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Oh, the irony! Vacation off to a great start…
So as a computer programmer I am all too aware of the potential for complete and catastrophic failure of a computer system at any time…and the ramifications that no doubt follow. Such an ironic occurrence, where my life gets a bit shredded by such a failure, occurred last night, when we arrived at San Jose Airport to catch our JetBlue red-eye flight to Boston for our family reunion.
All of the JetBlue computer systems at San Jose Airport were offline.
You can imagine the chaos that followed. The only thing we could do is check in via the online web-enabled kiosks. All of our luggage bag tags? Hand written. Boarding passes? Hand processed. Determining that everyone is on board? Let’s count the open seats. Assigned seating? Heh.
We arrived at 6:20 pm for our 9pm flight, and found ourselves stuck in line to get checked in for an hour; hand writing five bag tags alone took 20 minutes. The flight left late, landed late, and we had bets on how many of our bags were actually going to make the flight to Boston with us. Luckily those 20 minutes were well-used, as everything arrived as it should have. Thankfully the kids slept pretty much the whole flight, at least that part of taking the red-eye went according to plan…but poor Eli got sick at the end and spent most of the time while they were waiting for me to get the rental car with his face in an airsick bag. He’s doing ok now though.
In any event, I feel for those JetBlue employees last night. Talk about a tough job, managing that crisis. I’m just glad it wasn’t my computer system that failed on them!
So I have a bucket list…
Lately I’ve been slowly but surely ticking things off my bucket list…you know, the list of things I want to get done before I pass on the the next existence, whatever that happens to be. Thought maybe I’d share some of my progress to date.
- Played in a World Series of Poker event – check, although I may try again next year
- Getting my college degree – in progress
- Publish a book – check, although a second one is in the works
- Cruise to Alaska -someday
- Another vacation on Maui – someday
I’ll keep adding to my bucket list as I go but I’ve got things moving along!
One of the things I am struggling with is whether or not I’ll walk when (if?) I graduate towards the end of 2013 as I expect to. It would require a trip to Salt Lake City to do so, so I am not sure how many of my family could make it, but it might be worthwhile to do. What do you think?
Why can’t web crawlers use some ethics…and some intelligence?
So I’ve been up since 4am this morning battling what is essentially a Distributed Denial of Service attack…basically a bunch of computers sending requests to our web servers over and over and over again. After two hours of battling, the culprit was found and disabled.
This company offers to crawl data on websites via some customizable code. However, their business practices are definitely questionable. A google search is most enlightening. This web crawler hit our site over 7,000 times in a 10 minute span. And based on that Google search, we are not the only ones.
Now there are a couple of things I simply don’t understand. First of all, who’s the genius at 80legs.com that thinks hitting any site on the web at this volume is a good idea? I understand that they have a business, that they are selling crawling technology, but how much do they expect to sell if the end result of implementing their crawler is the immediate block of the crawler by the unwitting victim? Certainly whoever is paying them to crawl our site is now going to be disappointed.
Second, why would anyone think that this sort of crawling is ethical in this day and age of botnets and hackers? If I was building a business based on this technology I would at a minimum make sure targets could remove themselves from the line of fire (80legs claims it does so but it doesn’t work…they don’t honor robots.txt like they say the do), and make sure my bot speed was within reason speed wise. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all crawl the web without causing mass chaos and overwhelmed servers. Certainly if you have the intelligence to write a crawler, you have the intelligence to throttle a crawler.
Or maybe my standards are too high.
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 