Gary Kirk

All females so far? Not complaining
Things I like about Big Brother 8:

• The Diary Room
• Emily
• The twins, with their mics removed

Things I dislike:

• People getting booed
• Tracey. Sorry, but no.

I’m on a wikibreak at the moment. On Thursday I blanked my Wikipedia userpage, adding {{wikibreak}}.

I need to temporarily abandon my day-to-day Wikipedia editing until my exams are over. It would probably be best if I unsubscribed from wikiEN-l and foundation-l, not to mention MediaWiki-l, but I don’t want the messages in my Gmail disrupted - I’ll just try to ignore most messages, maybe look through at weekends for the next ~month.

I’ll not be doing too much with Xinki either.

As for my The Apprentice proposal, well - I’ve sent it to the relevant person and it’s up to him to let me know.

The EastEnders webcams at bbc.co.uk allow visitors to take a sneak peek at what is being filmed at the current time. There are three cameras - one showing Albert Square, one showing George Street (where the nail bar is, under the viadict) and the third showing Turpin Road (where Scarlet is, I think). Recently the Albert Square one was blanked (”This webcam is censored”) and apparently the Vic was covered in something. Well, today it isn’t, and I’ve uploaded a few interesting screenshots of what’s happening right now on the Xinki Wiki: do look as it’s fascinating! I just saw what looks like a policeman… look out for one on 22nd June!

A second release candidate of MediaWiki 1.1.0.0 is now available. It’s currently running at sweet-technology.co.uk for testing purposes. The previous release, rc1, is running at garykirk.org.uk.

The final version of MediaWiki 1.10.0 should be released within the next week or two at the latest, I imagine.

The Xinki project experienced minor vandalbot linkspam edits on several wikis over the last few days. This blog, as I have said before, gets many spam comments which are blocked by Akismet.
Until now, no anti-spam measures were in place on any of the wikis hosted by Xinki.
On Thursday (yesterday when I write this) the first spam edits were seen at the newly-installed pre-production stage Sweet Technology encyclopaedia wiki. The SpamBlacklist extension at mediawiki.org was installed and activated, but it is not known if it is functioning correctly as yet.
This morning similar spam was seen at the Xinki Lab and on the main Xinki Wiki, and consequently the ConfirmEdit extension was installed on all Xinki-hosted wikis as an emergency measure, going live at 14:30 GMT.