Yabba Dabba Doo

ON THE SECOND DAY of the Spring semester, I awoke in bed bleary-eyed and glanced at the clock. Good Lord! I had a class to teach in five minutes!

I ran to the phone to try to find someone at the college to tell the class that I would be a tad late. As it turns out, the School secretary was not at her phone. I then tried “IVC information,” but, as usual, that only gave me a recording. I tried some of the extensions mentioned on the recording, but that only yielded more recordings!

Boy was I steamed. How hard is it to hire actual human beings to answer the gosh darn phones?

I guess we’re a pretty peevish bunch at Dissent. Even our friends are peevish.


bout a week ago, I ran into a couple of student friends at Rutabegorz in Tustin, an old-school vegetarian restaurant. One of them, Jonathan, said hello, while the other, Mr. E. Debs—an occasional contributor to Dissent—grunted diffidently, as is his custom.

“What’s up?”, I said.

That prompted a torrent of abject peevitude from Jonathan. He explained that, several weeks ago, he had tried to register for classes at IVC online, but he was immediately stymied because, somehow, his enrollery was premature.

He had not waited, it seems, for his “enrollment window."


“What’s that?” I asked. Well, nobody at IVC had actually told Jonathan what his enrollment window was. He had one, though.

Jonathan then explained that, when he proceeded to try to enroll anyway, he received an error message according to which, owing to his prematurity, he was preventing other students from enrolling! Imagine that!

None of this meant anything to me. “So what’s your beef?” I asked. Jonathan looked at me like I must be kidding or something. He then patiently explained:

"Any well-designed system will have excess capacity built in to handle things like this—busy periods, network attacks, and so on!”

But of course! Any idiot knows that!

Well, that was about it. Jonathan said goodbye, Mr. Debs grunted, and off the two went.

A few days later, Jonathan sent me a message to which he attached two emails regarding the above-mentioned incident. The first, dated November 22, was addressed to Glenn Roquemore, President of IVC:

Dear Dr. Roquemore:

It has come to my attention, through a message placed on the Web by your programmers, that your system is unable to handle the extra load placed on it by students attempting to enroll prior to their enrollment window. I had no idea how determined my fellow students were to register, or that two or three of them might attempt to register prematurely at the same time! I also had no idea how starved for funds you truly were! In order to see any appreciable delays from an extra three users per second, you must be running your college enrollment software on a ten-year-old Pentium laptop with 48 megabytes of memory.

I am prepared to help. If asked, I will donate to the college my dual processor Pentium Pro server, circa 1998, with four 9Gb disk drives and 512 megabytes of memory. With Linux, the Apache web server, and the MySQL database engine, you ought to be able to get 100 users/second out of that machine, easily enough to accommodate over-eager enrollers. If, by some astronomical windfall, you get hold of an off-the-shelf computer from Sam's Club—well, your limiting factor becomes your network capacity.

In the interim, you have my profound sympathies, as does the engineer who has to prevent that poor Pentium laptop from melting down.

Very truly yours, Jonathan

Weeks passed, but Jonathan received no response from the Roquester. Jonathan commenced seething in peevitude.

He then turned to plan B. On December 9, he emailed one Jim Phaneuf, the district’s “Associate Director of Information Systems & Services”:

Dear Mr. Phaneuf:

I am a registered student at IVC. When I attempted to register prior to my registration window, I got an error message stating the following:

You are being denied access to the registration system for the following reasons: You may only use registration during your assigned appointment periods. By trying early you are preventing others from gaining access to the system. Please do not try again until Tuesday, November 29, 2005 after 02:00 PM

Is it literally true that I was inadvertently preventing others from gaining access to the system? Don't you have sufficient system and network capacity to handle requests from people accessing the registration system by mistake, without undue stress?

My brother works on online multiple listing service solutions for the real estate industry. His systems can handle tens of thousands of Web transactions per second, each involving multiple page builds and database calls. The data centers are modest—four or five dual processor machines facing the Web, four database servers, and four application servers. The connectivity in each facility is also modest—two peered T1 lines.

I can't believe that SOCCCD can't field that kind of architecture for its students! If you have something reasonable like this in place, why do you say that people who attempt to register early are preventing other people from using the system?

Sincerely, Jonathan

Once again, he received no response whatsoever.

Yesterday, I ran into Jonathan yet again. He was still steamed about the enrollment snafu. Said he:

“My guess is that either they were being stupid and moralizing for the hell of it, or that students were trying to game the system by trying to ‘snipe’ the first available classes in the enrollment window. If the latter, there are obvious technical steps to solve the problem, e.g., decoupling the authentication phase from the subnet used to run the rest of the enrollment system.”

I guess so. Absolutely!