News (blog)

From Organic Design wiki

17 February 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 17 February 2007 at 03:20
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Ampersand articles are working again ;-)[edit]

The long-standing problem of not being able to have ampersands in article names has been fixed at last! It was actually not the XmlWiki code at all, but our mod-rewrite rule for allowing Friendly URL's. The rule makes all requests for URL's in friendly format get transformed into the long format of .../wiki/index.php?title=pagename, but that means that any ampersands would be treated as query string separators and would never reach the PHP runtime environment.

A simple change of the rule to the semi-friendly format of .../wiki/index.php/pagename fixes the problem. It works because this semi-friendly format is descriptive enough for apache to determine that the index.php script should handle the request. That script can then obtain the article name from the full request information in the $_SERVER hash.

See also

13 October 2011[edit]

Posted by Nad on 14 October 2011 at 00:06
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OccupyAuckland begins 15th October[edit]

15 October 2011 is the international day of action for the Occupy movement and United for Global Change events. We are the 99% and it's time for Auckland to join this growing movement.

OccupyAuckland will start with a march from Britomart (get directions) at 3pm on 15 October 2011.

We'll be marching up to Aotea Square (get directions) where our occupation will begin. We'll hold our first general assembly at the occupation to start getting organised.

Spread the word

You are the 99%: its up to you to spread the word. Don't forget to RSVP on Facebook.

Download and print our A4 colour poster or leaflet, or make your own. You can pick up copies and join others postering at Unite, 6A Western Springs Road, Morningside from Mon 10 - Fri 15 October at 7pm. You can poster with wheat paste.

Go to occupyauckland.org for more information.

11 May 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 11 May 2007 at 09:54
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PeerPedia[edit]

Guido Urdaneta, Guillaume Pierre and Maarten van Steen are a team from the Netherlands who are using the current advances in logical overlay networks and DHT technology to design a decentralized system for hosting large-scale wiki web sites like Wikipedia, using a collaborative approach. The design focuses on distributing the pages that compose the wiki across a network of nodes provided by individuals and organizations willing to collaborate in hosting the wiki. Their paper presents algorithms for placing the pages that ensure the capacity of the nodes is not exceeded and the load is balanced, and algorithms for routing client requests to the appropriate nodes.

  • Peerpedia - local article on the general notion of P2P MediaWiki and P2P-LAMP
  • See also Globule, an Open-Source Content Distribution Network

30 June 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 30 June 2007 at 22:25
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Site working in IE[edit]

The problems with the site not rendering in Internet Explorer have been fixed. We all use Firefox, so as the site design evolves it sometimes gets a bit out of kilter with IE.

10 July 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 10 July 2007 at 02:10
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Livelets fixed[edit]

The Livelets extension has been fixed and is now using Mootools for the Ajax functionality. There may still be some bugs to iron out to do with caching.

23 July 2014[edit]

Posted by Nad on 23 July 2014 at 21:41
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Ethereum Genesis Sale starts today![edit]

Ethereum Logo.png
Ethereum is a new crypto-currency that has been under development for the last couple of years lead by Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum is not just another "alt coin" though, it really is the next generation of this paradigm, taking it out of the basic currency role by offering full-scale general purpose distributed application development and testing framework. Ethereum does still have an associated currency aspect called "Ether" (ETH) which performs the important role of "fuel" in the Ethereum network. Distributed applications in the Ethereum network require payments in the form of Ether to fuel every computational step and storage operation on the system.

Bitcoin and Litecoin are often thought of as the gold and silver of the crypto-currencies. To continue with that analogy, Ethereum could be considered as the "oil" of crypto-currency since it plays the role of fuel which can be used for any generic application. Another interesting and important aspect is that Ethereum could help to pave the way towards how a real-world resource-based economy might be implemented, which seems to be the only viable way to transcend the economic bottom-line problem.

Yesterday was a special day for the Ethereum community because the so-called "Genesis Sale" of Ether began. The Genesis Sale is a forty two day period in which Ether is being made available in exchange for bitcoin starting at a rate of 2000 ETH per BTC for the first two weeks and then reducing by 30 ETH each day after that. Ethers are purchased from the Ethereum home page at www.ethereum.org. All the BTC accepted by the organisation for he purchase of Ethers are deposited into a single bitcoin address so that people can easily see how much has been bought so far here. As I write this about twenty hours into the sale over five thousand BTC worth has already been purchased which is over three million US dollars!

See also:

3 June 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 3 June 2007 at 05:59
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Distributed DBMS[edit]

We've been talking about the new up and coming P2P environments with high-level applicational content for years now, but where are they? It seems to me that there's only one obstacle left in terms the components required for this transition to take place in P2P space, and that's a distributed database management system. The first step was moving up from plain file content to more object-like content using metadata overlay networks or semantic overlays, but to have a fully-fledged shift of content from web into P2P we need to be able to use our current applications, and they require the ability to query the data, usually using SQL syntax. Designing a SQL-like P2P space has some extremely difficult obstacles to overcome, but never the less solutions are under development, such as the PIER project and P-Grid which build querying ability into their DHT layer.

Once the P2P space is accessible via SQL, the local peers can requests active content such as PHP or Perl from the network, and execute the code locally which execute their database queries and file IO like usual, but these queries propagate back out into the space to be processed instead of to a local database server and filesystem.

4 April 2007[edit]

Posted by Phalseid on 4 April 2007 at 00:34
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Wikijobs at wikiexpert.com[edit]

Here is a geo-centric list of wiki-based jobs if anybody is interested. Feedback is welcome on how to run these projects through OD, and have it benefit the development of the project. I am thinking about merging wikiexpert.com back into OD, so feedback on that would be appreciated as well. Wikichat.org has proven useful for talking to prospects and clients initially. So enough umbilical cord stuff: here is the baby: http://www.wikiexpert.com/wiki/Job_Board

01 May 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 1 May 2007 at 01:09
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DPL "dpl_clview" column added to database[edit]

The error which comes up when attempting to select uncategorised articles with DPL has been fixed. The error which comes up explaining how to add the new column has a syntax error in it because it contains a double apostrophe which is affected by the wikiparser. Also the DPL documentation regarding the additional column contained errors which I've fixed. The correct syntax for adding the column should be as folows (set prefix_ appropriately before executing it). <sql>CREATE VIEW prefix_dpl_clview AS

SELECT IFNULL(cl_from, page_id) AS cl_from, IFNULL(cl_to, ) AS cl_to, cl_sortkey 
 FROM `prefix_page` LEFT OUTER JOIN `prefix_categorylinks` ON page_id=cl_from;</sql>

This allows queries to select uncategorised pages, for example {{#dpl:category=|count=5}} which yields the following result:

Extension:DynamicPageList (DPL), version 3.3.3: Warning: Skipping bad option for parameter 'category'.


Extension:DynamicPageList (DPL), version 3.3.3: Error: No selection criteria found! You must use at least one of the following parameters: category, namespace, titlematch, linksto, uses, createdby, modifiedby, lastmodifiedby, or their 'not' variants


Extension:DynamicPageList (DPL), version 3.3.3: Warning: No results.

8 May 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 8 May 2007 at 01:54
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NukeDPL extension[edit]

A new special-page extension has been made today called NukeDPL which is based on Brion Vibber's Nuke extension. The original allows sysops to list all new pages created by a particular user or IP address, and delete selected items from the list. NukeDPL uses the same delete-from-list methodology, but allows the list of deletion candidates to be selected by a DPL query.

I used this to remove all the old XmlWiki XML-properties articles, about 1500 of them in all. I did it in smaller sets using the DPL count parameter to test the extension and it seems to work reliably for blocks of around 500 articles or less. The total number of pages went from around 8000 to about 6500, but the good-page-count has remained the same at 2080 because the XML articles contained no wiki links.

All deleted article's histories will be purged from the database (probably by using the SpecialDeleteOldRevisions extension) which should greatly reduce our backup size.