Quoderat

The Wikipedia article about me was vandalized yesterday (vandalized version) by someone from the IP address 24.225.66.95, which seems to be in or near Raleigh, North Carolina.

What should I do?

1. Edit the article myself to remove the vandalism? — OK, that’s a really bad idea
2. Go in anonymously and edit the article? — also a bad idea
3. Rejoice in the fact that my article is important enough to be vandalized?
4. Despair in the fact that my article is not important enough for anyone else to have noticed and fixed it?
5. Reconcile myself to the idea that the edits are not vandalism at all, and I am, in truth, “a freaking looser who knows nothing” and “a noob”

I’m leaning towards #5, though I’m disappointed that kids these days seem to have forgotten how to swear properly: “a freaking loser”???

I forgot that I’d enabled Google analytics for the XML 2007 web site. Even though the conference is long over, I though it would be interesting to look and see what some of the trends were from September 2007 to January 2008 (keeping in mind that these stats apply to the kind of web users interested in a tech conference, not to the web at large).

I’m using a single dedicated server to host ourairports.com, megginson.com, and a couple of minor domains. OurAirports is a database-heavy application using (currently) a MySQL v.5 database hosted on the same server. I’ll offload the database to a separate server if traffic keeps increasing, but as long as I’m getting compliments from tech people for my fast response times (mainly thanks to MySQL’s built-in query caching), there’s no point paying for extra hardware.

Uptime

My ISP set up the server for me last summer with a bare-bones Ubuntu distro, then I installed the extra packages I needed using aptitude over ssh. Since then, I’ve done many Ubuntu in-place upgrades, rolled out hundreds of changes and upgrades to the web apps and dozens to the database schema (some very significant), and upgraded WordPress n-teen times. Check this out:

$ uptime
 13:08:31 up 175 days, 10:02,  1 user,  load average: 0.23, 0.06, 0.02

That’s right — since my ISP first set up the server with a basic Ubuntu system, I’ve never had to restart it. In fact, if Apache and mod_php (PHP5) had ‘uptime’ commands, they’d show almost the same amount of time, since I restarted them only to make configuration changes in the first few days of setting up the server (unless apt stopped them to install a newer version during one of my upgrades). I’ve restarted MySQL more recently, but again, only to experiment with configuration changes (especially for fulltext).

-1 for being cool, +10 for having a life

Using reliable old technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP doesn’t win any cool points, but it certainly makes maintaining a web server and its applications easy. I can go on vacation, for example, without worrying about being able to get online to fix or restart my server every couple of days. I don’t have to stay up until 3:00 am on Sunday night so that I can take the server offline to roll out new software versions or bug fixes (aptitude installs any security fixes in place). I spend lots of time with my family. I go to my kids’ school concerts. I learned banjo and mandolin (why not, since I have the free time?).

It’s the developer, not the language

And yes, my PHP web app is easy to maintain and extend, because I designed it to be that way (I can often implement, test and roll out new features in a matter of minutes, even when they require database schema changes) — it’s the developer, not the programming language, that determines the quality and maintainability of an app. A lot of newbies use PHP, so there’s a lot of bad PHP out there, but the same can be said for any language, even Ruby.

Image: Thomas Penn, second proprietor of Pennsylvania, not as nice as his dad William.

Almost a year ago, I wrote that Open data matters more than Open Source — it doesn’t matter (to you, the end user) whether a web site is using Open Source software or not, if they still keep your data locked up.

Here’s a nasty example: Robert Scoble has just had his Facebook account disabled for running a script to try to scrape his personal information off the site (since Facebook doesn’t provide him with any other way to get it).

I understand that Facebook needs to protect against malicious bots — and they might decide to restore his account once they know what Robert was actually trying to do (though for now all traces of him have vanished) — but do we really want to have hope for the good will of social sites and beg for our own data every time we want it? Are web site owners the new version of the Proprietors in the early American colonies, who can grant rights as favours when they see fit?