Just when you thought it was safe to take a look at what the OLPC project was doing putting Windows XP on their XO laptops for children, comes news that the OS originally developed for the XO, Sugar, is going to be developed as a spin-off company called Sugar Labs.

The great thing about the XO project was that it was so bold. It wasn't just going to be a cheap PC, it was going to be a PC with revolutionary energy and networking features paired with an OS with a new paradigm for user activity. In many ways, it was ditching old conventions born of another time and another environment in favor of features that were designed to make the laptop an optimal fit for its intended audience.

It seems that this was too much to ask for. Now, instead, kids will end up with an innovative laptop using an archaic and derivative OS or they'll get to use an innovative OS on some company's cheap hardware.

I guess playing nice wasn't on the curriculum.

Oh well, sometimes the best of intentions are simply too difficult to pull off. My guess is that the real problem was sales related. If too many people balk at buying a laptop with a unique OS on it, and they'll buy it with XP, you put XP on it and get it into people's hands. In doing so, maybe you compromise a little bit of your soul, but hey, your intentions are still good.

I've been a big fan of alternative operating systems, so I'll be following what happens over at Sugar Labs. I used to boot up NeXT before it became Mac OS X, and dabbled with OS/2 before and after it became OS/2 Warp. I played with Be OS too. I remember the dark days of the Mac platform when their former CEO Gil Amelio was looking into selling Macintoshes running Windows NT. That would have been the end of Apple,  but that was a different time and a different place.

Of course, it's no big surprise that the XO won't run Windows Vista. Most companies won't run Vista on their computers either. Maybe this is an opportunity for Sugar Labs? That would be a really ruel joke to play on kids though, wouldn't it? They get XP while the corporate world migrates to Sugar? Not a very nice thing to do to the children.

Quick post today. I would love to ruminate on what being able to run Windows on the OLPC/XO in addition to Sugar means for the One Laptop Per Child Program, or OLPC's split with Intel or even more fun, their new XO-2 $75 laptop, but... there are issues closer to home to cover.

I tried to bolster our site a bit last night, and ending up knocking the site offline for a little over an hour. I couldn't get it back online.I had run into the same issue before but this time, none of the previous solutions fixed the problem. And by last night, I mean midnight here on the Pacific Coast of North America.

So what do you do in the middle of the night when your site is down and won't get back up? It's rare when this happens, but it does. A good service provider will make sure that when there is an emergency, they have somebody available to take care of it for you no matter what the hour. They get paged, and they take care of you. If that somebody is on your staff, lucky you. Most small businesses don't have that person. For Social Edge, I kind of function in that role. But last night it was beyond what I could do. I sheepishly filled out the after hours form and sighed deeply as I hit submit. A little while later I received an email letting me know that the required fix was implemented.

There's still work to be done, as I need to figure out why what I did caused things to stop functioning this time and not last time. Hopefully, when I try to implement the fix again it will be smooth. Moral of the story is, when picking a service provider for mission critical systems, make sure their support is 24/7 because you never know when you're going to need it.

Evidently, Social Edge is to Chinese search engine spider bots as David Hasselhoff is to Germany. The bots love us!

In wading through our recent slowdown, we found more than one cause for our woes. Turns out there were a couple of bots from search engines in China that were crawling our site, but they were hitting inaccessible pages, leading to, well, some huge error logs among other problems.

As a result, I've temporarily turned off  the wiki and added a couple of exceptions to our robots.txt file. A little more testing and I'll turn the wiki back on, but the fact that it can be edited with a login was problematic.

If only we had been Rickrolled.

But no, we had something else happen that was worse than having an 80's British pop star appear unexpectedly on our screen. Truth be told, I always kind of liked Rick Astley. Okay, fine, I admit it. I owned the album. On cassette.

Nope, we had a different kind of surprise sprung upon us, and just like when I'm the butt of a practical joke, I feel stupid today. I hadn't kept up with all of the security updates for our software here on the Edge, and some hackers took advantage of a loophole to send traffic through our site to other sites with what we'll call a less philanthropic, more capitalistic site with fewer discussions about social entrepreneurship. No content or user data has been compromised, just our bandwidth and my pride. As regular visitors know, SocialEdge.org has been very slow for the past week, and this appears to have been a major contributing factor.

Why do people do this? In this case, the exploitive method used somehow increased SEO results of this less than respectable site by taking advantage of our more respectable nature. At the end of the day, it's the same reason that you get SPAM in your inbox telling you that you can get a cheap prescription online or that some Nigerian nobility has died and their kin wants to give you a ton of their money. Somebody clicks the link and somebody else makes money.

I'm tempted to hand out the IP addresses of the folks involved to the internet community at large and see what kind of mayhem could be brought to bear on the perpetrators, but I don't need the headache that comes with misguided retribution. Instead I'm working with their ISP to try and shut them off. I've also upgraded our software to block the exploit and have removed what never should have made it's way onto our systems. There is still some clean-up to do, so bear with us and we'll be back to full speed shortly.

This process has also revealed some other issues that we can address that will allow us to make some improvements that should result in a better, faster and more reliable Social Edge. In the end I'm going to choose to view the glass as half-full and filling up. I'd almost like to thank the hackers for helping me to make Social Edge a better site. Almost, but not quite. I'd rather have them sit and watch the same Rick Astley video over and over again for as many hours as I have wasted figuring out what they did and how to fix it.

But hey, can you blame them? We can't all have jobs with a purpose that we believe in. Some people are left to peddle their misbegotten wares via thievery and deceit.

So hang in there, and we'll do our best to make sure that Social Edge performs as well on the back end as you do on the front end. You're an amazing community filled with amazing people, and you deserve nothing less.

In 20 years, will anybody think of Waterworld when Kevin Costner's name comes up in a conversation? Or will they be more likely to reminisce about Field of Dreams or Dances with Wolves? I would guess that Waterworld will fall more and more out of the publics' conscience, as fewer and fewer people reference it.

(If you missed Waterworld - and most people did, thankfully - it was sort of an anachronistic sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, with Jet Skis and gills.)

Then again, if people are interested in finding out about horrible movies of the past, it will float right up to the top.

Getting your content and/or media out into the ether may not return immediate results, but if it's tagged well and of high quality, it will rise to the top of appropriate conversations. Seth Godin blogged about a new site called Addict-o-matic. The link he posted was a search of Acumen Fund related information, and lo & behold, there were three X-Interviews with Acument Fund Fellows on the page that came up.

Good stuff, and a whole lot more enjoyable than Waterworld.