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Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

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31–40 of 209 posts

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#31
post #19

This very example -- requests were technically illegal all the time without devs realizing, but something in the stack changed to start rejecting them -- demonstrates the fallacy of the "be liberal in what you accept, strict in what you issue" principal. If all the web servers involved had been strict in rejecting the illegal request from the start, they would have noticed the bug in development before deploying to f…

This doesn't demonstrate a fallacy in "be liberal in what you accept" any more than closed source software demonstrates fallacies in Linus's Law. The problem wasn't liberal acceptance, it was that liberal acceptance ended when Cowboy was added to the mix. Strict acceptance would have shown the error earlier, but continued liberal acceptance would have allowed continued functionality.

You mean so long as everyone standardizes around a non-standard, rather than the actual specifications of the standard, it'll work?

I think I prefer just adhering to the standard in the first place.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#33
post #8

What's the deal with all the scrollbars on this page?

Yeah, why is every image, heading, and paragraph on that page surrounded by scrollbars where most don't work and are not necessary?

What browser are you using? I'm not seeing that here on my devices...? We are using pretty vanilla Bootstrap.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, why is every image, heading, and paragraph on that page surrounded by scrollbars where most don't work and are not necessary?

What browser are you using? I'm not seeing that here on my devices...? We are using pretty vanilla Bootstrap.

http://i.imgur.com/v0b1LKC.png

This is what I see in Chrome on OSX.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#35
post #8

What's the deal with all the scrollbars on this page?

Yeah, why is every image, heading, and paragraph on that page surrounded by scrollbars where most don't work and are not necessary?

In their CSS, they have a rule for every

tag to have "overflow: scroll" for some reason. Not sure why they didn't use the default value for overflow, since there's nothing on that page that needs to be specifically told to scroll.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, why is every image, heading, and paragraph on that page surrounded by scrollbars where most don't work and are not necessary?

What browser are you using? I'm not seeing that here on my devices...? We are using pretty vanilla Bootstrap.

The issue is you've got the following CSS on lines 31-33 of blog.css:

body.blog .blog-post p { overflow: scroll; }

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#38
post #23

This proves a very important pet peeve of mine: Your modern application has a highly dynamic operating point. There is no way you can deploy a system and expect it to be static for eternity. Back in the day with low interconnectivity you could. But today it is impossible. When you build stacks on top of system for which you have no direct control, you must be able to adapt your system. This means you can't statically…

You're combining two issues.

Yes, if you let other people run your infrastructure, you are beholden to their operations decisions and schedules.

It is not impossible to design around that (new) problem, but it is sometimes expensive.

The trick is to know what external dependencies you have, and that is almost impossible to fully quantify in the XaaS and cloud model.

Re: Post Mortem: A single whitespace character

#40
post #3

Cowboy is quite a well respected we server of the Erlang flavor. I'd guess heroku rejiggered something in their stack, perhaps adding cowboy as a reverse proxy or load balancer in front of their junk. Cowboy apparently shot yor no-good dirty sidewinding web requests in the face.

It is well known that you can't (should not) rely on bugs (or internal APIs)
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