I spent much of Wednesday in Pearson Airport's decrepit (but soon to be demolished in the staggeringly expensive upgrade of the entire airport) Terminal 2, wondering what the deal was with our flight that was supposed to be boarding.

The help desk sat vacant -- as it had for hours -- and the nearest information board was literally about 1300 feet down a walkway towards the terminal hub. I'd made this walk several times (for epic adventures such as the "going to buy a bottle of water, because the change machine down here is broken and I didn't dare try bringing change through airport security because I have enough junk to worry about already" journey) and it was really starting to get old.

There was approximately one (1) dual-outlet power gangplate in the entire facility -- which I managed to win from a gaggle of nervous-eyed crackberry users, all of us desperately fighting for the ability to siphon some precious electrons (I like to call it "invisible oil") into our drained batteries.

Yet despite this seeming hostility towards the accoutrements of modern life, the facility is surprizingly equipped with ubiquitous, free wireless.

The wireless allowed me to make a secure VPN connection elsewhere (I wouldn't trust anything over an unencrypted channel on public wireless), actually making use of the time to get some work done. It really is empowering checking code out of and into Team Foundation Services, doing database changes, and then rolling out deployments, all from some random chair in some random airport.

It also allowed me to visit Air Canada's website to check on the status of the flight.

Whoops, maybe not. Looks like there was some sort of java error on their middleware (which I know because they strangely feed the entire error stack to end users, rather than having a more professionally refined default error page). This stayed this way for as long as I bothered to continue checking, and made the website completely useless for this task when I actually needed it.

Coming back on Thursday, a late night had me crunched for time, so I wanted to check the schedule for New Jersey Transit's train to Newark Airport from New York's Penn Station. Just needed to know when I needed to catch one -- I'd never been on it before, and had no idea what the frequency was -- and how long it'd take.

No dice.

The online train schedule information system was down. Just had to hoof it and hope. Luckily there was one in the station, ready to go. Maybe there's always one queued, but I wouldn't know it from their information system.

Today I wanted to order a gift from the Future Shop's website. After a detailed error message, it then flipped to a message proclaiming that they were doing "routine maintenance".

Then there are the amateurish downtimes that have occurred on some of the large meme sites, when moves or upgrades that should be seamless end up causing hours of outages. I'm a huge fan of Flickr, but even their recent moves were far more disruptive than they should have been (though they certainly have much more of a justification -- namely petabytes of pictures on a top tier website -- than some jokers running a "lists of links" type website).

These are hardly isolated incidents, and I'm not trying to pick on particular organizations. It just happens to be the most recent frustrating demonstration that the web isn't where it should be, and far too many teams consider reliability to be much less of a concern than it rightly should be.

I've been doing software for long enough to know that few systems are foolproof, and that sometimes eventualities conspire against the best laid plans of the most considerate, skillful world class teams, but these sorts of should-be-exception situations are happening with increasing frequency.

Despite all of the improvements in computer science, and the advances in the platforms that we're developing against, the net direction seems to be downwards, with reliability apparently coming after all else.

This isn't a good trend.

QuickNotes

Office 2007 is quite nice, though from my experience it's a little bit unstable. Between Word crashing while attempting to use the blog editing functionality, and Excel crashing at the oddest of times (the same experience being had on two completely different make and model of machines, with very different software stacks and few commonalities), it seems to be a fairly regular occurence. Finally the blog functionality in Word just stopped working altogether. On the bright side the document recovery is extremely capable, and I've never lost even a keystroke of typing, as it seems to be keeping a realtime backup going.