From the leader in this week’s Economist:

“Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.”

s/Financial/Technical/ and it applies just as well. What else are we doing in tech, if not figuring out ways for strangers to deal with each-other? Sometimes we focus on designing safeguards, like firewalls or spam filters, and sometimes we focus on creating opportunities, like social networks or source code repositories.

Peason: “Get out.”

JFK: “That’s a stupid answer. Everyone knows that. The question is how do we get out?”

How, indeed? As JFK had finally come to understand, military conflicts, justified or not, are like a Chinese finger trap: it’s easy for a political leader to order the troops in, but very tricky to pull them back out (just ask the British about Northern Ireland, the Russians about Chechnya, or even Pearson’s Canadian successors about southern Afghanistan).

Good luck to President Clinton, President McCain, or President Obama (alphabetical order) in January 2009 — they’re all smart and well-intentioned people, but they’re going to find that the trap has already been pulled very tight, and there’s not much room left to wiggle free.

http://www.feliciano.de/Webgalerie/bilder/Italy/une/yiwul/
http://www.unduetretoccaate.it/codice/aseje/wocobo/
http://www.altaiseer-eg.com/ar/articles/jed/umut/

At first, I thought they might be a kind of link spam — some sites display recent searches — but when I checked one of the URLs, I found something totally unexpected:

<?php echo md5("just_a_test");?>

They’re all the same. This is almost certainly related to passwords: is there a known flaw in a PHP content-management system like Drupal, or in the PHP API for a search engine like Lucene, where this would do some damage, or is it just a test probing for weaknesses? Is the PHP code supposed to be served up literally like that, or should I be seeing the MD5 instead?

21 Feared Dead in Munich Crash.

About twenty one of the 44 passengers and crew of the British European Airways airliner which crashed yesterday near Munich carrying the Manchester United football team and many journalists are feared dead. About eight others are in hospital, seriously injured. Frank Swift, the former international goalkeeper, who had become a journalist, died in hospital.

I didn’t hear about any crash yesterday, but according to the Wikipedia article on Manchester United, there was a crash near Munich on 6 February 1958 that killed eight of the team’s players. In fact, when you follow the full story link in the posting, there is a story about the crash. The phrase “From the archive” is hidden in the deckline, but the dateline is “Saturday February 2, 2008″ (probably automatically updated by the site). There’s nothing else in the online version to indicate that this is an archived story from 7 February 1958, though a Brit would probably know that British European Airways ceased operations in 1974.

This is an easy mistake to make trying to keep up a blog of current events, and I don’t mean to suggest that the maintainer is stupid, or that I couldn’t do the same thing — in fact, next December, watch this spot for postings about an air attack on Perl Harbor.

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”???

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?

Update: I read that the school concert went ahead, with Frosty the Snowman replacing the modified Silver Bells as the token non-religious song on the programme (Frosty makes no reference to any religious holidays).

Both of my children attended Elmdale Public School here in Ottawa from junior kindergarten to grade six. Now, my kids’ alma mater has triggered a nation-wide moral panic by changing the line “it’s Christmas time in the city” to “it’s festive time in the city” in the song Silver Bells for a grade-two and -three concert.

I’ve already gone on record saying that it’s OK to wish me Merry Christmas — I’m as proud of my Christian background as some of my friends and neighbours are of their Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu backgrounds — but that’s not what this was all about. The primary choir was already singing songs about Christmas and Hanukkah, and the choir leaders decided to add an additional song that was non-religious. I think that the existing non-religious songs Jingle Bells or Winter Wonderland would have been fine, but they decided to take Silver Bells — an otherwise secular pop song about shopping downtown in a city — and replace the word “Christmas”. Silly? Probably. An attack on Christmas or Christianity? Hardly.

What happened? This customer had a large mailing list that they used for announcements, etc. My guess is that they sent out an announcement, a lot of other gmail-users flagged it as spam, and whatever weighting algorithm gmail uses tipped it over so that the messages were no longer considered legit by default. I was able to train gmail not to treat those messages as spam (for me, specifically), but it took a week or two before I could trust that some of them weren’t being sent to the spam box.

Hard-core spammers have always had to deal with this kind of thing, and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out a way around it. What’s happening now, though, is that companies with legit (or semi-legit) e-mail lists are also starting to get into trouble, because web-mail makes it possible for hundreds or thousands of people to get together and all vote your e-mail to be undesirable.