The internet and making work.
May 15th, 2007 by clareLate in the evening of Tuesday 15th and it looks from this blog as though I lost interest in this project after Day Two on Sunday 13th as there are no entries from me for yesterday. Whereas Alun has been working away uploading sound clips and video clips. That though is not the real story though… oooo no ! I wrote a lengthy – and I mean seriously lengthy – as any friends (Colin?) used to receiving my e-screeds can well imagine I am sure; post last night.
It covered everything from artistic collaboration to the use of sound in performance art to me singing lieder ! I up-loaded it at 1-30am not knowing that half an hour earlier, at 1am, the server had crashed. This is very, very rare event apparently and the full extent of the problems this would cause only became apparent as today went on. I could not access web-sites that server hosts – most importantly the METRON site. I could not send or receive email for large parts of the day. Most frustratingly for me though was that my long and I hoped, illuminating blog post had vanished into cyber space. Alun has explained to me why this is in an email – I am inserting some of it here because it is so interesting to learn more – I hope you agree – about how this technology that we are all so dependent on actually works…Is
From Clare to Alun : ‘Subject: possibility ?
hi – i see that the blog is up again and you have added to it.
i read all the techy stuff from the server and it all went
down at 1am today – which was at the end of a couple of hours
of thinking and writing and re-drafting for the blog for me.
i sent it at about 1-30am and it didn’t get up-loaded to the blog.
is it possible though that the server will have a place where
it will have gone and they could retrieve it – surely they
can see what traffic goes to and fro from a user and they
must have copies ?
can you find out – i think it is the least they could do. i
wouldn’t mind generally except it was a substantial and
thoughtful piece of writing and it will be a lot of work to re-do.
any chance ?
Alun’s reply :
I think it’s highly unlikely because of the nature of the internet.
What happens is . . . the blog page only communicates with the web server
when you push the submit button. In between that it’s
not communicating at all with the network. Then you press the submit button
and your web browser software sends out a request to your local ISP asking
for the address of www.metronart.co.uk . It has to find the right unique
number that identifies the web server, and it has to do this each and every
time it requests it, it’s so stupid!
This means that by the time you pressed ‘submit’, the number was no longer
resolvable /findable, because of the hosting company’s networking error. So
the message never actually reached the server itself. It is possible it got
caught in another computer at the hosting company, though it may not
actually have got beyond your local ISP, since that’s where it would have
got stuck looking for the right computer address.
So I can say for sure, that the message is not on the Metron web site server.
You may be right that it’s on a networked computer somewhere at the hosting
company, but it will be extremely hard to identify, since these things are
mostly binary numbers before they get re-interpreted by the correct web
server, and there’s an awful lot of network traffic every minute.
I will ask them, but I really wouldn’t hold out any hopes.’
Isn’t that great ?
But fascinating though it is – the text is lost, as yes – you guessed it, I hadn’t backed it up. I hadn’t thought to – I had trusted the technology that I now expect to be there 24/7 and had sat in bed with my Powerbook and had composed and written the piece straight into the blog. So there was an important lesson for me today – this inscrutably clever stuff can break – it can let me down. It does seem bad luck that if this error is really so rare that it should happen in the week that I am using the internet for the first time to make a piece of work.
I have felt frustrated all day today – it felt as though the dialogue that Alun and I want to be having about Metron through the blog was being undermined. I felt personally aggrieved that my writing had been chewed up in binary numbers on an anonymous computer.
I am much restored now as the blog is back up. It is brilliant to see that he is back on the blog uploading sound and video and being creative with it all. I am going to attempt to retrieve the scattered pearls that I had strung together last night. I am now drafting first in Word and will then upload to be on the safe side !