ACCU :: You Write, the Editor Replies https://members.accu.org/index.php/articles/944 Professionalism in Programming en-us Administrator hourly 1 http://backend.userland.com/rss
Letters to the Editor + CVu Journal Vol 11, #6 - Oct 1999
Browse in : All > Journal Columns > LettersEditor
All > Journals > CVu > 116
Any of these categories - All of these categories

Note: when you create a new publication type, the articles module will automatically use the templates user-display-[publicationtype].xt and user-summary-[publicationtype].xt. If those templates do not exist when you try to preview or display a new article, you'll get this warning :-) Please place your own templates in themes/yourtheme/modules/articles . The templates will get the extension .xt there.

Title: You Write, the Editor Replies

Author: 

Date: 06 October 1999 13:15:33 +01:00 or Wed, 06 October 1999 13:15:33 +01:00

Summary: 

Body: 

Hi Francis,

Since you use Turnpike, you may not have been a victim of the recent email problems at Demon. Check out the gory details at http://www.helpdesk.demon.net/announce/da1999-08-24a.html courtesy of Clive Feather and friends. Ten days of hair pulling followed by a one-minute fix.

This is an interesting enough problem that it might be worth discussing in C Vu, or maybe you could convene a post-mortem BOF session at JACC or something. The obvious moral is that "mismatched unspoken assumptions are bad", but I think it would be over-simplistic to stop the analysis there. What sort of decision-tree do the Demon engineers use to focus in on a problem? Why did they assume for so long that this was a hardware problem? What mental processes led up to that "ah-ha!" moment of recognising the problem? And why didn't they instrument the software for logging much sooner?

When you think about it, most questions have simple answers. The trick is asking the right question. Would asking a different question have produced a solution quicker (e.g., checking creation dates on the cache files)?

There are more questionable assumptions in this world than we realise.

Lois Goldthwaite

If you have access to the Web I suggest that you go and read this salutary tale. We all know what characters are valid in specific contexts, don't we? Getting it wrong cost tens of thousands of people time and irritation. This was, of course, compounded by other human errors.If you want to swap war stories and what we should learn from them either in C Vu or at JACC be my guest.

Notes: 

More fields may be available via dynamicdata ..