Jamie Thingelstad

Started down the path of leaving Quicken after 15 years and moving to You Need A Budget. I’m hopeful!

I just backed Aaron Swartz Documentary - The Internet’s Own Boy on Kickstarter.

Strong hour on my spin bike. Felt good. Legs had a lot left if them. My Vitamix treat after the spin.

Trying to abandon Quicken and make the leap to just using my bank website like the kids do these days. Terrifying.

Trying to use the Paychex website and filled with rage over “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.”. Way to “upgrade”…

I wanted to find an easy way to show the current size of the MediaWiki job queue on WikiApiary. When you make changes to templates that are used on thousands of pages the queue can get backed up and it’s nice to have an easy way to keep an eye on this. The job queue is even one of the data points WikiApiary tracks and graphs. But I wanted something that was as close to realtime as possible. It wasn’t hard to do. This solution uses the External Data (see WikiApiary usage page) extension.

First we need to get the data. Let’s start by calling the siteinfo API method. The magic words are used to make this generic, and this should result in the right URL. If you are using a protocol-relative server setting you will have to modify this.

{{#get_web_data: url={{SERVER}}{{SCRIPTPATH}}/api.php?action=query&meta;=siteinfo&siprop;=statistics&format;=json
  | format=JSON
  | data=jobs=jobs}}

Now External Data has done the work and the value is stored for us. Now we get it by simply calling:

{{#external_value:jobs}}

I like to put that in a style so it’s big and obvious.

If you’re thinking ahead you’ll now be saying “Yeah, that’s neat, but it will be cached in MediaWiki for a hours!”. Yes, it will be unless you add a __NOCACHE__ directive to the page and use the MagicNoCache extension. This extension allows you to disable the MediaWiki cache on a page-by-page basis, very handy.

If you wanted to use this in multiple places you could even put an <onlyinclude> around it and transclude the job queue size in other pages, however I would be cautious about that if using the __NOCACHE__ directive as well.

Thanks to my buddy Kent for turning me onto The Gaslight Anthem. Started with The ‘59 Sound. Great album! #music

As you reflect on the gun bill vote yesterday, it’s worth watching Larry Lessig’s TED talk “We the People”.

Explosion at Boston Marathon. Know only that Jim Bernard is fine.

On related news, the Boston Marathon iPhone app is really, really bad. Unfortunate. Such potential.

Digging some ideas of putting Panic Status Board panels together with data from WikiApiary. Hmmm…

I make it a routine task to request removal from any and all catalogs that show up in our mailbox. Sometimes there is a bit of detective work to get removed from them, they don’t go out of their way to make it obvious. This made me wonder why email is required to have an unsubscribe method clearly displayed while catalogs and regular mail don’t have any requirement.

There should be a requirement for unsubscribe information to be presented plainly and near the mailing label. In fact, how about a URL printed for each mailing address that unsubscribes that address? Heck, I might even use a QR code for that!

There is something so beautiful about running water and snow.

Espresso and snow.

Linode NextGen: RAM Upgrade ← Love to see Linode doing great stuff. My server is migrating now.

Sure snow in April isn’t exactly welcome, but it is pretty. 📷