The Blog of Lucien Stals

It must have worked

Next on the agenda is looking at a better blogging engine.

I'm sure I've asked this before, but can anyone recommend something? We need a blog engine that supports multi blogs (not just multi user), and is free.

I still have a lot of loose end to tidy up over the next few week, mainly to do with student assessment, but I have started to think about what I’d *like* to be doing. High on that list is redesigning this ByteClub site. First order of business is tighten up some security issues. John worked out his blog had been hacked. As zooba had mentioned in an earlier post, these blogs have Win98 level security. Delete the password file and it just lets you create a new password. Some body had worked out how to delete the password file through a poisonous little URL, and let themselves in.

It’s really a flaw in the software for allowing it, but in the short term, I’m going to make everyone’s password file read only. This means that nobody will be able to change their passwords (unless you email me and get me to change the permissions for you temporarily).

Now for the bad news:

I have written a shell script to change all the permissions.

This should frighten the hell out of anyone who has a blog on this site, for at *least* two reasons. Firstly, I’m hopeless with shell scripts. It’s just another damn scripting language to learn, and one that I don’t use often enough to actually remember. So I just make stuff up and hope I got the obtuse syntax right. Secondly, I have a rather bad track record at maintenance on this site. Need I remind anyone of the great wiki debacle?

So I have backup up everyone’s blogs (at least I think I have. Did I mention that I hate UNIX commands? How does tar work again?) and am ready to run said script.

If you are reading this post, it probably means that the script worked and didn’t root everyone’s blogs. If you are *not* reading this blog….

Needless to say, much mirth was had at my expense this morning in the coffee room.

Now, about that upgrade…

It's no replacement for the wiki, but it was a bit of fun.

Something other things on the ByteClub ToDo list:

* make the markup more stylable (it compliant, but we could put more classes and id's in there as style hooks)

* clean up the default style sheet. I think there's a lot of junk in there not being used anywhere.

* make alternate style sheets a user preference (stored in cookies?). We could let people upload new style sheets whenever they want to?

I was going to upgrade the wiki engine, so I logged into the mysql server to check the db names. while I was there, I noticed some old db's we weren't using (Xaraya, for example) and thought I'd just get rid of those while I was in there.

So why did my fingers type “drop database wikidb;” instead?

Of course I hadn't backed anything up yet.

So now there's no Wiki

I'm seriously hoping that the backup script John mentioned something about ages ago actually happened. If not, err… would a public flogging suffice?

Now I scared to go ahead with the other update plans. But at least I have actually backed up the forum db now.

Okay, at 20″, it's not quite as nice as Pimasters, but I'm still very happy with it. Installation was a breeze. Just plugged it in, set the resolution (1680 x 1050. Yes, the verticle resolution is better than my old CRT's horizontal resolution was), and it all just went. No hitches.

I also managed to save a huge amount of desk space in the process (anyone want either of my old CRTs? I have no idea where to store them.)

(Product specs here)

Moves to give UN net control

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it's queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there's some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

I'm not normally prone to spontaneous poetry, but this one (by Robert Frost) just popped into my head tonight (part of it did. I had to google the rest). And it's got nothing to do with the Charles Bronson movie, Telefon.

It's been a long day, and I still have so much to do. And all I want to do is run away to a dark, quiet room, and code for a week. No interruptions.

Clinton suggested something the other day. And like so many of his suggestions, it was a bloody terrific idea. I only wish I had the time to implement it.

He suggested using the Mediawiki rendering engine (wiki syntax, etc.) as the heart of a new blog app. Get rid of this silly bloody PhpBB syntax. Add that to the idea I had to use Subversion to store wiki entries instead of a database, and you have the makings of a weeks worth of coding in a quiet, dark room. Maybe a bit more than one week. Perhaps two or three.

I first though about doing this with CVS for the wiki, but then I discovered Subversion , thanks to John. It handles some things that CVS doesn't do, like!
renaming files, which a wiki would need.

Clinton's
idea stems from the fact that we are all doing so much work with wikis (mainly Swinbrain), that converging on a single syntax would be great for the blogs, wiki's and forums.

I guess it will have to wait for the The Great Unification Project to get up off the ground.

In other news:

I gave my first Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) lecture today.

Taking up what Andrew (Cain) has been preaching for a while, I got his (and Clintons) help to put together a BBP presentation. It's a bit weird at first because it's so light on content. It all about just getting people interested in the topic. Lots of fun graphics.

But the effect in the lecture room was remarkable. Students giggled at the animations. They !
actualy looked engaged and attentive. Nobody fell asleep!

Because there is no real content, the presentation is quite short. I ran around 20 minutes, I think. There was some old “Chalk and Talk” style lecture material after that, but it didn't go for long (10min?) and I think I held their attention. Then there was some demos before the break.

For a lecture I felt completely under prepared for, I think it ended up going quiet well.

It would be difficult to do with some lectures as the style suits “presentation of ideas” more than it does “explanation of ideas”, but I think it was well worth the effort for that lecture.]]>

Some of you have been denied access to your blogs when passwords stop working. I'm no sure (yet) how this is related to the attacks, but it does mean that we are going to have to take a good long hard look at the blog software (amongst others) that we are using. You may experience some disruptions to normal service in the coming weeks. We hope it results in a better blogging experience at the end of the day

Thanks Andrew for the helpful suggestions about The History of Computing. I really want to get this subject off the ground one day. Probably won't be any time soon, but I can still dream about it. One comment I'd like to make is that everyone I talk to about this assumes I'm tal!
king about recent history. While that will certainly be a big part of it, I'd actually like to go way back. The Abyssinians, well before the Greeks rode to power, had devices for computing astrological events. While these were crude(?) stone tablets with markings on them, and bear little resemblance to what we thing of as computers today, they were, in fact, computing devices. Just as a slide rule is a computing device.

I had a quick look at the www.computerhistory.org/ site Andrew suggested, and I notice that it's collection starts in 1945. The first device that we might recognise as a modern computer was Babbage’s Difference Engine built in 1823, over a century before the above mentioned museums collection starts. The difference Engine was mechanical, but actually had memory.

Something else I would want to talk about in the subject is mythology. No offence to Xavier!
and Russell, but I was surprised that they didn't know about the
story of Prometheus. I guess there's no reason they should, but I think it's interesting that we have examples of the cultural importance of information as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans. I think I might even make it the first lecture: Prometheus, the first CIO.

And while were on the topic of mythology, I might do a lecture on modern mythology about computers. How many movies are there about “evil hackers”. And then there's all the films about computers turning evil (can you say “Matrix”). Ooh, how cool would it be to do an assignment on the Matrix? “No, really. I have to watch this for uni!”

So that's probably 4 weeks worth of lecture taken care of. We can leave the other 8 weeks for the modern history.

Honourable mentions would have to:

* The Y2K bug

* The DotCom boom/bust

* William Gibson, for coining the term “hyperspace”.

BTW, (going ba!
ck to the idea of the computer museum) I have the contact details of a woman at Monash who is involved with The Monash Museum of Computing History there. I'll have to talk to her and see what she has to say. I also heard that science works, in Melbourne, has some computer exhibits there, possibly including a replica Difference Engine. But I have yet to confirm this rumour

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It does NOT stand for Active Server Pages .NET!!!!!

I know that's the language we use in the labs, but there's so much more to the web than just ASP.NET. In fact ASP.NET obfuscates so much of the underlying web stuff that I wonder if we should even be using that language.

Why am I ranting about this now?

#1: I just replied to a student who said they thought their knowledge of ASP should get them an HD in this subject. In all fairness, that student realy does seem to know what he's doing in ASP.NET. But I had to point out to him that ASP alone will not an HD make, in this subject.

#2: I just over heard another student saying that he's studying ASP.NET.

We have NO subject called ASP.NET!

I was also trying to record another lecture today. 10 minuntes into the lecture I noticed that GarageBand wasn't actualy recording anything. Didn't want to stuff around with it at the time so I just unplugged the mike and turned it off. Now I'm one lecture down already

I'll try again tomorrow with lecture 2.