Migrating a wiki from Trac to MediaWiki

I'd set up a Trac installation for wedding planning, instead of using MediaWiki (the system Wikipedia uses, which I already had a couple of installations of) since we wanted both a wiki (venue data, possible honeymoon destinations, guest lists... shut up, it's useful!) and ticket system (useful for tracking things like thank-you notes and being able to assign specific ones to either Liz or myself).

However, Dreamhost doesn't support mod_python, so pages were taking way too long to load. I decided to switch over to MediaWiki for the wiki part and just use my existing Bugzilla installation for ticket tracking. Hence, a new script over on the code page, trac2mw. Our wiki was fairly tiny, so caveat user. I didn't bother having it migrate tickets tickets or attachments, since we didn't have any data there that was worth preserving. The input format, a MySQL XML dump, probably isn't ideal for a lot of people (since Trac runs on SQLite by default.) It does fix up the wiki page syntax (the parts of it we were using, at least), though.


Popular posts from this blog

Sloppy Graph, Sloppy Design

Image
I was spending time trying to fine-tune a graphviz file documenting the call graph of a piece of code and describing some of the critical functions. graphviz isn't really designed for the kind of long node labels I wanted to give it, so it would do things like put nodes in places which made it have to draw arrows reaching clear across the page. Finally I realized that rather than trying to talk graphviz into reordering its nodes, I could just refactor the thing I was graphing so that the flow wasn't so darned convoluted in the first place. Before (image links to full size version): After (image links to full size version): Corollary? If it's hard to get your call flow graph to look pretty, well, the graph isn't the only thing that's ugly...
Read more

Multithreaded Python, extensions, and static data

The GIL The GIL and Context Switching I use Boost.Python to write some C++ extensions for Python. I work on an I/O-bound Python program; Python has a global interpreter lock ("the GIL") which means that in a multi-threaded program, only one thread can be executing code inside the Python interpreter at once. Now, a thread can drop the GIL, and the built-in Python read and write routines do this so that while one thread is doing I/O, another thread can run. However, due to a peculiarity in how the GIL is implemented, 1 even though the actual I/O takes place during system calls that drop the GIL, the need to re-acquire the GIL after every I/O operation was killing our performance. For instance, one of the things that the application does a lot of is logging. Doing the logging synchronously -- as the code is executing and it wants to write something to its log, it needs to wait for the write to the logfile to finish before it can continue going about its business -- turned...
Read more

Maslow's Hierarchy of Engineering Team Needs

Image
Management is the continuation of prioritization by other means. —Carl von Clausewitz Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is the idea that people have an inherent and universal set of priorities. If you don't have enough air to breathe or water to drink, you'd better prioritize solving that problem, or you won't be around for very long to solve any other problems. Once you have that sorted out, you can focus on loftier goals, such as "feeling loved", "experiencing beauty", and "living a meaningful life". Software engineering teams have a similar natural hierarchy, and if you're leading one of them, thinking about the lowest point in the hierarchy where your team is struggling is a good way to decide how to invest your time. This post is also available as a Twitter thread . As the overriding goal of life is to maximize the spread of its genes and ideas, the overriding goal of an engineering team is to maximize the value it creates for ...
Read more