Tuesday, July 22, 1997 -- Computers
Too err is human, To really screw things up requires a computer.		Sometime while I was away, the internet was screwed up. I'm still sketchy on the details, but it sounds like InterNIC let a garbled file out, and the servers of the world couldn't figure out who to ask where microsoft.com is. That's all InterNIC does, really. You can ask it, ok, who do I ask where mysite.com is? InterNIC tells you, I think yourisp.net can tell you that. Actually InterNIC gives you the IP address for yourisp.net. Once you've got the IP, you don't need InterNIC anymore. I used to work for a local-to-Charlotte ISP. Customers would occasionally mess up their domain registration information, and their site would stop working. "People can't get to my site," they'd say. "I want you to fix it!" The problem was almost always one of miscommunication. Either the customer didn't have or give us the right information, or they changed it without telling us. What happened the other night, I guess it was Thursday (Hey I was travelling!), was that InterNIC screwed this up on a major scale. Operator Error. Of course, just like airplanes. [Truthfully, when a computer does something wrong, you can always find a human to point at and say, "You screwed up!" It's either the user, or the programmer. Or both.] I've heard a lot of talk about the restructuring of the 'net. Keeping InterNIC from being the only company that does domain registration and so on. They aren't the only ones, by the way. AlterNIC has a whole set of domains, too. The problem is, most ISP's don't point to them, so you can't look stuff up there. Someone needs to keep control of the names, to ensure uniqueness, but who should do this? Can it even be done by committee (would you want it to be, even?) Personally, I think InterNIC (Network Solutions, Inc) has done a pretty good job. They've been around since before Al Gore and the "Information Superslimeway", and have had to deal with a tremendous growth. I don't know. Well, one computer disaster is never enough to make me write about it here. I mean, they happen all the time. I've been wanting to write about Mir for awhile now, and things keep getting in the way (like life). I want to say that I'm amazed at how far we've gotten in the Space Exploration. I think we could have done better, in those dead times between Apollo and the Shuttle, and after the Challenger disaster, but I'm still impressed. I mean, think about it. Here we have this space station, a completely closed environment. An environment that, if it is compromised will spell the death of it's occupants. You can't just hitch home, if you know what I mean. And this thing *collided* with something else. I mean when you ahve a car accident how often can you go on driving your car (much less trying to live in it. I'm sure these guys were pretty stressed out. I would be. It's the only reason I can think of that they'd unplug the second most important piece of equipment. [Obliviously whatever pumps their air kept working..and is more important than the computer..] It took them several hours to get things back online, and aligned again, but they survived. They survived in one of the most hostile environments that exists. Three cheers for the Mir astronauts, boneheads that they are.. Kind of reminds me of that Simpson's episode where Homer screws up the shuttle mission and they are all saved by the "Inanimate Carbon Rod". Generic Joe's A Typical Male