deskthority

Tomorrow, Sunday 11 May, I'll be upgrading the wiki software. Expect some downtime.

Oh noes — it might end up looking Wikipedia :(

I like the version of MediaWiki we have now, if Wikipedia's is the alternative. No upgrade would ever solve any the things I don't like about MediaWiki. (Wikipedia doesn't even have the Preview tab any more when editing — what retard removed that?)

There exist backups, right?

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Wikipedia doesn't even have the Preview tab any more when editing — what retard removed that?

Too much damn foolish "simplification" going on in user interfaces these days. My own favourite is Google Image Search's relegation of the show size button – its most useful and therefore endangered feature – to a submenu consisting of just one item. Bravo, fellas. Bra. Vo.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Oh noes — it might end up looking Wikipedia

I like the version of MediaWiki we have now, if Wikipedia's is the alternative. No upgrade would ever solve any the things I don't like about MediaWiki. (Wikipedia doesn't even have the Preview tab any more when editing — what retard removed that?)

I've already checked the update on a test environment, it looks almost the same. Those wikipedia experiments are separate extensions which we don't use. The preview tab is actually a setting, you can turn it on or off. Having it turned on like now though means there are two preview systems. But I won't touch the setting.

Upgrade completed. Let me know if you find any problems.

It's working, but extremely slowly … did you put the wrong oil into the gearbox?

Should be fixed now. Its cron system produced slow php errors due to an old phpBB extension, causing it to relaunch the cron task endlessly, eating up all file descriptors. Should be faster than before now, due to more aggressive xcache and file caching.

It's not a speed demon, but it was limping along. Seems to have slowed down hugely within the last few minutes.

More of the same errors. cPanel has a shell fork bomb protection setting which lowers the number of open files to 100. Mediawiki launches "cron" jobs from page visits which is stupid, and had a lot to rebuild because the update cleared the cache. cPanel thinks mediawiki is attacking the server. I increased the open file limit to 200 and turned it into a proper cron job.

Oh, the good old "use visitors as crond" approach =)

Muirium wrote:Too much damn foolish "simplification" going on in user interfaces these days.

What was nice about classic Mac OS (System 7.1 upwards — that's as far back as I go) is that it didn't feel simplified, so much as it just worked.

It wasn't all roses, though. The big problem I had was only having TeachText, which didn't support multiple open documents, which remained a pain until I swapped it out with SimpleText, which support multiple documents but lacked a Window menu; Apple didn't get around to adding a Window menu to the Finder until, what, 9.1?

These days, that feeling of "just works" is gone — nothing either works or makes sense. You don't get the best of both worlds — you don't get either. I think the whole industry collectively ran off the rails years ago, and is just spiralling into bigger and bigger piles of stupid. It seems to a be a heady combination of being different just to "prove" you've actually done anything, obsessive copying without thinking, and complete and utter cluelessness.

It's like when the first E series Dell Latitudes came out, and Dell were so desperate to prove it was all new/save money that the nice smooth grease-resistant plastic surface was replaced with a textured one that was horribly grease-stained in 20 minutes. People are clawing at being different to the extent that every lesson learned to date is thrown away. (Except when it comes to Razer — another company, another new switch, another opportunity to copy the SMK tactile that was lost.)

The latest Latitudes have finally moved all the status LEDs where you can't see them, undermining one thing that Latitudes have got right for years.

My old D600 remains one of the best-designed laptops I've ever seen. It's just a pity that the D series had such horrible keyboards.