I guess if Flickr can have it's MODE, so can the Wait Wait Stats Project. Okay, it's not a festival, but it does have to deal with statistics 🙃
Wait Wait Stats Updates: Mode Edition
https://linhpham.org/blog/2026/wait-wait-stats-updates-mode-edition/
It's time for another update for the Wait Wait Stats Project, including a new (optional) higher contrast dark theme and getting closer to official Python 3.14 support across the project.
https://linhpham.org/blog/2026/wait-wait-stats-update-february-2026/
I guess it's time for the last #WaitWaitStatsProject update blog post of 2025!
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-december-2025/
I know our minds like to make patterns out of things that may or may not exist (at least, ones that only exist along a very long span of time).
So, it's funny to see something that looks like a pixelated question mark and a pixelated exclamation mark in this chart of #WaitWaitDontTellMe shows recorded in Chicago (purple), Away (yellow) and home/remote studios (green).
https://graphs.wwdt.me/locations/all-locations-shows-heatmap
As with last year, I will be doing a Wait Wait Stats Wrapped for 2025. This time around, I will be waiting until after the last regular show of the year (2025-12-20) airs before collecting data and publishing the Wrapped infographic.
If you are interested in checking out last year's Wait Wait Stats Wrapped, the images are available on Flickr
https://flickr.com/photos/questionlp/albums/72177720322647930/
Just a short blog post with updates to the Wait Wait Graphs and Wait Wait Reports Sites to fix an issue where shows with an all men panel were not getting counted correctly.
I found the issue after entering information for this week's #WaitWaitDontTellMe 🤦
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-november-2025/
The Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! that aired on November 1, 2025 was the very first show that had a panel consisting of three men: Adam Burke, Alonzo Bodden and Josh Gondelman. This happened a little over 10 years since the very first show with an all women panel that aired on September 12, 2025 with Faith Salie, Paula Poundstone and Roxanne Roberts.
I'm now running Fedora 43 on both of my laptops and decided to switch from KDE Plasma to GNOME. While I do like the customizability of KDE, but decided to go back to something a little more no-frills.
Also, I've switched from using MySQL Server 8.4 to MariaDB 11.8. Good thing that I got the #WaitWaitStatsProject apps and libraries to be compatible with MariaDB 11.8 😉
It's only been a week since the last Wait Wait Stats Project update blog post, but there have been a couple of updates to the web apps, API and upgrading production from Python 3.12 to 3.13.
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-october-2025-part-two/
I've posted some updates to the Wait Wait Stats Project on my blog, including a change in how panelist scores are displayed:
https://linhpham.org/blog/2025/wait-wait-stats-update-october-2025/
I think I might be well situated to migrating from MySQL 8.x to MariaDB 11.x or even 12.x when it comes time to redo my Wait Wait Stats production servers.
Earlier this month, I stood up a VM with Debian 13 and MariaDB 11.8 (stable release train) and ran all of the tests I've written for all of the Wait Wait Stats Projects sites without errors. I also compared the JSON output of several API endpoints that return a lot of computed data and they matched the output from an instance of the API running against a MySQL 8.4 database.
Just finished doing the same with a VM with Debian 13 and MariaDB 12.0 (rolling release train) and all of the tests ran without errors. I still need to verify the JSON output to make sure there aren't any inconsistencies.
Linh Pham