I run some mailing lists for earthquake information. We have something like 70,000 subscribers worldwide, and I regularly get complaints from people who have had their mail filtered by their ISP as suspected spam. So this is not an isolated problem.
Heh. And here I've been driving around for 20 years with a vanity plate on my car that says IMA NERD Perhaps it's time to turn it back in and get something different.
I have dealt with one headhunter who I found to be both honest and good to deal with. She is Ann Marx. She used to deal primarily with VMS, but she has since branched out, but I would recommend her to anyone. She has a web site at www.amarx.com And no, I'm not shilling for her. Every time she's called me in the last eight years, I've told her that I'm quite happy to stay where I am.
I remember that Digital [remember them, the VMS people?] had DecVoice that made really natual-sounding speech from text. And they had it back in 1988.
On the other hand, I think a lot of text-to-speech applications like having the mechanical sound. They probably think that because it sounds like Steven Hawking, it makes it sound more intelligent.
I agree with this. I run the web sites for the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program and we get big unpredictable traffic spikes after earthquakes. We can get a month's worth of traffic in two hours after a big earthquake. There's no way to plan for this, so we just pay Akamai for their caching service, and it's worked very well for us. You can read about traffic spikes we've had at my office web page.
Actually, they were American Airlines, which hasn't gone out of business yet. The spaceships in "2001" were Pan Am, and they're gone. I saw one of the forest dome miniatures recently at an exhibit of science fiction memorabilia at the Fullerton Museum Center.
For what it's worth, I read that traffic on CNN was about four times normal that day. Earthquake-driven traffic spikes are about that size overall, but they are very sharp. After the Nisqually earthquake near Seattle [2/28/2001] traffic on the Earthquake Hazards Program web site went up by 300x in 25 minutes.
It went from about 2 hits/sec to over 700/sec. I wrote a small article about it at
http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes/28feb2001
Bear in mind that the information in there about our server setup is now obsolete. After this event, I calculated that our Squid servers wouldn't be able to handle the load from anything bigger than about M5.5 in either SF or LA, so now we are served through Akamai Edgesuite.
I'm the system geek for the USGS Pasadena office, and I wrote the article referenced. I've found that traffic on our servers starts increasing within one minute of the earthquake. The peak traffic for California earthquakes is always ten minutes after the event. You can set your watch by it, it's that dependable.
As for the USGS servers having problems after earthquakes, we've been served through Akamai EdgeSuite since late 2001. So for the most part, our servers have been doing better. We've had a couple of other problems caused by other things, though. I've written reports about a number of these at
http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes
As for notification, I have one site that is not served by Akamai [
www.trinet.org] that still uses a Squid server. So I use MRTG to monitor the Squid, and it calls a small Perl script that pages me whenever the traffic on the site increases by more than 10% in one five-minute interval. This always tells me when people have felt an earthquake, sometimes ever before our automatic location systems are able to page us with a location and magnitude.
I'm the system geek for the USGS earthquake web servers, and the quake.wr.usgs.gov site was slow
last night. The site is served through Akamai
EdgeSuite, but the origin servers were on their knees. Turns out there is a Perl cgi that displays real-time seismograms, and everyone dogpiled on that. Do you have any idea what 200+ separate instances of Perl running simultaneously on a 1997 Sun Netra looks like? It's not pretty. On the other hand, the 'Did you feel it' questionnaires are processed by a pair of Athlons running FreeBSD and mod_perl, and they had no problem processing the now-17,000+ incoming questionnaires.
Earthquakes provide their own Slashdot Effect on our servers. I wrote an article about this a few years ago after our server got squashed the first time. Web Servers, Earthquakes, and the Slashdot Effect
We're not using Squid any more since we signed up with Akamai, but we still get big traffic spikes
whenever the ground shakes. I have a collection of them at http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes/
Slashdot Mirror
I run some mailing lists for earthquake information. We have something like 70,000 subscribers worldwide, and I regularly get complaints from people who have had their mail filtered by their ISP as suspected spam. So this is not an isolated problem.
Sounds like everyone is looking for something like the FreeBSD ports collection.
Heh. And here I've been driving around for 20 years with a vanity plate on my car that says IMA NERD Perhaps it's time to turn it back in and get something different.
I have dealt with one headhunter who I found to be both honest and good to deal with. She is Ann Marx. She used to deal primarily with VMS, but she has since branched out, but I would recommend her to anyone. She has a web site at www.amarx.com And no, I'm not shilling for her. Every time she's called me in the last eight years, I've told her that I'm quite happy to stay where I am.
On the other hand, I think a lot of text-to-speech applications like having the mechanical sound. They probably think that because it sounds like Steven Hawking, it makes it sound more intelligent.
I agree with this. I run the web sites for the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program and we get big unpredictable traffic spikes after earthquakes. We can get a month's worth of traffic in two hours after a big earthquake. There's no way to plan for this, so we just pay Akamai for their caching service, and it's worked very well for us. You can read about traffic spikes we've had at my office web page.
There is a group here at the USGS Pasadena Office that is doing this. You can read about the project at http://www.scign.org
Actually, they were American Airlines, which hasn't gone out of business yet. The spaceships in "2001" were Pan Am, and they're gone. I saw one of the forest dome miniatures recently at an exhibit of science fiction memorabilia at the Fullerton Museum Center.
Bear in mind that the information in there about our server setup is now obsolete. After this event, I calculated that our Squid servers wouldn't be able to handle the load from anything bigger than about M5.5 in either SF or LA, so now we are served through Akamai Edgesuite.
As for the USGS servers having problems after earthquakes, we've been served through Akamai EdgeSuite since late 2001. So for the most part, our servers have been doing better. We've had a couple of other problems caused by other things, though. I've written reports about a number of these at http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes
As for notification, I have one site that is not served by Akamai [ www.trinet.org] that still uses a Squid server. So I use MRTG to monitor the Squid, and it calls a small Perl script that pages me whenever the traffic on the site increases by more than 10% in one five-minute interval. This always tells me when people have felt an earthquake, sometimes ever before our automatic location systems are able to page us with a location and magnitude.
I'm the system geek for the USGS earthquake web servers, and the quake.wr.usgs.gov site was slow last night. The site is served through Akamai EdgeSuite, but the origin servers were on their knees. Turns out there is a Perl cgi that displays real-time seismograms, and everyone dogpiled on that. Do you have any idea what 200+ separate instances of Perl running simultaneously on a 1997 Sun Netra looks like? It's not pretty. On the other hand, the 'Did you feel it' questionnaires are processed by a pair of Athlons running FreeBSD and mod_perl, and they had no problem processing the now-17,000+ incoming questionnaires.
Earthquakes provide their own Slashdot Effect on our servers. I wrote an article about this a few years ago after our server got squashed the first time. Web Servers, Earthquakes, and the Slashdot Effect
We're not using Squid any more since we signed up with Akamai, but we still get big traffic spikes whenever the ground shakes. I have a collection of them at http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes/