TNSFF

Tech, music, sports, and other stuff.

12 Sep 2009

Rain Out

2 sausages: $16
2 beers: $16
2 hours sitting waiting in a rain delay: Priceless?

08 Sep 2009

No Need to Panic

My site has been flaky over the last bit as my web host is doing who knows what. Presumably they'll get it figured out.

Though this made me laugh ....

Well, it would have made people laugh if I had the ability to upload a file ... so instead, I'll just paste the text in:

12:35:39 up 8 min, 3 users, load average: 413.01, 255.54, 113.59

Good times.

Oh ... it's getting worse:

[flower]$ uptime
12:46:20 up 18 min, 3 users, load average: 742.20, 567.02, 336.31

06 Aug 2009

Twitter Broke the Web

With Twitter being down, and feeling the need to spew out characters to the Twinterweb, I opened up trusty MarsEdit and decided to update my good ol' blog.

That's when I realized how much Twitter had taken over.

I hadn't logged into my web interface in a bit, so I had a WordPress update, 4 plugin updates, and a bunch of pending spam. I cleared that out and then started crafting a post in MarsEdit. As I went to post those fateful words, MarsEdit choked on an XML-RPC error complaining about bad content.

I quickly scanned through recent post, looked for bad characters. I used the Googles to try to find an explanation. Finally, I noticed that each page of my blog was spitting out a PHP warning (because, you know, PHP is pretty dumb, and I'm too lazy to have turned off warnings) that it couldn't download my latest tweets from Twitter.

One quick click of "Disable" and MarsEdit sprung back to life.

Twitter was breaking my site.

At which point, it dawned on me, that at this point, Twitter being down is like having part of the internet's routing being down. It's tied into so many systems, and so much traffic/content flows through it, that when it goes kablooey, all that content has to route elsewhere. Which then floods those systems, and they start to struggle and burst at the seams a bit, and then folks overflow into another system, and so on.

Until, the end result, of course, is that Twitter was breaking my site.

Here's a graphical representation:

Twitter Down

It's fixed now.

My site, that is, not Twitter, which is still down.

12 Feb 2009

All the Way Broken is Better Than Partially Broken

Oddly, I learned a fun lesson today:

All the way broken is far better than partially broken.

I think I implicitly knew that--debugging completely broken things is far easier than debugging something that works sometimes--but our network at work today has been what you could politely call "flaky." And not knowing if your last keystroke got through to the server or if the request you just sent went off into the ether is not a fun way to work.

At least if everything was broken I could have shifted into doing non-online things and actually been productive.