Floop or Twoop?

Posted: Fri 27th March 2009 in Blog

Computers are dumb. Really dumb they're like a gullible younger sybling. The apprentice who's looking for the left handed hammer or a long weight.

They do exaclty what you tell them, and carry on doing it unless you tell them to stop. A partiluarly dangerios way of exploiting computer stupidity are loops. I'm my IT carrer I've seen 2 text book examples. A Mail Loop (Yay well done Contractor from "place near birmingham" Software and all on my ownsome created a bridgeloop.

The Mail Loop: Nice contractor sets up our new mail system, for some of us, leaving rest on the old system. Tells new system to deliver mail for people who aren't users of new system to the old system. Unfortuately he set the old system up exactly the same way. No problem, if you were on the old and sent to someone on the new, old would pass mail to new. Sounds great.

The smart umuncst you will realise the fatal flaw. Say you send a mail to typo@ourmail.example. Typo is not on the new server and so it sends it to the old server, typo's not on the old server so it sends it to the new server. The mail carries on going around in a loop. YAY. Computers are dumb. Wait for enough typos@ and Spam@ and evetually one of the servers will crash as the number of items looping arround increaces.

Now my second hard core example inolves 3 wireless access points  all bridged via WDS. So if you say sent a piece of data from a to b, it would go straight to b, but also get to b a bit later via c. It would arrive at b twice and b will reply twice and so on. This sort of thing is easily fixed by something called "Spanning Tree Protocol".

Now ladies and Gentlemen, concider the following Facebook Apps. Twitter, and Twitter updater. One updates your Twitter from your Facebook Status the other updates your facebook stutus from your Twitter. Right lets install both and see what happens. Lets call it a floop? or a Twoop (facebook loop or twitter loop). Will both these behemoth  websites frantically try and update each other till one or other crashes? Can a floop bring down web 2.0 as we know it. As a repsoncible user of both facebook and twitter I thought I'd find out.

Sad news is the twoop doesn't exist. The programmer of fb2twitter had the good sence to look for Dupicates. Not so the Twiter app people.

Tom doesn't destroy social networking as we know it. Nor does he get a neat feed. Duplicates ago go. But only 2 of each item.

Dang.