Things Fall Apart
I’ve been meaning to say: sorry about the weekly update. I’ve been getting emails from readers who miss it, and who try to resubscribe only to get an error message. It’s broken. Sorry. I wish I could fix it – I would if I could – but I can’t. Sorry. It’s probably the hacker who broke it. I miss it too – apart from anything else, it sold a few copies of the Dictionary every time it went out, which meant that in five years or so there might be a tiny royalty. Thanks, hacker.
I think B&W is probably on its last legs. I don’t have the tech skills to fix things, so as more things break, they will stay broken, until the whole thing falls apart. Sorry about that. I’m a bit gloomy about it – and somewhat bitter, too. Thanks, hacker.
I’ll keep it going while possible, of course, but it won’t be what it was, and as more of it breaks, more of it will not be what it was. Sorry. So it goes.
I can’t think of much worse news than the prospect of B&W closing shop. I’ve grown accustomed to its face, as Henry Higgins nearly said.
Yeah, I’m not very happy about it either. Such is life.
Might I suggest that you define the problems that need fixing out here as precisely as possible, in case one of the regulars has the know-how to help, even long distance? I don’t know what expertises people here have, but I’m sure there’s no lack of goodwill you can count on.
Indeed. My tech skills are all rusted out, but I might be able to rope in a friend who can give some sound technical advice.
B&W on its last legs? Unthinkable. Unfortunately I know bugger all about IT, but I have faith.
Nooooooo. I NEED B&W. If its a cash thing, let us know.
Ditto what Brian said, only double. Whatever it takes, let’s keep B&W going. It’s a beacon of sanity in an insane world.
Thanks, all. I’ll take you up on your offers if things do start to fall off. It’s only the update so far, plus the Dictionary of Euphemisms that’s sitting in the database but not visible on B&W. Not so bad really. I’m worried about the long-term prospects, but…oh, you know, candle, wind, etc.
turn to . . . rain . . .
If money would help, feel free to issue an appeal for funds.
I know better than to try to slug it out with Karl over fan status, but I think it’s really generous of him to commit to giving twice as much as Brian can come up with. This is an incentive to funnel all donations through Brian. There is one thing I’d like to do for B&W that I want all for myself, though. If you ever find out who the hacker was, I’m volunteering right now to beat the living crap out of him (I’ll leave the expired excrement for the rest of you guys).
Actually. I think Karl committed to giving double the collective amount. Well done.
Don’t you dare give up, Ophelia, now that Karl has graciously offered three times the collective amount and his kidney.
Seriously, surely among your readership there must be someone with technical help? Or otherwise go with G. Tingey’s suggestion. But don’t just give up.
Karl’s offer of his spleen is certainly a heartening sign. I promise that I will match whatever Merlijn offers with a donation equal to up to half of its full value.
Yes, Karl died to keep Butterflies and Wheels going. We owe it to his memory.
“There is one thing I’d like to do for B&W that I want all for myself, though. If you ever find out who the hacker was, I’m volunteering right now to beat the living crap out of him (I’ll leave the expired excrement for the rest of you guys).”
Uh uh. Sorry, Stew. Pummeling people is MY specialty, dude.
My spleen, my meager bank account, whatever it takes, dudes. The Cause is All. Who says secularists and atheists can’t wage jihad, too?
Ophelia,
Maybe you might consider shifting to Typepad?
It’s pretty easy to operate and cheap.
Great, Karl, can I have your spleen with some fava beans and a nice chianti?
You’d dare drink a chianti with my spleen? Philistine!
No on second thought make it Mateus rosé. Yum.
David, I won’t try shifting until/unless everything does break down entirely – i.e. until/unless B&W gets officially terminated by its owner or until/unless it stops functioning. But if that happens I’ll have to shift to something or else disappear, because this place ain’t mine.
I offer my measly support too. I can knock together a basic website, but that’s all. I am in for cash too.
Karl spleen with Mateus Rosé? Karl, you would serve it to me unaccompanied, surely! I do however recommend a good Coonawarra shiraz.
“No on second thought make it Mateus rosé. Yum.”
Ewww. Don’t even joke about drinking Mateus rosé, Ophelia. That’s disgusting!
“Karl, you would serve it to me unaccompanied, surely!”
Who the hell invited you to the table, Crispy?
I am drying my eyes from laughter, which is as good a reason as any to keep this thing going, by all means necessary.
And re. OB’s remark on candles, I hope she has now learned why it is better to light one than curse the darkness…
Ophelia:
Your original post suggested you were feeling . I hope you now realize you are not alone and we will do as much as we can to help.
“I am drying my eyes from laughter, which is as good a reason as any to keep this thing going, by all means necessary.”
You need B&W to dry your eyes? Next time try a hankie: it’s much more absorbent.
So sorry to hear about your tech troubles, Ophelia.
I am curious- who is the owner of B&W who might ‘officially terminate it’? Is there any way you can buy over the place? A call for funds will definitely see me responding.
B&W is such a rarity – both the blog manager,Ophelia and regular commenters are so sane, civil and kindly (tough guys Karl and Stewart may blanch at this adjective)that I lurk here nearly everyday.
Dear Karl,
I wept to see how much your fellow-posters loved you, that they gave up your life for another…. ;-)
Don has faith and Karl wants to wage a jihad.This is worrying me….
Even though I used to be our department’s webmaster I’m afraid that I’m pretty useless beyond basic HTML. (Note the “used to be” in the last sentence).
I also need B&W to carry on. I’ve become an addict in the short time I’ve been coming to the site. I’ll help out if I can.
(You can’t have my spleen though)
“B&W is such a rarity – both the blog manager,Ophelia and regular commenters are so sane, civil and kindly (tough guys Karl and Stewart may blanch at this adjective)that I lurk here nearly everyday.”
Actually, I blanch at the adjective “tough” – and I lurked here nearly every day, too, for a long time, before I made my first tentative comment. You’re right, though, and wouldn’t it be silly if a site dedicated to fighting fashionable nonsense did so by merely spouting its own?
“wouldn’t it be silly if a site dedicated to fighting fashionable nonsense did so by merely spouting its own?”
yes but this can happen. Everyone has his hobbyhorse and self-awareness cannot be taken for granted. Further, the commenters can drastically lower the tone. It is, imo, quite an achievement that the readers at B&W are generally a pretty ok bunch of individuals.
Yes, aren’t we? It’s almost scary, because it makes you wonder whether something like that could have just happened without a Higher Power being involved. For something to be “generally pretty ok” is what some people would take as incontrovertible evidence of irreducible complexity.
Now that Karl is gone, one can only wish that he has found true peace among the angels…
No, didn’t you hear a loud yelp coming from above a moment ago? I think he just bit one of them in the balls.
Alas, although B&W on its own provides compelling evidence for there being a higher power in the universe, most of the rest of the blogosphere contradicts this. Instead, it offers ammunition to my own world-view, which I call call ‘Stupid Design’. Look out for it on syllabi near you soon.
How I wish Karl were here to take the piss from it.
I’m sure he’ll be back. I expect he’ll have risen within three days. They usually do. Depends on how much yeast we put in the tomb.
Guys
This ownership thing. As far as I’m concerned, OB “owns” B&W, though technically I probably have first claim on parts of it (this is only a technicality, though).
But that’s not the issue here; what’s at stake is technical expertise. I programmed the site from ground up. So if someone is going to take over the technical side of things (and I’ve no objection to that), they’ve got to have a pretty good grasp of PHP, Perl, MySQL, etc. And they’ve also got to be able to understand all the coding that’s already in place.
There’s also something else at stake here though. B&W sits on a server which I’m responsible for. If then the site gets hacked – for example, if somebody exploits a hole in one of the scripts used to send out email notifications – then I’m responsible for it. (That’s why the weekly email facility is down. I don’t have the time to build in the kind of safeguards necessary to keep out a determined hacker [which given that we’ve already been hacked once is necessary].) This means that even if someone else takes over the technical side of things, I’m still going to need to keep an eye on things; and I’m very busy with other matters.
Also, it isn’t as simple as just moving files around. The whole site is database driven (well mostly it is), so there aren’t static files in the old sense.
I was waiting for Jerry’s input on this. I don’t have that expertise, but surely this is the thread in which we can try to establish whether anyone out there who cares about keeping this running knows enough, and can put in a little time, under Jerry’s supervision, to do what is necessary to maintain, safeguard and advance. Obviously, only a set-up in which Jerry spends less time having to supervise than it would take him to do everything himself is worth considering. Jerry, how much of the workload required to bring this back to pre-hacker smoothness would be permanent and ongoing and how much would be a one-time push to repair and put in safeguards which could, maybe, be upgraded with a high degree of automation? The answer is less for me than for somebody out there who might be willing and capable of lending you a serious hand. The more we understand, the more we’ll know if and how we can help.
The cavalry will come if you build a stable…
I’m glad to hear the technical update here made by Jerry. It’s not that things are broken but rather disabled because they are dangerous.
Seeing as he hand-coded it and maintains the server (on which other projects are almost certainly running that he is probably responsible for(and even culpable, possibly)) it would be crazy for him to let anyone else touch it. I certainly wouldn’t let a ‘volunteer’ anywhere near shell on a server under these circumstances.
Since it is really only the update mailer that is ‘broken’, it is probably possible to come up with a way to manually send an update – perhaps from a different server. I never saw what one of those updates were – did it contain just the links offered or did it contain these notes and comments as well? If OB can retreive the list of interested parties (I assume it’s just mySQL) in some manageable fashion without JS’s intervention, it shouldn’t be too difficult to manage.
By ‘manually’ I mean have someone (not OB) write up a ‘New on B&W’ email that has links and some content and then mass-mail it to the list. Really, someone could do such an email on their own with cut&paste, they just need to know who to send it to. (I am also assuming it was the email-sending script that was compromised). So it would be a once-a-week job, not demanding at all.
Clearly, I’m willing to assist with such a project, but it might be better off left alone at this point.
Well the scripts are also broken, because I upgraded the server software whilst recovering from the hack, and all the paths, etc. are now different.
It would be possible to do the mailing manually, except it is nearly 1000 people, so quite possibly you’ll get time-outs, run into ISP limits, etc., if you’re not pumping the names directly into sendmail.
Also, the update script automatically detected new material, so this would have to be done if it were to be manual (not too difficult, but slightly time-consuming).
I will fix this stuff, but I don’t understand sendmail well enough (at the moment) to secure the script against possible hacks (basically I’m worried about email injection exploits which attempt to subvert PHP’s mail command).
So I need time to think about it, etc.
Yeah, I didn’t know things were disabled rather than broken either. I don’t know much, and that’s a fact.
Nope, OB can’t retrieve the list in some manageable fashion, alas, because it’s not a list, it’s over a thousand separate entries. In this new database that takes minutes to load each page, one entry to a page.
It doesn’t matter that much. I just fret a little that people who liked it miss it (and a lot won’t know why it’s gone) – along with the fact that it sold some dictionaries every week.
No, mostly it’s this feeling that’s like expecting to be expelled or fired or evicted at any moment. But maybe I’ll get used to it.
Oops, that was a cross-post. Sorry.
I forgot to mention that one of the things I’ve done at the UW is code auditing of perl and PHP written by the student staff, with an emphasis on security. I don’t want to come across as bragging here–I just want to convey that I’m qualified to help with this sort of thing.
Hey, many thanks, Josh – looks to me as if you’re entitled to an apple crisp just for typing all that.
If I find myself out in the rain with no shelter for B&W, I’ll take you up on the offer.
Why am I not surprised that people are coming out of the woodwork with offers of every kind of assistance at the first hint of a problem keeping this site going? Though the kick I confess to getting out of it personally is the affirmation that there are so many more like-minded people out there. Who knows, maybe one day we won’t be such a downtrodden minority…
Actually, that’s seriously true, Stewart. It’s been of the major surprises for me of doing B&W, that there are a lot of like-minded people out there. Commenters and emailers are just the tip of the iceberg. It was clear pretty much from the beginning that it was going to hit a nerve – because of all the academic Names who agreed to contribute articles or interviews to B&W as soon as I asked – when we hadn’t even started yet.
Therefore, obviously, it has to keep going. It’s an obligation.
What? An apple crisp just for typing? That was not the deal I had in mind… Well. Perhaps a practice one. But I get at least half. Mmm.
(Not that Josh wouldn’t have helped out without my bribery — bribery just seemed like good form.)
Well I did say “looks to me as if” – not wanting to go around declaring people deserving of apples crisps that other people will be making. I always hedge these things – well not always – but often – I sometimes hedge some of these things, when I remember to, partly, I think, maybe.
Heh. No flies on you, I reckon, as far as I can tell.
OB — by the end of this comments section, I was relieved to see that things didn’t look quite as grim as at the beginning of the comments section. I like reading this blog enormously, although I disagree with it all the time. It is one of the bright lights.
But how soon we forget brave Karl…
Who?
Wasn’t “Who?” the question Karl was supposed to ask at this point?
Who?
I’ll _never_ forget whatsisname.