3/23/2000

In case I haven't said it lately -- Sheila rules.

Hey -- I'm editing this page in an outliner!

Update: still editing in an outliner!

Speaking of editing Manila pages externally, there was an update to the Manila RPC spec today. The full spec has been revised to reflect the changes.

blackholebrain: SubHonker2 abducted!

Keola posted a blurry picture of the alien suspected in the abduction.

Update 6:38 a.m.: We've been experiencing intermittent outages this morning. The problem may not be cured.

Of course, the real question may be: what am I doing up at 6:38 a.m.? It's hard to sleep when the sun's pourin' in, the birds are singin', and I got codin' to do.

More details about the outage: the three problems were inside PacBell. One was a bad port. (This means something different than I'm used to it meaning.) Another was bad translation between ATM and frame relay. (A configuration issue, I think.) The third was "bad OAM cells." As best as I could understand, cells are portions of packets -- packets are broken down into cells. When cells go bad, packets can't be re-assembled.

These problems are all at a level I rarely go to or seek to understand, or I could explain better.

At the end, Steve Martin from Conxion -- a bone fide trooper, a network superman -- had several PacBell technicians and at least one person from Cisco all in a long conference call until this got resolved. Basically, he was investigating the "cloud," and had PacBell technicians at each point. I didn't catch their names, but Steve made a note of taking them down -- these PacBell guys, unlike the folks he'd been dealing with earlier in the day (starting in the wee hours), were quite helpful. They got the job done.

And so, a little while after 11 p.m., the net came back up. Steve had some windows open that were doing constant pings to the outside world. All day long they just said "Request timed out." Suddenly the pings were coming back. We leapt to our web browsers. Hello Scripting News! Hello Salon.Com! Hello everywhere!