Just a Coder - nickfitz.co.uk

Well, that’s nice.

The Council’s electoral registration form came through the door today, so I visited the web site to indicate that everything’s the same.

I now have the confirmation email.

Definition of “line” in the following examination of the content of said email: something delimited by an RFC 2822-compliant line-delimiter (see third paragraph of section 2.1), excluding empty lines (that is, lines preceded by, and containing only, such a delimiter).

Content relating to me personally: 3 lines.

Content that’s merely relating to my confirmation (including “Thank you” and such, and therefore reasonable to include): 3 lines.

Content after that stuffed with legal garbage: 15 lines.

I’m tempted to do a word count, but let’s just estimate that there are something like twenty or thirty times as many words in the legalese as there are in the actual content of the message.

And people wonder why the Internet feels slow today.

P.S. Bonus points for the fact that, if I leave the “default.aspx” off the first link, the server returns an empty page, and is apparently Tomcat, despite the fact that the actual application is running on ASP.NET.

Without default.aspx:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:22:32 GMT
Server: Apache Tomcat/4.1.12 (HTTP/1.1 Connector)
Cache-control: private
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html

With default.aspx:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:27:31 GMT
Server: WebSTAR/4.5(SSL)
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 71428
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Ho hum.

On a forum I frequent, somebody recently posted a tale about some sysadmins having a problem with a server. Said server kept on restarting due to a signal from the UPS indicating that its power drain was excessive.

The solution the sysadmins came up with? Disable the Microsoft® Exchange™ service running on that server, to reduce CPU load, and thereby reduce the power being consumed by the server, and thereby stop the UPS getting upset.

The obvious question is: why was the server running a service which isn’t necessary (if it was necessary, how can they turn it off)? But this is a sidetrack question.

The important point is that the “solution” wasn’t a solution, it was a way of making the problem go away. This doesn’t work, and as a rule, the problem comes back in a much worse form.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve solved a problem by brushing it under the carpet. In the long run, it tends to ruin the carpet.

The solution is to provide a solution, not find a way of ignoring the problem.