Martin Geisler Online

FreeNet version 0.5.1 has just been released, get it here from SourceForge or from GimpsterDotCom, see FreeNetSeedNodes for links. By downloading it from GimpsterDotCom, you’ll get a different seednodes.ref file than the one distributed from SourceForge. This means that you node will be better integrated into the network from the beginning.

A story is now running as SlashDot, getting lots of comments. The network is seeing a lot of traffict from new nodes, so it seams that new people are joining the network. But the network still works beautifully, it doesn’t show any signs of being “slashdotted”.

After my last post you could the get the impression that I’m tired of running such an open WikiWikiWeb where everybody can change everything so easily. Nothing could be more wrong! When I explain the concept of a WikiWikiWeb to people most of them find it rather strange — they don’t understand how it could work.

But it does work. From time to time I see people correcting errors found on the pages here at GimpsterDotCom, making the site a little better each time. For example, after I restored [PHP Shell][], someone was kind enough to change the word “lunched” into the correct “launched” so that the page now make a lot more sense. I’m very grateful for those corrections because they’re the kind of mistakes that are hard to catch for me when I don’t speak English natively.

It’s these small and large contributions that proves to me that WikiWikiWeb~s work and I would like to thank everybody who have helped me since I launched (note, not lunched :-) GimpsterDotCom as a WikiWikiWeb.

Don’t people have anything else to do than mess up my pages?! Yesterday I made a new release of [PHP Shell][], and 13 minutes later some idiot (with an IP address of 12.151.162.13) replaced the entire page with the text “H A C K E D B Y A L N O R 3 S”.

First of all, you haven’t “hacked” anything — you’ve used the readily available editing facilities in PhpWiki to edit the page. Now, that’s really impressive — it shows that you can submit a form through a webbrowser! What a cool way to demonstrate the great computer skills possessed by the so-called hackers from this “alnor3s”… I guess we all have to fear these guys who have such great knowledge on how to do WikiVandalism…

Secondly, the term hacker is used about a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. according to JargonFile:hacker. Perhaps you confused yourself with a cracker (see the Jargon File), but I wouldn’t even call you that since you haven’t cracked anything — a WikiWikiWeb is already wide open to everybody.

Even if you have no creative skill, there’s no reason to destroy the work or others, especially when this work is given away for free in the hope that someone out there might find it useful.

This release doesn’t add any significant new functionality, instead it breaks compatibility with versions of [PHP][] earlier than 4.1.0 :-) The only new feature is that the stderr checkbox now remembers it’s state. Thanks goes to Michael Zech for sending me a patch!

Seriously, you or your provider ought to have updated your PHP installation beyond version 4.1.0 by now, considering that it’s almost 18 months since it was released (PHP 4.1.0 was released December 11th, 2001). PHP 4.1.0 was the version that introduced the new superglobal arrays: $_REQUEST, $_SERVER, and so on. I’m using them now in [PHP Shell][] because they’re the future standard and because it’s convenient.

For this release I’ve also fixed the generated [HTML][] so that it has become Strict [XHTML][] 1.0 accompanied by a valid stylesheet.

So, this release is mostly about standards complience, which is pretty important if you ask me, but which doesn’t add much new in itself.