Wednesday, July 26th, 2006, 12:19 pm
Downtime, Heat Waves, and Windows XP
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O, there I am at work again. By all means it’s an ordinary day, but the unusual heat makes me want to stay inside where it’s air conditioned. Just a minute ago I saw a follow Ph.D. student slamming his mouse and keyboard. I could see an empty Windows XP desktop, so I can only imagine that it froze on him (possibly after an important overnight experiment). That’s just something, isn’t it? No access to the results and a whole night gone in vain. I’d offer him Linux (it’s already installed on his secondary partition), but I don’t want to risk alienation or become his ‘support guy’.
My computer was running from April to July (SuSE Linux 8.1) without a single reboot, but we had three outages recently. These were due to the heat wave that evidently affects London datacentres, as well as California (notably the half-day MySpace downtime). I even heard about Utah too last week… downtime reported in news:alt.www.webmaster. I then found a news release and reproted it to Walt as a possible proof that the Web host was not lying. I guess we must all have to cope with the effect of the weather on our servers. Everyone suffers the same, so balance prevails.
