Hang In There!

Typepad's Engineering team is continuing to work on restoring all the features of their blogs, including this one. I know a lot of you are experiencing a variety of issues; I am too. This all stems from an unsuccessful attempt starting on Saturday night to migrate Typepad's blogs to a new data center. The attempt had to be called off. I guess the best counsel for now is patience—

But I'm sorry for all the folderol and botheration!

Mike

Featured Comments:

Greg: "An IT person once told me that 99% of his job was to fix unsuccessful migrations and unsuccessful fixes."

Kye Wood: "Long time IT professional here. People are always amazed and shocked and disappointed when computer software crashes out. Programmers are always amazed and surprised and thrilled when their code not only runs, but actually appears to work!"

Geoff Wittig: "My son is a software developer. He has worked for a big name as well as smaller firms. I asked him why (for example) medical record software sucked so badly. My practice's electronic record system has multiple frustrating bugs and has periodic 'upgrades' that invariably involve a week or more of crashes and new bugs.

"He noted the fundamental conflict between software quality and corporate profits. Reliable, effective, bullet-proof software takes time, skill and effort to create. It takes more time to de-bug it and make sure it's amenable to updates and extension. 'Good enough' software can be cobbled together from existing code and output from low-cost overseas programmers. Good enough to run a demo that looks impressive and to sell the product, but not good enough to be a solid, reliable platform. Once customers buy the product, the sunk cost of purchasing it and training employees to use it are the velvet handcuffs preventing a switch to something better. So software companies have a powerful incentive to cheaply create a product that's good enough to win sales, and much less incentive to produce rock-solid code that costs a bit more to develop."

Comments

[Bill]

Maybe you should move to Wordpress.

[William Lewis]

I was an IT person for a very long time, even was the IT manager for a small government agency for a decade. Then we were forced to migrate to Windows. Nightmares like Typepad's were all too common.

I am now a hotel front desk clerk and much happier. We still have that dog food on the computers but at least I don't have to pretend to make it run. I have more time for my photography too.

[Bear.]

Re Key Wood's comment - this is why fully automated cars are a long, long way away; a computer crash takes on a more literal meaning.

[PDLanum]

I am a retired System Administrator. When we migrated systems, we had extensive planning and tested back out processes.

We did a Global migration from Windows v4.0 domain controllers and Novell (our local site was based on Novell) to Active Directory (Windows 2000) which included several versions of Unix (not Linux - real Unix).

It took us well over six months to migrate the Global Network moving from site to site. At no point did we have to roll back to the original methodology at any site. We migrated will over 20K devices. We also migrated several acquisitions to the Global Domain.

We built copies of each environment and tested, tested, tested until there was a very small chance of failure. We also tested our fall back plans which were not needed.

The only issue we had was when a few "SW Engineers" who fought the system and lost some local data i.e. they did not use the proper protocol for storing corporate data on corporate resources. The majority of these "know it all's" were fired or RIFed within the following months.

Poor Admins lead to bad things happening. If you push a bad Admin too hard they quit - and they never document anything they do.

[Grahn Johan]

Kye Wood: "Long time IT professional here. People are always amazed and shocked and disappointed when computer software crashes out. Programmers are always amazed and surprised and thrilled when their code not only runs, but actually appears to work!"

Exactly! Worked many years as support for MRP. That is a program to help you plan production, manufacture, invoicing etc. Small company and mostly smaller type business. We only had 2-3 programmers working on changes.
Many times I heard the complain "Why can't you guys release a new version WITHOUT the bugs?" And my answer was just the same: "I am amazed that it actually works as well as it does!"
With new versions, of anything, it is a very small amount of code that changes. Most everything stays the same. We had areas that the programmers more or less refused to touch because it worked and they were afraid to mess things up!
As they say: "The more things change, the more they stay the same"

[Jakob]

Allow me to disagree with the two featured commenters - even though any software of nontrivial size has bugs, modern mature software is very stable and reliable.

Likewise, even major migrations should be practically invisible to the user. What happened with this Typepad migration seems super unprofessional.

[Rob Campbell]

Readers’ suggestions, you ask?

The main one from me would be that you don’t cut down on the writing in favour of photographs.

The mind and imagination are wondrous things, whereas photography is hampered by the physical reality of the world. Everybody has seen pretty much every form of landscape, portrait or sports picture; not everybody has ever thought every thought that comes out of your head and makes print. There are many more interesting ideas than there are interesting new pictures.

[Ben]

FYI, your RSS feed is still broken! I haven’t been getting notified about new posts all week! (just in case you weren’t aware)

[Dierk]

More detailed info on the broken RSS feed option: last post on the channel is *Scheduled Maintenance Planned for Saturday Night (...)* No updates so far... Atom, RSS1 and RSS2 not workin´ at all, unfortunately... Please come back to my reader ;_-) - Typepad´s engineers to the front...!