Yep, I was just recently described as "late-forties", and it was a shock.

We've reached that time when the pioneers are writing their memoirs, and the last few years have brought some fascinating stories. I read Tom Kelly's "Lunar Lander" this spring, "Failure is not an option" by Gene Kranz last year and Chris Kraft's "Flight" last month; and in the last few years as the archives have opened up, "Korolev" and other histories of the Russians.

I think that of all the memoirs, I like the flight controllers' the best. Astronaut stories are episodic and egocentric, while the controllers were there, as a team, from beginning to end and can tell a more coherent story. Their stories are also engineering stories. I got a lot from Kranz's book because he explains (and dramatically illustrates) "failure is not an option" in such a way that it's clearly a solid engineering discipline and much more than a slogan. It made such an impression that I wrote it into the development plan for a dot-com site a year ago. I was determined that the site would open on schedule, and wrote the plan with a flowchart that defined varying levels of success and contingency plans if a piece wasn't ready on time. I'd have a successful "mission", by damn, even if success had to be defined in terms of Apollo 13!

Which is apropos, because I had that philosophy in mind when I designed the BBS software. It has four levels of success:

1. Save a message. Subsequent failures thus do not result in data loss.

2. Add the new message to the thread table of contents (TOC) (stored in individual files). If this stage fails, we can always edit the TOC to make the new message visible.

3. Update the TOC in individual messages.

4. Update the front page TOC.

The interesting thing is that if the system can get through step 2, it's self-healing in event of later errors. Steps 3 and 4 happen automatically any time somebody posts, so a dropped message listing will appear eventually upon the next post; or Justin or I can use an administrative interface to force TOC regeneration on a very slow board.

I want you to know that we'll move heaven and earth to make sure your message gets posted!

--Robert