Github repo settings sync, using the Github cli
The number of Github repositories that I end up maintaining in one way or another ends up growing week by week. And keeping all of the descriptions and settings up to date in sync can be painful todo by hand. A little while ago I migrated my addwiki project to use a monorepo, and thus…
Resizing a qemu image root disk partition
Recently I found myself altering some virtual images for loading onto a qemu machine. I wanted to increase the disk space on the root partition, but couldn’t find any straightforward guides. So here is a little guide for future me, and anyone else. Install libguestfs-tools libguestfs is a set of tools for accessing and modifying…
WBStack setting changes, Federated properties, Wikidata entity mapping & more
During the first 3 months of 2021, some Wikimedia Deutschland engineers, from the Wikidata / Wikibase team, spent some time working on WBStack as part of an effort to explore the WBaaS (Wikibase as a service) topic during the year, as outlined by the development plan. We want to make it easier for non-Wikimedia projects…
WBStack Infrastructure
WBStack is a platform allowing shared scalable hosting of Wikibase and surrounding services. A year ago I made an initial post covering the state of WBStack infrastructure. Since then some things have changed, and I have also had more time to create a clear diagram. So it is time for the 2021 edition. WBStack currently…
Twitter bot powered by Github Actions (WikidataMeter)
Recently 2 new Twitter bots appeared in my feed, fullyjabbed & fullyjabbedUK, created by iamdanw and powered entirely by Github Actions (code). I have been thinking about writing a Twitter bot for some time and decided to copy this pattern running a cron based Twitter bot on Github Actions, with an added bit of free…
If you bake 2 lasagnes, and stack them, do you have 1 or 2 lasagnes?
This is the question that I asked a group of around 50 people this evening as part of a food for thought exercise. 37 replied before I decided to write this blog post, and here is a quick summary… The question was “If you bake 2 lasagnes, and then put one on top of the…
VSCode & PHP XDebug from Localhost, WSL2 and Docker containers
VSCode seems to be one of the up and coming IDEs over the last year. I personally switched from Jetbrains IDEs to VSCode fo most of my development work at some point in 2020. Apparently up until now I have avoided running the PHP debugger Xdebug. I had to do a little search around to…
dockerit v0.0.5 (Easier than docker run)
dockerit is a small CLI tool that I have been working on during the start of 2021. It’s intended to make running one off commands and CLI tooling easier in docker. Rather than having to write a long string of parameters for docker run, instead you can just use dockerit. This applies to both CLI…
Programmatically convert Github master branch to main
Back in 2020 Github said that the default settings for new repositories would change. On Oct. 1, 2020, any new repositories you create will use main as the default branch, instead of master Some blog post on Medium Github provided some advice for renaming branches focused around how this can be done in the UI.…
Testing WDQS Blazegraph data load performance
Toward the end of 2020 I spent some time blackbox testing data load times for WDQS and Blazegraph to try and find out which possible setting tweaks might make things faster. I didn’t come to any major conclusions as part of this effort but will write up the approach and data nonetheless incase it is…