Evan Prodromou: 15 Thermidor CCXV
It's been a few days since I posted on my blog -- since I left
Montreal for Taipei and
Wikimania 2007. My time has been
upside-down and backwards as I've traveled around to the other side of
the clock and a day into the future, and I've just been insanely busy
with other work.
My flight to Taipei was dreamy. I travelled enough last year to
get Air Canada's "silver" frequent-flier level, which earned me a
couple of system-wide upgrade certificates. They came in handy, since
I bumped up to business class on the leg between Montreal and
Vancouver, and then to the "Premier Laurel" class on the
EVA Air codeshare between Vancouver and
Taipei. That was first class across the Pacific Ocean, and man,
it's the only way to fly.
Jimmy Wales was on the same plane (but back in business
class...), so we got to chat a bit and we shared a taxi to the
conference site. Jimmy's really fun to talk to -- it's always nice
talking to another entrepreneur who's passionately dedicated to Free
and Open Content.
(We were in line for customs together, too, and I tried to peek at his
passport to find out his date of birth, over which there is
some confusion. But he had his thumb over the day
(intentionally...?), and all I got was "Aug 1966", which everyone
agrees on anyways. Dang! My personal theory is that Jimmy was born on
6 June 1966 and uses 8 Aug 1966 instead to avoid the demonic stigma.)
The conference centre we're in is great -- a really big, clean, modern
place. It's nice when we're inside, but Taipei in August is muggy and
hot like a laundromat in rural Mississippi. I find myself rushing
between buildings.
tags: wiki wikimania2007 taipei evaair jimmywales travel
IM IN TAIPEI HACKING UR DAYS
I came in a couple of days early to participate in the
Hacking Days
event. This is a pre-conference meetup for MediaWiki developers and those who love them. The meetup was really
unstructured and fun because of it, although there were a few points
of uncomfortable silence when people stopped talking and we all
realized we had 14 more hours of meetings and not much left to say.
There's also a real tension between the conference organizers, who've
encouraged non-developers to come to Hacking Days, and the core
developers who really want to just be left alone and get some work
done. This year the 2-day event was split into "Hacking Days" and
"Hacking Days Extra", with the first being invite-only and the second
being open to all.
I think it's a tension that needs to be resolved -- if outsiders
aren't invited to Hacking Days, we just need to say that and live with
it. We shouldn't let people think they're going to participate and
then cut them out. That's a bait-and-switch tactic and it's unfair. I
think that there's a need for an open-attendance MediaWiki conference;
I also think that MW is a big enough piece of software that
third-party conference organizers would be eager to make an MWCon
work. And core developers could get hefty fees for coming to talk!
tags: wiki mediawiki hackingdays wikimania2007
Some graphs from the benchamrks: for 0, 4, 8, and 16
KiB files, for up to one million files of each size.
onedir puts all files in the same directory,
subdirsofN puts N files per directory, and
subsubdirsofN has two levels of directories,
the leaf directories getting N files each.