I'm trying to organize a hack the wiki corner at the upcoming 26th Chaos Communication Congress (Berlin, Dec 27-30). The idea is to have a place where people interested in contributing to the Wikipedia/MediaWiki user experience on the technical level can discuss their ideas and get help implementing them - be it by writing extensions, toolserver tools, javasacript gadgets, api-based bots, or whatever.

I'm looking for people interested in being available for questions and discussions about any aspect of interacting with Wikipedia and/or MediaWiki in code. There has been some criticism from the German hacker community of the "wiki 2000" experience Wikipedia supposedly offers. There's quite a bit of energy directed at hacking up alternative ways to access and use Wikipedia content there. I'd like to channel some of that drive into improvements usable directly in medaiwiki or on the wikimedia sites.

Note that this my personal pet project, nothing official by WMDE. At least, not yet. If there are enough people interested, I hope we can get support for things like travel cost from WMDE. So please mail me (daniel dot kinzler at wikimedia dot de) if you are interested, so I can get things organized.

Oh, and: that congress is great fun, with tons of cool blinking stuff and

thousands of geeks - well worth going to in any case!

For some application, it is useful to have a DNS server running locally on your maching. I use dnsmasq for this. However, ubuntu configures dnsmasq for use on a gateway per default, which is not what I want it for. I want the following things changed:

• dnsmasq should use as upstream DNS server whatever resolvoncf resp. dhclient determine to be my DNS server.
• all my local programs should however ask only dnsmasq to resolve names.
• dnsmasq shall work locally only, not act as a DNS server for others in the network
• dnsmasq shall not act as a DHCP server.

So, here's the setup for /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

# Never forward plain names (without a dot or domain part)
domain-needed
# Never forward addresses in the non-routed address spaces.
bogus-priv
 
# use the resolv.conf generated by resolvoncf for upstream resolution.
# /etc/resolv.conf will initially be a symlink to that file. we will change that later, see below.
resolv-file=/etc/resolvconf/run/resolv.conf

# try upstream servers strictly in order
# useful if you want to override the upsteam DNS server you get from DHCP in the resolvconf config.
strict-order

# only work locally
interface=loopback
listen-address=127.0.0.1

# NOTE: the bind-interfaces is rejected by dnsmasq on my machione, even though it's present in the example config. odd.
# but the restrictions above should be sufficient anyway.
# bind-interfaces=loopback

# no DHCP (since we only listen to loopback, we only need to exclude loopback)
no-dhcp-interface=loopback

If you have a stupid ISP that uses wildcard A records to grab requests for unknown domains, you can filter them out like this:

# filter bogus A records
bogus-nxdomain=62.157.140.133
bogus-nxdomain=80.156.86.78

If you want to serve SRV records for special services (in this case, Jabber multi user chat):

# The fields are <name>,<target>,<port>,<priority>,<weight>
srv-host=_conference._tcp.dell-daniel,dell-daniel,5267

Then restart dnsmasq:

> sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart [...Dnsmasq...]