{"id":1660,"date":"2012-06-06T22:00:56","date_gmt":"2012-06-07T02:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1660"},"modified":"2012-06-06T22:00:56","modified_gmt":"2012-06-07T02:00:56","slug":"all-hail-the-mighty-rose-and-herman-and-mary-and-david-and-the-rest-of-the-gang-at-informs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/06\/06\/all-hail-the-mighty-rose-and-herman-and-mary-and-david-and-the-rest-of-the-gang-at-informs\/","title":{"rendered":"All Hail the Mighty Rose (and Mary and David and the rest of the gang at INFORMS)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A bit over a year ago, INFORMS<\/a> took over sponsorship<\/a>\u00a0of OR-Exchange<\/a>, a question and answer site for operations research and analytics. \u00a0And when I say “sponsorship”, I mean they agreed to host the site and provide all the infrastructure for the system. \u00a0It was a generous offer to a community that had been struggling to find a reliable home.<\/p>\n

Since then, OR-Exchange has, in some ways, thrived. \u00a0There are more than 600 questions, more than two thousand answers, and scores of participants. \u00a0Almost every question gets some sort of answer, and often three or four useful responses. \u00a0The site has avoided (much) spam through the diligence of the administrators (users who receive enough karma through their engagement with the site).<\/p>\n

But it has not all be “rosy” (a bad pun, for reasons you will see!). \u00a0The system response has been, charitably, atrocious, with countless errors, time-outs, and just plain slow days. \u00a0The INFORMS people tried, but nothing seemed to help much and the open-source community that created the underlying software (OSQA<\/a>) couldn’t help enough to get things working well.<\/p>\n

So those of us who believed in OR-Exchange put up with the slowness because the system was useful. \u00a0And fun. \u00a0But we did hope for a day when the system worked better, hoping that would encourage more to join us.<\/p>\n

This week, that day has come. \u00a0Through the work of new INFORMS IT head-honcho\u00a0Rose Futchko<\/a> along with INFORMS people such as David Wirth,\u00a0Mary Leszczynski, and (in earlier efforts) Herman Strom and undoubtedly others (let me know so I can add to the Hall of Heros), the problems seem to have been fixed. \u00a0The system is noticeably faster and more stable. \u00a0For proof, I offer the following giving the load times of the front page of OR-Exchange every hour for the past seven days (lower is better: every horizontal line marks 10 seconds). \u00a0See if you can figure out when the new system went in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, it might go all pear-shaped (in a wonderful expression I learned in New Zealand) over the next days, but things are looking awfully good (“Don’t jinx it Trick, ye eejit you!”).<\/p>\n

If you haven’t yet discovered the joys of OR-Exchange<\/a>, now would be a pretty good time. \u00a0You are far less likely to be greeted with a 500 error!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A bit over a year ago, INFORMS took over sponsorship\u00a0of OR-Exchange, a question and answer site for operations research and analytics. \u00a0And when I say “sponsorship”, I mean they agreed to host the site and provide all the infrastructure for the system. \u00a0It was a generous offer to a community that had been struggling to … Continue reading “All Hail the Mighty Rose (and Mary and David and the rest of the gang at INFORMS)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs-and-web","category-informs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}