“I Blew It”

I'm very unhappy about this.

I was all set to get sixteen rides in the month of August. Not quite my goal for the month, but not bad. It rained on Tuesday, and then Wednesday I was feeling horrible (Corinne thought it might be a case of food poisoning from the ham that I insisted was still edible), but today the weather was good and I was feeling great.

So what went wrong? (Warning: Technical comments follow.)

I suddenly had a bright idea for a performance improvement in Conversant (the software that runs this site). The was related to how it's configured to download mail: it integrates with a POP3 server.

Right now, after downloading a message, it closes the TCP stream, and then re-opens a stream (usually with the same server) to get the mail for the next mailbox. Closing and opening streams has some overhead, and provides no benefit, so I rewrote the scripts to leave the stream open to the server and just reissue the "USER" command when it was done with the first mailbox, to open the second mailbox.

Great idea, but POP3 doesn't support that!!! Duh!!! The UPDATE state of a POP3 session specifies that the TCP stream is closed, and no amount of begging was going to convince the POP3 server to loop back into the AUTHORIZATION state.

Yes, I should have checked the RFC on this before I started on it, but I was so excited about the improvements I was sure this would bring, that I jumped right into it. Lesson learned.

I only wasted a couple of hours, but it was after 6 PM when I'd finished putting everything back the way I'd found it, and that meant the second half of my ride would be in the dark, which is very bad.

So I didn't ride for a third day in a row, and my cool idea for an optimization was a total flop.