Comment On Not Much of a Cron Job

Wow. Just... wow. and I thought my accidental once-a-minute-for-a-week attempted rdiff-backup script was bad. I'll never misplace those asterisks again.

... what does that image have to do with the article though?

Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone link a page view (and not just the first, ANY page view) to executing a mass email script?

With most WTFs I can start to suss out a bit of the twisted logic behind what happened, but this just breaks my mind.

Do not know, the horned helmet and clock pendant would be Public Enemies' Flava Flav. Over a Outlook new mail letter icon. Icon must be an joke about something from Flava Flav's VH1 "Flava of Love" show.

Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone link a page view (and not just the first, ANY page view) to executing a mass email script?

I have done that, on shared webhosts without cron installed. What I did was to record the last <b>start time</b> of the 'cron' job and if it was more then 4 Hour, I would update the start time field, and execute the cron job. Worked fine. (And yes it was a hack, and I did put in a comment explaining why the code did what it did).

Wow! These guys truly deserve their kudos!

You know, I'm just happy that they were open enough to admit what went wrong.

Web-U-Learn, you've got MY business.

... well, okay, you're not seeing a single cent of it. But you have my RESPECT.

... well, okay, no you haven't.

What, they couldn't even write a flat text file saying "retarded email process = started" and then check to see if it exists before starting "retarded email process" again?

Well, at least they've fixed it.

Until next time.

Knee-cap. It's not a threat. It's a valid method of instruction.

Think they'll automate emailing again? Not if they are properly instructed.

And mea culpa is properly delivered formally. It's a little thing called professionalism. This is serious business after all.

I've got to believe, since they HAVE cron, and the script should have been set off by time-of-day automatically, that this whole bug ITSELF was a ill conceived response to some previous time when their cron wasn't up.

The image in today's article is now my buddy icon.

Justice:

Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone link a page view (and not just the first, ANY page view) to executing a mass email script?

With most WTFs I can start to suss out a bit of the twisted logic behind what happened, but this just breaks my mind.

"don't worry, I have the page set as my homepage"

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Batch-Process-Manager.aspx

You see, this is already accepted as an Industry Best Practice. All the true Enterprise Professionals use it.

I wonder if Overclockers UK use the same software? :-) I had a similar issue with them a while back.

This reminds me of a nice little WTF we have at my current job.

We have a [somewhat overbuilt] MySQL replication setup backing our website and batch jobs. Occasionally replication goes down and the website reads continue to come from our slaves. The worst that could happen is the customer gets some stale data and can't immediately see updates to their account. Right?

For some inexplicable and still unexplained reason, my predecessors decided to store any email that is to go out into a "queued_emails" database table. Actually, our API lets the user choose whether to queue the email. Fancy! Unfortunately for some of our customers, most emails are queued unnecessarily.

How do the emails get sent? Every minute, a cron job reads (from a SLAVE) some number of emails from the top of the queue, sends them, then deletes them from the queue (via the MASTER).

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out what happens when replication goes down or--hilariously--if replication is delayed by just one minute.

> "Don't you think I already did that," she snapped, "YOU need to come and do something about this NOW!"

The correct response to such a request is to calmly gather all the flashlights in the house, flip the main circuit breaker, and drive to a motel (with the flashlights.)

Welcome to the new thedailywtf.com website, now with 50% more words!

benryves:

I wonder if Overclockers UK use the same software? :-) I had a similar issue with them a while back.

Maybe their database accounts for every packing peanut and sends a different email for each one?

jimlangrunner:

And mea culpa is properly delivered formally. It's a little thing called professionalism. This is serious business after all.

At least they didn't sign it "oops, my bad".

So which is the real WTF?

1 - His wife left it until the last minute to do the course with no concern about anything that could possibly delay her.

2 - That presumably important medical training is given over the web, where the trainee can presumably just start viewing (to avoid the class) and then slope off out to dinner instead of actually learning.

with brownie points earned and the wife back on task, John moseyed himself into bed for the night.

And here's the real WTF, thinking John earned brownie points. Ask any married guy.

It's been a while since I used Windows, but the Task Manager displays bandwidth usage? Is this new?

Brownie points are real, but you need to redeem them as soon as possible after earning them. They have a half life of about 8 hours.

For me that's the WTFest of the WTFs since arriving here. I've witnessed some dumb things in my time and done quite a few dumb things myself but this takes the biscuit.

Well done Wb-U-Learn!

(PS I love the Flava Flav image even if I've no idea why he's there!)

Whoa there, the "techy" section (actually the first sentence) makes no sense.

A cron job is something that's set up using the cron daemon (crond process) that kicks off at specified times. You can't "run" a cron script in the way described.

Some other script could be run, but I'm pretty sure it's not a cron script.

It's part of the NT based Windows series (NT, 2k, XP, 2K3, etc.) [The Task Manager's 'Networking' tag.]

The 9X series used a different program ('Sysmon?').

kastein:

Wow. Just... wow. and I thought my accidental once-a-minute-for-a-week attempted rdiff-backup script was bad. I'll never misplace those asterisks again.

... what does that image have to do with the article though?

The image has a clock in it. I think that's the only connection.

Eh:

It's been a while since I used Windows, but the Task Manager displays bandwidth usage? Is this new?

It displays total bandwidth usage per-interface, but not per-app. You can also select the columns you want and enable the Read/Write/Other call/byte counts; unsurprisingly FireFox, Outlook, and the management app for my wireless card top the list on this system.

valerion:

So which is the real WTF?

1 - His wife left it until the last minute to do the course with no concern about anything that could possibly delay her.

2 - That presumably important medical training is given over the web, where the trainee can presumably just start viewing (to avoid the class) and then slope off out to dinner instead of actually learning.

My guess is it is HIPAA and other certifications that require continuous training. After watching a video, employees have to answer a very easy quiz. The course is exactly the same every year and no one learns anything new. No point in getting worked up about it.

Flava Flav came up with the cron job triggered by the home page idea.

A lot of CMS sites do that since not all web hosts allow you to have a shell account or cron jobs. The downside is that it assumes that the page will get traffic - if nobody goes to the page, the cron job will never fire. Not a big deal for a cron that updates the page contents, but for a mass-mailing, that won't work well.

Generally they have a lock so that it can only be called once - but this sounds like a custom job, so they probably forgot the lock. I know drupal does that page-request thing for general site maintenance, but it's a particular page (cron.php) that has to be called, and they assume you're going to set up a cron job with lynx or wget to make the page request. What's nice is that you can set up the cron on ANY machine, since all it has to do is make that page request.

After midnight a viewing of the homepage of your website

My website?

Eh:

Whoa there, the "techy" section (actually the first sentence) makes no sense.

A cron job is something that's set up using the cron daemon (crond process) that kicks off at specified times. You can't "run" a cron script in the way described.

Some other script could be run, but I'm pretty sure it's not a cron script.

...and it's so much funnier when someone explains the joke, isn't it?

Charles400:

with brownie points earned and the wife back on task, John moseyed himself into bed for the night.

And here's the real WTF, thinking John earned brownie points. Ask any married guy.

...or formerly married guy.

valerion:

So which is the real WTF?
2 - That presumably important medical training is given over the web, where the trainee can presumably just start viewing (to avoid the class) and then slope off out to dinner instead of actually learning.

If it works anything like the on-line professional development sites, they're interactive and require you to actually answer questions to demonstrate your understanding.

valerion:

That presumably important medical training is given over the web, where the trainee can presumably just start viewing (to avoid the class) and then slope off out to dinner instead of actually learning.

Not necessarily! One I had to do recently for similar reasons involved a large quantity of information being presented one paragraph at a time and the reader having to click through to each new paragraph. And, presumably to foil people clicking through quickly, the "next" button was placed at a completely different location on the screen each time. One training was enough to give you RSI and a splitting headache.

In fact it was so bad that I raised it with the company's health and safety department and they agreed I had a good point. Hopefully I created a big behind-the-scenes dust-up.

mccoyn:

My guess is it is HIPAA and other certifications that require continuous training. After watching a video, employees have to answer a very easy quiz. The course is exactly the same every year and no one learns anything new. No point in getting worked up about it.

Either you know from experience, or you made a very perceptive guess. At my workplace it isn't a video; it's a mixture of text, images, and cutesy javascript show/hide to reveal pertinent facts; usually between 8 and 16 web pages. And yes, it's the same every year, and yes, the quiz is very easy. And all employees are required to take it annually.

Thus it is that we in the IT department, who work in a building several blocks removed from the hospital and never darken its doors, must nonetheless test annually for knowledge of hospital emergency codes (code pink means someone is trying to steal a baby from the nursery), safety procedures, and other healthcare-related matters which we will never need to know except when it's time to take the test again.

Addendum (2009-05-21 14:23):
Note that there are actually about ten different courses like that, not just one. Each has its own quiz. All are required.

Justice:

Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone link a page view (and not just the first, ANY page view) to executing a mass email script?

With most WTFs I can start to suss out a bit of the twisted logic behind what happened, but this just breaks my mind.

Indeed it breaks my mind also.

I'm calling BS on the explanation.

Cron is a task scheduler. A job running out of cron runs at specific intervals that are governed by the system clock. Unless visiting the webpage caused the system clock to restart, there is no way that cron would fire that job off again.

Now, it is completely possible that the program was started by cron, and repeatedly restarted its own mailing routine because of some if(new_data){} subroutine, but it has nothing to do with the scheduler.

Satanicpuppy:

I'm calling BS on the explanation.

Cron is a task scheduler. A job running out of cron runs at specific intervals that are governed by the system clock. Unless visiting the webpage caused the system clock to restart, there is no way that cron would fire that job off again.

Now, it is completely possible that the program was started by cron, and repeatedly restarted its own mailing routine because of some if(new_data){} subroutine, but it has nothing to do with the scheduler.

OK guys, break it up, everyone go home. Show's over, Satanicpuppy called bullshit on the story over some technical inaccuracies.

But if I recall correctly that just displays the network usage for each specific NIC, doesn't it? I don't remember seeing per-process bandwidth usage. Still, I may be wrong. My memory's hazy about this.

Spectre:

After midnight a viewing of the homepage of your website

My website?

No no no - I read it again, and I'm almost certain it's my website.

I'm not sure what is more disturbing.

The IT department needs to know what Code Pink is?

or

That stealing a baby from the nursery happens often enough that you need a code for it?

Satanicpuppy:

I'm calling BS on the explanation.

Cron is a task scheduler. A job running out of cron runs at specific intervals that are governed by the system clock. Unless visiting the webpage caused the system clock to restart, there is no way that cron would fire that job off again.

It's pretty common to call any kind of task scheduler "cron," or something derived from "cron," whether it's a system daemon or a piece of code in a PHP script that's supposed to run tasks periodically; see, for instance <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cron/">the wp-cron wordpress plugin</a>.

I assume something of the latter sort is what the people in the story mean by "cron." Of course, this means that either they're running an e-learning business on the kind of cheap shared hosting that doesn't support a proper cron daemon, or they do have access to a real cron but are unaware of it, either of which would be a pretty big WTF.

ah, the poor man's cron.
nothing a single check flag couldn't have fixed.

a married man sleeping? there's no sleeping...

TRWTF is Outlook sucks up all available bandwidth to download a bunch of messages.

Lister:

I'm not sure what is more disturbing.

The IT department needs to know what Code Pink is?

or

That stealing a baby from the nursery happens often enough that you need a code for it?

Once is too often.

Announcing a code pink gives all hospital personnel the alert to watch for a suspicious person carrying a baby, and intercept if possible. There are telltale signs that would indicate an imposter in nurse garb: how the baby is being carried, what ID badge the nurse has on, and so forth.

Satanicpuppy:

I'm calling BS on the explanation.

Cron is a task scheduler. A job running out of cron runs at specific intervals...
<snip>
... but it has nothing to do with the scheduler.

Gee, could that be the reason why the article is named "Not Much of a Cron Job?"

Hmmm... no, I think it must be a coincidence.

voyou:

Satanicpuppy:

I'm calling BS on the explanation.

Cron is a task scheduler. A job running out of cron runs at specific intervals that are governed by the system clock. Unless visiting the webpage caused the system clock to restart, there is no way that cron would fire that job off again.

It's pretty common to call any kind of task scheduler "cron," or something derived from "cron," whether it's a system daemon or a piece of code in a PHP script that's supposed to run tasks periodically; see, for instance <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cron/">the wp-cron wordpress plugin</a>.

I assume something of the latter sort is what the people in the story mean by "cron." Of course, this means that either they're running an e-learning business on the kind of cheap shared hosting that doesn't support a proper cron daemon, or they do have access to a real cron but are unaware of it, either of which would be a pretty big WTF.

Kind of like the "ping" thing that had everyone worked up earlier this week. You're not going to stop the English language from morphing, even in tech-speak.

valerion:

So which is the real WTF?

1 - His wife left it until the last minute to do the course with no concern about anything that could possibly delay her.

My college-age daughter used to get herself into all kinds of computer trouble like that, in spite of my suggestions that she check out the printer & make sure it worked *before* 3AM on the day the paper was due.

She's better now, but it took quite a while. I'm ashamed to say I wasn't as sympathetic as I should have been. Well, maybe I was the first time...

RoverDaddy:

kastein:

Wow. Just... wow. and I thought my accidental once-a-minute-for-a-week attempted rdiff-backup script was bad. I'll never misplace those asterisks again.

... what does that image have to do with the article though?

The image has a clock in it. I think that's the only connection.

I'm guessing that the image is related to the casual nature of the language used in the apology. The whole idea of appropriateness of register with respect to your audience is becoming sadly lost.

captcha: minim... l'il bit

Wait, are we still talking about newborn humans, or is this some slang for atomic weaponry?