Friday, March 17, 2006

Consequences of an outage

What happens when a server ("filer") at blogger.com fails and the guys have a hard time to replace it, just like it happened to this blog in the last 16 hours? Among other things, the following events could be expected to occur:
  • Readers in 120 countries are doomed and outraged
  • A global conflict is imminent
  • Instead of 2,500 page views during the period, they receive 2,500 "403 Forbidden" error messages
  • Approximately $0.17 are irreversibly lost because the readers can't click the advertisements
  • My mailbox receives 8 messages from nice and wise readers and 1 message from a not-so-nice reader asking what is going on
The points above should be clarified. The 120th country was probably the Palestinian territory. This land must make a lot of additional progress to compete with Israel which is roughly the 20th most civilized country in the world according to the counter on the right side, with about 200 distinct visitors who visited this website in the last month.

Because there are only 192 countries in the world, with the current rate of new countries per week, we expect to run out of ordinary countries in a month and discover an extraterrestrial civilization. Note that only 191 countries are members of the United Nations because Mr. Jesus Christ (and Vatican) has chosen to avoid the United Nations because He apparently has a more ambitious plan to unite the nations.

I separated the authors of the e-mails to nice people and not-so-nice people. What is the difference in the interpretation of the hardware failure by these two groups?
  • The nice readers think that they have done something wrong, and therefore their access to the blog has been blocked
  • The not-so-nice readers think that their access to the blog has been deliberately blocked because they have done something that the paranoic owner of the blog did not like
These two lines look identical scientifically but there is a world of difference between them at the level of humanities. :-)