The 'Love Parade' is being revived in Berlin. The European rave festival was shut down a few years back because there was no way to pay for cleanup costs. Looks like they've found a corporate sponsor (McFit - an exercise chain) to pay for the garbage trucks.

Love Parade, indeed. It should probably be called "A week of X". Hope the pharmaceutical companies have pumped up their inventories. One and a half million people doing Ecstasy, speed, whatever -  and dancing 24/7 for a week or so to content-free techno-pop. You do the math. Actually, I wonder if anybody approached the pharmaceutical community for sponsorships... 

There's a bit of a stink raising over the sale of the operations of six seaports to a company in either UAE or Dubai - the stories are conflicting. Questions are being raised about the potential homeland security issues of an Arab country controlling our ocean ports. 

I look at it as more of an issue of selling out the country.  Why don't we sell them the Smithsonian? The Mississippi River? We could use the cash... Heck, why don't we sell them the White House?

Oh wait...

A survey of Canadian teens reports that 87% of them have sex over instant messenger, webcams, or the telephone. Coincidentally, the same number of them (87%) are reported to be sober at the time.

Wonder if the net will lead the world to zero population growth.... 

I was up most of the night getting the webserver working again. Apache failed to compile. So I upgraded. Failed to compile. Took out the mod_dav option I was trying to turn on. It built. Sigh. Since this was an upgrade, I installed it. But then PHP broke. All the websites, hosed. Nothing.  

So I recompiled PHP. But mod_dav wasn't working, and that was the whole point. Not only that but mod_rewrite wasn't working either. Turning on either made the build fail. Couldn't find libgdbm. I'm not using libgdbm. How many times do I have to tell you!?! Apparently, it won't listen. It will configure without libgdbm, but then will complain that it can't find it. Fine, I'll use Berkeley DB instead. Can't find Berkeley DB. And by the way, it can't find libgdbm (which it isn't supposed to be using) either. Oh, and to add insult to injury, it can't find /usr/lib/libgdbm.la - which is there because I installed it anyway, even though I don't want to use it. Why can't you find something that's there and you're not supposed to look for? Why can't you do anything right? Why? Why? 

I went back to last months apache package.  It wouldn't compile at all. The same errors about missing databases that I have no need for.  Now I'm really hosed. Can't get back to my working environment.

At about 3:30 AM I finally pulled out original sources and rebuilt everything in the exact configuration I setup a few weeks ago. (No small feat). Yay! Went to bed. 

Later this morning I started the forensics to figure out what went bad and why. Turns out that it's APR (Apache Portable Runtime). APR is supplied with Apache, but Apache (and APR) are built with a prior version of APR if it exists. I've had so many APR's on this system I can't figure out which one it loaded. The message that it required a newer version of APR made it suspect. Why the heck do you need a newer version of APR if you're going to  BUILD a brand spanking new version of FREAKING APR? What's wrong with this picture?

So anyway, I manually built and installed the APR piece of the webserver, and then used that version to build the rest of the webserver. Mod_dav built just fine this time around. But I'm not installing it today, since I already know I'll have to rebuild PHP again to make it work.  I'll just sit on it for a few days. I've had enough upgrade joy for the week. 

Need sleep.

Most of the places I've worked in the software world used CVS as the version control software. I can't tell you how many times I've cursed CVS because it will usually end up doing something stupid, and the only way out is to go in as a Unix administrator and mess with the repository to fix it. More than once I've done this and ended up messing up every developer in the place. Hacking the repository is a no-no. But the poorly written software often leaves you no other choice. With CVS there's no such thing as a mistake. If you put a file into the system, you've put it there forever. If you create a bug that wipes out your hard drive and make the mistake of checking it in, it's always there to wipe out the hard drives of any sucker that chances on that bad revision.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I'm now using subversion. Every single little thing that I hated about cvs has been fixed in svn. It's probably safe to assume that subversion was written by a group of ex-CVS admins who got tired of doing the same stupid things over and over.

Now if only I can get my webserver to load it up...  apache doesn't build mod_dav by default, which the svn webserver module seems to need. Apache likewise doesn't seem to want to rebuild since I upgraded my zlib for the mySQL upgrade -- it's getting a header conflict. I had to update zlib because mySQL wanted a more recent version of Berkeley DB, and Berkeley DB wanted a more recent version of about thirty different packages... Sigh... Back to upgrade hell. The problem with Linux is that it's always a moving target. Make that a few thousand moving targets that are all moving at different speeds, with each depending on hundreds of other projects which also move at varying speeds. 

Try plugging that into a spreadsheet...

OK, the fine print. I'm probably responsible for about a hundred thousand or so.  And close to 880,000 are the result of spiders and crawlers.

Human visitors? Maybe a couple of hundred...

It's all about fighting 'comment spam'. Turns out that Google's page rank mechanism has completely altered the internet landscape. It's all about getting links. There are folks out there whose job description is to find ways to get their employer's website link on as many pages as they can. The first place they go? Weblogs, bulletin boards, public forums. They post a comment. It has nothing to do with the article they are commenting on. It's just some text with a link in it. A link that presumably Google will find and increase their page rank.

Most of the truly public forums have closed already. This has helped to reduce the problem because the first wave of attacks was automated. Now the spammers have to do a lot of stuff by hand. Find the security mechanism and get through it to post the link.  That's why everything is being moderated these days.

Netscape anticipated this back in 1995. The SSL protocol was revised to include a personal identity. It was known at the time as an 'internet driver's license'. Without an established identity, you wouldn't be able to access the majority of web services being envisioned. This also would centralize authentication and create a new business model - some company or three would get very wealthy by being the gatekeepers of internet identity.

The internet driver's license died a horrible death due to privacy (and monopoly) concerns. Without privacy, the web would not flourish and reach its full potential. So went the argument. And without a credible universally acceptable identity mechanism, the only way to establish identity is the way we do it now. Every website that wishes to track identity has a login mechanism that is different from everybody else. That's why you now have hundreds (or thousands) of user accounts with passwords.

Now fast forward ten years or so. The web has indeed flourished. It still has yet to reach its full potential. In order to get to the next phase, it may be time to bring back the internet driver's license...

The music store is gone, so yesterday I took the day off. Today I'm taking another day off, and no, I'm not gonna' watch the game. Think I'll upgrade my databases.  Actually, I upgraded them this morning. That's all done.