Oblomovka

2003-02-19»

Faxyourmp.com went down for a couple of days this week. It was a bit our fault - we'd been stringing out the current server for a while longer than it was really spec'd for, and hadn't tweaked things to cope with the increased load we're getting these days. So when a major charity pointed to us (as they do) for a time-dependent campaign, and thousands of people started faxing simultaneously, we broke. We'd have been up quicker, but three of our volunteers have had big deals at their paid work this week.

On the other hand, that charity that dumped all this work into our lap managed to break pretty much every guideline that we ask people to keep. We've already finished being grumpy at ourselves for letting this happen, and we had some left over. So we sent them a mail.

Dear Big Huge Charity,

We're really sorry that we had to take down FaxYourMP over the last day or two. I'm afraid the [Charity's Name omitted] campaign against the [Particular Bugbear of Theirs] took us a bit unawares. We've been in the middle of transitioning to a new machine, and the sudden onslaught was a little bit more than we could take at the time.

We don't like taking down the service, as it's pretty tough on the dozens of people who use it every day.

Unfortunately, we're feeling slightly less apologetic towards your organisation in particular. Here's why:

1. Despite what we specifically request on our site you sent a pre-written message that you asked your members - and their friends - to cut and paste into our service. To quote from our own document:

   Why shouldn't I copy and paste "form" letters?

   We know your issue is important to you, but we've spoken to MPs - and if you are not a constituent, or you send a "copied and pasted" form letter, your fax will go straight into the parliamentary bin.

   If you're a pressure group, please think about what you're doing. If you encourage all your members to write to the same MP, you will not show that MP the depth of support for your issue. You'll simply have used up a few sheets of tax-funded fax paper, and irritated an underpaid secretary or researcher. And if you encourage them all to send the same rote letter, MPs will just assume you have a nasty little man with a photocopier blasting them out from your office, and ignore you even more than they did before.

   We really, really, really don't like people doing this. It effectively diminishes the hundreds of faxes we get from people who have pressing problems of their own, and for whom their MP is their last point of contact.

2. We notice that in your mailout, you suggest people "forward the mail to anyone you think might be able to help". Unfortunately, you don't provide any date or details of when the [Bugbear] will end its passage through Parliament.

   This is a very bad thing to do to us, and the Internet in general. That's because of what's known as the "Craig Shergold" problem.

   Craig Shergold - and you can skip this if big charities like yourself have heard it before - was a little boy who was dying of leukemia, and wanted to beat the World Record for Most Postcards Received before he died. Naturally, people wanted to help, so sent letters, wrote newspaper articles, told their friends, and later emailed around pleas to send the cards to his hospital.

   Fortunately for Craig, he got better. In 1991. The hospital he was connected to is still getting cards - 350 million at the last count, apparently. The message has also mutated to involve other charities, including the Make-A-Wish Foundation and Children's Wish Foundation. It's a terrible drain on everybody's resources, because there's no way to kill the message.

That's why responsible email campaigns contain a "sell-by" date.

Yours didn't.

Basically, not only have you diminished the worth of every fax that runs through our service, not only have you cost us a fair bit relaying a bunch of identical faxes that will go straight into the bin - and not the recycling bin, either - but you've also potentially doomed us to months or even years of fending off people who will persist on faxing their MP the obsolete details of a Bill that the MPs have already voted on.

In order to stop all of this, when we come back online, we'll stick a block on the text of the message which will turn away anyone attempting to send it. We'll probably put some non-shirty message politely explaining why we're refusing it.

Were we a bit less civically-minded, we might send you a copy of every refused mail with a note attached saying "Remember not to do this again!".

However, we won't. This is because we are lovely.

You, however, have been very bad, and this is your punishment:

Please carefully read this email and then ask one of your volunteers (preferably the one who wrote your original mail) to write an explanation, in words that would be best understood by organisations like the [Big Charity], about why what you did was such a bad idea, and how they can avoid doing this in future.

Then mail it to us, and we'll put it in a prominent place on our site, so we can encourage other large charities to read it before they do what you just did. We won't put the [Big Charity's Name]'s name on it if you don't want us to. We'll just put "Signed, a charity with over 500,000 supporters throughout the country who is very sorry and won't do it again".

Deal?

Lots of love,

- the FaxYourMP.com volunteers

No reply yet. Big charities and big companies don't like saying sorry, because their lawyers think it exposes them to all kinds of liabilities.

They forget that not saying sorry exposes you to the liability of being a complete dick.

2003-02-17»

According to the latest Perl 6 Summary, Leon Brocard has written a Brainfuck compiler, in Brainfuck, for the Brainfuck interpreter supplied with Parrot, a virtual machine named after a joke, written for a language that doesn't yet exist.

I think I've sprained my head.

AT&T Labs Research Projects. Smells old, and I've seen a few of them before, but never in one big odd pile like this. Everything from Web scraping proxies to Emacs speech-recognition (complete with the voice equivalent of Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Meta) to doodling email apps for the Palm. Some without source (or encumbered in a non-commercial licence), some without binaries.

When they talk about the comparison between blogging and press journalism, they never mention the two strongest differences for me. The first is trivial: it's word length. You can write as little or as much as it takes on the Web. On paper, you have to trim your ideas to fit the pattern of the page: pad out or reign in.

The second is the permanence of print, and the horrible finality of printing. I get a small frisson when I hit ":wq" on this entry, but it's a fraction of the sickening dread I get when I realise that what I've written is is now frozen in time, and printed on thousands and thousands of pieces of paper that can never be backspaced over, can never be undone. Some journalists talk about the pride they gain from seeing their words in print. I can't look at them. I can't stand it. It's all too definite, all too concrete. Words aren't like that. They're too soft. In event of disaster, they should be able to run home and hide under your skirttails.

And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.

And they're pretty bad at protecting their parents too: here's a piece written by Isioma Daniel, the woman who knocked out a lighthearted column on how funny the Nigerian Miss World was.

I remember feeling uneasy after completing the piece. It was breezy and sarcastic. My recent time in Britain, studying journalism at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, had made me irreverent - there are no sacred cows in the UK. The tabloids have finished them off. I printed a copy and handed it to my editor. "Make sure you read it," I said. A few minutes later I reminded him. "I have sent the article to your computer, have you read it?" He read a few lines. "It's fine," he said.

Two hundred or more dead later, she's got a fatwa on her head, and is in exile in the US.

2003-02-15»

Google buys Blogger. My take, shamelessly stolen from Quinn: "Google buys Internet stuff it doesn't want to go away.".

My other take: Winer's going to go ballistic.

For those of you who've seen the pictures of the Jhai PC in Laos, and read the note that said that the hardware wasn't working on the launch date, here's the full skinny, quoted from the mailout the Jhai people sent out this week:

Jhai Remote Village IT System Launch Delayed

At 4:30 a.m., Tuesday, 11 February, 2003, in Vientiane, Lao PDR, Jhai Foundation concluded here that the scheduled launch date could not be met.

The Problem

The original design was modified three weeks before launch to include a flashdisk (a data storage device that has no moving parts) at the village computer in Phon Kham. To include the flashdisk required a PCMCIA card. This was a solution developed in order to provide space for the size of the localized KDE, the Linux-based productivity suite, and related software so that the software more closely matched the hardware's ability to do the job the villagers wanted it to do. To integrate this device and this card into the system will take more time due to a variety of issues. The manufacturers are cooperating with the Jhai team on this effort, but the time required for integration is substantial.

This night the data on two hard drives needed for development were corrupted. And a Jhai PC was rendered inoperable. Although data and programs were saved on CDs, the time lost due to this accident makes it impossible to meet our deadline.

"From our team's perspective," says Jhai chairman, Lee Thorn, "the design of the Jhai PC and communication system is more than sound - it remains the best solution we know to meet the needs of the villagers in the Hin Heup district and perhaps to meet the needs of many poor rural people worldwide.

The problem is not the design.

The problem is a combination of factors - money constraints, constraints on volunteers' time, and my insistence on a deadline that turned out to be too optimistic. The responsibility for this delay is mine. I regret any inconvenience my decision has caused others. Any loss of face is my loss and should not be imposed on other members of our team.

Seeking Counsel From The Community

"We will be going to the villages today to seek their counsel on how to proceed from here. We hope to solve our problems before the rainy season begins in mid-April. This is a hope, not a prediction. However, we will not announce a launch date until more information is in hand.

"Jhai Foundation is about reconciliation and this is a reconciliation project of the Jhai Foundation. What is most important to us are our human relationships. We will remain true to our values and true to our friends here in Laos and elsewhere. As my fellow veteran, Kurt Vonnegut, once said, 'The thing is to be honorable.' We will continue to be honorable and we will continue to seek reconciliation of whole - and flawed - people with one another. The opposite of this is war and we will not go down that road. We will do this thing together. It will simply take more time."

Lee Thorn, chairman of Jhai Foundation

2003-02-13»

My RSS feed is eating up bandwidth, so I've implemented a "If-None-Match"/"Etags" caching doobry. Let me know if anything breaks. Not that you'll be reading this if it does.