Whoo!

Try out the new, cockeyed.com screensaver, built by the legendary screensaver developers at Midnight Software, for Windows operating systems.

The screensaver fills your inactive screen with those small square images that are the trademark look of cockeyed.com's front page.

Download the screensaver below, but first check out this quick lesson below:

A webserver is like a magic copy machine that delivers documents over the internet straight to your desktop. 

You never have to re-load the paper or the toner, and a typical webserver can make about 600 copies per hour.

Unlike a regular copy machine, the copies cannot be prepared beforehand and set on a table. If you want files, it has to wait for requests before it can start delivering. Luckily, webservers are fast enough that this setup usually works out fine.

If a particular website grows in popularity at a predictable rate, the operator can upgrade the webserver and its internet connection. But if traffic grows too fast, visitors have to wait in line for a few seconds for their turn at the files.

If each visitor is just viewing a tiny text file, the webserver can spit those out very quickly, but if the files are large, like movies or large photo albums, the service takes longer, and as few as 50 visitors can overwhelm the webserver.

Friendster.com is a website that seem to be constantly struggling to keep up with the incredible traffic they have attracted. This is a problem that many other websites would love to have, but it is getting a reputation for being unusable.

An outlinking internet superpower like Fark or Slashdot are in the position to link to a small, unsuspecting webpage, causing thousands of visitors to simultaneously descend en masse upon a single webserver. This is the internet version of "too much of a good thing", and has come to be known as "Slashdotting".

Cockeyed.com was Slashdotted once, on April 11th, 2002, a few days after the "work from home" story was online. It was quite a day, an honor that brought so much traffic my old webhost pulled the plug on the entire website.

When a webserver is overwhelmed, the website can take several minutes to load. If too much time elapses, the page will not load, and the user will get an error.

Geocities sites are under strain if too many visitors arrive at one time. That is why I can never link to Kelli O'Briant's Scratching page (www.geocities.com/ingenieragenetica), or to the Acme Tequila maker website (www.geocities.com/acmetequila/index.html).

Cockeyed.com is hosted by one of the fatwallet webservers. I am grateful for their hosting service. Please do not attack or organize against the cockeyed.com webservers.

The cockeyed.com screensaver is about 2.5 megabytes.. It will work on Windows machines only.  Click here to download the screensaver.

On the right is a sample of how it will look when it runs.

Thanks Midnight Software!