October 27th, 2006
You may not have noticed it, but our web site, blog, Just Enough Structured Analysis wiki, and yourdon.com email all crashed sometime mid-afternoon Wednesday, and wasn’t fully restored until this (Friday) morning.
I’m sure this had nothing to do with the fact that the Dow Jones average dropped 73 points today, or that two public buses were torched in a Paris suburb, or that Ford forevermore stopped production of Taurus automobiles, or that economic growth in the U.S. dropped to a sluggish 1.6 percent pace. These were just random coincidences, right?
Seriously, it was extremely frustrating and annoying to have everything come to a screeching halt so unexpectedly, and I apologize to our many friends, fans, clients, family members, and curious onlookers who drop in from time to time to see what’s going on. It turns out that we’ve got a search-engine mechanism associated with the site (so people can find out how often Tom DeMarco’s favorite phrase of “deeply interwingled” appears on the site; alas, the answer is “zero”), and its demand for resources has been growing exponentially for the past few months. Like all doubling, and re-doubling, and re-doubling phenomena (including such things as malignant cancer), it’s something you don’t even notice for quite a while. But once it becomes visible, it has a tendency to race out of control within a very short period of time … which is what happened yesterday.
Anyway, the problem has been fixed, and we’re back in business again. Thanks for your patience, and do check in periodically to see what’s going on…
