In continued praise of open source
I’m a caretaker of other people’s property. Intellectual, that is, or imaginary; your own definition of “the stuff that people think up” may vary. My role is to administer virtual spaces where others can publish their random thoughts. Flypaper. And, with some exceptions, the whole thing muddles along without much deep thought by either me or anyone else. At one point, I actually set up one hundred parallel blogs, but that’s just an example of the kind of things that you can do when you are slightly masochistic.
There are parallels to this blogspace. Empty places, because they’ve been created to facilitate. However, the world of software abhors deprecated versions, and abjures their continued existence. This afternoon I decided to do some necessary “updating of versions” and hit the bump of the forgotten password. This, after what seemed like an eternity of interrupted FTP sessions to get the newer version into the right stall; what to do, what to do? Random guesses didn’t carry the day, nor did a session of MySQL where I could see the encrypted “old phrase”, erase it at will but not replace the irrelevant with the important.
Thankfully we live in a world where open source means assistance is only a google away. Someone else had foreseen (or had) the exact same problem and then written a quick fix and made the fix available. Samaritans rock! In this case, a snippet of PHP called emergency allows an administrator to drop the code onto a server, reset the password and get on with more important things. The obvious warning: don’t leave the code in place after use. Erase it. Now. I can only tell you that it worked exactly as promised, and that doesn’t happen very often.
