MediaWiki; also, "Broadcom engineers are weenies"
In the beginning of the summer, I spoke with Safi Shareef about getting him an ACM server account so he could run MediaWiki to host the JHU Muslim Association's website.
Boy, am I impressed. Safi's wiki has non-techie users with accounts, and he's really doing cool things with it. He's using lots of the MediaWiki tools that I see elsewhere and think, “I should learn how to use that.” If I'm wikimaster@jhu.edu, he's sure showing me up.
Also, I decided tentatively to join the Linux Broadcom 4301 Driver Project. Broadcom is a chip company that makes, among other things, the wireless networking chip in my iBook G4. They refuse to tell anyone how to program their chip, so Linux developers can't write drivers for it. That means I have to use an external USB wireless stick just to get online with my Mac, since I run Linux.
The project's plan is to take drivers that already work, disassemble them to learn how they work, and use the disassembly knowledge to tell Linux developers how to write their own drivers. It's a cool application of the right of reverse engineering, and it'll hopefully make my laptop more useful to me.
The title of this post is taken from the old Netscape Engineers Are Weenies” message in a Microsoft product.