Archive: Opinions

I often remark that Murphy lives in our basement, but we loan him out.  As we launched the Lansing Star with its new technology and new look, Mr. Murphy definitely stayed home this week!  Of course I am referring to the well known 'Murphy's Law," which states, "If anything can go wrong, it will."

It turns out that it was named after a real person.  Captain Edward A. Murphy was an engineer who worked on an Air Force project to learn how much sudden deceleration a person can stand in a crash in the late 1940s.  One day, after discovering a wiring mistake, he cursed the technician responsible and said, "If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it."  The project manager overheard him.  He liked to keep a list of 'laws,' so he added Murphy's Law.  Murphy's Law became famous shortly afterward when the project's Air Force doctor, Dr. John Paul Stapp, gave a press conference, saying that because they believed in Murphy's Law they were especially careful, attributing their safety record to that philosophy.

But after this week I can attest that no matter how careful you are something is going to go wrong.  I've worked for months on updating the Star to a newer version of the technology that we use.  While doing so kills our great Google links temporarily, when they come back they'll be much better, spelling out the article headlines instead of a gobbldy-good mish-mosh of codes.  There are ways to handle the broken links during the transition, but those ways seem to have escaped me.

What was worse was that five years of stories equals a pretty hefty data base.  Part of the reason it took so long was that the old version of the data base had something in it that made transferring it to the new version not work.  In fact many, many different ways of doing it didn't work, until I found one that did.  I got the whole database transferred to a test installation.  I felt pretty happy with myself.  Then two weeks ago, right after the issue launched, I tried importing it into the real installation.

It could go wrong.  It did.  Now I had the whole thing ready to go, but it had zero articles in it.  That would be bad.

I eventually solved that problem (in a heated panic), only to find that the front page was taking a heck of a long time to load.  I narrowed it down to two components.  Unfortunately one of them was the advertisements, which we need to support ourselves in order to offer you the Lansing Star for Free.  Part of the technology move is a new Web ad server, which is both simpler and (I hope) more reliable.  Actually some of the ads in the old Star were served by this new server.  I was pleased with its performance, so I moved all the ads into it about a week ago.  It took a long time to move all those ads into it.

That's why it really stank (stinked?  stunk??!!) when it turned out that each ad added one second to the page load time.  A second doesn't seem like a lot, but when you are waiting for a Web page to show up, it actually is.  This was taking about 15 seconds on a fast load.  Nobody was going to want to wait that long.  Heck I edit the thing, and I didn't want to wait that long.

I went back and forth with the ad server developer, and finally we both shrugged and decided it would be a good idea to use a different way of getting the ads out of it.  That way was amazingly fast, even though all logic told me it should be slower.

I won't bore you with everything else that went wrong this week (our backup drive is still not backing up, and...).  Suffice it to say that I understand Captain Murphy's frustration with his technician.  Except that I am my technician...

Hooboy...

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