Entries from October 2007 ↓

This is simply a fantastic quote (and in my mind incredibly on-target):

“This mantra of ‘openness’ is everywhere nowadays. Facebook gets $15 billion valuation after it ‘opens up’ its platform to outside developers. Never mind the fact that Facebook is a one-way data roach motel where users’ metadata remains behind the company’s walled garden.”

Ouch.

http://counternotions.com/2007/10/25/motorola-on-iphone/

Tags: facebook, iphone

I want one of these:

“Think of it as a 45-foot-long bb gun. Only in this case, the BBs are fired at 20,500 mph at spaceships. Sort of. All the gunplay takes place inside a physics lab at the University of Dayton Research Institute. The goal: to test the mettle of the composite fabric or aluminum skins on orbit-bound spacecraft. The materials are designed to protect the vehicles from the tens of millions of undetectably small — but potentially lethal — bits of space junk that constantly zoom around Earth at a hull-piercing 17,900 mph.”

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/15-10/st_bbgun

Tags: bbgun, science, spacecraft

Wow. This is incredibly exciting news -

“Scientists Use Superconducting Cyclotron to Make Super-Heavy Metals”

This opens up the possibility of countless new isotopes that could be used in till-now unthinkable ways. Though it may sound as though I’m counting chickens that haven’t been conceived, let alone hatched, consider what this implies:

With the proper of amount of force [and acceleration, collision, etc.] we may be able to produce elements that previously only occurred naturally. Could mass-production of these elements be possible?

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/10/heavymetalisotopes

Tags: heavymetals, superconductor, science

Though ticket sales resumed Tuesday, it certainly appears that problems remained. Local media was not kind.

A Rockies spokesman on Monday had claimed that the site had been “…the victim of a deliberate attack”. When asked to provide details on this statement Tuesday, that same spokesman declined comment. It was noted that [thus far] no criminal complaint(s) had been filed on behalf of either MLB or the Rockies in relation to the site outage.

While the site seemingly collapsed under the volume of incoming ticket requests, the first explanation offered by the team was that of an attack. My suspicion that the failure was architectural in nature was bolstered when I heard the comments of a customer who was being interviewed by local news media (I’m paraphrasing as I did not transcribe his exact comments):

“[my first attempt failed], so then I created another account and immediately logged in and was able to purchase tickets.”

I think this indicates some issues around session management - the sessions that failed were “stuck” failed (lost in the fulfillment queue or something like that, perhaps because it overran itself). Brand new accounts would require a new login, and thus a new session token… and would work.

Serendipitous good fortune for one guy, but very telling in what probably really occurred.

Tags: worldseries, rockies, tickets

I’m driving this afternoon near the Tech Center in Denver when I hear on the radio that “…online World Series ticket sales have been halted this afternoon after the server blew up. There were approx. 8 million hits to the site & the server couldn’t handle it.”

Nice. Fucking idiots. MLB can afford to do it right, but the contract for this probably went to some executive’s nephew, who “… makes websites”. Morons. MLB went on record earlier this week as stating that “… [it is] not the first time we’ve sold tickets over the Internet.” Riiiiiggggghhht.

Apparently, at least 200 tickets (or aggregated sales, not sure) were made before the server went belly-up. I’m wondering how those orders will be fulfilled if the record of the transaction wasn’t properly recorded… no idea if it was, but since they didn’t plan for handling this amount of traffic, one must wonder about the *entire* transaction process.

Update: MLB’s ticket vendor, Paciolan, is stating that they “…experienced a system-wide outage”. Four hours (or more) after the initial failure, they are still offline.

Translation: the traffic caused a cascading failure that no one coded for, and as a result, they have no idea how to fix it because the issue is architectural in nature, not a simple matter of capacity.

Read here for more details: http://www.9news.com/news/top-article.aspx?storyid=79510

Tags: worldseries tickets, rockies, “major league baseball, mlb, “ticket sales