well crud

[arize]

hello. no tribe til sunday? that's wacked. and what's the deal with the fukin whale anyway??

[torrid_wind™]

Tribe has been buggin' me out. I can't think of one other site I use that experiences "down time", let alone for days at a fuckin' time!

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one who couldn't make sense out of their "whale" humor.

Have you noticed that they were giving us precise estimates of when Tribe would be up again (which they would fail to live up to - but that's another workshop), until yesterday? Sunday afternoon immediately translates to Sunday evening for those of us on the East Coast. But, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't get their act together until after the weekend.

[Brian]

Actually I know what the "fail whale" is and what it's about.

Firstly, do you know what Twitter is?
I'd start here.

Secondly, the whale tells me there some thing wrong with Tribe's API
The Fail Whale. AHOY!

To me this looks like the programmers @ Tribe have been reworking the system from the ground up. More insights as they come.

[torrid_wind™]

Thanks, Brian, your explanation was very helpful. I've heard of Twitter, but have never used it. Is this what youngsters are so busy using their cell phones for?

On the subway and buses in NY, many folks seem to be absorbed playing (what I thought were) video games on their little gadgets. I continued in this ignorant state until someone told me about the popularity of text messaging (with cell phones). I found out the phones have games on them now as well.


Beluga whales, "the canaries of the sea". Who knew? The Fail Whale, huh? (I learn something new everyday)

After Tribe's last outage, they explained they had rebuilt their image server. But, my browser has spent more time waiting for Tribe's image server to respond after they rebuilt it than it did beforehand.

Thanks again for the clarification. :-)

[Lily]

well it *is* Sunday p.m. in California, and that makes 4 straight days completely down so far which is a record in the year and a half I've been on Tribe -- and I see from a comment posted on some group here from Darren's blog or something something that I think is also a record: clearly expressed *resentment* at 129,000 hits a day. Now that is internet news. We keep getting the "it's just lil' ol' me doing it all" refrain, why hasn't that situation been corrected? Why doesn't Darren apparently have a boss?

Huge amounts of work were done by people making alt sites last year at this very time and then they all went still when we rushed back to Tribe--but they're still out there. It's really confusing to find your way here, and I'm finding that NING's got its own instabilities, but I bet they wouldn't mind 129k hits a day.

What I find incredible is that Darren apparently does have time to maintain a presence on Facebook, and run a gambling group there which is very busy, and do Twitter too and I'm sure other social sites as well. (Maybe he uses Thursdays for all this and that's why clearly nobody's ever home on Thursdays at Tribe.) To have the failwhale up on Tribe now just typifies this identification with any other social site but Tribe.

I'd read about the *scheduled* major project to begin Sept. 11--if this major crash was planned, why was no announcement made up front?

[Brian]

Lily,

Do you mind giving me the web address so I too may express my resentment for Tribe being down.

Seriously, forget Tribe. I am tired of waiting on it, and I feel like unsubbing because of it. Did they expect everyone to read the company blog? Really why no warning if they were actually doing the upgrade and not some "oh Tribe broken but we fix soon, durrr" type of message? Fuck!

Sorry but I had to vent. Really I like Ning now the more that I use it. I think I might start my own ning.com network, call it "alienated weirdos" or something.

[Brian]

I've gone ahead and make my ning.com site called Alienated Weirdos so stop on by!

http://alienatedweirdos.ning.com

[wildapache]

"The Whale of Fail" - what Darren's been saying

"Today I made a flippant remark that generated a fuckload of publicity.

I'm not used to doing this, at least not on this level. But I really had no idea what my words entailed for me or my company. Basically, I am in the middle of a giant recabling/equipment upgrade project for tribe.net and in the middle of this we have to take out the load balancers and reprogram them to be redundant. Because of this, we couldn't use the normal site down page on tribe.net so I told a contractor exactly the following: "We just need to get a site down page, put something up and we'll replace it with the regular page later."

Well, the contractor replaced it with this:

===
We're down, but don't worry, we'll be back up soon!



We promise to buy you all a pwnie when we're done

===

For those of you not thoroughly enveloped in the exploding sack of excrement that is Web 2.0, The Fail Whale is the perfect example of a meme perhaps becoming bigger than the organization or network that spawned it. I have my doubts about Twitter ( http://www.twitter.com ) personally, mostly because I have that "show me the money" attitude towards every Web 2.0 company I see. How does Twitter make money? Well, personally I think that the Fail Whale has made that point moot. No matter what Twitter does, whatever accomplishments they may achieve in the future, it will all be completely and horribly overshadowed by their contribution to society in the area of humor in regards to failure. In other words, nothing they ever do will ever erase the Fail Whale.

The Fail Whale is the creation of a Chinese born artist, Yi Ying Lu. It's a perfect example of instant fame created out of thin air. The Twitter folks needed a error.html page -- the page you see when the server is overloaded. Looking on a stock photography website, they picked the iconic image of a whale being hoisted aloft by doves with ropes -- a folly as surely doomed to failure as a poor single webserver trying to keep up with 5,000 requests per second (that would actually take about 4 webservers before I was comfortable with handling that many requests). As Twitter felt growing pains (and all web sites do, don't let anyone fool you), the image got burned into users brains more and more.

I love this image. My contractor knew I did too. So I laughed my ass off when I saw it, and then I told him to link to http://www.failwhale.com so maybe we could send some of our 129,000 people a day over to Yi Ying Lu to buy a Fail Whale coffee mug or t-shirt. This is one meme near and dear to my heart at the moment, because my job is pretty much like trying to move a whale by myself -- a fact very few people really give two shits about but it is turning out to be far more rewarding than I thought. And now it turns out that my offhand comment to "just throw something up" has given me a little bit of a boost to get through this day full of fail. And folks have started buzzing about it, which was completely accidental -- much like the Fail Whale's original fame.

There's no question this work on tribe.net was needed. The site has needed a major overhaul, starting with the servers. I am just scared now that my offhand comment has drawn more attention to tribe.net than I meant it to, and that when the site comes back up it will have a crush of visitors. You folks have no idea how much we DO NOT need that at this point -- I'm only halfway done with everything we are installing!

So, I just have to say this in closing: to all you tribe.net users -- we'll be back soon. But we may have a new "Site Down" page."

http://tjcrowley.livejournal.com/616100.html

[wildapache]

and on Twitter

http://twitter.com/tjcrowley

[Brian]

Ah. Very good very good. Some actual backstory.

Well at least he didn't use this:

[Paul]

Still down, and its almost Tuesday here....Blah.

Very inconvenient timing, the two weeks I happened to have internet access and almost nothing to do.

Well, it happens..

Anyone hear any news about when it will be back?

[wildapache]

"ETA for return of the site is 8:20pm PST on September 8"

which means fuckall at this point..

[Paul]

Oh snap.

Whered you find that estimate?