The prior week, I had two experiences that were somewhat scary in terms of technological behavior. First, this blog lost several of its most recent entries—which just disappeared—without any logical reason. There was not any known update to the server or compromise in terms of the accounts. Rather, some of the entries and replies to those entries just vanished. And then, I was working with a faculty member to get onto a wiki. Once she created an account, I went in as an administrator and gave her all rights. However, days later, she was not yet email confirmed. Further, I was asked to present on the wiki, and for some reason, the recent changes were not showing up. I could get the recent changes to show on 3 of my 4 machines, but the 4th one stubbornly would not show any updating. I cleaned out browser caches…updated the machine’s OS…and rebooted. I tried to update anything that might affect how the wiki was displaying, to no avail.

Always Backups

Of course, we always have data backups. I have information saved and protected in various files and on multiple servers. I could go to the administrator of the server to reverse back to a time to preserve work after a system has crashed.

The challenge though is in the trust factor. One expects machines to be predictable. One wants clear reasons why a tool is behaving a particular way. One needs a machine to be predictable—in its behaviors. One can’t have machines losing data or acting in non-logical ways.

If the system were to crash in a huge way, there is no guarantee that with all my backups that I could bring it back to its pristine original form. After all, I back up the nitty-gritty, but I don’t resave imagery from multiple locations. Even the idea of putting in the hours and mental concentration to rebuild a resource is deeply daunting.

Stability over Features

I understand the idea of many of those in IT security who extol stability and security over new features. One assumes the foundational pieces before the glittery ones of new features. We want the tool to just work first—in a way that is semi-intuitive. We do assume that we have stability and security first because without those we are not really able to innovate or risk-take. Of course, we want the works, too, in terms of a suite of development tools and features.

Anyway, the week was capped with a patched software that worked like a dream when I was uploading a large file to a remote server. That all worked like a dream.

I am still trying to figure out what happened with the account and the wiki, but I am reconciled to being somewhat left in the dark at least for a short while.