Month: April 2004

Another notch in the belt of “Bad Technology Decisions in action”…

Air America Radio was dead in the water up through 11 AM yesterday. They went from people being able to visit the home page, click a link, and listen, to requiring “registration” in order for people to get to the stream. Around 11 AM Mountain Daylight Time, they went back to their “old” setup (heh, the network is only a few days old) because their servers crashed and burned.

Consequently, my link to their stream was broken as they went to a “private” URI that you had to log in to see. I registered for an account (or tried to) in hopes I could see the stream URI and be able to update it on my block on the right-hand side of this page, but with everything totally borked, that was just out of the question.

But the biggest mistake is this: they made, IMHO, some poor technology choices for what appears to be an incredibly high-demand site. They are using Cold Fusion running on Microsoft Internet Information Server for their content management system. While these are nominally fine choices for small-to-mid-scale configurations, you have to throw a lot of hardware at the problem in order to handle the massive loads they appeared to be experiencing. You’d need to hefty back-end to drive it regardless of operating system and Content Management, and Cold Fusion is definitely no lightweight. There’s obviously either a few programmatic issues or else a severe lack of capacity at work there.

Bandwidth isn’t their problem: systems management is. They didn’t provide any informative message to users that the system was experiencing high load and unable to service requests, and their registration system was borked (probably) due to load during this big downtime window. My suggestion would by some dynamic offloading of registration through the use of a proxy-caching front-end: figure out the maximum load the system can sustain, track that using a reverse-proxy-caching front-end, and when load exceeds some arbitrary threshold at a point where the designers know it can handle it, throw up a message saying “unable to process your request at this time”, rather than allowing the system to try to process requests until everything’s timing out and nothing is happening.

* Sizeable farm of servers able to handle multiple millions of hits using dynamic content and proprietary technology like Cold Fusion, Oracle, and Microsoft Windows: $2,000,000+.

* Radio personalities to populate your new radio network: $$unknown millions$$/year

* Watching your web servers and streaming audio crash and burn due to poor technology decisions:

Priceless.

Kenny Hess, a student at Spanaway Lake High School in Tacoma, Washington, has been barred from producing any more videos in his broadcasting class. He failed to recite the phrase “under God” during the school’s Pledge of Allegiance, which is seen by all students and faculty on classroom TV.

He has been restricted to reading books during his broadcasting class, rather than learning broadcasting, for the rest of his high-school career.

Of course, he’s a senior, and it’s April, so that’s not too long 🙂

State law in Washington is aligned with judicial review in the 1945 case where the Court ruled that no person can be required to say the Pledge. In that case, pledge recitation took a back seat to freedom of religion, because Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot pledge fealty to any nation. School administrators suggest the 18-year-old should have written an editorial or prepared a televised opinion piece, rather than disrupt recitation of the pledge in its current form throughout the school.

“Our interpretation as a school district is that the law says we say the pledge,” said Greg Eisnaugle, Spanaway Lake principal. “‘Under God’ is still in it. If the court says it comes out, that’s what we’ll do.”

What do you think? Did the school administrators do the right thing? Did Kenny do the right thing?

(Side note: if Kenny’s an atheist, would he dislike the traditional epithet used in South Park when Kenny dies in each episode?)

My thoughts: Although I sympathize with Kenny, at the moment the law and school policy are not on his side. Acts of in-school civil disobedience are extremely disruptive, and I think, the wrong forum for them. He’s entitled to vote (since he’s 18), and it will be his responsibility to vote for candidates sympathetic to his cause. He’s also old enough to bring suit against the school district over the issue if he chooses, and were he younger, his parents could bring suit on his behalf.
On the other hand, he’s already apologized and agreed not to perform a similar stunt in the future. Prohibiting him from participation in his class for the rest of the semester seems an unusually harsh punishment. I’d think a day of in-school suspension would suffice.

This week is a week of trepidation for me, and about an issue I usually care nothing about… television.

Now, let me say.. I’m not a big fan of most TV

But don’t we all have our favorite shows.. and haven’t we.. and don’t we all have to see the end of our favorite characters and their fictional lives we somehow have come to value?

Sometimes we get robbed, like when Sam never returned home in the anticlimactic end of Quantum Leap. Sometimes we get surprised, like when there is no “final episode”.. and sometimes we get to see the lives of characters move on in TV (like Frasier, and next year’s Friends spinoff “Joey”), or even in the movies (Highlander, Trek, and soon, X-Files).

I remember when STAR TREK:TNG used to be #1 for the week in the ratings, and now.. fourteen years after that 3 week stint, I still faithfully watch Star Trek: Enterprise, knowing they are on the verge of cancellation because thier numbers are less than a third of #1 for wednesday nights.

An announcement will be coming in the next 14 days.

For all this time.. and for some.. even longer than that.. we’ve always known we could have some kind of Trek to tune into.. and now, if it doesn’t die this season, it will probably at the end of next.. and no more movies are coming.

Such is true for the “Buffy” fans this year, as “Angel” comes to a close, and for “Cheers” fans, as Frasier ends.

I’m lucky enough to be confident that Trek will probably come back some day in one way. but I marvel at the whole idea.. that we start to like these imaginary little worlds so much.. and when they go away, its a little sad.

The real fear is that with the new advent of reality TV, in a few years, people will look back at this whole phenomenon and not understand why we got sucked in..

90% of whats on TV sucks, no doubt.. but man.. that other 10%.

I know I usually wait till sunday to post, but I thought this bit of news would be hot, so, yes, you heard it here first..

JOHN KERRY HAS CHOSEN TV AND RADIO COMMENTATOR BILL O’REILLY TO BE HIS RUNNING MATE IN 2004.

From Reuters: “In an effort to secure the swing vote and the votes of dissatisfied republican voters, John kerry has added the host of Fox News’s “O’Reilly factor” to the presidential ticket”

I’ve put a link to the rest of article on my website..

www.timpane.com/kerry

EDIT by matthew: Fixed the link.