<i dream of a server farm>

Some men dream of women. Others of power and cruelty. I dream of a server farm.

I was dreaming when the phone rang. Rather than crawl back to bed, I seized the unexpected morning hours to fix a structural problem at Happy Cog. All went well until I tried to upload my work.

My friend Brian (not Platz) hosts Happy Cog as a favor. He hosted it from his home until he moved. He traded off fat pipes for a nicer place to live. Brian moved Happy Cog to a business associate's servers. Then he left that job. He moved it to a server house, then moved it again. I have 52 FTP bookmarks for Happy Cog. None of them work.

Happy Cog is easy. I call Brian (not Platz) on his cell phone, he gives me new FTP data, problem solved.

While updating Happy Cog, I noticed that Furbo Filters was down. Furbo Filters are plug-ins that perform web and graphic design chores. Craig Hockenberry of IconFactory developed the filters in 1997, before Adobe figured out the web. I kibbitzed on the filters and designed the site.

Adobe added our filters to the Photoshop 4 and 5 CD-ROMs. If they had bought the filters outright, Craig would be rich and I would have a server farm. Instead, Adobe figured out the web for themselves. Where did the Furbo Filters site go? Why did it go? I sent those questions to Craig, called Brian (not Platz) for a new password, and updated Happy Cog.  

I wish I could update The Web Standards Project. The WaSP's staging server is down, along with its mailing lists. Glenn Davis, co-founder of WaSP, hosted the site and its mailing lists at Project Cool, a company he also co-founded. Project Cool had a server farm.

Last year, DevX bought Project Cool, and, soon after the buyout, one by one, the Project Cool members quit. The last to leave was Michael, the web deity. Michael will be moving the WaSP site and lists to the servers at his new company, but he hasn't been able to do that yet. WaSP has no relationship with DevX.

During the series of mergers, ownership of the WaSP domain was erroneously transferred to DevX. When webstandards.org lapsed, nobody told us. So webstandards.org ceased to exist as a domain name. Our first attempts to re-register it were rebuffed by Network Solutions because we were not the "owners" of our own site.

While WaSP members wrote to me every day, asking what had happened to the site and mailing lists, anyone could have come in and bought the domain out from under us. Anyone but the rightful owners, that is.

Now the site is back, but the staging server has disappeared, making it impossible to do anything with the site other than look at it. We'd explain this to our members if our mailing lists had not also disappeared.

"It is beyond my control," says John Malkovitch in Dangerous Liasions. It's the pivotal scene of the movie: Malkovitch, in love with a woman whose honor he destroyed to satisfy a bet, abandons her rather than admit his true feelings – because to do so would shatter the world of vanity and manipulation that has given his life its only meaning. "It is beyond my control," he says to her, over and over again. We understand, though he does not, that the phrase is his death sentence. "It is beyond my control."

Four of my sites depend on the kindness of strangers and friends. It is beyond my control. I dream of a server farm.

29 August 2000