While in Spokane, I visited Auntie’s Bookstore, where, with the assitance of a fellow booklover, I acquired a stash of elderly Dickens books. Alas, only one of them had any date information.

So, someone on the Dickens mailing list I’m on, who is far more knowledgeable than I, has offered to look at some pictures and attempt to identify some of the editions, and place their dates. I thought I’d put the photos here, too, in case anyone can shed some light on this.

I don’t get excited about technology much any more. This is very intentional, because I know that if I let myself get excited about technology, I’ll once again start exceeding my tech budget. So I put the blinders on.

Well, today I got an Airport Express.

Wow, this is cool. What’s so amazing about it is its simplicity and ease of use. It’s a wireless access point, but it’s more than that. Right now, I have it plugged into my stereo, and the music that I’m playing on my laptop is coming out of the stereo over there, via the wireless network. This took all of 2 minutes to set up, most of which time was spent fumbling around behind the stereo trying to figure out where to plug in the “line in” cable.

Primarily, though, I’ll be using it so that I can take wireless networking with me as I move around campus. Anywhere there’s a network jack, I can have a wireless network in a few seconds.

What impresses me so much about Apple is not that they are doing anything particularly innovative, but that everything they do is *so* easy to use. Computers should make easy things easy and hard things possible. I should not have to think about how things work. Plugging it in should be the hardest step. And in the case of this little device, it was.

If you are running a third-party distribution of Apache (such as one installed via apt-get, or emerge, or ports, or rpm, or whatever else) it would be a great help to me (for a talk I’m working on) if you could send me a tarball of your configuration directory. Primarily, I’m looking for unmodified, or almost-unmodified, default configurations for the major OS distributions out there, in an attempt to:

1) compare them to the default config as shipped from httpd.apache.org
2) identify confusing configuration defaults which are the source of a huge percentage of the problems reported on #apache
3) identify things in the config files which are incorrect, insecure, or just stupid defaults
4) identify neat ideas that have been put into these configs which we could incorporate back into the official configuration files.

So, if you could oblige me, I would be enormously greatful. That’s rbowen AT rcbowen DOT com.

On a related note, we started up a mailing list a few months ago – packagers@httpd.apache.org – and, so far, my invitations for various package managers to join it has been met with deafening silence. The goal of the mailing list is to discuss the default configurations of popular third-party distributions of Apache, as well as to notify these package managers of important new things that have been done to the “official” release, which they might want to take advantage of.

Many of these third-party distributions, in turn, have really good ideas, that we’d like to discuss with them, and potentially incorporate back into the official release.

I’m a little perplexed why the package managers don’t want to be part of that conversation. I would have thought that it would be of great benefit to their users. Perhaps, if any of you are package managers, or know package managers, you could encourage one another to join this conversation. I know that it would at least be of great benefit to me.

Since I *know* I’m not going to remember this:

When installing apps (like RT or Drupal) which expect a mysql 3.x server, on a mysql 4.x server, you get strange messages about being unable to log in, and suggested that you upgrade your mysql client.

Before you spend hours or days hunting for what this might mean, try this:

mysql> set password for username@localhost = OLD_PASSWORD(‘passwordhere’);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

That converts the password to the old format (whatever that means) and permits the login.

I’ve been reading Dandelion Wine again. Wonderful book. I’m thinking that I’d really like to do a book reading this summer, but a much shorter one than Christmas Carol. I’d like to read the bit about Leo Auffmann’s Happiness Machine. But, because of the way every story is woven into every other story, it’s hard to pull out just that one bit, without getting a lot of the rest of it coming along.

I don’t know if I’ll end up getting to do this or not, and it really does seem a shame to leave out the bits about the trolly car, and the Lonely One, and … hmm. Maybe I’d have to do the whole thing. 😉

As many of you know, I run a Kenya website. It’s the oldest Kenya website, and the most popular, at least by my informal unscientific surveys. What makes it that way is the discussion forum, which allows anonymous posting, is unmoderated, and unrestricted, and does not require any kind of sign-up, login, or verification.

It is running on software that I wrote almost ten years ago now, and before that, was running on Matt Wright’s WWWBoard. (*shudder*)

On a fairly regular basis, these things happen.

1) One person posts an article posing as another person, in order to defame that person’s character. This often results in that person having a heated debate with themself, or, just as often, the imposter conducting both sides of the argument.

-or-

2) Someone, or a group of someones, post unpopular views. There is a public outcry to ban them. If I do ban them, I’m accused of censorship. If I don’t, I’m accused of favortism. In either case, I’m a communist, fascist, nazi, and all-around evil person.

-or-

3) Someone claims to know the *real* identity of one of the regular posters, and mounts a campaign to unmask that person. These often reach quite comic proportions, almost as though it mattered.

-or-

4) Someone discovers the statistics page, and claims to have compromised the site in order to gain that information. The latest version of this, the person discovered the referer information (hence removed) which contained large amounts of very unsavory referer spam. This civic-minded individual then proceeded to pin the blame for these referers on one particular scape goat, and launched a heightened version of #3, above.

-or-

5) People generally demanding that one person or another be banned, or that I institute moderation of one variety of another. Although having a panel of moderators is universally rejected, because the panel would be chosen via favortism, would represent one view or another, would ostracise this tribe or that, and so on.

Well, it’s getting a little out of hand. I’ve long thought about installing some more full-featured community-type software solution, and I’m looking at that approach again. I’m likely to go with bbpress as the main discussion engine. And I’ve been recommended to look at drupal as another possible framework. Although I’m not sure that my audience needs that kind of site, it might be interesting anyway.

My audience, in case you couldn’t guess from the above discription, is *primarily* Kenyan college kids, and, as such, they can be forgiven for many of their excesses. But sometimes I just wish they would grow up a little.

~> HEAD http://superbowl.com
200 OK
...
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 01:57:02 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.28 (Unix) mod_perl/1.26
...