contingency design

Cricinfo.com is probably the number 1 site for Cricket fans. Given the number of Cricket crazy fans in India and a huge Indian diaspora living all over the world, their traffic volumes must be huge. But that still doesn’t stop me from complaining about how a production website can throw up these really elementary errors:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (11) in /usr/cricinfo/QUIZ/inc/inc_db.php on line 19 Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket= ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (11)

I got the above error message when I tried to access there new Cricket Quiz site. Yes, things breakdown, I know but shouldn’t Cricinfo be throwing up a human readable, non-geeky message? Something like “Oops! Looks like our server is acting up again. We are very sorry about it. In the meantime why don’t you More...