June 01, 2006
Auditing our First Day
First and foremost thanks for a great opening day. It was awesome. We served up approximately 5Gig worth of bandwidth yesterday and dealt with our fair share of "launch day emergencies". You guys have been fantastic with helping us troubleshoot some annoying issues that were truly unexpected.
Who knew that our programmers couldn't do math?
"Stupid is as Stupid Does", said Forrest Gump. As most of you may have noticed when you used the polling system yesterday the math just didn't add up. It drove us crazy because quite frankly the math equation is not that complicated. In the end the issue was tracked down to a database field that keeps track of the total vote count for each poll. The wrong database field was being read which generated some of the craziest poll numbers we have ever seen. Needless to say, that has been fixed and we have sent our developers back to take the SAT's.
Hanging chads and other voting voodoo.
It came to our attention that some of the poll results were being purposely skewed. On some political blogs there were people who actually voted for their political hero more than once. Can you believe this kind of dishonesty in politics? Needless to say we tagged this our "Hanging Chad" bug and went to work right away.
Over night we were successful at updating the poll security structure. We removed reliance upon sessions and cookies to detect when a user has already voted in a particular poll and instituted more reliable and stable methods (we don't want to discuss all of them right now). The unfortunate bi-product to this update was that now everyone can re-vote at least one more time on your existing polls. So for those of you using these polls, your data may be skewed so to speak. But then again the existing data was apparently a hanging chad anyway.
Also... we updated the same routine with the ranking widget so now everyone can vote again with that system as well.
I could have constructed my own door to door survey by the time this thing loads.
We had many reports this morning of slow load times and erratic behavior during the window of 1am and 3am CDT. Since this was our initial public beta launch we planned an audit of all our systems. This audit was to see how the day actually went and how our hardware stood up. We had a pretty great day in terms of bandwidth. Over 5Gigs of data served yesterday alone. We completed a complete audit of the load-balancers and routing equipment across the entire infrastructure. During that window we experienced some intermittent and minor downtime that affected some of your visitors as we reset and calibrated some equipment.
This audit was an important step in improving the performance and reliability of the MajikWidget service, and part of our ongoing commitment to provide proactive service for our customers. But just in case you were wondering, we fired the guy who didn't send everyone an advance email notice.
It's not working on my browser, are you kidding me?
Ok we saw the screen shots and we are not calling you a liar. The fact is that we did experience some hiccups yesterday with the amount of bandwidth we were serving (thus the audit). In reality all of our widgets were designed specifically to be compatible with all modern day browsers. If it is a browser that was released in the last 365 days, we are pretty sure everything is golden.
What most of you encountered was a request to our servers that went unanswered. Our audit revealed that we had about 200 requests that did not get answered. The result on your visitors browser was that nothing appeared. The first instinct is to blame the browser; however it was simply not the browser or the code. The hardware was tired, overworked and underpaid. We're going to keep tweaking this to get it better.
So that's the major stuff.
We had a successful beta launch and are working daily on enhancing the user experience. As always we want to earn your business and appreciate the opportunity to do so!
Who knew that our programmers couldn't do math?
"Stupid is as Stupid Does", said Forrest Gump. As most of you may have noticed when you used the polling system yesterday the math just didn't add up. It drove us crazy because quite frankly the math equation is not that complicated. In the end the issue was tracked down to a database field that keeps track of the total vote count for each poll. The wrong database field was being read which generated some of the craziest poll numbers we have ever seen. Needless to say, that has been fixed and we have sent our developers back to take the SAT's.
Hanging chads and other voting voodoo.
It came to our attention that some of the poll results were being purposely skewed. On some political blogs there were people who actually voted for their political hero more than once. Can you believe this kind of dishonesty in politics? Needless to say we tagged this our "Hanging Chad" bug and went to work right away.
Over night we were successful at updating the poll security structure. We removed reliance upon sessions and cookies to detect when a user has already voted in a particular poll and instituted more reliable and stable methods (we don't want to discuss all of them right now). The unfortunate bi-product to this update was that now everyone can re-vote at least one more time on your existing polls. So for those of you using these polls, your data may be skewed so to speak. But then again the existing data was apparently a hanging chad anyway.
Also... we updated the same routine with the ranking widget so now everyone can vote again with that system as well.
I could have constructed my own door to door survey by the time this thing loads.
We had many reports this morning of slow load times and erratic behavior during the window of 1am and 3am CDT. Since this was our initial public beta launch we planned an audit of all our systems. This audit was to see how the day actually went and how our hardware stood up. We had a pretty great day in terms of bandwidth. Over 5Gigs of data served yesterday alone. We completed a complete audit of the load-balancers and routing equipment across the entire infrastructure. During that window we experienced some intermittent and minor downtime that affected some of your visitors as we reset and calibrated some equipment.
This audit was an important step in improving the performance and reliability of the MajikWidget service, and part of our ongoing commitment to provide proactive service for our customers. But just in case you were wondering, we fired the guy who didn't send everyone an advance email notice.
It's not working on my browser, are you kidding me?
Ok we saw the screen shots and we are not calling you a liar. The fact is that we did experience some hiccups yesterday with the amount of bandwidth we were serving (thus the audit). In reality all of our widgets were designed specifically to be compatible with all modern day browsers. If it is a browser that was released in the last 365 days, we are pretty sure everything is golden.
What most of you encountered was a request to our servers that went unanswered. Our audit revealed that we had about 200 requests that did not get answered. The result on your visitors browser was that nothing appeared. The first instinct is to blame the browser; however it was simply not the browser or the code. The hardware was tired, overworked and underpaid. We're going to keep tweaking this to get it better.
So that's the major stuff.
We had a successful beta launch and are working daily on enhancing the user experience. As always we want to earn your business and appreciate the opportunity to do so!
