Back to the Doomed College

It so happens by the ironic twist of fate I have come back the the college that thought me how not to do things.

Yes it is the very college I passed out from couple of years back. Back then I had written a post from the student's perspective of how things were happening in and around college the petty politics and the quality of our teachers, but this time I got a view from the inner depths of the corrupt college itself.

I hate what I have become, I hate to say I am a product of this once great college. To be a "Fallen Programmer" in this world where people craze for money and power I feel hopeless.

There is a conference that is going to come up and due to some coincidence it was my company that took up the job of putting up the conference website for these people. I took up the responsibility of doing the website.

This might seem pretty much usual stuff for the normal reader but if any of you have had a glimpse at a foreign university or even the IITs it is common to see that if they conduct a conference they do all the work of setting up and conducting the conference by themselves without any or little external help. This sort of work is usually done by the students and professors there. At least I believe this is how things are done, and as far as I know they rarely outsource such work to a private company.

Next came the pain in the ass part of the work. After completing some of the functional part of the work about 3 weeks since the contract came into our hands we had a meeting with he people there, regarding how they wanted to things to be presented and to function.

We got a slight overview how things were to be made from this meeting. It was a short meeting just showing us what is required to be done from some of the sample conference websites.

One of the expectations that I was expecting from this project was the fact that I will be dealing with people who were pretty much on the high end of the technical spectrum. Conducting a conference is not an easy thing, it requires responsibility and dedication to do such a job. But in due course of time I realized that I was nothing more that a naive fool to have thoughts like this.

The corruption in our educational society had spread itself into the very deep roots of the ones who is supposed to teach the young and upcoming generation on how things are to be done, this along with the fact that it was a government college just added more fuel to the fire. Them bureaucracy had also crept into what was already a degrading educational system.

In the next meeting I was meeting with the Head of the department along with the persons who actually will be leading this conference, we had a chat on how the conference site should look and feel and how the actual conference will be conducted. This was about an hour long meeting. By the time the meeting was concluded I understood that the head of the department had significant knowledge of how the system should be set up. I was happy that we were on the right track of things. He was in the opinion that such things should have done by the internal college authorities and not by external people, but circumstances were forcing them to do this act. I was happy that at least the hand of the former students of the college was there in the development of this website.

After this the actual problems started, we tried to keep the releases close to the deadlines as possible. The first thing we noticed was the sheer lack of communication that existed between the various people in the college and us who were making the changes, numerous mails were exchanged before they replied. Even when testing was done from our side, no one from their side was ready to take up the responsibility or even had the time to browse through the system we made. The usual ignorant mail of us not sending the user names and passwords persisted, even though we had send them the information in advance. They rarely understood the meaning of CC and To Fields in an email. The only one who actually did spend some effort to actually go through the work we had done was the Head of the department.

A job that should have been completed in about 2 weeks time dragged on for 2 months January mid, when we had our 3rd meeting. Talk about dropping a bomb shell on the developed framework. They wanted a whole revamp of the website. The front page, the looks, the links the layout you name it they wanted it changed.

I blame myself for this incident, being really green on the web development scenario, I had almost no experience in designing the look and feel of a website. So I just put up what was comfortable to me and this is what caused them to come back onto us.

Now this meeting was huge, I think there was about 10 staff people in there, each of them somehow related to the conference. The one who wanted to do all the change was the I presume the "Alpha Leader" of the pack. I think this person had little experience with some personal web design and with a very orthodox mindset did not ever understand the concept of what the Tabbed menus are, a whole restructure of the menu system was proposed which included both side navigation and top primary links to convey all the messages. The justification given was that people find it hard to browse through the tabbed menu, (Duh!!! I was not expecting chimps to take part in an international conference.) they were so confident that tabbed menus were so bad that nobody will actually understands them.

Take a look @ how they actually use tabbed menu for a conference site http://www.developersummit.com/

They wanted a more flat layout like this one http://conferences.computer.org/scc/2006/

The discussion went to the extend that, I finally had to say that if the person wanted to actually register in the website that person will need more knowledge that just browsing a tabbed menu. They were pretty surprised by that fact and they wanted to try out a demonstration on how to register and I had to sit there and explain the whole procedure, which was supposed to be tested by them in the 2 month time period.

After this the most disappointed fact was yet to come. In the final conclusion of the meeting was the discussion of the role of the conference manager. I was explaining how the conference manager is responsible for all the papers that come in for the conference through online submission, the task of assigning these papers, how to finally accept and reject the papers. How to give the users the right set of permissions for actually doing the tasks. They were overwhelmed by the tasks of the conference manager and I was surprised to hear from them that the conference manager had so many tasks under the person that it will make the manager a "Real Busy" person (Duh!! What did u expect a guy who sits on his / her lazy butt?), what was even more shocking was the fact they were not ready to take up such a responsibility. They were asking each other who will take up the responsibility of doing all this. (Remember they are people the conference organizing committee who is asking this sort of rubbish)

So the arrogant teachers had mauled the website from its orignal beauty to something more horrific, an abomination from a web designer's perspective. And after couple of weeks we had our 4th meeting, and this time I knew what to expect from these people. Just do as they say and get over with it was my policy as it was useless to argue with these arrogant people. But they always manage to throw in a few surprises every now and then. During the course of the time the server was up and down many times and due to some bad luck one of the professors tried to access the website and it was not available. We assured him that it will be up from now on and we had technical difficulties during that time. His response...

I agree that we get the website around here, but we should try to access it from someplace far off.

I should have jumped out of that window on hearing that, the Professor had a doctorate in his subject, I was expecting some sort of standard in the discussion, you know what my father knows the fact that a Website is accessible from anywhere in the world if it up and running and let me tell you he does not have a PhD. This is what the so called best college in the whole of my state has to offer?!!!!

This ain't over yet...I am waiting for the grand finale.

This is a very sad thing, and to even think of the fact that I spend 4 years of my life here in this doomed college.

How Not To Run A Server!!!

Longtime since my last post, been busy with a lot of things especially leveling up my Paladin in World of Warcraft. Other than this there were a couple of exams and a lot of DotA and some very annoying situations at work.

I will give more details of each in the upcoming posts. But this post is about running a server, well more specifically game servers.

This WoW server I have been playing on is a pretty nascent one. It has been set up pretty recently by a bunch of WoW lovers who also liked to offer "Blizz" like service to the public for free without any cost.

It was good initally, there was the occasional lag from time to time and then there were also downtimes. But hey it is free, I am ready to make some sacrifice for this no issues.

Then the people there decided to actually go for a More powerful server, they leased out a RHEL server with 16G RAM as their main server. Well they promised no lag, no more downtimes and all the regular politician style statement.

The most promising was the fact that the server migration will take place in 2 hours. This is just the begining of the story.

• The first rule of maintaining quality service is never to give false promises, even if do it accidentally.
  
  Take the case of server migration. I have been involved in server migrations that have migrate 10 year old databases from one OS to another, and it take months of preparation and planning before executing the actual migration. And migration can become a migrane, also to do a migration in under 2 hours will be an exalted achievement nonetheless but the reality is takes longer than that and it did over here about 17 Hours of downtime before the migration actually got completed.
  
  
• If you break it, you take the blame, you can't blame the users for blaming and flaming you because "you" did not keep your promise.
  
  This was yet another thing that came across in the particular server I was playing at. Not only the fact that they did not keep their promise, the down times were pretty high on the server with significant roll backs at various instances. This was not only annoying but it also wasted a lot of hard work which got rolled back during a reset.
  
  Eventually the unrest grew and it was only a matter of time before flaming began in the forums about the server, the MODs the admin and what not? And this brings us to the next point, of crowd control and anger management.
  
  
• When situation goes out of control you need be professional in how you control the people who have gone berserk.
  
  The MODs and Admin have more rights and powers in controlling what is there on the forum, this does not mean that they are GODLIKE and should use / abuse their powers to control the crowd, in this particular case the MOD posted a counter post which was more abusive to the crowd in general rather than the single offender (I am not taking sides here rememeber that), the MODs were so furious that they went out and said things like "This is their server, they will run it as they wish", "They will chop the heads off and suck the brains out of any one who does not agree" etc... What ever may be the crime commited by this offender it does not deserve such a reply from a MOD or and Admin.
  
  In this case I would have choped the gentials off the MOD and made them eat it for the response they put up there. It may be a free service I agree but there is a way to deal with people and this is not the right way.
  
  
• Don't making stupid excuses and whine like a Pussy, for the screw up you made
  
  Now the Head MOD wanted to make a message so here it goes.
  

  It is valentine and instead of spending time with my wife, I am writing this post spending my time in the forum...(And goes on), we are people who are providing free service because we love this game...we need not do this kind of stuff in the first place...
  

  OK you asshole, if you were not screwing up your promises in the first place you wouldn't be writing such posts already. And quit whining, I got a grandma who I need to take to the hospital and I got couple of kids whom I need to pick up from school...Hey asshole if you got your life to go on with, you should consider that more important than this, no one is expecting you to do charity for something you think you are doing with passion and love you have for the game, if you dont have enough time for those things don't come to the forum and whine like a big baby about the fact that you are not able to spend with your wife or grandma or kids because of the forum.
  
  The MODs should have either shifted responsibility or should have declared a holiday and should have locked the forum, not whine about it in a post.
  

  Forced Kindness deserves no thanks

• Finally dont make n00bish statements please.
  
  The Head admin finally came out with a wonderful statement.
  

  I think we have worked hard to deserve your respect...and we expect to be treated in that way...If I get any more compains regarding the server will be down the person will be banned for 24 Hours.

  Bravo, Motherfucker your just busted your balls, well the fact is your get respect not by releasing a threatening statement but from people who provide the service for, if they are happy you will get the respect you deserve and you provide crap to these people, they will not hesitate to throw back shit at you and that is how things work out.
  
  If working hard means loosing your sleep and running a server you are totally wrong my friend. It means providing quality to the people you serve. So you do not deserve "respect"
  

May be when I finally get to run a WoW server I will be able to show these people who the job is done.

P.S: I may get banned from this server if they read this post, but I really don't care, even as I write this post it is down

P.S: By the way if you feel you can threaten me by commenting in this post, remember what you said, let me restate that for you.

This is my blog, I will write what I feel and what I think is right from my perspective, do you think only you can chop off heads and suck brains, I can do far worse like cut off your genitals make pickles out of it and then make you eat them. Do not think I will hesitate to do that. I am more mean and sadistic that you think I am...So tread lightly...