I have only ever attended a Gay Pride celebration with the performing group I do sound for, the Righteously Outrageous Twirling Corps. So I see it with a slightly skewed viewpoint: My objective has been to gradually transform the festivities from scantily-clad go-go boys and drag queens on club floats to performing groups doing things that really require group skill, like color guard, choir, swim team, marching band, etc. It’s gone well; we’ve added (by my count) 4 more performing groups and the character of the parade is very different.

At my first pride, I expected to see the club floats, drag queens and go-go boys, and I did. But there was something else I saw (or rather felt) that I didn’t expect: a profound sense of belonging; family. These people knew who I was and loved me anyway. (The “anyway” represents a thinking error, but that’s another post.)

This year something happened, something big. To men, one gay and one straight, in Utah county, decided to do something to show support from the people not covered by the acronym. They created T-shirts saying “I’m [straight/bi/gay/married/Mormon/human] and I support = rights” and distributed them far and wide. They weren’t planning to march in the parade until the Pride center asked them to, so they did.

There were hundreds of them. Hundreds. The largest group in the parade by at least a factor of 3. They stretched out for a block. It was amazing.

My sister, her husband, their two sons, and my mom marched with them. Our mutual friends marched with them. Their friends who I don’t know, marched with them. It just went on and on…

…and this year, the Pride parade is expected to be bigger than the Days of ’47 parade. That’s a huge milestone. More than a milestone. It represents a shift in the culture that would have been unimaginable not many years ago.

I am moved beyond words, with gratitude and awe, for the showing of support from this new family of mine. I don’t have to apologize for who I am.

The MediaWiki is restored to its proper location at www.naptastic.com/wiki, but this is temporary: I am moving all content from there to a new wiki, which is not currently world-accessible, powered by DokuWiki instead of MediaWiki.

I like DokuWiki’s syntax a LOT better, though it does take some getting used to. It uses flat files instead of a database, which is less efficient, but much easier for me to manage.

In case you’re wondering, what broke on MediaWiki with the upgrade was the way LocalSettings.php was handled. It’s always used symbolic links, but it was possible to just put it in /var/www/wiki and have things work. With the update, that’s not allowed anymore, and /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php ended up becoming a symbolic link to itself. Guess how well that worked?

Frankly, I’m surprised the file system allows such a thing. Maybe I should tell someone…

I did an apt-get upgrade on my server last week which went off without complaining, but when I went to access the wiki again, it showed the setup screen, as if it had just been installed. “OK, no problem,” I thought, I’ll just run through the installation again, and since the database hasn’t been changed, it will just start working again. No dice. It now complains that LocalSettings.php needs to be moved from the config/ directory–a directory which doesn’t exist–into the wiki root–which is where it is. Correct permissions. I’m not running SElinux.

The people in #mediawiki were most helpful, invoking a chatbot to tell me I should install the latest version from a tarball, rather than using Ubuntu’s built-in version, and they’d be happy to assist me once I’d done that.

Fnord.

So much of my writings are currently inaccessible, and I don’t have my usual place to put things I’ve written, so I’ve got a bit of mental constipation going on right now.

What’s some good wiki software I can switch to? Ideally, it would have proper, per-page permissions using ACLs, and use flat files instead of MySQL for storing everything. I don’t care about WYSIWYG or skinning.