Archive for the ‘Stuff That Sucks’ Category

This morning I discovered that part of our product lookup system was dropping requests.  This caused Amazon product search not to work, as well as a large part of our products to get listed as being out of stock.  I have fixed the problem, but it will likely take at least 24hrs for the system to get back to normal.

I apologize for the downtime and any erroneous price watch alerts you may have received during this time of sadness.  It was quite odd — all parts of the system were running, it’s just that one part that wasn’t accepting connections.  Anyhow, please be patient while we return to our normal data collecting goodness.

This afternoon, one of our servers had some RAM die and that took down the Camel sites.  The faulty RAM has been pulled and the server is working again, so I have turned our sites back on.  Please let me know if you find anything broken!

(Thanks to our friend Justin who sprang into action and played doctor on our server.)

By the way, here’s the price history chart of the RAM we use and will be replacing.  Notice any problems with the Newegg price here?

It doesn’t get any better at Amazon, either.

Considering we bought at like $175 last time, things are looking rather bleak!

A bug in our product updating robot caused a bunch of Best Buy products to be erroneously marked as having prices of $0.00, and this unfortunately triggered the price drop alerts associated with those products.  I’m sorry for the unnecessary spam you may have received, but I believe things have been fixed.  If you notice anything suspicious or that you think might be a bug, please contact me so I can fix it asap.

Oh, and we had about 10 minutes of downtime starting at about 1am Pacific time.  This was due to a network upgrade that our ISP had scheduled but about which we saw no alert.  Next time we will be ready!