From: "Declan Ivory" <declan.ivory@eircom.net>
To: "'William Finnerty'" <wfinnerty@eircom.net>
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 8:20 PM
Subject: RE: Hit Counter Problem at Finnerty's (New Inn) web site
Dear Mr Finnerty,
Many thanks for the comments on my reply. I will follow up on the points that you have
raised in your note and I will be back to you at my earliest convenience.
Declan
Head of Operations and Delivery
eircom net
----- Original Message -----
From: William
Finnerty
To: Mr.
Declan Ivory (Head of Eircom Operations and Delivery)
Cc: Rachael O' Neill
(Eircom Customer Services) ; Assistant
Police Commissioner (Galway area) ; Police Commissioners Office ; Mr. Justice Thomas Smyth
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 6:28 PM
Subject: Hit Counter Problem at Finnerty's (New Inn) web site
Dear Mr Ivory,
Thank you for your e-mail of August 3rd 2001, and the helpful information it contains.
I would very much like you to restore the correct number to the hit-counter at my site
please. The reading this morning was 541 - so that it should now read somewhere in the
region of 7358 (i.e. 6797 + 20 + 541).
I note the views you express regarding the hit-counter being provided by Eircom as an
example of the type of facility that could be built into a web site. However, I can
find no reference at all to this particular idea in the Telecom Internet "Terms and
Conditions" agreement I signed on January 6th 1999. Legal information in my
possession suggests that once agreement is reached between the parties concerned, it is
not permissible (under the "Law of Contract" in this State) for one of the
parties involved to unilaterally introduce additional terms (or major variations, I
assume). It would be much appreciated if you could check up on this point with the Eircom
Legal Department, and I would be very pleased if you could arrange for someone to let me
know what their views are on this subject sometime within the coming two weeks please.
In connection with this point, I wish to stress that I could very easily have
installed a different kind of hit-counter to the "cgi" type that I decided to
use in 1999; and that the Eircom controlled cgi version which I decided on then was VERY
DELIBERATELY chosen because I judged that the reading it showed would have far more long
term public credibility than any of the other types I could have used on Eircom hosted web
sites at that time (or even now for that matter).
With regard to the possibility of I upgrading to a type of Eircom web site which
provides more accurate statistics, I would be happy to consider this. Please note
though that this may not be as simple a solution (for me) as it might first appear to
Eircom. Following some years of very expensive effort on my part (and with the long-term interests of future generations, including my own grandchildren, in mind), a number of the pages
at my Eircom site are now registered with some of the top international Internet search
engines; and if I have to change these page addresses in the process of upgrading, then
these links will be completely lost: unless of course I could hold on to the www page
addresses now in use - which I suspect Eircom might not allow me to do if I decided to
upgrade? I would be grateful if you could also let me know what the situation is
regarding this point please.
As an example of the search engine situation referred to in the paragraph above, you
may wish to note - and the example I give here is just one of several I could provide you
with - that anybody who now types in the words "esker riada" into the Google
search engine form will normally find one of my pages among the first 5 on the list
produced by the Google organisation (at www.google.com
). As you may know, the Esker Riada has played a major role in Irish history (and
indeed in world history as well) - partly because of the very strong relationship which
Clonmacnoise (founded in the 540's) has with it. Clonmacnoise (with students from
many European countries) was, as far as I know, the world's first major Christian
university: as well as being the most influential (very probably); and as I feel
sure you already know, Google now definitely seems to be one of the world's most popular
Internet search engines - if not the most popular.
I note the fault investigation findings you have mentioned; and writing as a person who
has worked in the electronics for over 30 years, I fully acknowledge that strange and
unexpected technical difficulties can and do sometimes occur. However, I have not up
to now come across the particular kind of sustained problem you describe. Normally
(in my experience), when computer disks are full they stop trying to store additional
information: and at that point they then either report the problem to the user (as with
the "Microsoft Windows Operating System" for example), or, they automatically
seek out and find storage space elsewhere. If it is the case that an Eircom hard
disk storage system starts corrupting cgi files when it becomes full, then it appears (to
me) that Eircom possibly have an extremely serious software design problem in their
system. As I see it, Eircom software design problems would not be any responsibility
of mine; and consequently I do not feel very happy about being expected to shoulder the
financial consequences for what I see as avoidable problems that are not of my making.
I estimate that the costs in question have now reached £1250 in total for me -
mostly in connection with the time I have lost trying to have this hit-counter problem at
my site corrected. Finally, and because I believe it might help you with your fault
investigations, I would like to point out that I have done some work for other people
(many months ago) on two other Eircom sites which use identical cgi hit-counters to the
one I use on my own site: and that neither of these two particular sites appear to have
experienced any of the hit-counter problems I have been having at my site during recent
months. The www Home Page locations for the other two sites in question are: http://homepage.eircom.net/~sarsfieldsgalway/
and
http://homepage.eircom.net/~atlantaquaria/
Yours sincerely,
William Finnerty.
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E-MAIL: wfinnerty@eircom.net
WEB SITE: http://homepage.eircom.net/~williamfinnerty/
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Declan Ivory" <declan.ivory@eircom.net>
To: <wfinnerty@eircom.net>
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 6:54 PM
Subject: Hit Counter Problem
Dear Mr Finnerty,
I am writing to you as a result of the various complaints that you have made in
relation to the problems that you have encountered with the hit counter on your web site.
I firstly apologise for the delay in coming back to you on this issue but it took some
time for us to establish the most likely cause of the problem.
Based on the investigation to date it is our opinion that the resetting of the counter
occurred due to one of our disk storage systems running out of space. The impact of this
is to reset the file size of the file containing the counter data to zero thus losing the
contents. We will of course be investigating ways of ensuring that this does not happen in
the event that the disk system becomes full.
The hit counter facility is made available as an example of the type of facility that
you can incorporate into a web site. It is supplied with no warranty or guarantee and is
not a standard part of the web page service.
For customers for whom it is commercially important to have accurate statistics on the
use of the website we recommend one of our business hosting services, where such
statistics can be provided using a standard reporting package.
I sincerely apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused you. If you would like
to pursue an option for a hosting service that provides additional level of usage
reporting please let me know and I will make arrangements for someone to contact you.
Please also let me know if you would like me to have the contents of the page counter
reset to 6797 + 20 + whatever the hit counter says at the time of the reset (currently it
reads 476) - I will have this done on Tuesday.
Declan Ivory
Head of Operations and Delivery
eircom net
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