We spent 11 hours on Sunday upgrading the BCRC server. We built a new root drive and a second drive that could include a live backup and swapped them in yesterday morning around noon (about two hours after we had planned to) and then spent until 8pm trying to get services working again. We had a couple of minor catastrophes. The worst one for me was discovering that I had made a typo and had failed to back up the 
BCRC wiki. I had preserved the raw database files but no longer had that version of mysql to open them with. I tried getting them to dump on the version of mysql on my openbsd box at home, but that didn't work. Then George reminded me that we had an old version of mysql installed on marlin (the department server). Mysql got installed on marlin years ago, but no-one has been using it (as far as I can tell). It took me half an hour to copy the files into place and then wipe the mysql database (in order to create a new root user for the database system with a known password).
We got all the critical services up before we left for the night. Since then, we've been wrapping up loose ends: I discovered I hadn't restored the data for the reservation system this morning. We still don't have https working. And I discovered that in the upgrade to the newer mysql, the dumps for tikiwiki don't match up, because what was a valid column label is now a reserved word. Eventually I'll have to figure out how to solve that. Ugh. Luckily, we're not actually using tikiwiki this semester.
I spent the morning dealing with crises related to the server upgrade and new resources we built for the intro labs. I was pleasantly surprised when Judy wanted to aggregate data from the enzyme lab. I had built stuff to do that years ago, but it never got used. I rebuilt it with newer tools and this morning was the pilot period. I was horrified when I went down to show the TAs because the machine we tested hadn't successfully updated to get a new hosts file. (We need to use a hosts file to get the workstations to connect to the server on the private IP so it can do a hostname lookup and identify which room the workstation is in. If they connect on the public IP, all we get is the address of the NAT gateway). I panicked when I realized radmind wasn't working yet -- I ran into problems getting it to compile. So I pulled out the stops and got it built in time to update problem machines over lunch. In the end, it was just that one machine that was a problem, so it wasn't a big deal.
Later, I attended a meeting with some SEO faculty and students. I got to meet two of my students whom I hadn't met before. I believe more firmly than ever that on-line education is a pale shadow of what students could out of a real class with me. I'm not saying it is absolutely not worth doing nor am I saying that all students in a face-to-face class do better than all students in an on-line class. But the potential for on-line education -- especially as currently implemented using WebCT, is much, much lower. On-line education, and WebCT in particular, makes simple interactions difficult. I'm glad I've had this experience, but it confirms the suspicions I've had about "distance education" since I first came into contact with it.
I've been getting more wiki spam again -- this time from a user (or bot) that logs in. Phpwiki doesn't facilitate finding the IP addresses of people that have logged in, but I did eventually track it down and block them. It was an irritating waste of time, however. Mediawiki has better tools for managing spam, but the botwriters have targetted it a lot more. They often hit the pages that get despammed so quickly, that I suspect they must be using automated tools for watching pages.
A few years ago, I wrote bit about 
Reinventing Paolo Freire. It's one of pages most frequently visited by people doing websearches. I've been revisiting in my mind two of the most serious problems with capitalism that I've discovered. The first is that, because capitalism is about making money, its actually poor at finding solutions that actually benefit people. Big software companies are not about actually empowering people at all -- they invest at least as much effort in figuring out ways to make sure people will have to spend more money on their software, rather than trying to figure out what would actually benefit people. Drugmakers are a lot more interested in creating something you have to take every day, rather than something you could just take once. Capitalism optimizes for solutions that cost people money, rather than solutions that could save people money. Most of what you pay for in a phone call are the mechanisms for metering and billing you for the call. Letting corporations drive how things get built guarantees they'll get built to benefit corporations -- not you.
Second, capitalism doesn't provide for margins of safety. Capitalism is about winning: the company that pushes the limits most successfully succeeds. And any company that doesn't push hard enough will get bought by someone who will. But that means that we're always running with the needle somewhere in the red zone: pollution, global warming, energy reserves, whatever. We're in a race to see which country can burn through the oil the fastest and extract the most value from it. Capitalism doesn't understand -- can't understand -- conservation: if land or people have economic value, you exploit that economic value to the fullest extent. And if they don't, they're nothing but a liability. A corporation can't understand leaving any economic value unexploited because corporations have no values other than the bottom line.
I don't know how we solve these problems other than having strong government that funds public research that isn't beholden to stockholders and that establishes clear guidelines for values that can't be measured in economic terms. Americans seem to have forgotten these principles. At one time, corporations had to show they were acting in the public interest in order to maintain articles of incorporation. Once, we might have solved the problem by acting vigorously to restore these principles, but in a global economy, the money can simply pick up and go somewhere else now. We've opened the bottle and let the genie out. I fear it will be hard to get it back in without a crisis that destablizes the entire system.
StevenBrewer