Gettin' Wikijiggered

Wikijiggered? Trust me, it's a politer word than what I'm thinking at the moment!

I've been wrestling with DokuWiki, a wiki that the TechGnome (aka Nayth) mentioned to me. It's neat - a wiki that relies only on PHP and the standard HTML/Javascript/CSS blend, no backend database (unless you want one) and no java classes (I'll come back to those in a minute). One upshot of this is that the pages are saved as text files -- yes, I said text files, vanilla flavoured, human readable, completely portable text files.

So why am ready to rip a few limbs off something? ACLs.

Access Control Lists. Or should that be Administrators Cursing Loudly? Without ACL features turned on, DokuWiki performs as expected, all is well. Turn the ACL features on, and register a new user, get a password emailed back, and login... except the username/password combo doesn't work. Aargh! How can be so close and yet so far?!

I want to set up this wiki in a school, but I don't want anyone in the world being able to hack up students' work, I'd like a certain level of security around this - if student X vandalised student Y's work, I'll be able to track X down and kick his sorry ar... erm... reprimand him. But I can't do that with someone on the other side of the planet. Hence security. Hence ACLs. And hence "Aargh".

The security issue also came up the other day with blogs. KP wanted a blog that only she and her students would access. I was looking at setting up a blogging system anyway, but had assumed that the TechGnome would know how to lock up subdirectories of our webserver - what do I tell my students until they're tired of hearing it? Never assume.

Nayth, to his credit, had not been simply resting on his laurels - the issue was that Apple had changed things significantly when they introduced OS X, Nayth had simply not had the time to dig through the manuals/forums/online support, and no one had pushed him to find out the answer.

At this point, God said "Come, let us go down and confuse them" (actually, that was the people of the Shinar plain [Genesis 11], but it works here too), and reminded Nayth of something he had seen. Mac OS X Server has a built-in weblog setup.

A quick look at this revealed that it could be locked down to specific users who would be authenticated by LDAP against the users on our file server. Hooray! Problem solved. (Never assume.)

Further inspection of this wondrous blogging system revealed what I should have suspected. It's not something Apple cooked up from scratch - in fact, it's a pruned version of Blojsom, a java-based implementation of Blosxom. Pruned? Yes - Apple have removed several aspects of the standard Blojsom implementation, added their own OS X branded skins, tied it to LDAP, and so on. The point is obviously to make it work neatly with OS X Server, which it does, but at the sacrifice of features and the user interface.

Some of this can be worked around (e.g. themes), but others present a problem. For example, WYSIWYG editing is a standard feature of most blogging systems, but Apple have removed that bit. You can probably install TinyMCE, but if you do, forget about using Safari. There's no easy way to upload images - you can put them into a folder in the web server, but then you have to add the image tags manually. (Unless I can get one of the Blojsom plugins to do this for me. And here I'm starting to get out of my depth - Blojsom is java-based, and its plugins are java classes. If it's just a case of editing some text files to enable the appropriate classes, fine, but if something goes belly-up, well... oh look, a decoy!)

And if that wasn't enough? A user can only have one blog, based on his/her username. Of course, it's possible to create a blog for a 'group', and we could create as many 'groups' as we like, but this means creating 'groups' that aren't actually groups, and cluttering up user lists, and I hate kludges like that at the best of times.

In short, Apple's Mac OS X Server weblog system is wikijiggered blogshlock. (For that matter, so is Safari. Safari could be the best browser on the planet, except that when it comes to some things, like using rich text editors in blogging systems, it's hopeless. Hmm, I can feel another rant coming on.)

Software that takes you nine-tenths of the way, and then leaves you flat on your laurels, just short of your goal - don't you hate being wikijiggered?

Update:
Oh, the shame. The ACLs weren't the problem. The problem? My bad.

It turned out that in adjusting one of the files to set up the 'superuser', Dreamweaver was saving the file with 'Mac-style' CR line endings instead of 'Linux-style' LF line endings, and this was screwing up Dokuwiki's attempts to read the user names and password hashes.

I suppose I could blame the documentation which directed me to make the changes to that file but never mentioned the necessity of ensuring that it is saved with LFs rather than CRs, but then again, that documentation is in a wiki, so I suppose the responsible thing is to go back and add this myself.

So I guess I wikijiggered my own blog post. Ain't irony a beautiful thing?

Onions Make Me Cry

From Miguel Guhlin's blog for Sep 24:

TorPark, an anonymizing browser (available for Windows) that doesn't have to be installed on your computer, is now out, shares Ben Horst at SolidOffice.org. ...[snip]... As far as I know, while it's possible to block, many school districts don't have a clue. . .the best they can do is block the download site that students might use. Now, all students have to do is load TorPark onto a USB drive (some schools are providing USB Flash drives to students as alternatives to floppies, so all they have to do is load it on there...convenient, huh?). ...[snip]... It's also available in different languages!

Plug it into any internet terminal whether at home, school, work, or in public. Torpark will launch a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously. How much does Torpark cost? IT'S FREE.

What are the implications for something this easy to use? Well, don't worry, info-tech people will be getting all excited about blocking this! Quick, Quick...get started blocking and filtering!! What is fascinating is how K-12 schools can continue to try and block sites like this when there are communities of developers figuring out ways to bypass the blocks and filtering...it's a free speech, protect your privacy kind of use that many Americans see as fundamental.

To achieve strong anonymity, intermediate services may be employed to thwart attempts at identification, even by governments. These attempt to use cryptography, passage through multiple legal jurisdictions, and various methods to thwart traffic analysis to achieve this. A more recent approach in internet anonymity involves the use of an onion router such as Tor. Onion routers send information over encrypted protocols to several intermediate computers around the world in order to make identification more difficult. This has been countered with advances in text analysis, in which the identity of a writer is determined by comparing the writing style of a piece to styles of pieces in which the author is known.
[Source]

This last point--text analysis--almost reminds me of TurnItIn, and the ongoing controversy of using it.

At McLean High School, in Virginia, students collected more than 1,100 signatures on a petition opposing mandatory use of the service, according The Washington Post. The anti-Turnitin faction argues that the database violates students’ intellectual-property rights. And the high school’s use of Turnitin creates the sense that students are guilty until proved innocent, says Ben Donovan, a senior at McLean. "It’s like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student," he says. Source: The Chronicle Campus Blog [Source]

Around the Corner - MGuhlin.net - Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway. - Mignon McLaughlin


I hadn't heard of onion routers until I read this blog entry and then did a little research, starting with the TorPark site itself. It's not hard to see why some school administrators would be getting nervy - this sort of technology can easily make a mockery of a school's filtering efforts.

And the more I think about that, the more convinced I am that trying to use technology to thwart people from using technology is about as sensible as washing grease stains with olive oil. (I was going to say, 'painting over wallpaper', but then I remembered my father... /sigh/.)

That's not to say that we don't use technology at all in managing technology in our school. Obviously Internet content filtering in a K-12 school is good practice, if only to protect little ones from the "nasty stuff". At the same time, relying almost exclusively on technology to handle what students do with technology is just crazy -- if we imagine that filtering systems will stop older/smarter students who are determined to bypass it, we're deluding ourselves.

The TurnItIn issue surrounds the use of software to detect plagiarism -- one gripe with it is that every student is "assumed guilty until proved innocent". As one commenter to the Chronicle Campus Blog pointed out, the software "will only catch the laziest students that simply buy a paper or copy a website off of the Internet, but it does nothing to stop a student from using a thesaurus to change enough words to fool the software" [comment 9 on the aforementioned Blog]. As almost every word processor now comes with a thesaurus, casting through a paper and 'adjusting' enough words to beat the software takes relatively little effort. (How many of these teachers have actually considered changing their assessment methods to address the problem?)

In the same vein, but on a different scale (but not that different), the music publishing companies who are currently pushing legislators in several countries to treat everyone as music pirates (and remember, you're guilty until proven innocent) are following the same flawed logic -- digital rights management is all about using technology to stop you from using technology. But can it really? I read somewhere recently that the new DRM technology in the latest incarnation of iTunes was broken in three days. If you can think of a way to lock it, someone else out there can conceive a way to unlock it.

I honestly think it's naive to believe that you can defeat technology with technology. But there's plenty of people out there who are going to try. And there will be lots of tears before they're through. Mostly their own, I suspect.

Authority? What's That?

Tim Bray's latest blog entry raises a question I expect as a teacher and IT Coordinator I will hear more and more: how can we be sure that the info on a website is reliable and authoritative?

First, let me quote from Tim's blog:

Let’s ask an interesting real-world question that real-world people might ask: for each of the ten provinces of Canada, what is its population? Let’s suppose you’re not a Canadian insider who knows that the Source Of All Numbers is Statistics Canada. So, you could go to Wikipedia, which would be easy and quick. From East to West you’d look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Edward_Island, and, well, I’ll stop there, because the pattern is obvious. On each of those pages you’ll find the population, along with a lot of other basic facts, presented crisply and legibly, no further steps required. ¶But you know, that’s just the Wikipedia; some joker might have gone in and changed the number by couple hundred thousand up or down, just for fun. Wouldn’t you be better off going to a source with some real authority?

ongoing · Wikipedia: Resistance is Absent


Tim goes on to explain how he then searched on the government websites of the various provinces, and was confronted by lousy web design, URIs that only a machine or an über-geek could conceive (for example, www.gov.on.ca/ont/portal/!ut/p/.cmd/cs/.ce/7_0_A/.s/7_0_252/_s.7_0_A/7_0_252/_l/en?docid=EC001035 -- wha...?) and he concludes that "Wikipedia is going to win". Given his original premise -- if you want to have authority on the Web, you have to show up on the Web... And those who ought to enjoy more authority than Wikipedia aren’t [emphasis mine] -- it seems safe to conclude that Tim isn't entirely happy with this situation.

So let me make a few observations.

Tim is probably right in thinking that far too many people would read the Wikipedia articles and be satisfied with that, not bothering to check further. Students often tend to do this. Mine would if I let them... but I don't.

I've taken to telling my students that websites are not "nuggets of information" waiting for them to come and pick them up, but signs on a trail leading to the "real answer". The trail metaphor is a handy one, since it suggests that they have to continue on, following the links, occasionally doubling back from dead-ends to re-find the trail, and so on.

Some of my students would have certainly found the stats Tim wanted much faster than Tim -- they would have scanned through the Wikipedia article's links and found at the bottom this link: StatCan 2001 Census which is sort of where Tim ended up, but via a longer route.

Then there's the issue of people changing entries in Wikipedia. There's no question, people do weird and stupid things, and changing entries in Wikipedia is one of them. But an even stranger thing also happens -- people fix the mistakes! They get very defensive about it. And it's why Wikipedia works.

But there's one phrase in Tim's blog that really stands out for me: Wouldn’t you be better off going to a source with some real authority? [Emphasis mine]

Define real authority. (Actually, I might pose this as a question to a senior Computing class.) Government websites? (Is that laughter in the background?) Newspaper columns? University sites? Books? (Remember Margaret Mead vs Derek Freeman? I won't even mention Derrida.)

I know that for many, the suggestion that "real authority" is largely ephemeral will ring of heresy. But I'm part of a generation that has grown up realising that the "authorities" all too often spoke (and still speak) a lot of BS.

I would like to think that students who are now growing up with the Web, like my own daughters, will turn out to be fairly savvy when it comes to evaluating info from the Web, from the media, from wherever. They'll know that there's a need to check and cross-check and evaluate and never take any of it for granted. And they may not need to know how to spell authoritative.

Web to point.. oh?

Last Thursday and Friday, I was at an IT Integrators Conference in North Sydney. I got to see an interesting cross-section of things being done in Australian schools, as well as hearing from some compelling speakers, particularly Jim Mullaney and Stephen Downes. The common theme was "Web 2.0" (though there was some discussion that maybe that term has now been copyrighted? Oh, please - next someone will try to take out a trademark on "ugg boot"... oh... right).
So now the places where IT and education are coming together are blogs and wikis and newsfeeds and learning management systems. That's fine for me, I'm familiar with all these things, but in a short time I will become responsible for staff who are almost totally unfamiliar with these things and who are still trying to get their heads around how to integrate web browsers and email and word processors and Powerpoint into their classroom practice. "Web 2.0? I'm still at Web 0.2, thanks!"
The challenge is how to bring these staff up to speed on what they can do in the classroom with IT, but on the positive side, Web 2.0 presents far more opportunity for students to be involved in the technology. I always worried (still do) about how Powerpoint is used in classrooms - I've seen too many people (from Principals down) using several thousand dollars worth of equipment to do what could be done with an old-fashioned overhead projector. (The term is "powerpointlessness" - thank you, Jamie MacKenzie - check out From Now On.) Web 2.0 tools - blogging, wikis - allow students to put their own thoughts and ideas online and participate in a dialog that can be larger than the classroom and longer than the lesson.
That's not to say that Powerpoint presentations, email and Excel spreadsheets don't have their place - obviously they still do. But Web 2.0 tools have the potential to redefine pedagogy in a way that "office" software and older web-base software didn't.
I think the key idea is dialog, with students being participants in the processes of uncovering and connecting disparate components of knowledge. If that's a little hard to follow, I suppose it's because I'm not exactly a constructionist, nor a connectivist in how I view knowledge.
How well I get this across to my colleagues remains to be seen.

Blogging with Flock

So I'm using Flock to manage blogs and newsfeeds, but in checking to see how it handled the feed from my own blog, it's not been too happy.

The problem would appear to lie in the way Flock is formatting the HTML it sends to Blogger. Or perhaps in what Blogger is doing with it.

As an experiment, I'm sending this post to Blogger via Flock, but I'm keeping a copy of Flock's html so I can compare it to what ends up in Blogger.

Should be interesting.

Update 1: So far, there's no problem, so I'll try editing in Blogger and see if it takes. (This is where things went awry before.) I'll add styling in this post, maybe that's where the problem lies.

The other issue is that the new post shows up in Vienna, but not in Flock itself. Very strange.

Update 2: adding styling hasn't caused problems.

I'll try blockquotes and links. Here's Ongoing.

What else can I try?

Update 3: the HTML gremlins have gone away, but Desultoration still won't show as a new post in Flock. $#@!

Update 4: it's the next morning, and suddenly the new posts in Desultoration have appeared in Flock. ?!?!? Okay, it's only beta software, and I should know better than to expect it to work perfectly. Still, if it continues to happen, I'll be giving the News part of Flock a wide berth.

Blogged with Flock

Sorry, Pluto - The Umpire Is Always Right

At first, solar system astronomy and international cricket would appear to have little in common, apart from both being in the news this week. But there is a link between the issues of Pluto's status as a planet and the ball-tampering saga from the England-Pakistan test match. In both cases, there is an umpire in the middle of the situation whose job it is to make decisions about what's acceptable and what's not. And some people are not happy with the umpire.

In the case of Pluto, the umpire is the International Astronomical Union. Faced with various views about what constitutes a planet, the IAU has produced a definition that leaves Pluto out in the cold - a planet is more or less spherical, orbits the sun and clears other objects from its orbit. That last bit was the kicker - Pluto apparently doesn't clear other objects from its orbit; specifically, it's orbit passes inside Neptune's, and therefore it's behaving outside the new "rules".

(Update: it's been pointed out that Neptune obviously doesn't clear its orbit either, so why is it still a planet? Conversely, the two are in a resonance pattern that means they will never come near one another, and their orbits do not actually intersect. So the IAU's rules either don't apply or they should apply to both Neptune and Pluto. It's easy to see why many astronomers are disputing the new definitions.)

Some astronomers have expressed their disappointment with the verdict. They'll made it clear that they will continue to debate it. Others have been philosophical about the matter. NASA's position is nicely diplomatic: "NASA will, of course, use the new guidelines established by the International Astronomical Union," said Dr. Paul Hertz, Chief Scientist for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. "We will continue pursuing exploration of the most scientifically interesting objects in the solar system, regardless of how they are categorized."

Pluto, at least, has handled the news gracefully and continues to orbit unperturbed.

In the test match, on the other hand, there are two umpires out in the middle, and for over 100 years, those two men out in the middle have been the ones with the final say in regards to anything and everything that happens on the field during the game.

In the England-Pakistan test match, the umpires saw something they thought looked like ball-tampering. They inspected the ball. They spoke to the Pakistan captian Inzamam-ul-Haq, and concluded that the ball HAD been tampered with, and penalised the Pakistani team. Inzamam then refused to lead his team back onto the field after the tea break. After half an hour and two requests by the umpires for the Pakistanis to resume the field, the bails were removed and Pakistan were deemed to have forfeited the game.

Since then, we have heard an extraodinary amount of discussion on the part of several people about whether the umpires acted properly. Australian umpire Darrell Hair has been singled out by several figures in Pakistani cricket, notably PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan, former England captain Mike Atherton, and former Pakistani players Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Sarfraz Nawaz. There has been a general implication from these figures that Hair has a bias against Asian players. These same people insist that there is no evidence of the ball being tampered with, and that Hair was wrong to end the match. The fact that Hair has in the days after this controversy erupted offered to stand down if the ICC was willing to compensate him for lost earnings has only complicated the picture.

let's consider the possibilities:

1. That Hair is biased against Asian players, and fabricated the accusation of ball-tampering. (But if this is the case, how did he convince fellow umpire Billy Doctrove to agree to it?) His offer to stand down is because he knows he was in the wrong.

2. That Hair is biased against Asian players, and wrongly concluded that Inzamam was tampering with the ball. His offer to stand down is because he knows he was in the wrong.

3. That Hair is not biased, but mistakenly thought that Inzamam was tampering with the ball. His offer to stand down was the result of the stress and pressure brought about by the implications of bias made by various commentators.

4. That Hair is not biased, and Inzamam was tampering with the ball. Hair's offer to stand down was the result of the stress and pressure.

5. That Hair is biased, but Inzamam was tampering with the ball. Hair's offer to stand down - probably still the result of the stress and pressure, but maybe a bit of the other as well.

Regardless of any of this, there's one thing that is (or ought to be) abundantly clear - Inzamam was absolutely wrong to not bring his team back onto the field. The umpires allowed them more time than they needed to get back out and resume play, and in failing to resume the field, the Pakistanis steered the game to only one possible result. In any sport, a refusal to continue play by one side can only be interpreted as a forfeit. Regardless of whether Inzamam and the rest of the Pakistan team thought they were being hard done by, they should have finished the game. Former legendary umpire Dickie Bird summed it up correctly: "Everybody should have used a little bit of common sense, tried to finish the Test match then thrashed it out behind closed doors."

Inzamam now faces a charge of bringing the game into disrepute, but therein lies another testing moment, but in this case for the ICC - Inzamam's decision not to return to the field was clearly wrong, but will the ICC deal with this in a way that does not undermine its own authority? If the ICC fails to discipline Inzamam, its credibility will have dealt a serious blow.

The ICC will also need to address some of the spurious rhetoric coming from the Pakistanis. Pakistan tour manager Zaheer Abbas said the news of Hair's offer was a "huge victory" for his side. A huge victory? Hardly. Zaheer went on to say, "This also proves our protest on the fourth day of the final Test was legitimate..." Does Zaheer really believe that not returning to the field and forfeiting the match is a legitimate way to protest a decision by an umpire? If so, he should get completely out of cricket and all other organised sport today.

Maybe Hair is biased. Maybe the Pakistanis have a problem with non-Asian umpires who don't put up with crap from the players.

The simple fact remains - during play, the umpire is always right. You might not agree with the decisions, you might think the umpire is an idiot, or has it in for you - it doesn't matter. You finish the game, then you can lodge your protest, have the debate, whatever.

During play, the umpire is always right - even on Pluto.

Unthink

I was reading Tim Bray's blog the other day titled "Unswitch", and the follow-up to that blog, where a number of people responded to Tim's dissatisfaction with Safari. I mentioned the blog to a colleague as we were installing Firefox on his laptop.

His reaction was quite interesting - he told me that he would be quite happy to only use Safari and didn't really want another browser on his laptop. (The reason we were installing Firefox is because one of our online applications, an important one in our organisation, doesn't play nicely with Safari.) Further to this, he is happy to confine himself to using Apple's Addressbook, Mail.app and iCal, and has changed over from MS Word and Powerpoint to iWorks. He likes this arrangement because it's all so seamless.

Now, I can understand that... up to a point. It's nice when applications work well together, and Apple's applications do play very nicely together. But does that mean that Mac users ought to look disdainfully upon software that doesn't play nicely with Apple's own offerings? And why does my colleague want to restrict himself to a single browser? Having another browser doesn't stop him from using Safari for his general surfing. So what's behind his desire for one browser only?

At this point, I must confess that I am the sort of person who has multiple applications for all sorts of things. I like to try new applications, and if I like them, I keep them, and use them. The browser I mainly use is Camino, but I know that there are some things that Camino doesn't work well with, such as those wysiwyg editors you find included in many web applications. So I have Firefox as well, which handles those things that Camino objects to. I also have Opera, which handles certain java applets that even Firefox finds hard to digest (such as the searchable database at ChessLab). I also have other browsers, for other reasons.

Does it matter that I have several browsers? Not as far as I can tell. It's not like email clients, where having more than one client on an email account could be a recipe for disaster. For me, it's like having a set of tools where I can pick the one that best fits my need at the time. The same goes for text editors. For more heavy-duty crunching, I have TextWrangler, and I use jEdit for working with Lilypond files, but I've taken to using TextForge for the simple stuff.

And yet my colleague is clearly not alone in his "one browser to rule them all" way of thinking. It's not just Safari advocates - I'm aware of Firefox supporters who would happily see all other browsers (and certain operating systems) go the way of the dinosaur. What's behind this way of thinking? Honestly, no one browser is that good, and having more than one browser is no real strain. Is it a desire for simplicity? I could understand that. But I don't think that's it.

My suspicion is that, for some people, it's akin to politics and football teams and racing cars, e.g. "I'm a BrandX man." You know, that "draw a line in the sand" thing that leaves some of us walking away shaking our heads.

For others, like my colleague, I think it's something even worse - a desire to not have to think. "I don't want to have to remember which browser to use where, I just want to click on it and go." "I don't want to have to decide." They want the decision already made, no choices, a straight line to follow. So, one browser, one word processor, and so on.

Why is this worse? Because it leads into something else Tim Bray mentioned in his "Unswitch" article - infofascism.

I used to think that it was the Dark Side who were the main perpetrators of this (and I still gnash my teeth whenever I find myself using a certain Word processor that thinks it knows better how to format my document than I do - and yes, I do have the autoformatting turned off, and the preferences set to suit my way of doing things, and the #$%&! thing still finds ways to annoy and frustrate me.) But I've come to realise that others, including Apple, also try to impose their desires on their users.

For example, my colleague, conceding that Safari was not sufficient because of that web app he must be able to use, asked me to transfer his bookmarks from Safari to Firefox. (One browser, remember - if he has to use Firefox, he'll use it for everything.) I asked him why he couldn't do this himself, and he pointed out that Safari didn't have a menu option to export its bookmarks. What the...?

A quick look at Safari and, sure enough, there's an option to import bookmarks, but no export. I tell him (and myself), there must be a way. A quick search on the web shows how to reveal a hidden menu in Safari called "Debug". It includes the option to export bookmarks. Problem solved.

But why is that menu hidden by default? Why does Apple assume that you will not want to export your bookmarks from Safari? Even if Safari was the best browser on the planet, isn't it presumptuous of Apple to conceal options in the software you may want to use, and to make it that little bit harder to switch to something else?

Don't get me wrong - I'd rather have my Mac than a Windows box any day. OS X has opened up a whole new arena to me via X11. I'm now able to work with stuff that previously would have required setting up a separate machine to run Linux. Which gets at the very point I'm trying to make. Computers allow us to expand and explore our thinking. When software starts channelling us into certain ways of working that lead us to not think, that narrow our options, something's gone wrong.

Or maybe I'm overstating the case. Maybe there's plenty of people out there who prefer to have the software developers do a lot of the thinking for them, making their lives a bit simpler. Maybe.