| If you want to mediocre, MediaWiki is for you! | ||
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+ strong typing |
"Veni, vidi, MediaWiki!" ((BMcC[18-11-46-503]) ⇒ In seige warfare, MediaWiki defeated me)
MediaWiki was like my parents: Because they did bad things to me I did bad things. [fill in the blank] (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
MediaWiki: Mediocrity big time. (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
I have been THINKing about all my complaints about MediaWiki ever since I started using it, 18 May 2020 (+2020.05.18). I now have reconsidered and maybe I have been expecting too much from the MediaWikitechies.
I write web pages which I feel have individual dignity and right-to-life. But MediaWiki is apparently a group groupie thing for producing group groupie websites suck(typo) as Wikipedia, in which all individual contributions are subordinated to the group groupie goal of producing a homogenized mass. And, so far, that is a valid endeavor: The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is wrong: The tower could not be built by a few master structural engineers (who may not even have been able to ride a chariot straight, per Alabama Governor George Wallace's assessment of intellectuals) in peer discourse, respecting each other's boundaries: they needed what I call "a mongoloid hoard" of worker bees to do the heavy lifting.
So too Wikipedia, although, there, outside experts are welcome to "contribute" if they will stay in their place as I was recently (ca. +2022.03.19) peremptorily informed I was not doing when I was misperceived as trying sneak something of historical value into Wilkipedia and one of their self-important volunteers peremptorily explained to me that I was "spam" trying to abuse Wikipedia for personal gain. Mea culpa, kid.
What I had tred to do is to insert individually self-accountable web pages that could stand on their own without the groupie group into a group groupie MediaWiki framework and expect MediaWiki to honor their unique individuality, so that my pages could easily be extracted from the group groupie herd for a different destiny outside the Wikispace, not just to be homogenous homogenized grains of sand contributing to a vast ocean of Wikistuff, going with the current as part of the destiny of the herd. As themselves likely techie zombies I should never have expected the MediaWikitechies to treat frames in a Wiki page as even potentially having the possibility of an independent existence (Who could possibly want anything to be other than the function it was originally meant to serve?).
I wasted a lot of my precious time trying to extract individual web pages from the hoard with a huge ugly script of regular expressions: WB+
It says in the Bible:
"The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay His head." (Matt 8:20)
I was hoping for a social surround which would support the individual (obviously: me), and that is folly. So I will stop bitching about MediaWikishit and bow to a reality I am stuck with. But I, like Galileo, still think:
Eppur si muove.
Just because MediaWiki is bigger than me and I am stuck using it, I do not have to like it: Every person is a judge of the whole world, even if only the opinions of a very few persons with social power matter in any group groupie social formation, and therefore guilty sentences can only be carried out in asbentia. I forget who said it: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple stupidity (aka: ignorance).
+2022.10.16. Yesterday I made a change to my HTML files which seemed to me innocuous: removing some "ID" and "TITLE" attributes. The result was tha the spacing between the date+version stamps and the "Return to TOC" blocks at the bottom of each of my pages disappeared. When I restored these attributes, the problem reverted. It seemed repeatabele. I am not going to try it yet again becaue it's not worth it.
The HTML I originally had (From my MediaWiki days...) I did not understand, so I have implemented changes which while not good, I fail to understand somewhat less. It's like if you took some clothes out of the closet in your bedroom and the dishwasher in the kitchen stopped working but if you put them back the dishwasher worked again. This does not make sense to me but, as I hae long accepted: The computer is bigger than I am. It is disgusting and discouraging. Is it more of what I got stuck with from having originally to use MediaWiki for these pages, or is ita HTML and/or CSS bug or what? I have no idea. but either it is wrong or I am wrong and haven't been able to figure it out, and I am stuck with it.
Here is a link to the Internet Aechive for my earliest captured version of what I did on APtS, from 14 November 2020: here
+2024.02.12. I think I have finally removed the last MediaWiki from this website. I am left with over 1,700 empty "<span>...</span>" span and "<div>...</div>" div tags where I removed MediaWiki classes that were no longer being used. +2024.02.15. Wrong again: I found over 900 instances of « class="reference-text"» which iis another class I do not think is used any longer..
So my website is yet another way not as I would like it to be. Please, my reader, cut me some slack. Thank you. bradmcc@bmccedd.org
I never liked and always had trouble with "strong typing" of variables in computer programming languages.
This day (+2023.05.28), I finally figured it all out: I had an array of arrays and I had been a nice little boy and declared the array as an array of arrays of strings. But I had forgotten I had one program I almost never use where I add an integer to each item in the array, thus giving an array of arrays for strings-and-integers. So the program puked because of a typing error. I finally found my problme due to having tried to be a good little boy, and I changed the array to be an array of arrays of anything. Problem solved after wasting several hours of my precious life.
Second piece of relevant information: My old story about my 3rd line manager, Mr. Richard Herodes, in IBM MVS Development in 1979, who said to me:
"We know you can do the work your way. But what do we do with all the programmers who can't tell an 'L' from an 'LA'?"
What's this about? In IBM System/360 hardware there wer etwo instructions that looked a lot alike. It's been so long ago now hta ti forget but it wa something analogous to this: "LA" meant: Tell me the address of John's automobile. "L" meant: Bring me the automobile at the address wihere John's automibile is. The difference is a couple words on a piece of paper versus 3 tons of metal. In the physical world nobody is likely to confuse these things but in computer programming it's very easy to confuse them. The result wa computer programming bugs that were oftn hard to find. IBM's solution to the problem was to have he rpogrammers write their programs in a "higher level language" wher they could not make such mkistakes.
The higher level language had strong typing: The programmer said that variable "X" would contein a string and variable "Y" eould contain an integer, so if the programmer tried to assign "Y" to "X", the compiler could detect the error and issue a "Type mismatch" error message before the programmer's mistake could cause any trouble in rality.
In other words: "Strong typing" of variables, whatever computer scientists may think of it in the ivory (or silicon) tower, was, for management in the real business world, a maens for trying to keep mediocre progarmmers from screwing up. As Mr. Herodes acknowledged, I was not a mediocre programmer and could tell the difference for myelf. But since the business of business is business, I had to conform to a rule that did not apply ot me for the sake of the organizaiton as a whole. (Acrually, I did not completely have to conform: None of the mdeiocres even wanted to deal with "L" or "LA" because they felt the "higher level languages" were also higher like Mercedes Banz's versus Yugos. So I got to work on the one Yugo in my group while I never liked their Mercedes Benz's. I thought i wa better than them becuase I worked on what was beneath their dignity.)
Strong typing is a way to mnage mediocre programmers. It just got in my way. If I want to add 1 to a product name, I don't waht anybody telling me I can't add a number to a charcter string. I undertand that. Every variable should be an Any → no, I've matured with age, so now I would say: ny ariable should be abl eto be an Any if I want it to be. And, yes, I would concede moree and say th it's OK for the default ot be strong typing so long as I can easily say "No, thank you." whenever I feel like it. Let the mediocre programmer have wht they need and let me have what I want, and I'll even promise to not tell them about it unless absolutely necessary, to keep people who can't control their hormones from knowing about things they can't handle and there fore need to be kept in ignorance of. God damn "strong typing" of variables in computer programming.
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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