Springer LNCS, or, How not to do alerts!

I subscribe to Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) alerts. Several times now, I have received alerts when there was no web content at the URLs that they sent me. Very annoying, wasting my time. Please, this is 2009: try and make things work!.

The latest was yesterday: at Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:53:35 -0700 (PDT) I got an alert email from Springer LNCS:
Dear Glen Newton,

We are pleased to deliver your requested table of contents alert
for a new volume of "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
subseries: "Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence".

Volume 5632: Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition
by Petra Perner
is now available on the SpringerLink web site at
http://springer.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.Ee.2Tp.1gRdiL.ByTshW..N.I9y2.3DBm.bW89MQ%5f%5fDJNcFRf0

Going to this page (as of Tues 14:26 ET July 21 2009, ~24hrs later), or to any of the URLs for the articles (including DOIs, like http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03070-3_5) gives me - No, not an error page - but a BLANK PAGE:


How hard is it to make sure you don't send out alerts with links to web pages until after the linked-to pages actually have the content you are planning on presenting?

And at least try and have a decent error page when you do not have the content in place.

Oh, and 1999 called, they wants their web infrastructure back.


[Of course, by the time you read this entry these URLs may be working...]


Update: 2009 07 21 16:03 ET: Now when I go to the above pages, instead of a blank page I get a general launching-off page for SpringerLink:


Still not good enough! :-)

Update: 2009 07 21 22:40 ET:
Now the URLs for the articles work:

but the URLs for the publication do not:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Java, MySql increased performance with Huge Pages

[Resources updates: 2010.07.07 , 2009.11.03 , 2009.05.27 ] Long running, large memory, high performant applications often have special needs with respect to their memory management. On Linux, Solaris and other modern OSes, the translation look-aside buffer ( TLB ) - whose page size of 4k for many CPUs/OSes - becomes a scalability issue in these extreme conditions. In order to get around TLB scalability issues, huge page sizes are used to reduce the impact on performance. This can be of use to installations with large scale Java, MySql and other large memory applications. 300% improvement : " Well, in my case, I was able to achieve an over 3x improvement in my EJB 3 application, of which fully 60 to 70% of that was due to using large page memory with a 3.5GB heap. Now, a 3.5GB heap without the large memory pages didn't provide any benefit over smaller heaps without large pages. Besides the throughput improvements, I also noticed that GC frequency was cut down by two-third
Read more

IBM on Linux: "Lean, clean, and green"

IBM developerWorks has an article ( Linux: Lean, clean, and green: How GNU/Linux is becoming more eco-friendly - 26 May 2009) which examines some of the Green benefits of the Linux operating system. It focuses primarily on the low resource demands Linux has on systems (as well as its support for older systems), thus extending the life of machines that would otherwise be junked. Also discussed is virtualization and aspects of the Linux OS that reduce power consumption in servers. Additional Green Linux and Open Source resource: LessWatts.org - Saving Power on Intel systems with Linux Ten ways Linux can turn you green . 2009 Green Computing With Open Source Software . 2009 Open Source is Already Naturally Green: Fewer Lawyers, Fewer Showers, More Real People Add Up to Big Green Wins . 2009 Is Linux the Greenest Operating System . 2009 Go Green, Save Green with Linux . 2008 Linux captures the 'green' flag, beats Windows 2008 power-saving measures 2008 Canadian Green Party
Read more

Postscript coding resources

Image
Postscript is one of my favourite programming languages. Resources for postscript programming are not too common, and are always popping up and then disappearing, as things tend to do on the Web. Here is a snapshot of links that work: I will do my best to keep them up-to-date.
Read more