension, allowing for extra reconciliation and also editing of Wikidata directly (as far as I understand it). You can find some documentation on this topic on Wikidata itself.

This post serves as a summary of my initial experiences with OpenRefine, including some very basic reconciliation from a Wikidata Query Service SPARQL query, and making edits on Wikidata.

In order to follow along you should already know a little about what Wikidata is.

Starting OpenRefine

I tried out OpenRefine in two different setups both of which were easy to set up following the installation docs. The setups were on my actual machine and in a VM. For the VM I also had to use the -i option to make the service listen on a different IP. refine -i 172.23.111.140

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Minecraft Java mod using Bukkit / Spigot

May 28, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I have owned Minecraft Java for several years, but despite being a software developer, I have never looked into creating a mod, until now! This is certainly a different topic compared with my regular blog posts, but as always, I hope it will help someone somewhere.

I stumbled upon a video by one of the fastest-growing Minecraft YouTube channels (Dream) in which he quickly demonstrates creating some mods from suggestions in comments. My journey starts here, and with the fact that I can see an org.bukkit.event.Listener class imported.

This post should serve as a guide that works today, and I also now have a template bukkit mod on GitHub that you may find useful, as all Bukkit templates that I found were years out of date. However, perhaps I should have been looking for Spigot templates! Figuring all of this out only took an hour or so, and at the end of it, I was able to create a mod that left me with a world which you can see below.

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Browser extension to clear your Facebook advert interests

May 26, 2020 / / 31 Comments
Extension logo

At the end of 2018, I wrote a blog post that included some JavaScript code to quickly remove all of your Facebook advert interests from this settings page. This has started to become one of my more popular posts and so I decided to take another pass at the project and convert the code into a browser extension.

The new extension provides the user with an extra button on the ad interests page that will automatically go through and click all of the remove buttons for all of the interest tabs that appear on the top bar. The UI isn’t the best, but it is functional!

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mediawiki-docker-dev v1 rewrite

May 22, 2020 / / 2 Comments

Back in 2017 at the Wikimedia Hackathon, I played around with Docker and docker-compose in relation to MediaWiki and testing with multiple setups at once while developing, meaning multiple PHP versions, web servers and databases. My original slides can still be found here.

Since then mediawiki-docker-dev evolved into less of a testing system and more of a development environment, allowing the use of a master replica DB setup, easily swappable PHP versions, debugging and more. The project on GitHub currently has 40 stars, 38 forks and has seen 17 people contributing back.

Over the past couple of years, developer productivity and development environments have been a big discussion area. The Wikimedia technical conference in 2019 had the main topic of Developer Productivity. There have also been a few efforts in a few directions trying to figure out what is best for the majority of people. These include local-charts (Kubernetes based environment) and MediaWiki-Docker (simple docker-compose based environment).

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Adding git bash to Windows terminal

May 19, 2020 / / 2 Comments

I just saw a tweet saying that Windows terminal is now generally available, so I had to give it a try.

After downloading from the store and booting up I realized that only powershell, cmd and wsl are listed by default (and also Azure which I don’t really care about).

Clicking around the UI a little there is a settings menu item that opens a JSON configuration file in notepad. This configuration file defines the behaviours of the terminal including the profiles that can be loaded.

After a bit of searching and documentation reading I came up with this profile which I now use for my git bash installation (I hope it can help you too).

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Reducing Java JVM memory usage in Containers and on Kubernetes

May 19, 2020 / / 4 Comments

For a while I have been running a Wikibase query service update script for WBStack, which is a Java application on a Kubernetes cluster. Part of that journey has included the updater using all available memory, hitting into the kubernetes memory limit and being OOM killed. The title of the post is a little verbose, but I wanted to include all of the keywords that might help people find the answers to the memory issues that I was running into.

Before getting into my weeds, if you want the answers head straight to https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2017/04/04/openjdk-and-containers/

UPDATE: This blog post was written with Java 8. Java 10+ now automatically recognizes memory limits and enforces them. https://www.docker.com/blog/improved-docker-container-integration-with-java-10/

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WBStack 2020 Update 2 (May)

May 17, 2020 / / 1 Comment

WBStack is now in its 7th month with 76 user accounts who have created 226 MediaWiki sites running Wikibase, of which 145 are currently online (81 deleted sites). 295,000 edits have now been made in total, which is an increase of 95,000 in the last month, which roughly equates to 2 edits a minute for the month.

The most active site is currently UniTest which is “a Wikibase sandbox with information about the research ecosystem”. Second and third come School of Design and Hercules Demo.

Screenshot of the WESO UniTest Main Page, 17 May 2020
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2019 Year Review

April 19, 2020 / / 0 Comments

A year or so ago I decided to start making yearly posts reviewing one of my online list. I’m a bit late this year considering it is April already, but it’s been one rollercoaster after another during the start of 2020.

Blog stats

  • 23,940 page views, up from 12,374 (93% increase)
  • 16,276 visitors, up from 8,578 (89% increase)
  • 11 posts, down from 25
  • 101 comments, up from 28

It’s a shame I wrote less, but I did go travelling for 6 months of the year, so it makes sense.

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