Subject: Technicalities Resent-From: nystaff@agency.com Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 17:39:36 -0500 From: "Mitch Golden" To: "Staff (New York)" Technicalities Nov. 29, 1999 *) Give those guys Four Hands! Well, the new Oppenheimer Funds site recently launched at http://www.oppenheimerfunds.com/ This was a site that was begun during the Carboniferous period, we handed it off to the client sometime during the late Cretaceous. (March 1998 and May 1999 respectively.) A fair amount of technical work went into that site, which was done by Dante Gomez and Chris Stetson. The client opted for a simple technology (perl) and nice modular design. Despite lots of trouble on this account, I for one am pretty proud of Chris and Dante. *) Doing "It" So many of us are jaded nowadays. We've been doing "it" for years and years, and while "it" is always still fun, we struggle a bit to recapture that joyous feeling of our youth. You know, that nervousness, that special excitement of the very first time. Not knowing just exactly how "it" is going to feel. "It" is never again quite the same, right? Last week we had members of the tech department who had the pleasure of seeing their first web sites go live. Debra Ronsvalle, who is Tech Lead on the Brisk team, had a soft launch of the site about two months ago, and this week the full site went live. It's not our most technically-deep site, but it shows how fun something relatively simple can be. Written with Flash Generator interacting with perl, you can go to the site to send an electronic postcard. Send one to the members of your team: http://www.liptonbrisk.com/ If you made the mistake of reading the Technicalities a few weeks ago, you know of Henry Sauvageot's travails. I think my favorite moment during the FUBU work was when Henry had to figure out why the site, which was performing well on our dev environment, was crawling along at one or two pages per second on the live server, a hefty Sun box. Henry had to explain to the client that his "Ferrari was in the shop for a tuneup". Turned out that the ISP had misconfigured a few things on the server. Having fixed that problem, Henry went on vacation to the Carribean expecting the site to go live while he was away. Nope. Henry's tan faded noticeably when he he heard the news. Tuesday night, the site gave its last effort to keep from going live. At the very end the final impediment to putting the site up was - as usual - software. For some reason, the Oracle database kept spitting out this cryptic message: ERROR: ORA-01041: Take a long walk off a short pier. Getting it to stop necessitated six hours of struggle involving Henry, George Fang (the office Oracle expert), myself, and an Oracle technical service representative. None of us are really sure what we did to make it work, but the Flaunch the next day was pretty fun.