Cold Blast for Iceman Registration

Last Friday and today mark the two Iceman Cometh registration days. Two, you ask? Why two? Well, the site that was handling registrations went down one-half hour before registration was to begin. Why is that, you ask? Well, Steve Brown does a wonderful job explaining SportsBaseOnline’s problem in the email he sent out Friday night (typos corrected by yours truly):

Dear __________,

I am very sorry about the cluster during tonight’s registration process. At 6:30 PM everything was set to rock and then somebody launched a program to register themselves. This program contacted SBO 100 times per nanosecond and resulted in 100,000 hit[s] on the SBO site in one minute.

SportsBaseOnline is doing everything they can to stop this attack and then figure out how we can go about getting everybody else registered in an organi[z]ed and efficient [manner]. As soon as we have a plan, we will post it on the Iceman website and send out another Constant Contact email.

Again, thank you for your patience!

Sincerely,

Steve Brown

This is a very interesting email. I knew you were going to ask that, so I will tell you why. First, Steve should really consider proofreading his emails before he sends them out. It only takes a few minutes and can do wonders when it comes to promoting a professional look for any business.

Second,

This program contacted SBO 100 times per nanosecond and resulted in 100,000 hit[s] on the SBO site in one minute.

…a nanosecond is one-billionth of a second. That means, if the server is contacted once per nanosecond, it is contacted one billion times in one second. If it is contacted 100 times per nanosecond, as Steve stated, then it would have been contacted 100,000,000,000 (read one-hundred billion) times per second. At sixty seconds, the server would have been contacted 6,000,000,000,000 (read six trillion) times in one minute.

No wonder the server crashed! The math most certainly doesn’t jive with Steve’s email, but maybe the server took 100,000 hits and said, “I quit!” Who knows? Well, Steve should.

Another question you may be asking is why would anyone do this? Assuming everyone is an Iceman junkie, someone must have wanted to get in really badly to want to contact a server six trillion times. Another viable theory is that someone just wanted to mess with all the Iceman junkies. Either way, the latter was most certainly a success! In summary, we can assume one of two things:
• This person simply wanted to screw with everyone who wanted to register – genius!
• This person wanted to get in really, really badly and planned quite poorly – moron!

I am going to assume the latter is true, and I am proud to say that we have witnessed a true case of moronacity¹!
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1 moronacity (mōr-ŭn-ăs‘sĭt-ē) – the act of being a moron.